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.
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Apple vs. the "Free Market"
101–110 of 169 posts
Re: Apple vs. the "Free Market"
#102> 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…
>The app store is, at its heart, an enabler of totalitarianism. The first link of the chain is forged from the freedom to own your computer for marginal profits, but the rest are forged from your human rights.
1. Practically speaking, those restrictions are trivially bypassed by changing the region on your apple account, or using an alt account for app store. Yes, this presents a hurdle, but given that any serious totalitarian regime would probably also be implementing network-level blocks for such services and you'd need VPNs to bypass those, I don't think this materially changes availability of those apps.
2. Apple is doing those things because they have to comply with local laws. Would you rather have multinationals flout local laws? Or only when it suits your politics? What makes one country's laws more legitimate than another? Some of the hate speech/defamation laws in European countries are arguably pretty draconian as well. Should Apple, being an American company, push American notions of free speech to European countries?
Re: Apple vs. the "Free Market"
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Aren’t you free to load any OS you like? Not while the bootloader is locked.
The thing is, there aren't many hardware examples which allow installing an arbitrary OS, esp. if one has specific hardware requirements. I prefer machines with a Wacom EMR stylus, and it's simply not possible to find a device which: - supports the same Wacom EMR technology as my Samsung Galaxy Note 10+ and Kindle Scribe - has a high-resolution display - decent battery life - tablet form-factor I currently compromise…
I used to use a Surface Pro 3 on Linux just fine, I really don't think the hardware requirements are an issue. And circumstantially, Linux has upstream Wacom device drivers that still supports hardware from 2003 (at least my CTE 430).
Re: Apple vs. the "Free Market"
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 r…
This isn't a problem on Linux because there's a careful community oriented path for users who may not understand what they're doing without cutting things off from knowledgeable users.
In fact OSX let everyone just download and run binaries and even that didn't have this problem. That's not a hypothetical situation, literally everyone used computers that way until recently.
There's a long tail of people who will manage to blow their devices up regardless but maybe they shouldn't be using computers unaided. It's very frustrating to make literally everyone else's lives harder just for them.
Re: Apple vs. the "Free Market"
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> Freedom to run the software you choose on your own device is the only way to have actual privacy. Given how many services are off-device I'm not sure how accurate that is. If I'm running a Framework laptop with Linux, I can have very little privacy if I'm using Metabook and Gmail for socializing.
Well... yes, one does have to make good decisions and be intentional about using private software even on open platforms. But at least with open platforms, one has the choice to do so without a corporation being able to unilaterally wipe something away from that platform, or impose terms on that software due to market capture.
Re: Apple vs. the "Free Market"
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
You do not. This has been established for quite some time. You’re not forced to purchase Apple. If you like Apple, you know you’re getting the ecosystem that comes with it. Honestly the App Store is already garbage with the heavy amount of moderation it has. I can’t imagine what a cesspool it would be without that oversight. Admittedly, I’m a fan of this approach. I like it. If I didn’t, I just wouldn’t buy Apple pro…
>I like it. If I didn’t, I just wouldn’t buy Apple products. I’m not sure why that’s so hard for people. Because Apple is so aggressive about lock-in that it excludes reasonable interaction between people with Apple and people without. The texting situation with pictures and videos is the most glaring example. You are not forced to purchase Apple products, except that you are.
Pictures text just fine to non-Apple users. Videos don’t go through, but that’s because of a limitation of the text protocol (and Apple is finally providing support for the extended text format that allows videos to be sent via text)¹. Claiming that iMessage should be opened up is kind of like saying that you should be forced to allow people to park their cars on your front lawn. iMessage is a non-zero-cost service that Apple provides to add value to their products. You might as well insist that Apple allow people to install iOS on a non-Apple phone.
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1. I will criticize Apple for bad UI design in that if you text a video to a non-iMessage user, it silently fails rather than alerting the sender that the video can’t be sent.
Re: Apple vs. the "Free Market"
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
"If Netscape doesn’t like Microsoft’s bundled IE with Windows, they should just take their app off the Windows OS. All these companies moaning about Microsoft 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 Microsoft’s platform is providing value to them and they should pay what Microsoft wants." The irony is striking: Microsoft (Windo…
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…
>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.
I'm glad that walled gardens like Apple and their App Store teach people how valuable is the Open Web.
Re: Apple vs. the "Free Market"
#108> 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…
You do not. This has been established for quite some time. You’re not forced to purchase Apple. If you like Apple, you know you’re getting the ecosystem that comes with it. Honestly the App Store is already garbage with the heavy amount of moderation it has. I can’t imagine what a cesspool it would be without that oversight. Admittedly, I’m a fan of this approach. I like it. If I didn’t, I just wouldn’t buy Apple pro…
The issue is there’s no choice. There’s Apple, Google, Samsung and there is utter trash. You just can not buy a good phone that you can fully own. You can’t even buy a mediocre phone you fully own.
Re: Apple vs. the "Free Market"
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
While the examples are all valid, the restrictions don't apply on mobile Safari. Why do corporations and devs continue to accept a share cropper role by paying Apple to host native apps? FirefoxOS had the right idea, make the browser the principal gateway for applications. It was a decade ahead of its time, but the mobile web is now at a level where native apps aren't needed for the most part.
> Why do corporations and devs continue to accept a share cropper role by paying Apple to host native apps? Push notifications. That's it, and presumably why Apple waited 8 years[1] before allowing them on iOS PWAs. [1]: https://developer.chrome.com/blog/push-notifications-on-the-...
I remember companies pushing their own listening apps so they could collect more of your behavior than from podcast apps. Patreon will not pay the fee if they pull all payments from their app. It can be a player/browser app with all the instrumentation they want.
Re: Apple vs. the "Free Market"
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ok, but then I’ll need another kind of locked-down device provided by a company with enough power to force other strong companies to not be dicks, to do all my actually-important-in-normal-life computer stuff.
This isn't a problem on Linux because instead of force you have a small group of maintainers who the users are able to outsource the decision making to. There are other ways to do this which work much much better and don't constrain the user's freedom.
Fine and dandy until half the software I want and/or need to run requires a root kit or otherwise dangerous access and the alternative is “don’t get to do that thing” where “that thing” may include stuff like communicating with clients or a job interview or whatever.
Short of legislation (please! Please just outlaw shitty behavior like this!) you need a platform too big to ignore that prohibits the worst behavior, or you’re gonna be forced to choose between two kinds of loss constantly.