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Apple vs. the "Free Market"

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Re: Apple vs. the "Free Market"

#41

Post by brigadier132 »

taeric wrote: post #38
brigadier132 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are explicitly purchasable. What do you think advertising on the App store is? What do you think Google paying $20 billion to be the default search engine is?

Apologies, I was meaning that as "even if we grant that they are not purchasable." That is, I wasn't wanting to argue the point of if you can directly purchase it, as that doesn't seem important for the point?

You're right it isn't necessary to the point and no need to apologize. I just don't want to give apologists for this terrible behavior a rhetorical out.

Re: Apple vs. the "Free Market"

#42

Post by Arkanum »

FinnKuhn wrote: post #36

> Every artist, performer and creator on Patreon is about to get screwed out of 30% of their gross revenue, which will be diverted to Apple Stopped reading after the first sentence as this just isn't true. First of all this only affects users who subscribe via the iOS/iPadOS app. Secondly Patreon creators have the option to have the prices for those Apps adjusted so that they receive the same amount of money and Appl…

I thought, (although the rules might have changed), that Apple explicitly forbids having different prices between your website and the app, and will kick you out of the store if it finds you doing this?

Re: Apple vs. the "Free Market"

#43

Post by add-sub-mul-div »

blackeyeblitzar wrote: post #26

General computing devices like smartphones should allow users to install whatever they want without any cost or restrictions.

That's a good distinction. It doesn't bother me that I can't run arbitrary code on my Xbox, it does a specific function well and I don't need or expect more from it. But with a phone or computer it would never be acceptable to need permission to run given code or be forced to go through a platform middleman.

Re: Apple vs. the "Free Market"

#44

Post by throw0101d »

AlexandrB wrote: post #22
throw0101d wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why not? Are we all beholden to the Apple marketing department style guide? Aren't they proper nouns?

If so, then Ipad and Iphone (or perhaps IPad and IPhone) are more grammatically correct: https://www.yourdictionary.com/articles/proper-noun-capitali...

Not if the name of the products are iPhone® and iPad®.

* https://www.apple.com/legal/intellectual-property/trademark/...

There's a fellow who did a bunch of stuff with computers:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann

You would not write "Von Neumann architecture", but rather "von Neumann architecture":

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/von_Neumann_architecture

Cites:

* https://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/2012/02/do-i-capitalize-t...

* https://www.thesaurus.com/e/grammar/when-to-capitalize-words... § 5

If the word is at the beginning of a sentence it may be capitalized, but mid-sentence it should follow its proper name:

> Rawashdeh says that before generative AI, eBay had billions of signals about what consumers bought and sold, and the feedback that they’d share with eBay about their experience on the site. […]

> EBay is agnostic about who it will work with for generative AI. It partners with Microsoft for GitHub and buys AI data center infrastructure from Nvidia, for example. […]

* https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/ebay-uses-generative-ai-em...

Re: Apple vs. the "Free Market"

#45

Post by mikehearn »

"Every artist, performer and creator on Patreon is about to get screwed out of 30% of their gross revenue"

Does Apple have access to Patreon creators' gross revenue? I thought they only charged commissions on payments through IAP, which I assumed is only a minority of their overall gross.

Re: Apple vs. the "Free Market"

#46

Post by haswell »

brigadier132 wrote: post #4

Apple's product is its users. All of the privacy changes are not to protect the privacy of their users, it's to ensure that there are no ways to access Apple device users without Apple being the middleman.

If Apple’s product is its users, who are its customers?

> All of the privacy changes are not to protect the privacy of their users…

This is reductionist, and multiple things can be true at the same time. There’s no doubt that Apple has realized privacy is a competitive advantage, and as a customer, it’s one of the reasons I give them money.

Even if you could lay bare the deepest desires and true motives of everyone involved, the result of those motives is a product that is more private and more secure than most alternatives.

To boil this down to “this is only about lock-in” completely sidesteps a myriad of other factors in play.

Editing to add: I'm not saying Apple is blameless here or that their advertising goals and other business deals shouldn't be scrutinized. I'm not even saying that I buy their privacy marketing, but there is an objective difference between their current model and the companies that exist purely on the basis of selling customer data. I find it really problematic to equate them with the behavior of the Metas and Alphabets of the industry.

Re: Apple vs. the "Free Market"

#47

Post by brigadier132 »

api wrote: post #24
brigadier132 wrote: post #4

Apple's product is its users. All of the privacy changes are not to protect the privacy of their users, it's to ensure that there are no ways to access Apple device users without Apple being the middleman.

Apple is the only big tech company left that even pretends to care about privacy and does even a half-assed job of it. If they're doing it in part for self-interested reasons, that's fine. It's better than nothing. Their cloud storage product even has on-device encryption. Nobody else offers that, and in fact AFAIK Google and some of the others even have it listed as against their ToS. They're also working on privacy…

Freedom to run the software you choose on your own device is the only way to have actual privacy. What you have right now is just a centralized store of all your data on Apple's servers.

Re: Apple vs. the "Free Market"

#48

Post by tvink »

adesanmi wrote: post #31

If Patreon doesn’t like Apple’s rules, they should just take their app off the App Store. All these companies moaning about Apple yet aren’t doing the one thing they have the power to do which is just leave. If they refuse to leave, then they’re admitting that Apple’s platform is providing value to them and they should pay what Apple wants. I support creators on Patreon, what exactly is wrong with just doing everythi…

Counterpoint, monopolization is not a good thing, and as long as Apple doesn't allow alternative app stores, we can talk about how the value they provide is artificially gatekeeping the devices of over a billion people from running the software they would like. There's not only business in this equation, and historically attacking tech monopolies through legislative power has been more effective than suggestion that businesses exclude themselves from business to make a statement.

Re: Apple vs. the "Free Market"

#49

Post by KolmogorovComp »

areoform wrote: post #39

> Tumblr still remains heavily moderated and heavily censored. Why? Because Apple kept kicking Tumblr out of the App Store on the basis that it contained sexual material, and without Apple users, Tumblr was dead in the water > Apple claims this is merely a matter of "editorial standards," no different from a bookstore deciding not to shelve pornography. The difference is that in this case, Apple can block you from pa…

Aren’t you free to load any OS you like?

Not trying to justify anticompetitive behavior from Apple here, but tired to see people saying ‘do you own it?’ when they really mean ‘does the manufacturer help installing third parties apps on its default OS’.

Re: Apple vs. the "Free Market"

#50

Post by a_c_s »

AlexandrB wrote: post #16
phony-account wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are we all beholden to the Apple marketing department style guide? He should go the whole hog in this radical stance of civil disobedience and just spell the names entirely wrong!

It can certainly be obnoxious (I remember everyone calling Microsoft, M$ in the early 2000s), but if the goal is communicating an idea to an audience spelling it iPhone vs IPhone vs iphone vs Iphone doesn't make a difference. What I don't get is advocating for radical civil obedience to a company's preferred trademark names.

Calling any of this "radical" is rather dramatic and framing it as "obedience" misses the point.

If someone says "My name is spelled e. e. cummings" then writing it "E. E. Cummings" is weird. It feels either uninformed or a deliberate, though tiny, mark of disrespect.

It would also be weird to spell the Motorola "Razr" phone's name as "Razor" as that's not the spelling Motorola gave it.

It isn't about "obeying" the poet nor the corporation but rather following social norms to spell things as the named person (or the namer of the item) prefers it to be spelled. And if you don't follow this convention then... oh well, most people will probably forget about it seconds after they notice it as they have other things to think about.

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