Are we really better off having competition for competitions sake rather than looking at what delivers the best outcome? Is there any value in preserving the business models of lesser products which are unable to compete on quality and features? Many of these businesses are on shaky ground anyway. BNPL companies are in a dire situation where almost every other financial institution such as banks, paypal, etc all copying their very easy to copy product.
Yes, because there's a fundamental cost to society.
The cost v. benefit and what's actually an acceptable payoff is of course up for debate.
However the day has been coming for a long time. It doesn't take that much in the way of critical thinking, to have been able to preempt that this situation would manifest.
Many people have been asking for this for a long time.
Let's hope it's not too late when the destructive effect of monopolies are taken seriously.
In this case, I can argue that Apple is protecting us from crappy companies. Tile sold its business to Life360. Life360 sells users' location data to anyone willing to pay for it. What's the fundamental cost to society of keeping companies like Tile around?
Maybe Life360 goes out of business. A bunch of engineers get hurt, some product people, marketers, accountants, administrators. 300 employees, laid off. That sucks, I agree. The effort of earning 27 million MAUs will be thrown down the toilet if they fail. That sucks. Now Life360 users must migrate to something that Apple offers. Is the product better? Yes. Does Apple have a fundamentally rivalrous relationship with its users? No. Does Apple sell users' data? No. I see no demonstration of consumer harm in this segment.
Let's take a real hard look at the people harmed by Apple's monopoly. These are other monopolists of their own vertical who are incensed that they can no longer enjoy monopolistic rents. Furthermore, that company may go out of business. The people being put out of business are likely engineers who would have no trouble finding another job. I do not have sympathy for technologists. I do have sympathy for the tens if not hundreds of millions of people in America who struggle to make a living. What's the effect to them if we break up Apple? Nothing. What's the effect if we don't break up Apple?
Apple at this point in their life has reached a point where its value proposition is more than just a luxury. They've created meaningful products creating meaningful changes in lives. Apple Watch has helped vulnerable folks (including me) get emergency services via fall detection, which leverages technologies and products made possible by Apple's "monopoly". Apple gives consumers the option to privately monitor their own home and premises through Homekit whereas other surveillance services brazenly monetize their services by selling data to law enforcement.
In the case of Homekit, what do consumers gain if Apple had to break out its home automation unit? They may have to pay more for that standalone service or else have their data monetized in other ways. Is that good for consumers? Heck no. What's paying for those services now? Apple's "monopolistic" profits.
I could go down the line with every one of Apples units and services. They've helped my family experience a level of richness that we've never enjoyed before.
For as much as pockets of the tech industry grandstands about "monopoly" because they don't like IAP rules, actual people don't care because they have benefitted greatly from what this "monopolistic" entity has contributed to their lives. You're going to have a tough time convincing me that this would all be possible had Apple not consolidated many parts of the industry.
> Yes, because there's a fundamental cost to society.
Insofar as my non-tech family and friends see it, this "cost" to society has been more like a dividend. When Apple starts acting maliciously, I'll drive everyone here to your local Attorney General's office.
Here's how I see Apple: Apple is Jupiter. It's the largest planet in the solar system. Is it terrifyingly large? Yes. Is it protecting me, Earth, from getting smashed by asteroids? Definitely. I like Jupiter.
Historically this was not true, although it has been true in the U.S. since the 1970s. Historically it was understood that a lack of competition was itself harmful, regardless of whether the monopolist was benevolent or not.
In the case of technology, harm is more difficult to demonstrate. How do you quantify the harm done by the absence of new products or services launched? It's easy to say Company B undercut Company C until Company C went out of business after which Company B raised prices. It's harder to say Company A had such a strong position in the market that companies D-Q never got past step 1 before either shutting down or being acquired by one of companies A, B, or C. Harder to prove the absence is harmful, but there is still harm being done.
If nothing else, a company so large it engenders a fan base that will defend its every action is edging toward "too big to regulate" in a way that doesn't bode well.
For what it's worth, I'm not big on breaking up existing companies along arbitrary lines as much as I am on unwinding acquisitions. M&A activity is what I think is knee-capping technology, and Apple is less guilty of that than many others.
Apple builds a beautiful, big house with no locks. A very wealthy family moves in. They love their new house. Then some folks started snooping in to spy on the household or to steal from them. Some of those thieves decide to use their loot to create more houses for the community. This causes the community to flourish. Others keep the loot to themselves.
Apple realizes this house needed locks from the start, so they install them. The community is arguably negatively affected, as there is no longer a home to steal from. Does this make it wrong for Apple to install locks?
