Meanwhile Paul Thurrott loves the MacBook Air and sings the praises of Apple’s integrated ecosystem.
https://www.thurrott.com/mobile/mac-and-macos/301371/apple-m...
So the truth, as usual, probably lies in the middle.
The walls of Apple's garden are tumbling down
251–260 of 429 posts
Re: The walls of Apple's garden are tumbling down
#252I’ve been a recent convert to the iPhone. It gives me a unique perspective since I’ve spent almost my entire life in the Android ecosystem. I first bought an iPhone 5c on a whim, which is well out of support by apple, 5 versions behind the modern iOS. If you turn it on, all the default Apple apps work, in 2024. You can stream Apple Music and download podcasts with no App Store whatsoever. It’s a powerful little devic…
> In the end, Epic and Spotify get a fat 30% boost in revenue and nobody notices anything different. Well, let's be clear here: Neither Epic nor Spotify are selling anything with Apple today. Epic's games are not available on iOS, and Spotify requires you to make all purchases through their website. Spotify's motivation for wanting change on the iOS platform is primarily due to how limiting Apple's profit share and A…
No one I know uses Apple audiobooks, I thought it was only Audible in this market.
Spotify is a loss making company finding reasons to blame its problems. What annoys Spotify is that Apple Music exists, this is the age old problem between vendors and distributors, where vendors hate it if Walmart comes out with its own peanut butter jar to sell. The fundamental problem with the vendor here is their product is not differentiated, Apple isn’t worried if Walmart sells other smartphones, they don’t care but Reese’s is extremely worried and will make a huge hula about private labels and such. Spotify as a technology has nothing unique, their audio isn’t even lossless yet, their music is now available through Apple, Amazon, YouTube, Tidal and who knows what else. They basically have some network effects due to social media and are living off a first mover advantage, meanwhile as their see their dominance erode they are trying to find boogeyman’s to blame. If Apple removes 30% tax, Spotify won’t magically become a successful business, Spotify still needs to find something more differentiated than the sea of music streaming apps out there. Netflix kind of did it with originals and superior efficiency, Spotify won’t be able to do anything until they take a hard look at their business and truly diagnose why it’s such a trash heap.
Re: The walls of Apple's garden are tumbling down
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
The only thing Apple cares about is Apple making more money. they will gladly gouge the end User so that their executives can line their pockets. there is nobody here you can actually ”trust”.
Such a bad take, please go back to Reddit where you might be congratulated for garden variety “everyone else is greedy and evil, but I can see through them and speak truth to power”. People here have higher standards on their takes. If all Apple cared about is making money, would they have spent upwards of 10 Billion+ on an Apple Car only to cancel it later. At its height, Vision Pro R&D cost 2 billion per quarter, y…
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Re: The walls of Apple's garden are tumbling down
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple never got rid of SMS. And there has been no embrace or extend. All they did was put an optional message service in the same app. One that isn’t even the most popular making it strange to say there is no competition.
> All they did was put an optional message service in the same app. They did a bit more than that. There were the glory days that if you ever left the Apple ecosystem, but iMessage ever had an awareness of your number, no other iMessage users could reach you until or unless you did some incantations that Apple didn't make obvious, ideally from an Apple device (that you may not own anymore), to allow your friends to k…
Ya I got bit switching to android when people started calling wondering what happened when I wouldn't respond to their texts.
Re: The walls of Apple's garden are tumbling down
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
> People keep having to learn that developers cannot be trusted either The problem with this is that Apple is also a developer trying to sell you things. I would feel better if Apple's goals and the user's goals were aligned all the time instead of just some of the time. Admittedly, Apple's real priority is just to make money on every transaction that occurs upon an idevice.
Yes businesses are in the business of making money. Apple is a business. The hope for you (a consumer) is that your needs and theirs are aligned sufficiently well that they solve problems you benefit from while minimizing how much they exploit you. It’s capitalism.
