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A comment on Tim Cook’s Fortnite trial testimony was unexpectedly revealing. Parent comment

Re:Tim Cook’s Fortnite trial testimony was unexpectedly reve... by azinman2 on Sunday May 23, 2021 @03:12PM (#27257667)
S3 is actually quite pricey. Not as much on the monthly storage (tho it can be depending on size), but network egress is really where they get you. On the scale of the App Store where the app might be 100mb but it gets downloaded potentially millions of times it gets expensive fast.

Now imagine your app is free. Yet you have to pay for all these downloads. There wouldn’t be any free apps anymore.

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Re:Tim Cook’s Fortnite trial testimony was unexpectedly reve... by Closi on Sunday May 23, 2021 @05:30PM (#27258758)
At $0.05 per gb transfer, it would be half a penny per 100mb app download. Someone has to pay for that - at the moment Apple subsidises the free apps, presumably because they think they are good for the ecosystem.

Although lets be honest here, free apps could easily continue to be subsidised by Apple in any future model. We are talking about far less than a dollar per iPhone in terms of hosting/bandwidth costs for all the apps, so this really is something that Apple could easily just swallow.

Let's not forget that the availability, quality and abundance of apps, made by developers, is a key driver of success of the iPhone, and Apple makes plenty money from hardware sales. I won't lose sleep over the thought that they might have to pay for some hosting.

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Re:Tim Cook’s Fortnite trial testimony was unexpectedly reve... by majewsky on Sunday May 23, 2021 @06:39PM (#27259285)
> $0.05 per gb transfer

That's including AWS's insane profit margin, though. I have my cloud deployments with Hetzner, where extra traffic costs € 1.19 per TiB, so that 100 MiB app download would not be half cent, it would be 1/100th of a cent. (And that's before we consider that Hetzner gives 20 TiB per month free traffic with every VM.)

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Re:Tim Cook’s Fortnite trial testimony was unexpectedly reve... by Closi on Monday May 24, 2021 @05:34PM (#27269995)
Very true!
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