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Apple vs. the "Free Market"

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Re: Apple vs. the "Free Market"

#71

Post by incrudible »

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…

Apple does not control which websites you visit. Your ownership argument could also be leveled against game consoles, which do not even have web browsers these days. Phones are certainly more important, but the idea that manufacturers must not be able to curate what runs on their platforms strikes me as overreach. Put a tax on it, maybe.

Re: Apple vs. the "Free Market"

#73

Post by card_zero »

a_c_s wrote: post #50
AlexandrB wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

I remember many years ago representatives of Photoshop® visiting forums to tell us that we must always add the registered trademark symbol whenever we mention Photoshop® - sorry, Adobe Photoshop® - and that we mustn't use the verb "photoshopped" but must instead say "digitally altered with Adobe Photoshop® software". And we told them to fuck off. But as you say it all depends on social norms and conventions ... which are not homogenous, so these things are always being tacitly fought over.

Re: Apple vs. the "Free Market"

#74

Post by adesanmi »

MangoCoffee wrote: post #67
adesanmi wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again: you can literally go on Patreon.com on your iPhone right now and subscribe to any creator you want without paying Apple’s fees. The mobile web is literally a suitable alternative and competitor right now, but for some reason people on HN have given up on this concept and think every website needs an app. Patreon should just leave the App Store and invest in their already great multi platform website with no ga…

I feel like I'm talking to a brick wall.

No, you just don’t have an argument. Patreon has a perfectly working mobile application called Patreon.com that doesn’t have any gatekeepers. It’s fully mobile, responsive, and allows me to do everything I want to do right now.

If the article they wrote had said “We’re leaving the App Store because we don’t agree with Apple’s fees” then people who want to support creators will continue to use their excellent mobile site.

Apple’s App Store is NOT the only distribution platform that exists for iPhones, so please stop pretending that it is. The web is a thing.

Re: Apple vs. the "Free Market"

#76

Post by haswell »

brigadier132 wrote: post #63
haswell wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

> If Apple’s product is its users, who are its customers? Anyone trying to sell something to an Apple user. And you are right that I'm being reductionist, Apple clearly makes significant profit from the devices themselves, but that revenue is not growing. The revenue that is growing is "services", "app store", and "advertising" revenue. Apple's $20 billion a year deal with Google to be the default search engine accou…

When people describe services where “the user is the product”, they’re generally referring to the fact that the primary business model of the company selling those services is to impinge on individual privacy by collecting extremely detailed information about those users and then selling that information to interested parties. It is that intimate detail that makes each user so valuable.

Google is buying search traffic from Apple, not user dossiers. To conflate the two is a category error. Even when you consider Apple’s advertising business, it cannot be argued in good faith that they are behaving in the same way most large advertising-driven companies are operating. Selling ads is not by itself enough to make the claim that “users are the product”, and to whatever extent they are, the ad business is secondary and coexists with their core business of selling hardware and services. This remains a meaningful distinction for people who want to buy products not fully predicated on selling their private details.

The reductionist take removes all context and makes it impossible to have a substantive discussion about these finer points, and reductionism in general is against site guidelines.

Re: Apple vs. the "Free Market"

#77

Post by api »

brigadier132 wrote: post #56
api wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iOS and macOS are not the same product. If you want a real computer you have to get a Mac, which is why I do not own an iPad. IMHO if you can't run anything you want on it it's not a real computer, it's a "console." This is how I think of phones. The iPhone does everything I want a phone to do, but that's not much: web, a few apps, turn by turn directions, texting, e-mail, etc.

I'm like you and my primary device is my laptop. That being said: For the vast majority of people, their phone is their primary computing device.

These people are generally not technically knowledgeable at all. If you opened up the phone so it could run any software, all of them would instantly become infested with malware that would massively invade everyone's privacy and probably steal their credit cards and scam them.

I grew up with the open Internet starting in the 1990s. I feel like a lot of people haven't wrapped their heads around just how hostile and riddled with scams and hustler bullshit it's become. The mobile ecosystem is the worst, possibly even more user-hostile than the web. The potential for privacy invasion is a lot higher too since people carry their phones around.

The Internet today is a "dark forest." Any platform made for technically unsophisticated people must be locked down like military hardware for operation in a theater of war. The iPhone is actually not locked down enough to protect most users' privacy.

Re: Apple vs. the "Free Market"

#79

Post by NekkoDroid »

incrudible wrote: post #71
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…

Apple does not control which websites you visit. Your ownership argument could also be leveled against game consoles, which do not even have web browsers these days. Phones are certainly more important, but the idea that manufacturers must not be able to curate what runs on their platforms strikes me as overreach. Put a tax on it, maybe.

Nobody is saying anything about what they offer on their stores, people are complaining about when they wanna not use their stores and want to install something else that would be entirely possible but is artifically limited, to force the user to use their stores. That is overreach from the manufacturers.

And yes, IMO it should also apply to consoles. But those aren't marketed and used as general purpose computing devices.

Re: Apple vs. the "Free Market"

#80

Post by brigadier132 »

haswell wrote: post #76
brigadier132 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If Apple’s product is its users, who are its customers? Anyone trying to sell something to an Apple user. And you are right that I'm being reductionist, Apple clearly makes significant profit from the devices themselves, but that revenue is not growing. The revenue that is growing is "services", "app store", and "advertising" revenue. Apple's $20 billion a year deal with Google to be the default search engine accou…

When people describe services where “the user is the product”, they’re generally referring to the fact that the primary business model of the company selling those services is to impinge on individual privacy by collecting extremely detailed information about those users and then selling that information to interested parties. It is that intimate detail that makes each user so valuable. Google is buying search traffi…

> When people describe services where “the user is the product”, they’re generally referring to the fact that the primary business model of the company selling those services is to impinge on individual privacy by collecting extremely detailed information about those users and then selling that information to interested parties. It is that intimate detail that makes each user so valuable

This is your personal definition that suits your argument. I'm not going to get into a debate about semantics.

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