Accurate. Businesses that show consistent good will towards their users often just haven't become successful enough to afford to exploit you yet. Pointing out that Apple only really cares about extracting your money is mostly an admission that they've found we will let them do it.
Re: The walls of Apple's garden are tumbling down
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even the most extreme Apple position isn’t trying to take 30% of all of Spotifys revenue, they’re trying to take 30% of each subscription originated on-device, for the first year of that customer. Which is still a huge cut, and still a problem that doesn’t encumber Apple Music, but the business question for Spotify is “do the incremental subscribers make sense (in quality and quantity), not “sell one subscription and…
The crazy thing is that Spotify has already proven that in-app subscription on iOS isn’t necessary to their business, since they’ve already succeeded in becoming the most popular music service without it! But of course that’s not going to keep them from asking their government to give them more.
Business is about staying in business, not being popular. A streaming pricing model, so you lose money on your best customers streaming 24x7 who get a great deal whilst keeping mediocre customers on a free tier because it is expensive. An advertising service where the audience is so tight they won't pay the price of a coffee for music streaming. Popular but sustainable? They already can't pay artists enough, only getting away with that because artists don't have a choice but to bend over.
Re: The walls of Apple's garden are tumbling down
#257Deep into a Mixed Reality project with WebXR right now. So sick of everything working on Meta Quests and even cheap Android phones, yet Apple Vision Pro requiring the user to confirm warning messages and iPhones requiring so many insane workarounds due to no support at all.
Can't wait for other browsers than safari being green lot on iOS.
Re: The walls of Apple's garden are tumbling down
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe Apple’s “scale” is because its users do not enjoy being shackled to crappy SMS?
Maybe so; it doesn't really matter when you're looking at damages. It's Apple's job to solve interoperability with their own platform, and not only have they failed to provide SMS-levels of interop, they actively work against it to promote ulterior products. It's exactly the sort of anticompetitive bundling that harms the market without improving competition. Maybe Ma Bell's success was in-part due to their free long…
the only "free long-distance" calling on Ma Bell was with a blue box.
Re: The walls of Apple's garden are tumbling down
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
my half-hearted counterpoints: 1. what about something like a usb flir heat camera? yes i know webusb exists, but having to go to a website to use a peripheral (and give it permissions to that peripheral) is not ideal 2. apps can change on you at any point, potentially maliciously. I'm not naive enough to think the app store will catch this kind of thing every time, but at least you have control over updating apps, a…
OS cohesion/themes are already kind of a dead idea. These days the priority is cohesion within the app and platform. When I open Discord, it looks basically the same on Android, iOS, Mac, Linux, Windows, and web. If I know where something is on one platform, I can find it on all the others. I don't care that Discord on Mac doesn't look like Spotify on Mac. The others are also kind of mute points, No one is auditing a…
One of the plus of platform cohesion is that you don’t have to learn the same thing twice while you’re on the same platform. I know that as soon as I press CMD+, I get in the settings of the app. Option+CMD+T, will toggle the toolbar if they have any, and you can customize it to your liking. But today, applications wants you to live in their space, so they make things harder to switch from it. No one cares that Discord on Windows looks the same as on macOS, as most people only use one platform, if you have to hunt for everything as it doesn’t want to use the menubar.
And for app updates, people do. I can hold on on updates until I’m sure it’s good to use. You spend a month not using a web app, and it’s become something alien.
Re: The walls of Apple's garden are tumbling down
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fortunately it's up to regulators to decide what favors the population best. At least in EU they seem to be active (USB iPhones anyone), albeit slower than I'd like.
In democracies, usually it's up to the population to decide what favors the population best. Also, in democracies with a somewhat free market, you can simply choose not to buy phones that do not ship the port you prefer.
In democracies, the population decides what favors them, and the government enacts their will via regulation. Without regulation, some companies will abuse their customers when profitable to do so, often dominating over the companies that do not.