Early, unfettered access to users and user data created a sort of primordial soup for innovation. It's impossible to argue that it didn't increase company formation. However, many companies grew by trodding on ground they should have had no right to.
The core of the issue here is not user data, but the ability to interoperate with the phone OS. It's absolutely possible to do that without exposing sensitive data, by providing APIs and adopting open standards (for payments, notifications, message extensions, maps, etc etc). Case in point, it would have been technically impossible for Tile, or anyone else, to create a product as good as AirTags. That was not a matter of product vision or creativity, only of who has actual access to the phone hardware.
A better analogy would be that Apple does not allow you to bring third-party furniture into the house. You must buy theirs. And then the same for food, and eventually clothing, and water, and electricity... one day you bring this really cool TV into the house, just released, guess what's their next product offering that will slot in seamlessly with your furniture?
(I use all things Apple, but this power is starting to get me concerned)
Home+ has been in the top 50 for as long as I can remember and it's a $15 paid app.
This is actually is a cost, as it's used to justify their continued domination.
The harm done shouldn't be examined purely in the sphere of the consumer .. it should be extended to society. The cost of Apple's continued success, is the probably failure of other smaller ventures. They stifle, and they dwarf most other commercial entities.
In another comment I mentioned that any set of user-positive functionality is underlain with a far more strategically important business benefit.
The only reason they do good is to continue to grow. Let's not kid ourselves.
And if we're talking space analogies, I'd argue it's actually closer to a black hole ..
not on android
But they won't, because they'll lose face and control of the data.
Unfortunately, Apple is not the kind of product I would actually want to use. They are still behind Android on many features, because the lock so much down, don't prioritize compatibility, etc.
They also cost more, and you can't develop apps for them unless you also have a Mac. To any techie, that's a problem, especially when a MacBook costs more than anything else I've ever owned.
iOS apps also seem to often cost a few bucks, despite free equivalents existing for Android. Perhaps because they are more expensive to make, or because they can't rely on a data collection business model, whatever the case pretty much everything seems more expensive.
There are lots of reports that third party stuff is just a bit worse because of the privacy restrictions.
The UI is non-customizable in a very annoying way, it's all based on gestures and shortcuts with many things hidden.
Apple makes appliances more than computers. Android, Windows, and Linux all share a general idea of doing anything, in any scenario.
With Apple you're never quite sure what they'll do. Anything beyond core phone use cases seems more like a bonus, and a lot of the exclusive features have to do with some other Apple specific thing.
Plus, apparently, they don't have per app notifications, and some are saying that push notifications can be unreliable.
There is essentially never a time when I want anything like a full do not disturb. So... I'd have to be interrupted every 4 seconds by crappy apps that spam notifications to avoid being unreachable?
With Android, you feel like no matter what tech task you want to do, you can probably do it with an app. I don't get the impression Apple is really trying to be more than an appliance.
I don’t mean to be adversarial, but are you saying you’re a techie who never owned something costing more than $1K?
I made the very highly questionable choice of getting into embedded systems with no degree or math talent, and while being clumsy enough I probably shouldn't drive.
.... so I have never made more than $30k a year, usually less, even when I've been in semi-leadership-ish roles designing $10k equipment.
A lot of the big companies that have a spare 100 grand laying around seem to want people who can do RF design and hand solder a BGA.
Low volume work for ultra small non-tech companies is a pretty different skillset.
There's nothing all that advanced, but the schedules are tight, things have to be repairable by people with very limited training, you're doing lots of unrelated work, there's legacy gear everywhere, arbitrary marketing related restrictions, and hardware costs matter.
Admittedly not a very big issue for most working professionals, but I would think it could be a bit of a problem for anyone in a non-tech industry trying to learn on their own.
At the same time, there have been comments (here also), that because iDevices have such amazing support and hence longevity, they're actually more cost-efficient. Hand-me-downs and resale value make an investment into an iPhone or iPad actually better value for money than replacing an Android device several times over the same time span because Samsung et al like to drop support like it's going out of style. For example, an iPhone I bought 6 years ago is still actively supported and in-use by some elderly relatives. It still gets updates!
Reminds me of this quote from Terry Prattchet's discworld series:
A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.”
iPhones kind of have to be, they wouldn't be very useful if they weren't mass market with the ecosystem that comes with that.
They might be very slightly more cost effective in the long run, but many modern Android devices promise multiple years of support, and of course, one can(As I'm currently doing, but should probably stop) use them beyond that period, or install aftermarket firmware on some of them.
