The OpenAI grift, the Facebook & Google stalking advertising, the Uber “independent contractors”, and the Amazon two-for of workers pissing in bottles and squeezing your suppliers so prices rise everywhere.
Yes, what a loss for the EU.
And by the time the EU attempted any of those, we already had the duopoly and the competition was already dead.
That's a pretty massive claim. Do you have any examples of this?
If the software you use today, that the businesses you go to, even in the US, are using it, then there's hardly stagnation, is there?
We aren’t going to out bid them on any of these things. We have to make it illegal, and vote in people who will enforce the laws.
Corporations have pressure points and there are a myriad of ways to contribute to the overall progress that each one wants to see for themselves.
I ran debian as my daily driver for like half my life; now I’m on mac and never have to worry about my friggin wifi driver.
It sounds like a lot of the "I used to use Linux, but nothing worked" crowd are either previous Arch-users (no shit you had to do everything manually) or older folks.
Have you noticed how bad the Docker experience is on Macs though, after how many years?
I think it is unjust to share strong opinions about previous issues that Linux distributions had without recent evidence.
Your desire for Apple to become an open system removes my choice to opt into a closed ecosystem, when you already have an open ecosystem to play in.
Yeah, I mean Linux is an abject failure, nothing ever works or runs on it. Nobody needs open data formats or open protocols for interoperability. Binary blobs for the win! /s
>Your desire for Apple to become an open system removes my choice to opt into a closed ecosystem, when you already have an open ecosystem to play in.
Don't worry, it's easy to lock down any open system and we can give you that should you desire it.
>, I mean Linux is an abject failure, nothing ever works or runs on it. Nobody needs open data formats or open protocols for interoperability. Binary blobs for the win! /s
I didn’t say anything of the sort. I said I actively choose a “more closed” ecosystem. Linux has similar problems IMO - “I want to buy a GPU” shouldn’t come with trying to figure out whether the device drivers will actually work, to me. If you want that, you have that choice.
> Don't worry, it's easy to lock down any open system and we can give you that should you desire it.
Only within the constraints of what you want which is that everything should adhere to a standard and be interoperable. Which, again, as I said you can have on android. Go buy a pixel phone, and a samsung watch and see how good the experience is.
I’ll say this again - there are open ecosystem alternatives for you out there, in android. Some people, even technical people, are ok with a smaller ecosystem knowing that there is lock in. If you don’t want that, don’t use it. But if you push your choices on me, you restrict my options and remove my preferred platform to have one more platform you want
If you don't like it (and I can totally understand why), there are numerous other smartphone makers out there with products that allow better integration with these watches and you're free to buy one.
MS didn't get into trouble because they went after competing browsers, they got into trouble for doing that while also having a monopoly on PC OSes. Apple doesn't have anything like a monopoly in this market (their US market share is about 50%, worldwide is around 28%).
If Apple makes a watch that can receive and send iMessages then there is no reason any other device shouldn't be able to use the same APIs that Apple uses.
It absolutely creates a system where competitors literally cannot compete with the same features.
For instance, try to play a video game on MacOS. While Vulkan is available on every playform, it's not available on MacOS or iOS despite the fact that it would take an engineer at Apple a weekend to implement (figuritively speaking). Apple are also killing off OpenGL support for MacOS.
Generally, Apple deliberately build a "dependence ecosystem" for their consumers on the product side while also actively preventing engineers from using portable technologies on their platforms.
The fact that MacOS is as open as it currently is is a miracle and I am sure executives hate that.
They create the fastest and most ergonomic mobile hardware on Earth but, outside of web browsing, video editing and some engineering workloads, there's very little you can actually do on it.
Re executives being mad: The thing is, they make money off Mac hardware, and even then its profits are dwarfed by iPhone and iPhone accessories. Which are of course locked down.
Microsoft tried to build their own extensions to the internet standards, like activex and proprietary DOM/JScript extensions, explicitly designed to lock devs into IE’s ecosystem. It's quite impressive that they managed to miss this opportunity to Adobe. And how Adobe then just... squandered it. I would expect that "being the necessary proprietary piece in significant chunk of internet" would have some deep strategic advantage, but both tech giants couldn't be bothered to do a good job.
Imagine if you could swap out Siri for Alexa. The privacy guarantees are nothing alike. People buy iPhones because they prohibit unsafe choices.
In the 1990's, Microsoft Windows had over 90% of operating system market share. They were a monopoly.
iPhones are only 58% versus Android in the US right now. That's nowhere close to monopoly. Globally Android has 71%. Android is thriving.
With Windows, you didn't have a choice. With iOS and Android, you have choice.
There is no need to have a "clear" monopoly like Windows in 1990's to abuse your power and presence in the market.
It's generally in the 70-90% range. Right now, it's much easier to argue that Android has a global monopoly.
> There is no need to have a "clear" monopoly like Windows in 1990's to abuse your power and presence in the market.
