For a certain demographic of people, I would agree. I continue to push the iPad for my aging parents because it can do what they need to do without my tech support. They don't need all the flexibility of a computer as a general purpose computing device. They just need to browse the web, write emails and watch videos, and the iPad is perfect for them.
Any questions, or do you still want to whinge over how "turing completeness isn't computation!"? You're welcome to it, but quite obviously the Digital Markets Act has nothing to do with it. Apple would be a designated gatekeeper if they sold Cuisinart blenders, now they have to cope or leave the relevant markets.
It's truly shocking to me how some people are willing to write multiple pages of comments in response to this. Half the people in this thread are replying to every positive comment they can find crying "Atlas Shrugged!" like bloody murder.
I don’t think the DMA will change much but do find it funny how many people think they are defending human freedom by getting a convoluted process to run emulators, uBlock, and piracy apps on their phone.
So... what's a better way to defend human freedom? Letting market conditions deteriorate further?
How exactly are they different from Apple, then? Why didn't Apple resist their incorporation into FIVE-EYES and Europe's surveillance network?
> If I were them, I’d say their best chance at defending human freedom would be to make nuclear reactors easy to build
That's the Free Market's job. If the world's largest company was a nuclear reactor business and not a smartphone one, maybe they'd be doing it.
> This will end up being as useful as GDPR privacy notices and cookie consents on websites.
Or as effective as their USB-C regulation. Time will tell, eh?
Because Apple sells the highest security mass market consumer device ever made? Because Apple brought easy to use, end to end encryption to the masses with iMessage?
No clue what your point here is besides regurgitating some non-specific conspiracy theory about the extent of Apple’s cooperation with the government.
> That's the Free Market's job.
Regulation is not the free market’s job, as you evidently believe since you are so excited about digital markets regulation.
Maybe they could start by not categorizing wood pellets shipped across the Atlantic and produced from strip mining forests in southeastern United States as “green energy.”
> Or as effective as their USB-C regulation
How was USB-C regulation effective? Yeah Apple complied, but are customers’ lives better? In aggregate? By what metric? I for one had to buy a new iPhone cable for the first time in half a decade to connect my phone to my car. By its stated aims, the regulation was not effective in my case.
https://twitter.com/trunarla/status/1706760798662758517
I suppose hackers really are digging EU regulation in this area!
https://twitter.com/trunarla/status/1706766113672212932
Gamers too?
This argument may not be worth continuing if you don't have anything left to say.
Me: By what standard? In my specific case, it wasn’t.
You: Blah blah blah burden of proof hierarchy of disagreement.
So do you have any citation or do you plan to keep deflecting? So far, my anecdote has been the only evidence provided about the matter, even if it’s weak which I already conceded.
Deflecting what? Nobody here cares about your metric of success, which so far seems to be substantiated on the same marginal frustration that people felt with the 30-pin to Lightning switch. Nothing you have presented suggests a populist rejection of USB-C. If anything, it's actually much more popular than Apple's standard.
> How was USB-C regulation effective? Yeah Apple complied, but are customers’ lives better? In aggregate? By what metric?
...did you miss all those links of people plugging their iPhones into displays and class-compliant devices? People programming and gaming and working with standard audio equipment using a single cable, like they should have been able to do from the start?
Customers lives are great right now. People who own non-Apple products like the Nintendo Switch or cough cough a Macbook can now charge their iPhone using the same cable. Households that avoid Apple products waste less money and material owning and buying cables for one device. Lack of MFi certification means that the cheap cables don't have to be built like shit. Hell, the simple fact that you can break the connector to remove it from your phone instead of taking it to the Genius Bar so you can get the whole IC board replaced.
I'm sure it's frustrating for Apple, losing out on the licensing fees and killing their dream of owning a serial standard. Sucks to suck.