Samsung seems to do security updates for about 4 years now, and OnePlus promises 3 major versions.
That said, a 1K computer that would wholly replace your other (probably >1K) computer shouldn't really affect your ability to afford that.
Most of the stuff you listed as an is things that others desire as a feature. And if that isn’t you, Android is a great alternative.
Your solution is focus modes, which they spent rather a long time talking about in the keynote.
Some say you can whitelist the messages app and let all contacts message you, some say that doesn't work? There's a lot more discussion and confusion than I'd hope to see about it.
It just seems a little less smooth than I'd expected, like as if "No affect on any other notifications, just make this Aliexpress app stop spamming" isn't really a core use case.
nb there’s also time sensitive vs not time sensitive notifications that can be filtered on, but it’s up to the app to say which are which.
iOS does have per application notification settings. Also apps have to ask permissions to even send them. You can also change how each app's notifications behave. It's also possible to group all notifications from an app or a group of apps to be shown at certain time of a day, all at once. I don't think there's any reliability issues.
https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/11/01/how-to-manage-not...
The focus modes expand this so that you have even more power to control how notifications work at certain time of day (or location etc). Focus modes also apply to all your Apple devices at once.
> iOS apps also seem to often cost a few bucks, despite free equivalents existing for Android. Perhaps because they are more expensive to make, or because they can't rely on a data collection business model, whatever the case pretty much everything seems more expensive.
This has a benefit that there are more high quality apps on iOS than on Android and the apps aren't abandoned as often.
It could be that nobody can make a better product, because of their power. Buying power for parts, for startups, for marketing, lawyers.
That said, I'm not for regulating too much, they do indeed make a fine product. I have an iPhone, it's to closed for my tasted but it just really works well.
No but competition is the bedrock of the resource distribution philosophy at hand. If thats not the case then we should just let all companies consolidate in to a large monopoly because their products are superior to non existing companies.
Trotting the 30% tax as an Apple exclusive problem is extremely disengenuous.
Sony, Microsoft and Valve also charge 30% (and have draconian agreements that are even worse than apples).
It’s like Foxxcon all over again; when Apple does the same as everyone else, suddenly it’s a pariah. (For context I’m talking about the suicides at Foxconn due to the abhorrent working conditions, despite the fact that nearly every large OEM and board maker used them: Apple got the most shit).
Sometimes I think the media might have a bit of bias against Apple for some reason.
Not that the criticism isn’t justified, but it’s definitely not levied even handedly.
This makes these two appstores completely incomparable. Enrolling in one is voluntary, and is done by developers because it is beneficial to them, another one is extortion.
Second; while you can sell your program in other places, you may not charge differently than steam. Which makes a lot of sense but is quite hard to grapple with in reality. I think there are cheeky “letter of the law” ways of working around this but obviously Valve don’t want that and then look for other reasons to just drop your entire catalog at random (this was not done by Ubisoft, despite the title and article claiming that: https://gamerant.com/ubisoft-remove-game-steam/)
After all; why go outside of steam if it’s not cheaper?
https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/drm
Some games can be bought on Steam, GoG (DRM-free), and/or their website.
Example:
https://www.kerbalspaceprogram.com/games-kerbal-space-progra...
https://www.gog.com/en/game/kerbal_space_program
https://store.steampowered.com/app/220200/Kerbal_Space_Progr...
Since Apple has locked down the platform, they are the price setters: they decide for you that 30% is fair. Seems extortionate to me.
In fact it’s likely by virtue of the platform being so closed that the rate is so high (as my examples are console platforms which also seek to be hermetically sealed environments), so trotting out f-droid as a refutation does little.
Maybe I’m numb to this from working in games; try making a game and avoiding the 30% tax; even on a free and open platform like PC, outside of Epic and some home-grown launchers you’re going to be paying 30%. For consoles; forget about it, that’s the price.
It’s pay to play, and if you don’t want to pay then… don’t, nobody puts a gun to your head any forces you to support the iPhone. At least you have an alternative platform to target that is cheaper (Android).
Where as I got death threats when we put The Division 2 on Epic Games; the public opinion was not a good one: https://reddit.com/r/thedivision/comments/ae8vnd/_/ednd9fr/?...
Right? If you don't like their monkeys then don't join their circus! Apple is spending billions of dollars to create their iPhone market that these people then want to tap into and profit from for free! Apple doesn't get paid unless you get paid, distribute your app for free and you don't have to pay Apple anything. Oh, you want to make money? Then you're going to have to pay for that!