Well it depends what you mean by "abuse". I mean, even small companies can "abuse" their customers by not building the interoperability their customers want. But we generally prioritize individual freedom, that private businesses ought to have free choice in what they work with or don't. That's important.
That only becomes a problem when consumers aren't able to switch to a competitor. I.e. when there is a monopoly provider. I.e. which controls 70-90%+ of the market.
https://www.removepaywall.com/search?url=https://www.wsj.com...
Sorta. My understanding is that Google Play has the global monopoly. If it were plain Androids that users bought to own, to do with as they wanted, I'd be much less sombre about where mobile ecosystems are headed (namely, that governments, banks, public transport companies, and many other organisations will require a DRM-locked device if you want to live a normal life, buying bus tickets while passing the algorithmic fraud checks instead of needing to travel to a remaining ticket counter for example). It's barely even the future anymore, bank and transit company apps already mostly only run if you have a Google account and are on a locked-down ("Google Safetynet") device or go to great lengths to hide that you've got full access to your own data on your bought-to-own device
https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...
Presumably the DoJ wouldn't have sued Apple for being a monopoly if it was impossible for them to legally qualify as one?
https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/gallery/justice-departm...
The only tariff change ever made on the appstore was as a reaction to an antitrust lawsuit and copied straight to Google. Just that is enough of a proof.
And that's a key part of the discussion.
I tend to side somewhat with what the author is saying: they can be both relatively true statements and a way to abuse market power at the same time so identifying it as fitting the mold of one or the other is only the start of the conversation. People against the practices tend to care more about the latter and I think that's why we've seen the EU, Japan, and now Brazil regulate the behavior based on that rather than asking "what's Apple's target usage type".
Ah, yes, the author is clearly interested in an in-depth discussion of the tradeoffs in allowing 3rd-party users access to data that you tell your customers is 100% always encrypted.
> I personally don’t agree - they’re clearly using their market power to lock consumers into their walled ecosystem. This causes there to be less competition, which increases prices and reduces innovation. DOJ seems to agree.
instead then the quality of discussion here will match.
To give one example, Apple has removed an option for Airdrop file sharing between iPhones that are not on one another’s contact lists after the pressure from the Chinese government to stop it from being used for protests coordination. And yet this change was silently rolled out globally as a part of an iOS update.
So, no, “Good enough for most people” is not actually good enough.
But, gone are the fun days people spam airdropping funny "This is the captain" pictures to everyone while waiting for takeoff in an airplane.
This is correct, as in some countries, you use your phone to authenticate access to banking applications and payments (e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart-ID). However, I find it a bit of a stretch to claim that having iMessage access on a smartwatch is essential for being a functional member of society.
Corporations will always take steps to ensure their profitability. Apple, for example, is incentivized to keep its systems locked down to maintain its ecosystem. There are likely other justifiable considerations behind these decisions. While laws exist to regulate what corporations can and cannot do, there should be a reasonable balance. That said, I don’t think this is a battle worth fighting - people can simply switch to an Android phone, which offers better support for a wider range of smartwatches.
Giving all your data to Google (an adtech company) is not an acceptable solution. Not to mention that it's incredibly difficult to leave the Apple ecosystem, by design.
So what is the solution here for the common non-tech savvy smartphone user?
So honestly I think that legislation such as what's happening in the EU is the only solution. This includes investigating Google as well as Apple. I'm not a huge fan of legislation in general but the current state of mobile computing is depressingly bad right now.
> However, I find it a bit of a stretch to claim that having iMessage access on a smartwatch is essential for being a functional member of society.
Btw I agree here. Perhaps the EU is being a little too overbearing in some aspects, but most of it is good. I think in this case Pebble is trying to take advantage of the existing interoperability provisions, which are a general framework allowing devs to request access to certain functions. However the EU has said that they want to target smartwatches in particular which sounds like misplaced priority to me...
Agreed.
What I originally meant was that I don’t see Apple’s reluctance to open up the iMessage ecosystem as an indication that they wouldn’t support a banking or government authentication system. I just don't understand the concern here.
You're making that statement as if iPhones don't have security issues and people using Android definitely have to learn about those things.
> They want to just click 'yes' on every popup and expect things to keep working. Because they know that they are not qualified to answer that yes/no popup question. And those people do not care much about lock-in and walled gardens.
What exactly is it that Apple does that makes it not matter whether you click 'yes' or 'no' on these popups?
This also doesn't address the obvious solution: safe and easy defaults, and an option for manual overrides in advanced "I know what I'm doing" settings.
And no pop-ups at all.
They care about privacy and freedom, so they have different opinions besides Apple. But they don’t care that much, so not everyone is trying to figure out if their phones have a hackable toggle.
Customers are interested in new products and services that are good. This is how all currently popular products began, obviously. By preventing competitors from being good, as Apple and Microsoft and Amazon and other mega corporations regularly do, there’s no chance for competition to get to the point of attracting customers in the first place. Those people that you think are not interested in one thing or the other COULD want those things if they were allowed and easy to do without all these anti competitive practices.
