Judge rules Apple executive lied under oath, makes criminal contempt referral
thebignewsletter.com
thebignewsletter.com
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.36...
> The testimony of Mr. Roman, Vice President of Finance, was replete with misdirection and outright lies. He even went so far as to testify that Apple did not look at comparables to estimate the costs of alternative payment solutions that developers would need to procure to facilitate linked-out purchases. (May 2024 Tr. 266:22–267:11 (Roman).)
> Mr. Roman did not stop there, however. He also testified that up until January 16, 2024, Apple had no idea what fee it would impose on linked-out purchases:
> Q. And I take it that Apple decided to impose a 27 percent fee on linked purchases prior to January 16, 2024, correct? A. The decision was made that day.
> Q. It’s your testimony that up until January 16, 2024, Apple had no idea what -- what fee it’s going to impose on linked purchases? A. That is correct
> (May 2024 Tr. 202:12–18 (Roman).) Another lie under oath: contemporaneous business
So was Roman incompetent or just kissing ass hoping to become the President of Finance
Why do you think Apple sent the Vice President to such a high visibility trial and not the President, who is the person with the ultimate authority and accountability in Finance?
In any large enough organization (and I haven't stumbled on one where this wasn't the case), private or public, the people at the top are shielded by a "second in command" whose job is to take the hit if needed, with the promise that they're next in line for the big position. It's a requirement of the job, they do it and maybe get rewarded, or don't and absolutely get ejected. Sometimes it pays off and they get the coveted president, CEO, etc. position. Sometimes it doesn't and they go to prison or their career is completely derailed.
Survivorship bias says we only see the ones who managed to pull it off. If you look at any large company's CEO now, they're there because they took these hits or provided plausible deniability for the big boss in the past.
Generally no but when you look into scandals like Dieselgate, Enron, Lehman Brothers and others you'll see a pattern of lower level employees being pressured to sign off on misleading documents that the higher ups could just sell as "real". Work in any company or institution above a certain level and you'll see it every day.
It's a test for loyalty, it's a way to select a successor, and very importantly a way to subsequently guarantee that loyalty and keep the ambitious deputies in check. Every large organization is a pyramid scheme of avoiding accountability and passing it on to the lower level.
Why not both?
Having spent several years at the top levels of an F500 valley tech company, I'm certain a consistent, broad and aggressive posture like that doesn't happen by accident or any lower than EVP. There was a meeting at some point where the Chief Legal Officer basically laid out the options: A) Give in and do what the court ordered, B) Do most of what the court ordered but drag our feet on all of it and 'accidentally' miss some of it where plausibly deniable, C) Make only token concessions to the order while ensuring the actual intent of the order is blocked, delayed or minimized wherever possible.
Someone with an EVP title picked "C" and until that person spends a couple months in jail on criminal contempt, senior execs will never pick "A". The VP Finance going down isn't enough. Until Tim Cook's staff meeting has an empty EVP chair for several months, none of this is serious. They'll just accelerate this VP Finance's options, bonus the shit out of him and consider his "sacrifice" to be collateral damage.
Agree. They'd have to feel some personal threat of going to prison or at least losing their fortune. As long as they feel protected behind the corporate veil, it's not a big deal to them.
> I fear this particular guy isn't senior enough to be the example we really need.
>> Tim Cook ignored Schiller
>> Cook chose poorly.
>> Cook, Schiller, and Maestri were the ultimate decision makers “about what they felt was [an] acceptable” level of risk to cabin the Injunction’s effect in terms of link placement and design.
Unless they omitted (C) and the EVP suggested it, it seems like they should share the blame by proposing something that's not an actual option.
He was actually complimented by the judge. Schiller was overrruled by the CFO.
Por qué no los dos?
Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43852145 - May 2025 (504 comments)
A senior Apple exec could be jailed in Epic case - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43859814 - May 2025 (58 comments)
A simple tradesperson is also personally responsible when they fuck up their job despite better knowledge. So if those can go to jail for the consequences of their dealings why shouldn't a CEO where the consequences are potentially of a scale several magnitudes higher? Wasn't personal responsibility in everybodies mouths, or is that only important when we talk about poor people?