If these people don't like it then I suggest they try distributing their software via Walmart, Gamestop, or Staples. Wait, what? You can't access their stores for free to sell your stuff! Say it ain't so!
Frankly I'm tired of this juvenile discussion. These people obviously have no clue as to how retail works and can't see that Apple has actually cut them a hell of a deal! A better deal than you're going to get distributing any product via a traditional retail channel.
Feel free to donate as much money as you want to them though.
However there are other trillion-dollar companies that have free consumer services if that's really the issue (which it isn't). By the way, millions of apps are not monetized and therefore free to host so clearly there's not a critical cost associated with the app store but rather pure profit margin.
Simply allowing the install of additional app stores would solve all these issues and allow for more competitions and the free market to discover the real price of app store services.
Let people install alternative app stores and every single issue is resolved.
Apple may make a large chunk of profit from the iPhone (which only comes from scale, mind you; 1 new iPhone would cost a million dollars to make but 100M copies of a new iPhones only costs ~$40B to make), but the solution can’t be “App Store revenue drops 99%” (which would certainly happen; why would anyone stay with IAP and not switch to PayPal or stripe for a <5% fee?).
Just put a scary looking, click 35 times on this hidden menu option to allow proper sideloading, not this 3 apps for 7 days bullshit.
Edit: This may sound ridiculous, but I seriously do not think companies like apple or microsoft have ever contributed anything of value to society. They are merely rent-seeking operations.
Firstly, the “botnet” is afaik opt-in and it still has a semblance of privacy in its design. You might do well to inform yourself of how it works and how people have played around with it.
Saying that Apple or Microsoft have not added value to the world is just absurd.
For one thing; we would very unlikely be running windowing systems of any kind without them. I know that sounds absurd and like it was inevitable, but there was nobody else doing that at the time afaik.
Second to that Apple did put a lot of effort into typography on computers, something nobody else was doing: so you can thank them for fonts.
Microsoft made popular the idea of ad-hoc file sharing with samba/smb.
Microsoft’s office suites, love them or hate them, literally run the world; I can’t even imagine a company that doesn’t interact with excel.
Apple created (or at least heavily developed) CUPS; which remains the best way to print on every UNIX system I’m aware of.
These are just a few examples, and sure, the history is mired with anti-competitive bullshit and forced attempts at pushing awful technology, but…
Such blatant ignorance is unjustified on this forum. I’m honestly ashamed.
That's some very poor imagination. I run a company since 2007, haven't opened MS Excel even once since ~2006, ask me anything. Thing is, companies existed long before excel came to be, and will exist long after it will fade away to history.
Ever been audited? Nearly every auditing company is using excel.
Even if you’re not using excel, it is the lingua Franca of spreadsheets. The next closes thing is a CSV which largely exists as an interchange medium.
Excel is undoubtedly the world's most used and most popular database software even though there is a multitude of alternative more, efficient and frankly, even more, user-friendly solutions out there. It is frankly ubiquitous.
I hate that this is true, but it is reality.
[0]: https://www.efinancialcareers.co.uk/news/2020/10/excel-mista...
If I would ever be asked to provide some report in a proprietary format like MSOffice (I know it is pretending to be open, but this OOXML is nothing more but a mockery and corruption of an open standardization process), I'll ask to buy me licences for the necessary software to compile such report, including a licence for the operating system to run the OS-specific software on.
You “opt in” by enabling “find my iPhone”. The same feature has now been scope creeped to include constant active scanning in your local area and reporting back. The original feature sent Apple your devices location periodically.
You have to dig through a series of menus and scary warnings to turn the additional garbage off.
You can retain the capability of the “find my” while not participating in the network.
EDIT: decided to see how hidden and scary the warnings are: https://imgur.com/a/lTgxzHt
Rent-seeking is a seperate issue, but no different to the Industrial Age and how Railway providers would do the same. We have inadequate governance.
This isn't true for Microsoft.
They're a monopoly for most of the PCs on this planet and since they've been that for years now, changes to a different system which may still work out are hard and sometimes even impossible.
Same goes for the mobile infrastructure for different reasons. Someone who "grew up" in the Apple infrastructure will have a hard time changing to Android and vice versa. However people within the Android infrastructure have at least a greater choice of hardware (and for a few of them choice of an Android version).
Microsoft makes so completely bonkers amounts of money just from Windows and Office that they can use it to prop up other branches of their business that aren't generating profit yet.
