Sigh, not that I expected anything else from Apple at this point but of course they only change the rules for the US.
As a business, I understand why they would - more revenue. At least there's some progress and I wouldn't be surprised if the EU follows suit.
There is no side loading on iOS, even for the EU.
Not by my definition of side loading.
Apple as the company we used to know is long dead. I still buy MacBooks and iPhones but only because some remnant of the past still exists in them. The new company came up with Vision Pro, screwing Spotify over app commissions, screwing game developers users love (Epic), non-upgradeable devices, extremely difficult repairability, etc.
Spotify is the one who screws everyone. They deserve it
> Epic
Epic is another example of a shady company who doesn't want to give a cut from its micro transactions from users (users who are brought to them by Apple's innovation)
> difficult repairability
iPhone repairability score is 2-3 points higher than Pixel's according to iFixit. Only HMD beats iPhone.
How? They pay the exact same percentage as Steam does to it's creators, 70%.
Record labels are in the business of screwing musicians, though.
This is too easy of an answer. Would you take more money if I offered it to you?
My problem with Apple here is that I believe it's short sighted. Lack of compliance or whatever you want to call it, could threaten the whole business by forcing legislation and legal action.
The idea Apple deserved a cut of Patreon podcaster's monthly subscription fees was beyond the pale.
I mean, these leaders are supposed to be the best of the best and we're all sitting here wondering how they can be so idiotic and short-sighted.
They had a perfect thing going. Make free money, do next to nothing. All they had to do was make some concessions, not get too overconfident, and maybe reel it back a tad when things get hot. But no. They got so cocky, so arrogant, that now they risk losing it all.
Time and time again I am just shocked at the sheer stupidity behind the biggest companies in America. Any bozo off the street understands the danger of arrogance better than Apple leadership. How are these people in power and how do they repeatedly make such poor decisions?
Honestly I love the current macs, but of course I would like to be able to upgrade them as well. But yeah I also have the feeling that Apple is getting less innovative, more sloppy and more greedy, but I'm not sure I think its become a whole other company.
And yet during his time we had upgradeable MacBooks and Macs. Heck, even iPhone battery was upgradeable while he was still in charge.
Eh, wot? iPhone battery has never been easily replaced. Yeah, you could do it, but it still involved tiny screws and fiddly bits; you’re not popping a new one in while waiting at a stoplight.
But I do miss the days of throwing some cheap RAM at a MacBook.
Only real advancement I've seen is in Apple Silicon. Which is fantastic but very much on a tik-tok cycle like Intel. Really wish these companies would cut back on constant model upgrades and instead spend more time polishing the products.
This, honestly, doesn't seem to be in line with the injunction if it still applies to apps published by developers from the United States?
This is the Big Tech playbook. Apple and Google know what they're doing isn't legal. But they make so much doing it, that it's worth the lawyer fees to delay and delay and appeal and appeal as long as possible to keep the money train flowing. Historically the fine has never been as big as the profit, so even if they eventually get in trouble for it, it makes sense for them to profit in the short term.
If they also apply the same rules to other countries, it would hurt their case that this court order is unjust.
They exist to seek profits.
If this was a losing strategy for them, they would've dropped it long ago without the ruling.
Other countries should implement similar laws, not hope that Apple does the right thing.
Hope is a bad strategy.
In either case, this thing will die with a whimper, not a bang. Apple will have to concede to EU and it would not surprise me if other large markets will demand the same.
So the stage is changing. Apple could have flown under the radar and made concessions with terms they could dictate, letting them simplify their offerings across the world without attracting regulators and mega-lawsuits (and hear me out - maybe focus on products and innovation instead). Now, they fight against multiple jurisdictions at once, which all have different requirements (obviously, since they are different bodies). Even if they fold now, by reducing the tax and making more lenient rules, they’re too late. They already have regulators and judges dictating for them what to do, so their agency is permanently limited.
People forget that in the EU, the ”gatekeeper status” wasn’t just ”go after Apple and Google”. It was the App Store specifically. For instance, Gmail was evaluated but not included.
TLDR Apple has to sleep in a bed that they shat in themselves. They were universally popular and could get away with lots of questionable behavior, but instead angered everyone and are rightfully getting curfewed.
I'm confused a) who is taking the concept of free markets seriously, especially in this context where markets (and competition) are arbitrarily defined and owned by corporations and and b) who would view self-interested laws as either surprising or bad? Of course laws are in self interest. Why on else else would you pass a law?
If you really truly think that regulation is dragging down some market, it's easy to talk about in specific terms. It is only possible to employ "free markets" in bad faith.
All it takes is a single competitor to gradually gain more and more strength and competitive advantage via dumping, regulatory capture, or other means (see: organized crime and syndicates) to win the death struggle.
What has saved us hasn't been some magical free market, it has been the markets themselves, once they achieve trust status, fundamentally undermined by science and technology creating a new market that upends the old one.