The market amd the law allow it, and so it is the case. Moral justifications are just post-hoc fluff.
These liers should eat their words.
Otherwise what is painful punishment for a poor person is just a laughable fee for rich people.
Judging by tech, apple is right now in deep water due to the failure of delivering apple intelligence and a major drop in software quality.
Judging by political positioning, cook’s donation to trump’s inauguration didn’t sit well with the fanbase.
Now, it seems Cook is going for shady behavior against judges.
Maybe it’s time for a major change of leadership. Financially they might be ok, but one can’t avoid the feeling they’re burning the furniture to heat the house.
If corporations are not bound by laws they don’t like, then why should they be protected by laws they do like? Should the US turn a blind eye to IP infringement against Apple?
On the other hand, it may have saved his company billions on tariffs.
I do think a zeitgeist where it being openly done is applauded as smart is a sad state of the country.
unless you somehow think that corruption is morally neutral and only "bad" because there's laws against it?
1. Any fines for not complying would be less than what they would lose by complying
2. That no individual would suffer any consequences for blatantly disobeying a court order.
In my opinion, the whole concept that a company can break the law but no human can be held responsible is insane.
I really hope that criminal charges are brought against those involved in making a conscious choice to both lie to the court and ignore the court order. Hopefully that will make other executives think twice when put in the same situation.
I do as well, but I have little hope that it will.
Prosecutors don't like prosecuting perjury. It's tricky to prosecute (particularly because of how close it is to the first amendment), takes a lot of time, and often it just ends up with a minor slap on the wrist. I've seen other cases with outrageous perjury that resulted in no criminal prosecution.
This is a broken part of the justice system. Particularly because these apple execs have the money and lawyers to drag out any prosecution until everyone involved is dead. But also because it relies on government prosecutors caring in the first place.
It is tricky to prosecute and prosecutors don't like it but perjury rarely has anything to do with the first amendment.
Wait, isn't the board personally liable for their decisions? I'm not a lawyer, obviously.
Perdue pharma is a high profile recent example of this , but there dozens of such events from big tobacco to baby formula
not really.
corps have the defining feature that their passive shareholders are protected from personal liability, but not their officers, directors, nor employees.
they are "entities" so they can sign contracts and you can sue them and bring them to court. they are entities so the entire body of preexisting laws about suing and bringing to court would not need to be rewritten from scratch for corporations, it slots them into the rights and responsibilities that individuals have.
Objectively and ethically, it's reprehensible, but subjectively, we're now living in a blatantly pay-to-play world and everyone else is doing it, and there are clear, easily quantifiable gains of billions to be made from that bribe.
(The best part of all this was learning that inauguration bribes have been happening for decades, generally to little fanfare.)
Where can I read more about this?
The hardware company would have to publish specs allowing anyone to offer operating systems running on Apple hardware.
The Apple value pack comes mostly from brand value, deep ecosystem interactions, and being pretty much the only big corp ONLY focused on high end personal computing devices. Almost all their revenue is from B2C, their incentives are more aligned than most other big corps.
Any split to not actually harm the customers would be more focused on services such as apple card, icloud, the apple plus services (music,tv,…) etc.
Tbh, even EU mesures i think would be better if apple was instead forced to open the hardware (provide docs and bootloader, and no penalty for an user that takes advantage), rather than opening the OS or store. Not needing such openness on store and OS/core libs, actually allows apple to be more nimble and providing de better service (or bigger margins :( ), buto opnning hardware could actually give other OSs a chance, for once there could be a linux phone, as iphone has few hardware configs, and the device is very wide spread, 2 factors making it very attractive to devs (as example, check asahi linux, how quickly it became usable on a platform without docs)
This would play much more into “i bought this device i run wtv software I want” without restricting software vendors, Apple could keep the benefit of tight integration (that consumers like me like), but would have to provide the docs (and boot) for alternative OS to rise.
>Maybe it's time to breakup Apple - separate the computer and phone divisions.
Which also means, "it's time to breakup apple" means nothing, not sure why OP suggested that as a method to punish a legally problematic CEO/board. they don't have a multisegment monopoly allowing them complete control over supply chains, or multi region monopoly on smartphones that would be effected by a breakup.