Should they be broken up? Yes, together with the other tech giants. Are they doing something that's particularly amazing compared to what Google is doing with the Pixel? Not really. Google was doing magic eraser before iOS 16.
They're "just" a tech company, if a monolithic one. They're not meaningfully improving the lives of humans in a way that lifts millions out of mental illness. Emoji wallpapers are nothing more than distractive features to our inevitable suffering.
Let's try and temper our praise of what tech companies are actually doing for humans so we can focus on what's important in life: the reduction of human suffering globally, improving outcomes in welfare holistically for all people everywhere.
Appreciate it! Yeah, I figured maybe I'm just not used to enough WWDCs -- but surely they can't be this feature packed every time.
There are some seriously good consumer-facing features in here, that I find it easy to not be cycnical about.
> Should they be broken up? Yes, together with the other tech giants. Are they doing something that's particularly amazing compared to what Google is doing with the Pixel? Not really. Google was doing magic eraser before iOS 16.
But this isn't really about just one feature in particular -- the combination of these features under Apple just seems more cohesive than when Google puts them together. When I see Google Pay, I don't think it's going to kill Venmo -- when I see Apple doing peer to peer payments, I worry for Venmo.
There's also an implicit trust (their continued emphasis on "privacy", they're leaning into it hard), and Apple has built a reputation on having things be easy to use for the end user -- even if it's at the expense of control and power users.
Google has less of that golden UX reputation, and a lot of people get really turned off by the proliferation of low price and also low quality devices that are full of bloat/spyware and end up sacrificing user time. Low price does not imply low quality, and I prefer the relative openness of the Android, but I have to admit that Apple does UX pretty well.
> They're "just" a tech company, if a monolithic one. They're not meaningfully improving the lives of humans in a way that lifts millions out of mental illness. Emoji wallpapers are nothing more than distractive features to our inevitable suffering.
This is interesting... uhh that's one of the biggest companies in the world. Not one of the biggest tech companies, one of the biggest companies period, by revenue.
I'd argue they're doing a lot for improving lives of humans, though not necessarily related to mental illness -- that you have to lay at the feet of some of the social media companies and other things.
Emoji wallpapers are distracting features, but what about the people who organize local protests or use their iPhones to look up vital information? Gotta take the good with the bad here -- most of the examples were also pictures of people who were important (i.e. presenters' family members).
For example one of the presentations that really hit me was the easy of parental controls/time limits for devices -- in my mind they've just become the default correct choice for parents who have to grapple with how to control their childrens' exposure to the internet/content. It's a bit of a first world problem, but still it's one that parents the world over will have to deal with and they've chosen to spend time making it easy.
Apple is somewhat sheltered from the bread-and-circus promoters designation in my mind because they really do produce tooling -- iDevices have stayed tools and for the most part are not as surveillance heavy as other similar tools.
> Let's try and temper our praise of what tech companies are actually doing for humans so we can focus on what's important in life: the reduction of human suffering globally, improving outcomes in welfare holistically for all people everywhere.
I agree with this sentiment, but it seems little weirdly moralistic -- the world is actually doing massively better, human suffering is trending downwards. It's not all gone obviously but most of human life is getting better -- Apple can do more to help move that along, but doesn't seem like a reason to downplay their accomplishments either.
Again, I just want to state I'm not a diehard Apple fan, but I think I can reserve the right to be impressed!
That's the thing about competition -- it just sneaks up on you, and the firms that are just slowly making really good incremental updates win over the long run. It's little by little, then all at once.
For example, being able to clip your iPhone to your monitor, and get two camera feeds at once. This looks kind of silly and like a gimmick, but this is going to shake up the live streaming space a little bit.
People have been mucking with buying DSLRs, setting up software, getting a second overhead camera, making sure things don't overheat. If they do this right, that's all over, and now more and more people are going to be using the iPhone (they probably already have) along with maybe an external monitor.
At some point, a nerd will implement the pairing and use-as-camera ease (if it isn't already possible) on windows/linux, and it will get even easier.
Another thing towards the end -- apple dipping it's toes into collaboration, and building it into the platform and across apps. Google is definitely reaching a lot of people with Chromebooks and building itself a platform, but Apple's UX and focus on being buttery smooth/sacrificing customization for widespread usability feels like it's going to win.
Is Apple search inevitable? Isn't it basically already here? Every search that someone does from Spotlight is that much closer to being one less search that Google can see/monetize.