I'd say more like 95-99% of humanity tbh.
I mostly want my phone to just work.
When customers aren't empowered to choose which company they engage with, companies should not be allowed to choose which customers they support.
Apple is demonstrating here that they can control every aspect of what you can do with your phone, including not allowing Pebble to work.
Apple doesn't even allow you to replace broken parts in your phone unless it has an Apple approved signature that can be validated.
> Apple doesn't even allow you to replace broken parts in your phone unless it has an Apple approved signature that can be validated.
That's fine, I don't want to buy a used iPhone and find out it has random parts in it.
This example completely misrepresents the issue. Nobody is asking Apple to add support for Pebble watches to their devices. They're asking Apple to stop preventing Pebble (and other smart watch manufacturers) from being able to support Apple devices.
They are late with most new tech as they will just wait until it becomes cheaper, why? Because they already know it's not a deal breaker.
They removed a bunch of fundamental and heavily used ports from the Macbook for years. Because they knew people would just work around it and buy dongles.
They put the charging port for their wireless mouse on the bottom of the mouse so it wasn't possible to charge and use the mouse at the same time. Because they knew people would put up with it because it was pretty.
For a lot of people, it's not that it works well or anything. It's about the brand and the design. It's about the marketing. And when it's about that and not the actual product you can do whatever you want to your product and it doesn't really matter. And compatibility with other brands doesn't matter because they've already bought into Apple's brand over everything else including basic functionality.
Apple Watch for style, sure. It's a watch after all. Not that it actually looks good.
Plenty of people play games on Macs. It may not be the purpose they bought it does they bought it for general use and that’s part of the general use for many.
For general uses they aren’t better. They cost more. You’re unable to upgrade them. They have less ports and require dongles. The list goes on.
I’ve not had any issues with Linux Bluetooth drivers is so long I can’t even remember when.
You may buy macs now because you’re used to them and you think they’re better. But really you got into macs because of the brand. Because there are very few areas where it is truly better than the others.
This is an extremely dangerous mindset, even if you never leave Apple's garden. As a reminder, Facebook and TikTok are on the App Store. We cannot encourage this zombie-like behavior and simultaneously have a healthy, free society.
> Because they know that they are not qualified to answer that yes/no popup question
Apple put thought into their permission system and made it easy to understand even among non-HN users, so that regular people can make meaningful choices about what information they want to share with apps and the companies who make them. There might as well be no permission system and no sandboxing at all if users are just going to spam the "yes" button all the time.
If Apple wants to be the brand for the tech illiterate that's fine—the real problem is that their hardware (and to a lesser extent some of their software) is actually a lot better than the competition, especially every since the M1 CPU came out.
So people like me and other HN denizens are left to hope that either some competitor actually becomes competitive; or Apple positions itself in such a way that they can simultaneously provide the "dummy mode" for dummies, and the "power mode" for people like me.
For the latter option, they clearly don't want to do it, probably not because they don't trust power users to do power user things; but because leaning on the dummies for cover helps them protect their walled garden.
Cue great frustration.
There's extremely few reasons why a modern Android phone from Google or Samsung is less secure than an iPhone, against any attack vector that 99.sevennines% of people [1] would ever experience. The worst way I've ever seen the most tech-illiterate person ever mess up an Android phone is by installing some QR Code reader that took over as a home screen launcher so it could (nonmaliciously, but questionably) put its QR code reader as a home screen left of the app icons. It should be way harder for Play Store apps to do that, because this guy needed professional help (me) to figure out where his home screen layout went.
But that was it. That's the worst I've ever seen. Android's security is very good.
While not a security concern, I've had multiple iPhone users ask "what the heck is this screen to the right of my app icons" (referring to the App Library introduced ~2 years ago). One person thought they'd been hacked. Kind of a similar inconvenience vector as that QR code app.
[1] The 100-99.sevenines% of people who might actually find themselves the target of an attack vector that Apple's unique security can help mitigate are, for example, journalists or dissidents who find value in Advanced Data Protection and Apple's generally very good and healthy stance on cloud security and end-to-end encryption. This level of security should be available to everyone, on every cloud provider, even if it only directly advantages a small number of people, but Apple is the only one really doing this right now.
This happened to people I know. Some innocent sounding app replaced their launcher and added a fake Gmail widget to their home screen. It prompted them to login and, well, you know the rest.
This would never happen on iOS because you can't change the launcher.
People that know what they're doing can go nuts and sideload apks all day long, which is still more flexibility than you'll ever get with Apple.
People that barely know how to use their phone outside of a few key apps will never have to worry about this attack vector.
This statement doesn't make sense except if you are implying that Android doesn't have reasonable security despite not being a walled garden like iOS, and allowing e.g. interactions with smartwatches.
This is 90% of humanity, including people we all know and love.
Apple serves these people pretty well.