He should go to jail!
What you've just described would be the single greatest punishment to an entity in the (admittently recently established) history of case-law, would upend the tech sector (maybe justly), lay off 10s of thousands and effectively stop work at downstream supply chains.
I get that this is the point of the punishment. However, do you think politicians, investors, lawyers with controlling stake, The DOD with security integrations, would allow that to happen?
Put another way, do you think the rule of law exists for the hyper rich when the current admin put.....Linda McMahon on the presidents cabinet?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43852145 ("Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds (wsj.com)" — 336 comments)
Shortly after the next unexplained bull market in $TRUMP a pardon will appear along with direct links to their upcoming subscription service conveniently preloaded and un-delete-able from the iPhone Home Screen.
Given Apple's direct pushback against Trump's anti-"DEI" campaign, it's less likely than I might have thought - or maybe that's leverage? e.g. what if Trump promises to pardon Apple's executives if they remove the giant rainbow thingie from Apple Park and stop selling pride-related Apple watch straps?
You seem to have made the mistake of thinking that a news article saying “a judge in northern California" means “a State of California judge in the northern part of that state" rather than “a federal judge in the Northern California District Court”.
You're normally right. But Trump is also a very petty narcissist. His "culture war" is pretty much "anyone who makes him feel bad".
>Apple's execs are definitely powerful enough players in that war to protect themselves from consequences.
That's why I hope courts do start throwing contempt around. Execs need to remember they aren't above the law to the point where they can blatantly lie to a judge.
https://appleinsider.com/articles/25/04/02/trump-admin-poach...
Tim Cook is better at PR than Musk, but he's also a member of Trump's inner circle (why else would there be tariff carveouts that directly benefit Apple?):
https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/apple-ceo-tim-...
Unlike Musk, the two were also close during Trump 1.0.
The rainbow thingy isn't a gay pride thing. The rainbow colors are out of order, just like in the original Apple logo.
There is this despondent feeling among most people that the law no longer applies to the powerful and we watch the behave with ever more brazenness. The saving grace is the amount of pushback needed to put them back in line is very small. Once they see any consequences for their actions they will fall in line.
Over the last 25 years, we’ve become more tolerant to larger leeway for those of certain societal status. A relatively large whiplash must happen to course correct the general behavior, in my opinion.
Indeed. Someone (or a couple few well-known someones) in positions of real "power" need to do some real prison time in a real prison for their massive lawbreaking and abuses of power before they'll take the situation somewhat seriously.
We've become more powerless, you mean. The government has become more tolerant.
It's less of a feeling and more of a repeatedly demonstrated reality. It shouldn't be that way, but most of the time it is. I'd love for that to change, but I can't fault people for not expecting it to happen any time soon.
I would wager that idea crossed the mind of Luigi Mangione.
It will take more than a slap on the hand from the court to change anything.
Almost no-one gets that choice.
The choose a risk of going to jail for a more likely bonus.
gee, I wonder why! you now have POTUS openly defying the direct orders from the highest court. That's so much further past some corp executive committing a crime that hasn't even gone to trial yet.
We're seeing this with just how fast and ruthless many executives were after Trump won the election, actually. The behavior of some of these people is best described as "swearing fealty": donations to Trump's circle, dismantling of anything remotely smelling as "DEI" instead of standing up for what was sold as "core values" over the last years, compliance instead of resistance (just recently Bezos in the Amazon tariff pricing issue, or the "resignation" of 60 Minutes producer Bill Owens so that the Trump admin doesn't impede a corporate merger).
We've been asking ourselves "wtf are the Russian oligarchs doing" after Putin invaded Ukraine, and now we're seeing just the same compliance from our own oligarchs.
No, we have not. There is no oligarchs in Russia, money has no political subjectivity in Russia, and they are owned by those whom Putin put in charge for this.
How so?
From the "free market" party from a senator with at least some shame on the red aisle.
It really is open season for buying politicians.
Steve Bannon has said many times he would've kept Lina Khan.