Well yes, sort of already there, yes. But Google will still get to see/monetize for a while yet, as explained below. The class action lawsuit might accelerate that process. Apple’s WWDC announcement that Spotlight will now feature more prominently on home screens is the next step in directing your searches, with Siri and/or other search tools/partners.
With Spotlight your are directed you to web search results not from the search preference set in your default browser, but instead for the preference set in Safari. And Google is the default preference in Safari. So Google will still see most of the searches (and keep paying $billions for the traffic).
An example might illustrate this clearer: say Firefox is your default browser and Ecosia (or Mojeek) is set as your search preference. In this case the Spotlight search would go ahead and do the search in Firefox using the search preference set in Safari (which is likely to be Google). Ecosia or Mojjek or any other different choice you make, is bypassed.
Astonishingly, even if you delete Safari, the default search choice of Safari will still be used by Spotlight.
You're overblowing it. Nobody is shitting their pants.
I agree that Android phones are inferior compared to iPhone (since forever?). And Google knows it.
But you're underestimating the beast that Google is.
Infact I think Google even gave up on making flagship devices, because Pixel phones are positioned as a midrange device.
It's a Ferrari vs Toyota situation.
Now, if Apple comes up with a search engine that magically gives you the best result up top everytime, _then_ Google would be really concerned and have a code-brown situation (even if search engine is not where the majority of $$$ comes from).
Google search has degraded.
If Apple comes up with a great search engine, then Google would be concerned.
> But you're underestimating the beast that Google is.
When I think of how Google exerts it's power on the consumer I can think of these things:
- Search
- GMail (the on-ramp to GSuite)
- Chrome
- Android
These are all powerhouses, but they're not unassailable. In fact I think Apple's moat is more defensible than Google's -- lots of companies have tried and failed.
I'd love to hear why I'm wrong though, I've never worked at big G or worked in ads or some other sector they Google is dominant.
Google is making some great inroads with Chromebooks (and essentially trying to get the next generation), but... Just about everything Google does I'd rather trust Apple with, and all that we're waiting for is them to give me the chance.
Just to clarify, I'm not in that room :)
[1]: 73% according to StatCounter.
(Though the same disgusting practice is used on laptops where a mid-class 5 years old laptop can easily outclass a “modern” low-end one..)
Well-off people can afford the iPhone SE, which will get updates for 5-6 years. Poorer people get the fancy schmancy latest Android device with 42 front cameras that'll stop getting OS updates in a year or two. After 3-4 years it's completely unsupported by anything and bordering on unusable, at this point even the security updates have stopped.
Then they go get a new Android phone and GOTO 10.
Buy better phones then? Samsung and Google both offer 5 years of updates now.
>after 3-4 years it's completely unsupported by anything and bordering on unusable No they aren't, and we all know you don't have a source to support this.
4+ years ago this wasn't the case and I watched people get burned by shitty support multiple times - all the while my iOS devices chugged along. Even flagship phones could get 0-1 official OS level updates.
Oh, and check the fine print on those promised "updates". IIRC the Samsung one guarantees "security updates" for 5 years - basically they'll backport fixes for high enough severity CVEs to older phones. You won't be getting 5 Android OS updates on them.
I'm willing to bet actual money that no more than a half dozen Android models you can buy _today_ with Android 12 on them will get Android 16 as an official update. On the other hand I can pretty much guarantee that the iPhone 13 being sold today will still get iOS 20.
People naturally gravitate towards those.
0: https://reddit.com/r/samsung/comments/v5nkpm/s22_horrible_ex...
Not really relevant to your point as a whole, but about BNPL. In Mexico basically any credit card worth having offers BNPL. Typically the agreed solution is just to charge interest to the merchant. Stripe Mexico has it: https://stripe.com/mx/pricing/local-payment-methods (see meses sin intereses), for an example of the fees involved.
In addition to this there are some institutions (like American Express) that offer BNPL at no charge for the merchant (other than the interchange fee).
No consumer pays interest in this scheme (it's in the name: meses sin intereses, months without interest), well, as long as they don't miss a payment (they charge interest then). So at least for this industry I don't think Apple is major threat. Surely BNPL firms can figure something like this out for the US. I think Mexico is not unique in this scheme.
This skims borderline on anti-competitive behaviour which will probably cause more regulatory scrutiny in the future. It is also an interesting question what is the overreach and what is genuine investment - Apple will go out of their way to solve a problem in silicon if they can't do so otherwise yet this is not something that you can probably fit in a legal framework easily.
Yes you are
In what ways are they using their market power to diminish welfare or competitiveness of the marketplace?
