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Why are you people defending Apple?

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Re: Why are you people defending Apple?

#181

Post by jancona »

czhiddy wrote: post #97
mechanical_fish wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iBooks has a significantly smaller variety of books than Amazon. But will this be true for long, now that this particular shoe has dropped? Apple's primary target here is probably Amazon. A company which, incidentally, is no stranger to the art of using a powerful distribution network, an existing customer base, and a DRM-locked e-reader platform as a lever to demand big shares of revenue: http://www.jeremyrossmedia.…

If I remember correctly, Amazon's planned Android app store caused a giant ruckus a few weeks back because of the ridiculous pricing policies.

Of course Android allows competing app stores--indeed Amazon's is one. So both developers and users have a choice on Android that's not available on iOS.

Re: Why are you people defending Apple?

#182

Post by fjh »

__david__ wrote: post #107
Bossman wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Valid points. You're right. Maybe I went a bit overboard. But you can't deny that Apple is continuously trying to prevent people from using anything but their services and goods. I don't blame them for that. What I blame them for is pushing everyone else out just because they control enough of the market to do so. > I suppose it could be your alarms, preferred weather cities and stocks app choices. Or your SMS databa…

> But you can't deny that Apple is continuously trying to prevent people from using anything but their services and goods. I wouldn't even say that. I'd say "Apple focuses on making their services and goods work together painlessly." Being incompatible with other things is not the goal but it does end up being the end result some of the time. It's a subtle but important distinction.

> Being incompatible with other things is not the goal

Yes, a lot of the time it is. Apple went out of their way to prevent the ipod working with non-itunes software, they also went out of their way to make itunes music streaming over the network incompatible with other software.

Re: Why are you people defending Apple?

#183

Post by ugh »

statictype wrote: post #137
jad wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If users are truly the losers in this deal, then won't they vote with their wallets?

In what sense? Many (like me) already own iOS devices and are invested in it with all the apps/games/songs/books that we already bought. I probably won't switch platforms based on the absence of a newspaper/music subscription service, but I sure would like the option of having those.

(Songs have no DRM, you can play them everywhere.)

Re: Why are you people defending Apple?

#184

Post by speleding »

30% is not as much as people think it is. I've been involved in billing systems that do recurring billing and it is actually surprisingly hard, a lot harder than one-off payments. Just a few examples:

* Credit cards on file get stolen or expire all the time.

* People forget to cancel in time and do charge backs which you then have to resolve in some other way.

* People e-mail customer support a lot more than for regular payments ("I want cancel, and please refund last x month too"). Support is expensive

* Apple operates in a lot of countries where credit card penetration is very low and other payment methods are required.

... and then they handle the entire operation of the app store, and they need to make a profit somewhere. When the iPhone just came out Apple claimed they were not making any money on the app store and I think that's entirely believable. Margins will have gone up as scale increased but now that they have added recurring billing those margins will be lower again.

Re: Why are you people defending Apple?

#185

Post by cmoscoso »

imichael wrote: post #48
lotusleaf1987 wrote: post #16

Zach said it best yesterday: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2224469 Of course Rhapsody can't sell their stuff for a 30% margin. It's not their own stuff! They're trying to be the last link in a chain of 90/10 (or more) splits. They repackage record labels' repackaging of artists' content. Do you think the artists would find 30% economically untenable? The App Store is 70/30 because Apple can take things straight…

So ideally they publish music from the artists directly, eliminating the other intermediaries and effectively making them the... the... the record label.

For iDevices, yes.

Re: Why are you people defending Apple?

#186

Post by elehack »

superuser2 wrote: post #179
elehack wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They own the infrastructure, but they do not own the device. The customer does. They bought it. Apple comes along and says that anything you want to use on the device you bought and paid for needs to go through their infrastructure. That's where it becomes a huge problem. Not that they're charging for using their services, but because they're charging to let people do things with their property.

They're charging to let people do things through the iTunes store . Find me an example of them going after someone who liberated themselves from the iTunes store - Cydia still exists. Last I checked, there aren't any.

But they make it very clear that the iTunes store is the only authorized/approved means of doing things on the device, and try to make it illegal to do otherwise (although the Library of Congress put a temporary stop to that agenda). And while they don't go after the jailbreakers, they do try to diminish their experience with things like the iBooks jailbreak test.

When you combine this behavior and stance with the "charging through the iTunes store" policy, it becomes effectively a mostly successful attempt to charge for doingsomething with the device. The Apple Tax in isolation, while disturbing, isn't intolerable. It's when you combine it with their other policies surrounding the platform that the real problem arises.