The populists are socially conservative but economically liberal in many respects (not all, obviously)
He should be in jail for covering up a sexual abuse scandal, but alas
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AAPL/
Maybe somebody could enlighten me but the off hours part shows -2.3%, is that a correction because people are losing faith in apple or what exactly? and would these off hours loses get converted to on hour losses or what exactly? (Sorry I could ask AI but I might as well ask here as well)
So I had done some calculations and please correct me if you think I am wrong but at 4:00 pm USA time (EDT?) the stock was selling at 213.5 open (I am not sure what the differences b/w open,close etc. are , I am not a finance guy) but it went from 213.5 open to 207.8 right now
Taking the % lose from its peak just at 4 PM EDT & multiplying it by its market cap? 3.19Trillion(1- 207.5/213.5 ) is 89_648_711_944 , ie. 89 Billion $.
So from my understanding Apple lost 89B $ in like a span of 2 hours (4PM EDT to 5:10-ish PM EDT which is the approx current time while writing this post)
That sounds REALLY BIG. Like I used to think damn Trillion $ are a lot but if such a case can cause apple to lose 89B$ in span of 2 hours then either I am doing some calculation wrong or this case has a truly big gravity that its worth not to just skim over it I guess and truly read it at detail I suppose.
Just my two cents..
Thanks for this information. I was genuinely confused after I had written this comment because well this information of epic games was already available 8 hours earlier so that had already been factored in the market 2 hours ago so I was confused as to why this change in 2 hours.
Also, I would genuinely appreciate it if we could have a seperate HN thread just for this news itself. Sounds really interesting and I have quite an opinion on it
The headline sounds positive, but apparently its not positive enough to keep the stock from dropping.
My reasoning is that a lot of traders are simply afraid of losing a potential "wow" moment, so they stockpile just in case and then unload once they are sure that it's nothing special - simply to avoid their bosses going "why did you miss the boat on Apple?!?!" if the price skyrockets.
I don't know but seeing so much money move so fast with such high velocity and such corrections in minutes and thus losing or making billions. I really want stability and it does seem to me that in some sense I wish for every economy to be more comprised of small businesses which aren't changing their stock price in such drastic measures though I think such an opinion might be unpopular around here.
The thing about a company worth several trillion dollars is that even minor movements involve (what are to us laymen) huge sums of money. Conversely, huge sums of money really are just minor movements to that company.
Some people talk about how the middle class has a hard time understanding the vast difference between a millionaire and a billionaire. The same thing applies (but probably compounded due to being at a larger scale) for thinking about billions vs. trillions of dollars.
(Just speaking to the question of scale; as someone else brought up, there've been other happenings that affect stock prices besides just this case.)
My favourite part: "Unlike Mr. Maestri and Mr. Roman, Mr. Schiller sat through the entire underlying trial and actually read the entire 180-page decision. That Messrs. Maestri and Roman did neither, does not shield Apple of its knowledge (actual and constructive) of the Court’s findings."
> Apple’s response: charge a 27 percent commission (again tied to nothing) on off-app purchases, where it had previously charged nothing, and extend the commission for a period of seven days after the consumer linked-out of the app.
Not only have they been asking for this, but the link to your external checkout could only be in once place in your app, and could not be part of the payment flow (where else would you put it??)
They also want rights to audit your financials to determine compliance
And this scary popup before going to the external payment page: https://d7ych6cwyfyiba.archive.is/AZrEz/0c8d40ed4a6886240370...
Not sure if such a large font is used anywhere else in iOS
The whole thing was so obviously designed to prevent any developer from seriously considering it, maintaining their anti-competitive advantage. Glad the judge finally had enough.
My. They forgot "Apple cannot guarantee making payment elsewhere won't give you cancer."
Judges always mess this up. They act like their words have power. They issue one injunction, the party violates it in a flagrant manner, then the judge issues a new injunction.
You have to impose a coercive doubling fine, or something like that. Say $10 Million on day 1, $20 Million on day two, until compliance is secured.
Who do you jail? The CEO? What if he’s directed his subordinates to comply and they simply know he doesn’t really want them to? It’s hard to jail those lower down the food chain, because does Apple even care? I don’t know that would be effective. They might get indignant and use it as a rallying cry, because it doesn’t really cost the business anything.
A more comparable analogy would be to enjoin Apple from selling the relevant products, e.g. they cannot collect any commissions until they comply.