He discusses how motivations fundamentally change after profit margins peak and argues that profit after this point necessarily produces less economically efficient processes (in terms of the flow of demanded goods and services, not the shareholder, who does receive further productivity gains). In this context, undesired market advantage (legal or illegal) is just a symptom of profit, but it can be analyzed like any other sort of inefficiency. The core prescription is to nationalize the process or otherwise remove the profit motive around peak profit (which is, to be clear, not always easy or possible to identify... but in the worst case, this would open further opportunity for private capital to invest in the next generation of improvements).
He also discusses how failed investment cycles can resonate into market crashes faster than capital can rationally reallocate. Both of these above observations seem very very relevant to our current situation in the US today, and should cause everyone to look askance at people who aren't concerned about how healthy our political economy actually is.
> fundamentally undermined by science and technology creating a new market that upends the old one.
The kicker here is that there's no reason to expect either to continue yielding the same rewards. Some industries have projectable, plannable, investable growth patterns; others do not. Almost all the industries with predictable growth rely on consumption driven by yields from the lucrative exploitation of frontiers, mostly technological recently as you point out. I suspect that the market is going to get incredibly volatile as capital sees this frontiers dry up and adjusts expectations. ideally by cannibalizing itself and not eating us, but it might need a little help in that regard....
Beneath them, people tend to get good at programming before they get good at spotting exploitation, so there is always a stratum of True Believers to feed the operation. Individually they wise up and graduate, but the stratum remains as it is fed from the bottom by the proverbial sucker born every minute.
Then we have the top of the pyramid which actually does benefit from it all. They are small in number but they have enough money to fund the whole space (more importantly: enough money to have a reason to fund the whole space) so they have outsize influence. They could decide to ban me for saying this, for example.
Do we agree? Or will we find ourselves on opposite sides of this fight the millisecond the specifics of this case fade from the public eye?
The world stage is no more a safe place than it has been for any other part of history.
I would be lying if I claimed I hadn't dreamed of being liberated by a foreign power with more cultural competence at governance (which excludes Russia, obviously, but they probably at least aren't worse), but realistically anything but a slow scale-down in military power would probably entail the bloodiest world (and civil) war in history. Maybe nukes, too.
But, there's a fork in the road. We can choose to scale down our military presence (and control of trade) today, and figure out how we actually want to exist in a global community outside of letting our corporations swing their dicks freely... Or we can blow trillions of dollars continuing to make fools of ourselves rampaging through other countries rather than building high speed rail before we lose our grip on hegemony anyway as a matter of pure economics.
Or, I suppose, we can just murder anyone who disagrees with us until we're just miserably exploiting each other inside of high walls armed with automated guns. Something tells me that's the option we're going to pick.
Well it is. And it's willful. That trillion dollars is spent almost entirely on US made things by US workers. Only a small slice (still large in absolute terms) goes to those mega-contractors. The rest is the only thing that has kept any semblance of American manufacturing alive. The military buys everything (this isn't an exaggeration, you would be hard pressed to find something in your life that they don't buy in quantity) , and there are countless businesses that pay decent wages with benefits for low skilled workers in every state that are only still in existence because of military spending.
It also functions as an incubator, having special provisions for small businesses, especially those owned by marginalized people or located in especially impoverished areas. Basically "We need need coffee filters, so if you buy the equipment and higher the workers, we'll sign a contract to buy 2,000,000 packages a year from you. (And it's a kick-your-door-down felony if you try to backdoor foreign made filters)."
That's why it is never cut. It's a welfare plan that republicans agree too because it requires holding down a job to access. It comes with the side effects of keeping factories running and getting an overpowered military.
Also there may be some foreign policy applications.
But now our politicians are so dumb they don't realize that's what was agreed long ago, and think they can have one part of that deal and not the other.
Well that's not that obvious... Sure EU is more than willing to protect consumers from foreign(American) megacorporation because the cost of doing that is very low.
Entrenched major local companies? Well stifling competition through excessive regulation and propping up to bit too fall semi-zombie corporations is not necessarily that great for consumers long-term.
Regulating and fining them is very cheap politically when there are no jobs that can be lost or lobbyists to disappoint.
The EU. Let me explain, because this was confusing:
In US political debate, free markets have become synonymous with ”let companies do what they want”. Today, most of US ”markets” are neither free, nor (arguably) even markets at all, such as Amazon or health insurance. It is a mix between feudal system and protection racket.
Just like ”freedom isn’t free” in terms of civil liberties, same goes (imo) for markets. If you want to optimize for ”freedom” of markets, that means a non-zero amount of regulating them. This is obvious both in theory and by opening your eyes and looking outside.
As far as how to regulate them, I believe the EU is doing a good job, especially in the face of novel technology and business topologies. Basically, allow everything that isn’t deliberately anti-competitive. Because, drumroll, competition is fundamental for markets to work, at all.
Sorry for the confusion. It’s hard to make points when words mean completely different things in different parts of the world.