Re: Why are you people defending Apple?

#187

Post by wmeredith »

reedF211 wrote: post #138

I'm completely disgusted by Apple's behaviour on this topic. Apple should be ashamed of itself for gouging developers. This is like if someone has a bakery in Des Moines, IA and then wants to expand to New York, and the city of New York insists that the price of cake the bakery charges be the same or lower than the price in Des Moines where the rent and operation costs are a fraction of what they are in NYC. This kin…

Except, uh, without the monopoly.

Re: Why are you people defending Apple?

#188

Post by statictype »

Tyrannosaurs wrote: post #177
statictype wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what sense? Many (like me) already own iOS devices and are invested in it with all the apps/games/songs/books that we already bought. I probably won't switch platforms based on the absence of a newspaper/music subscription service, but I sure would like the option of having those.

Wasn't it obvious when you bought the non-transferable music, books and apps that this was the sort of company you were dealing with? It strikes me that this is a pretty unreasonable complaint. If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, I don't think it's fair to moan when it turns out it's a duck. I'm not knocking Apple, I like Apple but we as consumers need to be aware of what we're buying i…

I think you missed my point: I'm not feigning outrage at the fact that I can't transfer everything I bought for phone A onto phone B.

I'm saying that shutting out apps because they don't cough up Apple's ransom only hurts the customer and that customers won't necessarily vote with their wallet and move somewhere else because they have already invested in their current platform/device.

Re: Why are you people defending Apple?

#189

Post by bane »

burgerbrain wrote: post #151
bane wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People tend to build their identities around their affiliation. Attacking Apple probably makes him feel like you are attacking him. Similarly his support of Apple is merely him supporting his own identity. It's silly, I know, but people do that all the time. It's freakishly hard for people caught in the identity/affiliation trap to disentangle that aspect of their psyche's. It's often why you can observe fantastic le…

I absolutely agree. I think the trick is realizing that the mechanism is exactly the same for apple as it is with any other "affiliation"; Apple just happens to be particularly effective at it. Democrats and Republicans can get by with painting the opposition as Communists or Facists (who is supposed to be who? it seems to change every other week...) whereas Apple goes with "cool" vs. "lame", or variations of. Almost…

Hipsters are the most persistent, insidious type of this phenomenon. They are quite literally the epitome of the phrase "let's be different, just like everybody else".

Their affiliation/identity is based on artificial or perceived scarcity. It's no different than the type of people that walk around flaunting their bespoke clothes and car, and talk about the singular performances of operas and ballets they've attended (but probably don't really understand).

There doesn't have to be any actual substance to the trivia they know, only that know that to fit into their affiliation they must adhere to certain guidelines regarding scarcity.

For hipsters it's unknown bands, a certain psuedo-bohemian style of clothes pastiche and a few other odds and ends that mark their affiliation. But the attitude is not really any different.

What's always striking about hipsters is that when you see a lot of them quickly, one can't help but be struck by the boring sameness of it all.

Reminds me of this site: http://www.latfh.com/

What makes it particularly insidious is that once somebody joins this affiliation, how completely consuming it becomes. It affects everything that person does down to their transport. But in the end it's really just a quest for personal identity by people who are unable to self actualize that identity for themselves.

Re: Why are you people defending Apple?

#190

Post by sethg »

akashs wrote: post #121
lotusleaf1987 wrote: post #16

Zach said it best yesterday: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2224469 Of course Rhapsody can't sell their stuff for a 30% margin. It's not their own stuff! They're trying to be the last link in a chain of 90/10 (or more) splits. They repackage record labels' repackaging of artists' content. Do you think the artists would find 30% economically untenable? The App Store is 70/30 because Apple can take things straight…

I think you're grossly underestimating how much 30% of revenues means. Let's look at how this could actually affect you. Lets forget for a second that Amazon is even part of this issue. Let's stick to straight software development, what HN knows best. Let's look at the profit margins of some of the best software companies: http://www.google.com/finance?catid=us-54399928&sort=ANI... Look at what percentage of revenue…

But most of those companies are not dependent on direct-to-consumer sales for their revenue. You’re never going to see “Oracle Database, Standard Edition One—$6,000” on the App Store directory. I suspect that even Microsoft gets most of its software revenue from either OEM deals or big-business hundred-seat license packs, rather than from over-the-counter sales.
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