Jail is a good punishment, but not a very effective form of coercion when the wrongdoer is a business.
The way the monetary system is set up guarantees that market monopolies will occur. The monetary playing field is centralized and asymmetric. It's a basically a system of privilege and handicaps on a broad spectrum. Then people are surprised that those with more privileges keep winning predictably and form monopolies.
Isn't this business 101? Charge what the market will bear? Unclear to me why the court thinks profit margin needs to be a factor of the value of goods/services/ip, or that the court is even capable of determining what that value is?
The sheer arrogance of Apple leaders is astounding. They think they are outright owed rent on anything that runs on an iPhone, iPad, etc. Apple thinks developers are nothing without Apple. Look at how snubbing developers has worked out for the Apple Vision Pro. It was already a niche device, but it's a ghost town.
However, it appears being at the edge of bankruptcy, and having turned the ship around has made them paranoid of losing a single cent.
When Apple Store came out it was great.
I was a Nokia employee at the time, and 30% was a dream compared with what you would have to pay to phone operators, app listenings in magazines with SMS download codes, for Blackberry, Symbian, Windows CE, Pocket PC, Brew, J2ME,...
However we are now in different times, and acting as if the developers didn't have anything to do with it, it was all thanks to Apple's vision of the future, it is pure arrogance, and yes the Vision Pro was the first victim.
Here is another one, if they do really announce an UI revamp at WWDC 2025, I bet most will ignore it.
I ask "what was all the money for?!" puzzled "what do you mean?" "Steve Jobs saved up like 200 billion dollars in cash at Apple, but what was it all for? what was the plan? was he going to buy AT&T? was he going to build his own telecom or make a giant spaceship? what was it for?"
And he looked at me with just the deepest and saddest eyes and spoke softly "there was no plan" "what??" "you see, Steve's previous company, NeXT, it ran out of money, so at with Apple he always wanted a pile of money on the side, just in case. and over years, the pile grew and grew and grew... and there was no plan..."
Apple now has more money than they know what to do with it. They have spend close to $800 billion stock buy back in total by the end of this year.
They could have lowered the the margin of Mac and gained Market Shares. Which is something Steve said during NeXT era that Apple got greedy. Focusing too much on margin.
Michael Milken published a paper analyzing exactly this issue a while back.
It is "easy" to understand why parents would lie to home invasion robbers about whether or not they had a safe in the house. Leaders of companies will readily lie if they believe that the survival of their company is at stake. The rational is "well someone might get mad that we lied but at least the company will still be here."
That was more than 20 years ago, under a totally different market condition and Apple leadership. Back then, they needed developers to turn the ship around, now they think devs need them. They's a cash cow and act like assholes.
No, that's the opposite of what actually happened with the iPhone. Back in 2007, Apple actually saw evidence from the customer buying frenzy that Apple didn't need 3rd-party devs to make iPhone a wild success. After the very desirable iPhones got into millions of customers hands, it was the 3rd-party devs that needed Apple more than Apple needed the 3rd-party ecosystem as I've mentioned before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39291668
Maybe an alternate history would have had all the 3rd-party devs deliberately boycott Apple iOS and thus only create apps for Android in 2008. We now know that didn't happen so we'll never know if devs realistically had enough leverage back in 2008 to alter Apple's App Store commission structure and policies.
The iPhone was so desirable as a platform that new popular apps like Instagram and WhatsApp were released for Apple iPhones months before Android.
Apple did not write those apps themselves.
I get the exact same feeling. They're afraid of collapsing despite being way ahead.
They were better in the pre-Mac days. I was a big Apple fan until the Mac came out.
Apple's external veneer is stellar, and the overwhelming majority of people don't know and don't care what it is holding up that veneer.
I want them to prevent social media companies from tracking my device across my other apps.
I want them to integrate billing so I can easily cancel subscriptions or get refunds.
I want them to require Oauth that allows me to keep my email private from app developers.
These features make my customer experience better not worse. I’m sorry it sucks for app developers to make less money but for customers it’s mostly a good thing.
Being a hacker means having curiosity about the things around you, having the desire to be able to change and understand things.