Citation: Apple
> Regulation is not the free market’s job, as you evidently believe
Innovation is. The European Union was not founded to build a better Nuclear Reactor (nor would it tangibly impact their citizen's freedom). Regulating the market those citizens participate in does. I'm not so sure why you're complaining about this so much. If Apple's self-righteous crusade to own all digital IP was truly worth it, they could abandon Europe and continue on. But it's not- for one because they value money, and for two because they already work with FIVE-EYES and every domestic European nation to surveil on their users. No conspiracy, Apple documents it themselves: https://www.apple.com/legal/transparency/
> I for one had to buy a new iPhone cable for the first time in half a decade to connect my phone to my car. By its stated aims, the regulation was not effective in my case.
Cope.
It's a democratically passed bill to protect a market from extensive damage. Here are the people who voted for it: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/cmsdata/242706/IMCO%20Voting%...
Again, if Apple shared your opinion then maybe they'd call Europe's bluff. Again, Apple is chronically incapable of doing this because it would mean being eaten alive by shareholders that make $DIS owners look rational. Leaving the European market would be the trigger-pull of Apple's suicide.
> and now all they can do is nitpick connectors
...you're still mad about a $4 gas station cable? Seriously?
> and firmly demand that Apple support something almost no users care about.
"Why is the United States wasting their time with these Rockefeller people? They're coping over things the unbridled success of Standard Oil, pushing legislation that none of their customers care about!" - imagine the free market with a bunch of yous at the helm.
One can believe regulation is counterproductive while complying with it. Compliance isn’t evidence of success.
> you're still mad about a $4 gas station cable? Seriously?
USB-C is the last connector I’d cheap out on for my personal electronics, given its tendency to fry devices. In any case, the rationale for standardizing the connectors was that buying cables was an environmental and anti-consumer catastrophe, which is hilarious for a continent that imports wood pellets from across an ocean to heat homes. Suddenly me having to buy one is no biggie?
(I’m not mad, I’m perplexed.)
> imagine the free market with a bunch of yous at the helm
It’d be much better. I actually care about asking if regulation is productive and effective. You seem to be focused on whether it’s a sick own and think people who question efficacy are “coping”.
For example, I commented elsewhere in this thread that Apple’s requirement to only rent Macs for 24 hours at a time in VPS services is silly and shouldn’t be enforceable.
If I could facepalm any harder, my hand would pass through my skull and hit the wall behind me. Your definition of success is relative, and judging from every piece of evidence you have presented so far, it's also quite petty. Not the same definition of success the EU is using. So... you're welcome to disagree, but nobody is using your metric of success.
> Suddenly me having to buy one is no biggie?
Quite literally, yes.
> It’d be much better.
I'm going to tear my hair out. This is the reason nobody takes you serious in argumentation.
> I commented elsewhere in this thread that Apple’s requirement to only rent Macs for 24 hours at a time in VPS services is silly and shouldn’t be enforceable.
Congratu-fucking-lations. Next you're going to have some prophetic vision that their relationship with China is somehow harmful, or that the Butterfly Keyboard hurt your fingers. Maybe you are the expert market correspondent you claimed to be.
> You seem to be focused on whether it’s a sick own
You know what? I am. Apple spent the last 10 years playing their own game of sick ownership, now it's only fair that they should be forced to choose between first-world market access and fair play. If you want to question the efficacy of user freedom, use actual examples and arguements. Here's the chart again if you need help: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-qgQR5VUoGDU/UzV5nP4xKnI/AAAAAAAADo...
As annoying as it is to call it out, that’s a classic whataboutism right there.
1. An undertaking shall be designated as a gatekeeper if:
(a) it has a significant impact on the internal market;
(b) it provides a core platform service which is an important gateway for business users to reach end users; and
(c) it enjoys an entrenched and durable position, in its operations, or it is foreseeable that it will enjoy such a position in the near future.
Seriously, what site are we even on right now?
Or did you mean just running ARM Assembly?
...or a sufficently advanced browser :p (and people wonder why MacOS is loaded with lazy Electron ports...)
Distributing software should be free, ignoring the cost of transmitting the information and storing it on the client. Apple's pricing is arbitrary, and their defense of it is unsubstantiated. Forcing the App Store to compete is the only natural step forward for Apple, whether they (or their shareholders) want to admit it or not.