I think my example of BNPL firms is pretty good! Very hard to compete with BNPL @ no extra cost, from the company that already knows quite a bit about you, even if they never share it.
I also thought that the demo showing cropping out content from an image was impressive - but it’s the type of “tent-pole” feature Apple uses in stores and advertising to show how powerful their newer devices are - older phones don’t have the AI features. They time it well - guaranteed that with the iPad improvements we’ll see a new iPad to demo them.
Frankly, I’m excited. Apple’s managed to allow me to run 8 apps at the same time on my iPad Pro if I plug in a second monitor. On an M1 chip that could run full macOS if allowed and designed that way. Yep, basically Apple turned iPadOS into Windows 7 Starter Edition for netbooks (which was limited to running three windowed apps at a time, if I recall?).
It’s cool. Give it another year or two and they’ll have figured out how to present more apps on screen - and they’ll sell me an M3 chip to do it, probably.
Speaking of basic iPad functionality, I’m still waiting for the ability to listen to Spotify in the background while watching videos at the same time. No rush, Apple. I know you just got around to marking messages as unread, a feature I think my BlackBerry Pearl could do back when I was waiting for Copy and Paste and an App Store. Let me know when I’ve the AI needed to take screenshots of individual windows on my iPad now that they can overlap, that would be quite useful. Or swipe to scroll when using Sidecar.
Biggest disappointment: the keynote made zero mention of Shortcuts app on macOS. Will I ever be able to set timed automations on my Mac like I can on my iPhone? Will we ever get - not just feature parity - but a really awesome, well-integrated story to tell about automation across all these devices? (I suppose the answer, now, as always, is to write a native cross-platform app, but there’s a no-code story that’s been very slow to develop here…)
I wish they’d just kill FileMaker already, it would be so much better as an abandoned feature of iCloud since I’d get it as part of my Apple One subscription and they wouldn’t up sell me on enterprise features I don’t need in order to, you know, share things with others. Apple’s need to call some products business and other products consumer means it can never fully adopt consumer products like SharePlay and iMessages within their business products like FileMaker or MDM. Slack could have been an Apple product, but Apple can’t figure out how to make and price it’s products for small businesses and freemium. Not to mention I’d pay more if I could add more people to my family plan and help manage the family’s devices, but nobody seems to want to do that either.
What kind of a brain do you have when you can watch a video while listening to music? What's the use-case for this?
Even better if they can use some of their advanced AI on an app-by-app basis to remove noise in videos or remove music tracks from videos automatically and focus on the talking. Then I could put my own music in the background or leave it silent to focus better. I can do this on a computer with Rogue Amoeba’s apps and VST plugins, but I can’t do anything remotely like this on an iPad Pro.
well they have mentioned at least that I will be able to run them from Spotlight. Something I was wanting to do with Services since I came across Quicksilver app back in the days.
Everything I mentioned... is from the update and other stuff from the link.
Seeing the massive amount of updates that actually seem like huge wins for consumers is what triggered the thought I typed out.
We're on HN to talk about interesting angles/takes, and if you've noticed I hid at least two in my post, which is why I thought it was worth posting:
- PMs at Google should really be worried right now
- Apple needs to be broken up
> The best thing is: you're the top comment atm while the features mentioned in other comments (those which acutally mention features) are hilarious: tab weather to get past weather, mark comments as unread and for whatever reason: pair your phone to your laptop camera.
The rest of that is classic HN -- users here are so technical (and usually have long standing grievances/wants) that they are interested in very specific feature sets and less fazed by the rest (especially if unlike me they are already Apple devotees).
> I guess I keep on not watching the presentation and wait how this thread develops. It's a fantastic advertising implosion.
It's advertising, but it's also a shot across the bow (again, why I made my comment). Apple barely needs to advertise intentionally/drum up a buzz storm, and especially here on HN. Apple is one of the most valuable companies in the world, WWDC touches the lives of many successful developers (they mentioned 33MM devs in the apple program, that is insane), it is naturally of importance to much of HN.
The company, what it stands for, and it's history are all deeply embedded in the minds of technologists the world over.
Again, I really am not a Apple fanboy (nor some Apple PR sockpuppet account):
- I barely talk about apple on my blog[0]
- I don't write Swift -- (it wasn't very good last time I glanced at it compared to the alternatives)
- I definitely don't like ObjC (weird bad lisp? no thank you)
- I don't develop apps natively (NativeScript for the win), I don't even have an active app developer account
- I use an SE2, but most features stay off and I buy it precisely because I do not plan to change it for the next 10 years if I can get away from it (also, RIP FirefoxOS)
I was just really impressed with their presentation, and my biggest take away were the thoughts I shared here, because they might be interesting (and Google PMs are here).