On android, I wrote small toy apps for myself, I could build and self-sign an APK, I could poke at how the system worked and read all the source code I wanted.
Tragically, due to blue bubbles and group chats within my family, I was forced to switch to iOS, and I thought sure, it wouldn't be so bad...
No, it sucks for hackers, you can't build and sign apps from linux reliably, you need an apple account and to pay $100 even if you do have a macbook, the APIs are limited, you can't see the source code for the most of the kernel or platform, apple has a ton of APIs you're not allowed to use.
My firefox addons I developed for myself installed fine on android, but I can't even use those on iOS.
I want apple to let me use the device I paid for.
Don't like it? Don't use it. (I don't.)
I personally do my hacking on Mac, Linux, and on my RasberryPis, in my secure home and behind a firewall. But I don't want a hacker-friendly phone holding my passwords, credit cards, social media, email, photos, GPS location, cameras, microphones, etc., with a persistent cellular connection to the internet and at constant risk of being left in a taxi or cafe. I would never put the effort into locking everything down, and I'd probably fuck it up if I tried anyway.
Apple is the one who implements the advertising ID companies use to track you. And preventing that tracking is a os-level feature, not a thing they review out of app.
> I want them to require Oauth that allows me to keep my email private from app developers.
You are describing a private email address.
That's why I talk about the veneer that users don't care to look beyond. Customers get bent by Apple and aren't even aware of it.
I would like to be able to prevent it, like running a firewall or disabling bluetooth for certain processes or more...
But that's no reason to prevent them from being opt-out. It should be possible to not use OAuth, integrated billing, social media tracking etc.
I’m genuinely surprised Meta and e.g. Citrix haven’t launched their own app stores in the EU. Maybe GDPR disincentivises the worst shenanigans.
Security is not mutually exclusive with informed consent. Apple's greatest trick was convincing you -- and, evidently, themselves -- that it is.
This is what Apple’s ATT was designed to prevent. If app developers want to do that now, they need to ask the user for permission. The more Apple’s control over the platform is rolled back, the more stuff like this happens.
As a user, I don’t want to be using, say, a recipe app and be secretly tracked by Facebook in the background.
They didn't say anything about not liking social media, only that they don't want to be secretly tracked.
No, we don't. Apple fans from all nations do, but there is literally zero national pride in Apple.
blanket statements like this are never accurate
What does it have to do with nationality? I've seen Apple fanboys from all countries. Sure, Apple's market share in the US relative to other phone manufacturers is high, but that's mostly due to the "trust" Americans have in US-based companies (you can argue this trust is misplaced).
I think it's mostly the lack of users. Apple snubs mobile developers all the time, but since they gate access to a large chunk of well-paying customers, developers are ready to jump through any hoops.
If there were millions of Apple Vision Pro users I'm sure the developers would have followed, but it's of course a chicken and egg situation considering Vision Pro lack of content.
I think it isn't really chicken-egg, is what I'm saying. Devs were so hot to target iPhone from day one that the first or second major OS update added an entire infrastructure to make that possible. There was so much interest it made Apple back down! For the Vision Pro they had that on day one and it wasn't nearly enough to sell the thing to devs, because again, nothing did nearly enough to sell the thing to users.
Who cares if it’s pocket change for google or meta, nobody wants another Facebook app.
$3500 is, as I said, pretty close to petty cash even for a sole-owner LLC that needs taking at all seriously, and I would front that sum without a second thought out of my own personal pocket if I thought VR had legs, the same way I've put about $9k toward inference-capable hardware in the last two years because AI obviously does have legs. It's an investment in my career, or at least toward the optionality of continuing a career in software in a post-AI world, assuming I don't decide to go be an attorney or something instead.
I appreciate not everyone can drop a sum like that, like that. I can and I'm not ashamed of it. Why should I be, when it's exactly what I've worked the last 21 years straight to earn?
Her gaming company you can read about here:
Apple tried to focus on productivity and some light entertainment and didn't even throw the other two a bone by supporting a PC link feature. Particularly they didn't make a physical link possible - Wifi is not reliable/high bandwidth enough for most people, so those third party solutions aren't cutting it.
