So there are more ruthless companies out there.
We should stop personifying them and idolizing the products they make. Look at the chess moves. They're a monster.
It should terrify you that some of the best products on the market are owned by a company that wants to extract as much as it can from the rest of us. They're no different from Oracle, just with good products. It's a winning strategy, and they're now positioned to sink their claws deeper.
They've decimated the competition leaving you with a device that costs too much, isn't repairable, doesn't run untaxed software, and spies on you. The next moves will lock you down even harder.
Like seriously people. We're empowering "I have no mouth and want to scream". We're making it come true.
An Orwellian, Stallman-killing nightmare. The anti-web. In a posh, glossy finish.
Brilliantly said. In the early days of MP3s I ripped all my CDs and refused to get that content locked into Microsoft's platform as I wanted control. Today I find myself so deeply tied to Apple's platform that I don't think I can get out.
I think we need the government to step in and require open APIs when a company is vertically integrated to allow competition in. E.g. you built the phone and the cloud service. Fine every cloud service app on the phone has to support an API that allows me to use the phone with a different vendor's cloud service. And we have precedent for this too, e.g. at one point I could only buy a landline phone from Bell, the gov. came along and told ATT they had to allow other companies to provide landline phones that would run on Bell's network.
My photos library is larger than disk space, so if I wanted to export photos out of the cloud I'd probably have to do it manually in stages. And I've lost my original MP3s somewhere along the line. Yikes.
Aside from the nostalgia, I have appreciated the ability to listen with any program I wish, and listening while offline has happened a few times. I don't know how long I'll continue buying physical media but I'm liking it for now
Re: Music - I still have my original MP3s and AAC files from ancient versions of iTunes (originally imported via LAME) and have travelled across many Macs and even across to Windows and back. If you've lost the originals I'm not sure what Apple can do about that
The thing Apple does have, and lets them remain in first place (but not the majority like the US), is the long tail of the iPhone 6 or whatever that someone has passed down to their kid or sold second hand that's still working. You don't see the same amount of Galaxy S4s hanging around, even though when both phones were new market share was a lot more equivalent for the two.
I think part of this may be a market difference here. The majority of non-tech people are on prepaid and buying a phone that's <€300 unsubsidised every 3-4 years. So they could get a second hand iPhone that's already 3-4 years old for that price, or they could get some Android mid range model new for like €200 and more people opt for the latter.
I really don’t think Siri will ever be that effective.
They have some weak network effects with iMessage (in some markets) and convenience around iPhotos, but nothing serious.
Up until recently I was on the verge of switching from Pixel to iPhone. There's no way in hell I'm switching now.
Honestly, the main reason I chose and prefer Android is that it's possible to side-load apps. Originally that was because I planned to develop some dumb apps for personal use and didn't want to deal with any corporate bureaucracy. I never did that, but I have no interest in losing the capability.
Exactly, they deliberately crippled the feature to make it too painful to bypass their corporate bureaucracy. It's only useful for the narrow uses that suit Apple. In no way is that ability comparable to side-loading on Android.
Getting rid of Google is not an option. The choice comes down to how much Apple I want in my phone.
Why shouldn't it? It could reveal their true colors in starker terms than one has seen before. It's one thing to know, abstractly, that they're an amoral self-serving entity. It's quite another to see it demonstrated so openly.
Now we have utterly clear and factual evidence showing that position is rubbish.
There is a clear and desperate need for anti-trust regulation.
You're missing my point. I'm sure Sundar Pichai has sent similar emails, but that fact is abstract and therefore remote. Jobs/Schiller sent these emails, but that fact isn't abstract, it's right here in our faces.
It’s not that bad a look.
So I honestly don’t understand the angst around this. It seems like there is this idea that the only cost associated with hosting apps on the App Store is the transaction fee, but that’s only part of it. Apple is a for-profit company, and their margin is in line with other industries.
I’m not defending the shitty things they’ve done, I just don’t understand why people think 30% is excessive.
Apple has zero risk and 80% profit margins (on the App Store anyways).
Lastly, retail stores are where you typically purchase one-off items. They don’t keep charging you for that refrigerator month after month.
The two business models aren’t really comparable.
Grocery stores: < 3% Profit margin, huge inventory risk.
App store: > 70% profit margin, zero inventory risk.
Put another way: If grocery stores cut gross margin by a couple points they'd be out of business. They are basically charging the absolute bare minimum they need to make a profit. The reason? Competition.
Apple could drop their App Store gross margin by 50% and still have one of the most lucrative operations in the world.
You don't realistically have that option for phones. It's insane to require a company to build their own phone hardware, OS, app store, and get the majority of people to switch over to it before you can sell books without paying a 3rd party for it.
If you're starting with that premise, then you've already made up your mind.
The fact is that the 30% covers more than just the purchase and you have to ignore that completely to maintain your "zero good arguments" position.
I’m not saying Apple should get nothing, but they need to justify why they are entitled to that much. Sure they created the phone, operating system, etc, but without those third party apps the iPhone would be a stupid toy not a bajillion dollar a year business.
If you want to justify the 30% because it funds development of the developer resources and frameworks and such, I would say that Apple would be doing all that stuff regardless of money from the App Store since without it they aren’t going to keep selling phones at massive premiums.
But then it's a chicken or egg scenario. The iPhone was one of the best-selling smartphones of all time even before the App Store existed. If those third-party apps didn't exist without the ecosystem Apple set up and maintains to this day, the whole progression stops cold. Apple uses the 30% to justify the entire App Store ecosystem (payments, reviews, localization, distribution, updates, etc.) because it guarantees that it's scalable and sustainable. If the App Store and apps become more popular, they're still covering the costs. Console manufacturers and other platform manufacturers (hardware/software) have agreed and set their prices at nearly the same levels independently of Apple. That's not a coincidence.
As an aside, it’s totally different seeing “Sent from my iPhone” when it’s Steve Jobs sending it from his iPhone.