The freedoms we have, and the freedom that should be protected is market choice to buy or not buy any consumer product.
If you don’t like Apple, don’t buy its products and purchase a device from a large number of competitors. It is really that simple.
There is no rule that consumers have a right to do anything. You are not guaranteed a right to install a Windows app on your iPhone, or iPhone apps on Windows. You aren’t guaranteed that your coffee machine can run Python.
It's nice that they provide that service for those developers that want it. It's not nice that I don't have a choice to distribute my own app however I see fit.
See, I want to build an app, and people want to install it, but Apple is standing between us, dictating how we must and must not interact.
> As an Apple customer I value these things pretty highly, more than I value any one app.
Then you're free to not enable sideloading when it eventually inevitably materializes, and miss out on apps that aren't available on the app store. This decision is still yours to make. We've had this on Android and macOS since forever.
I propose Apple start charging some pennies for every million UIView calls.
But Apple always offered Xcode for free and, iirc, some Macs even came with an Xcode installation CD in the box. But major macOS updates were also paid back then. But the version that came with your computer out of the box was still free. So no, I feel like "we need the $99/year and the 30% to support the R&D cost of our APIs" is a mostly made-up excuse. It's not like Apple would operate at loss if they remove the $99 and 30% fees tomorrow.
Remember: Apple is considered a gatekeeper for app installation regardless of the cost they pay to maintain the platform. Charging per-call on a literally free API would be so profoundly stupid that it would force a second Digital Market Act.
Making an API public, even if the necessary code runs entirely on-device, is not free. It incurs immense upfront and perpetual R&D costs.
The digital markets act is about facilitating competing entrants to “essential platform services.” Charging for the Apple technology those entrants use would not be inconsistent with its aims. A developer could use their own UI framework that draws straight to the window server itself! And maybe use some of that famous Android audio processing software!
Sorry, that's like saying the Apple Developer program fulfills the DMA qualifications because it's not "inconsistent with it's aims".
Apple is of course welcome to try any of these things; nothing stops them as a private business. They failed to defend the mandatory value of the App Store in Europe though, so I fail to see how they could defend an arbitrary charge on other API calls. Apple quite literally cannot call Europe's bluff - that's what my original upstream comment was about in the first place. You can talk confident smack about Apple's talent in the pissing contest, but none of that means anything when the capitalist leash gets tugged and the alternative is losing money.
There is not a single value Apple holds that they would not forgo for money.
Mine as a consumer is that Apple doesn’t have dark patters when I want to cancel my subscription with your app. When I try to cancel my membership for something else like a magazine or the gym I have to go over 10 steps…
Then you're not my user. And I'm not talking about anything involving money anyway.
> When I try to cancel my membership for something else like a magazine or the gym I have to go over 10 steps…
It's the government's job to enforce consumer rights, not Apple's. I'm sorry that consumer protection in the US is so terrible. Where I'm from, "credit card on file" is just not a thing and most of everything is prepaid. If a service really insists on charging you against your will, you can block your card and get a new one but I've yet to hear about this actually happening to someone.
This is a complete red herring and a very sly one at that.
Sure, MS have no obligation to make it so that Safari can run on Windows.
However, Microsoft also cannot stop Apple from building a version of Safari that runs on Windows. Or iTunes on Windows. And when Apple built iTunes on Windows MS had no right to force them to fork over 30% of every song they sold within iTunes to MS. MS had no right to force Mozilla to build Firefox around the IE6 engine, or Chrome around IE6.
It’s very likely Apple, Google, or Mozilla would not have existed if governments (specifically the EU) hadn’t stopped Microsoft from pushing it’s options as the default, never mind blocking alternatives altogether.
Microsoft also doesn’t charge a ransom fee for 3rd party applications to use the hardware features of my computer, that I’ve already paid for. Apple does this with the NFC chip in iPhones - public transit companies the world over need to pay Apple money to use the nfc chip present in iPhones to pay for transit.