Apple users are mostly locked out of the existing PC VR ecosystem - Apple didn't have to rely on developers writing dedicated apps.
It "works for me".
Regardless, you don't throw away your headset after a flight, obviously, so even if the ticket were half the price you'd still come out ahead after two or three trips.
This said, headsets like AVP improve the flying experience but don't magically solve it: they are still too heavy and uncomfortable to wear for more than 1-2 hours. That's why I'm betting on the more lightweight (and cheaper) sunglass-like products to actually win that market.
It's not like there's much reason to care about comforts on short flights. Anyone can tolerate economy for an hour and you'd probably not get out your VR headset for a short hop either.
VRChat, I agree, should absolutely be there and unrestricted. It wont be though. It isn't uncensored on Oculus either.
VR pornography is quite massive in Japan for instance. Huge in fact. The Vision Pro doesn't even have a DMM.com/Fanza app for that.
I don't think most users would even consider getting a device that doesn't allow them to view their existing catalog of purchases, pornography and not.
Again, this could've been solved by simply supporting PCVR.
> VRChat, I agree, should absolutely be there and unrestricted. It wont be though. It isn't uncensored on Oculus either.
I don't think the VR Chat app on Oculus is very popular. Most users are just going to run it via PCVR for better performance, feature support, etc.
Can you elaborate?
It just so happens that most of the more racy avatars also are more detailed/power hungry and run afoul of those limits.
Apple Vision Pro has ~3,000 native apps, plus millions more compatible iPhone/iPad apps.
In the absolute worst case the company will pay a fine in the order of tens of millions and the whole thing will go away. And the executive in question will get a fat bonus and promotion for his loyalty.
I really don't think Apple's dev policies has had anything to do with this. The issue is the price - it's simply inaccessible to the vast majority of consumers, even many moderately high income consumers due to its value being somewhat unproven.
there, fixed it... the top brass at USG also behave this way, they're following the leader (or more likely the other way around, USG behaving like a private interest corporation)
https://appleinsider.com/articles/25/04/02/trump-admin-poach...
I'm hoping this judge's ruling will actually be enforced by the executive branch, but I'm not holding my breath. I wonder if there are any mechanisms that allow state law enforcement to enforce federal judicial orders.
This isn’t really about that. The reality is that the AVP costs $3500,- and realistically, how many users are there? It’s much more likely that developers will begin building for VisionOS once Apple releases a more affordable device.
Contrast this with early iPhone app development where people were turning out in droves EXCITED to build something.
Apple has lost the trust and enthusiasm of the developer community by making their lives harder and harder over time. Of course they aren't going to lift a finger now unless it will make them money. The same wouldn't be true if Apple provided them the support to get excited about a new platform.
This is exactly what everyone said about the original Macintosh, which cost $7,695 in 2025 dollars. The prediction value of the price of this AVP model is close to zero.
And remember, you need more than us on HN to spark enthusiasm amongst developers of the calibre they need. Think AAA game studios, major sports leagues to produce premium courtside experiences, etc. The only way forward I see for Apple Vision (Pro) is if they put their money to work.
They can pick:
1. Subsidize it down to upper-middle-class impulse buy/middle class splurge, so about $600-800. This is still a stretch because even at that price it's hard to justify as-is today, but iPhone Pro Max and AirPods Pro sell and they don't do that much more than what you can get for half the price.
2. Back up a truck full of cash to NBA and/or NFL for courtside/sidelines experiences at every game.
3. Back up a truck of cash to the biggest names in gaming to nab full exclusives, and make sure those games are so good even diehard Apple haters can't resist it.
Anything besides those 3, in my view, will not launch this platform.
Now, on HN we know some people, though plenty wealthy enough to afford Apple, are choosing Android for function. But I doubt most of the public even thinks about that choice through that lens. Green bubble is the same as arriving to pick up your date in a 2002 Civic. It projects "I'm probably broke." Statistically. In the US only.
https://www.joe.co.uk/life/sex/owning-an-android-is-official...
A few months back everyone was writing the eulogies for Google and how they fumbled AI. Now Gemini is one of the top models (if not the best) and it is extremely capable and price competitive
Meanwhile Apple is still trying to wrap the head around AI. (Didn't stop them from making a splashy marketing campaign though)
So no, both companies are not the same.