Seeing a company this dominant is kind of alarming -- you can't do the usual handwave of "oh but their product is bad". The problem is that their product is actually very good, and they seem to be the ones that care most about your privacy and align with your goals.
[EDIT] - Correction, Apple isn't the most valuable company in the world
[0]: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Avadosware.io+apple
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
In the case of the GP comment I think the point where you crossed the line was "I love how you just keep on sounding like an advertisement just before you repaet again that you are NOT an Apple-Fanboy". That's the sort of flamewar swipe we definitely don't want here. How the other person feels about it in any given case isn't dispositive; the problem is the effect such comments have on the ecosystem as a whole.
You're so focused on specific features that you don't see the total picture. For normal users the significant feature is that it just works better: better integrated, better usability, better support. And through the integration they've replaced entire companies too focussed on a single feature as a product.
Even, or maybe especially, for technologists Apple should not be a joke, but something to admire. They do a lot of impressive technical stuff that should awe techies: just replacing intel by a home made cpu with no impact to users other than hugely improved battery life and speed?
As a person who used to work at Intel a long time ago in a non-design/architecture role... It is unbelievably impressive what they've done. Maybe it was always going to happen so there's nothing Intel would have done, but it must sting.
It's so hard to plan chips 1/2 years in advance and predict what the market will consider impressive, etc. They really nailed it.
They're also about to massively win with NVidia open sourcing their linux drivers, games-on-linux finally becoming a thing with Proton, etc.
Corrected -- you're right I should have said they're one of the biggest companies in the world. Wiki has them @ #6 by revenue.
I'd disagree on HAVING to buy their product long term, but for now it's certainly true that most of the world runs on fossil fuels.
> I love how you just keep on sounding like an advertisement just before you repaet again that you are NOT an Apple-Fanboy :D
Well I'm glad the prose is advertisement quality! I was certainly growing in my praise, but I think they deserve it at least a little bit.
It's funny because I realize full well that they're android-ifying themselves a bit (customizable lock screens), but it's done in the typical apple way where I think most people will never run into a problem with it, and it will feel intuitive/look good.
> PS. in the IT tech world I live in, having an Apple device automatically leads to becoming a target for all kinds of jokes (which is why nobody has one) but maybe I just don't understand what "technologists" actually means.
Yeah we probably just live in different worlds, no problem with that!
I guess I'd have to disagree. the only product that apple really blows out the rest of the competition out of the water are probably in wearables, and that's mostly due to google's incompetence. Everything else is dominating market share either due to owning macbooks being a fashion statement / status symbol, or people are forced into it by the walled garden because they already own one or two of their products. I'd also might agree in the tablet space you could argue they are probably better than android but I wouldn't say they are doing better by much, it's mostly the app ecosystem for tablets being really poor in android.
Images have now to be built as x86 for deployment vs arm64 locally. iOS project dependencies need to be rebuilt as well, and some would have broken build scripts because they never imagined you could be developing on arm64 so platform arch is hardcoded everywhere. I've had this issue myself, but it's on third parties to update, not Apple. This is all well known, and already the case for Windows RT / ARM and others, the Apple ecosystem just needed time to adjust.
> This is all well known, and already the case for Windows RT / ARM and others, the Apple ecosystem just needed time to adjust.
and I'll continue to wait until they smooth things out more cause right now it's still not there yet.
This is a serious shot across the bow for other companies who are vying for do-everything-be-everywhere dominance (basically, Google). I can only assume that product design/vision people at Google are watching this and absolutely shitting their pants (if I'm over-blowing it please let let me know).
Also, despite how absolutely customer beneficial almost every change looks, Apple (and other similar size companies) probably should be broken up. This is too much power, too many markets to dominate, too much synergy for one company to wield. They will never meet the current legal requirements for a monopoly, but this is definitely monopoly power on display.
Apple is an existential threat to so many companies (Venmo, BNPL firms, activity trackers, news companies, traditional TV broadcasters) and they seemingly execute so well that I don't even know where to start. How can a BNPL firm compete with apple offering the same service at no extra charge? Just the disappearance of easy money has crashed their valuations already.
They managed to describe AI/ML in an actual meaningful way halfway through the presentation. I'm impressed by that messaging in and of itself -- most of the time AI/ML is introduced as future porn/hand waves, Apple is engendering trust.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5D55G7Ejs8