What choices might those be? The only other mobile operating system that people develop for is Android. How is a duopoly choice?
But there is, in the EU. That's what this whole thread is about. Like it or leave it, our market, our rules.
This is not even remotely true. Economies of scale mean that power accumulates and monopolies emerge, and monopolies are the antithesis of competition. In order to ensure competition, you need regulation to shake the jar regularly.
I love Apple’s hardware. But I want to be able to get software from other sources just like I can on my Mac and my windows computer.
- Phones are designed and used as general purpose devices, complete with thriving app ecosystems. I’ve installed software from dozens of companies on my phone - for gaming, work, leasure, health, everything. Phones are used much more like computers than an Xbox. We buy them to use them like computers.
- Unlike most game consoles, phones aren’t subsidised by the App Store. Apple makes a profit from iphone sales even if you don’t buy any apps.
- Phones matter more. I carry an iPhone in my pocket every day. I don’t carry a Nintendo switch.
Its my phone. I bought it with my own money. I do feel like I'm entitled to do whatever I want with my device. Its mine.
OS and device vendors forcibly inserting themselves between developers and users like Apple does is unprecedented. Because Apple has a literal technological supremacy over most of the humanity (since iOS devices use secure boot that can't be disabled and relies on keys burned into silicon that you can't change because you lack the technology to do so), regulation needs to happen to enable fair competition among iOS apps.
In other words, no one needed to enable competition when adversarial interoperability was possible. It is not possible on iOS devices because of combination of secure boot and code signing policies.
It's eerie how similar the iphone browser situation paralllels that.
The EU tries to balance this out with more regulation to prevent the stalemate and conflict of interests that exists in the US. Things like the Senate launch system that just exists for pork. Our welfare is for citizens, not big business :)
And it's fine, Apple doesn't have to enable sideloading in the US. But if they want to sell here they'll have to play by our rules.
After Samsung, Huawei, Xiaomi.
This is also why iMessage isn't a thing here in Europe but whatsapp is.
But the latest info is that Apple is going ahead with opening sideloaded stores, but for EU region only.
The market is not competitive enough to actually be able to vote with my feet/dollars. Options are give up control (choose Apple) or give up privacy (choose Google). That is not a choice consumers should be forced to make.
Yeah 100% the other stores will not allow for private APIs and circumvent privacy protections and anti-tracking mechanisms. I would 100% believe Facebook on the App Store vs Facebook on the Meta store will be the same…
That said, there's not a whole lot an app can do to track you (without requesting special permission) that a random website you visit couldn't.
Besides immoral, obviously tons of apps would leave the App Store for a different store making it a much crappier experience for folks that use those very popular apps.
If you don't use Facebook, then it shouldn't matter if they move to a Sketchy App Store.
They were about vendor abuse, vendor contracts. Which is one of the key ways Microsoft tried to maintain its power over the tech industry.
And of course as another person noted, Netscape was not in any manner blocked off of Windows. Netscape lost because it was charging for a browser while IE was free and usually installed by default. Then Netscape compounded the disaster by producing a couple of particularly terrible browser versions in a row while IE kept improving.
There was no scenario where a $49 browser was going to win regardless.
It wasn't FireFox, but Netscape definitely was actively worked against.
> Am I misremembering this era?
Apparently.
But here is a link to refresh your memory.
https://bootcamp.uxdesign.cc/the-netscape-microsoft-browser-...
To save you a click:
"The Shell Execute Bug
However, Microsoft’s most significant tactic was the infamous “shell execute bug.” This bug caused some users to fail when trying to install Netscape, but it was not present when installing Internet Explorer, giving Microsoft yet another advantage. While Microsoft claimed the bug was unintentional, many believed it was a deliberate attempt to prevent users from installing Netscape. The bug caused significant damage to Netscape’s market share and cemented Microsoft’s dominance in the browser market."
Of course they did, what kind of nonsense is this? It isn't their computer.
PC makers had to pay for licenses based on the number of computers sold, regardless of whether they were bundling Windows with them or not.