Google has no idea how to survive in the new paradigm.
This isn't the first time an influential leader (like Jobs) chooses the next leader only for everyone to realize the next person isn't a "leader" type, but rather someone who was put in charge to maintain the status quo, not tarnish the previous leader's legacy, and not come up with crazy new ideas.
Maybe Apple is too big to have a product person as CEO? They are so big that they essentially need a diplomat at the top spot? If so, at least let someone like Ternus call the internal shots and lead the products.
Apple is extremely not the type of company to recruit a CEO from outside, so if Cook is doing any kind of succession planning I have to imagine it's Ternus.
Definitely some of those vibes there. I’ve generally been on team apple for this case, and as Gruber notes, they largely won the case. Dunking on their power to set other contractual fees seems to have come back to bite them. That said, as a user, I strongly prefer to use Apple’s in-app payments — I was just buying a hearthstone purchase from Blizzard; on my laptop it popped up options like “Credit Card or PayPal?” I was like “nah” and loaded it up on my iPad to pay with Apple Pay.
Do I hate PayPal? No. Do I appreciate a payment service that shows all my recurring payments in one place, lets me cancel them, and feels generally very safe? Yes. I’m happy to have Apple compete on fair playing field for payments.
Summary: Oops.
I'm sure both the app developer and Apple are happy to let you pay 30% extra for the convenience of Apple Pay vs PayPal.
Suppose the chargebacks due to fraud/whatever without Apple Pay cost the issuing banks 0.20%.
Then the banks reduce their expenses by paying Apple 0.15%.
Maybe it helps reduce customer service calls and the associated expenses. Maybe Apple results in higher total spend. I’m sure the leaders at JPM, BoA, Wells Fargo, etc have done the calculations to figure out that it is better for them to pay Apple than to not.
And since it is not required for any bank to allow Apple Pay to work with their cards, it stands to reason that in a competitive market like credit cards, it doesn’t result in an increase in end user prices.
PayPal does.
> and feels generally very safe
PayPal doesn't??
On the other hand, if you're using it exclusively for payments rather than receiving money maybe it's fine?
But there are so many stories where PayPal closed someone's account and didn't give them back their money, am I really supposed to trust them in the case of a dispute where I'm owed a refund?
> Keep in mind this whole thing stems from an injunction from a lawsuit filed by Epic Games that Apple largely won. The result of that lawsuit was basically, “OK, Apple wins, Epic loses, but this whole thing where apps in the App Store aren’t allowed to inform users of offers available outside the App Store, or send them to such offers on the web (outside the app) via easily tappable links, is bullshit and needs to stop. If the App Store is not anticompetitive it should be able to compete with links to the web and offers from outside the App Store.”
And there's a subsequent post elaborating on this point: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/05/01/apple-lost-but-...
Keep in mind this whole thing stems from an injunction from a lawsuit filed by Epic Games that Apple largely won. - emphasis his.
And he's right, Epic "largely lost" that case, Apple only needed to concede the minimal things they didn't win and it would have been an epic win (as opposed to an Epic win) for them. Sweeney didn't get much of what he wanted, Apple mostly got everything they wanted.
...
> referred the matter to the U.S. Attorney for a criminal contempt investigation.
It's suddenly become a negotiation again.
Based on the tariff carve-outs and the political appointments Trump's made, Apple leadership is definitely inside Trump's inner circle.
They've been smart enough not to parade Tim Cook around in a MAGA hat, but just barely:
https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/apple-ceo-tim-...
I expect there to be some performative lawyering by the Trump administration until the case blows over.
Though the contempt referral may have not been part of the deal and might cost extra.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250501083454if_/https://www.th...
Try running snidump for a day while reading HN, including
(With SNI)
firefox https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/judge-rules-apple-executive-lied
(Without SNI, i.e., "No SNI")
{
printf 'GET /web/20250501083454if_/https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/judge-rules-apple-executive-lied HTTP/1.0\r\n'
printf 'Host: web.archive.org\r\n\r\n'
} |openssl s_client -connect archive.org:443 -ign_eof -noservername > 1.htm
firefox ./1.htm