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Apple vs the Law

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Re: Apple vs the Law

#381

Post by overfeed »

davidw wrote: post #370
Disposal8433 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good. I would hate for my country to become like the USA.

Things are pretty dire right now in the US, but to understand that... it's complicated and I don't think you can blindly reject everything from how things are done in the US. They all have to be reasoned about individually and as part of a bigger system.

> I don't think you can blindly reject everything from how things are done in the US

Sure, but I doubt there's any country in the world that aspires for its citizens to be treated like American consumers.

Re: Apple vs the Law

#382

Post by tsimionescu »

jjaksic wrote: post #310
Tainnor wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These companies may be smaller than FAANG, but I also feel that if BASF disappeared overnight it would have a larger impact on the world than if Facebook disappeared. HN is sometimes incredibly biased towards consumer tech.

Define "impact on the world". Facebook has massive impact (arguably net-negative). I haven't heard of BASF since 5.25 floppies, though I'm sure they produce some very important things. Did you mean positive impact? Physical impact?

Are you working in a business that buys chemical products for manufacturing? If not, why would you interact with BASF?

This is exactly what the GP was saying: you're looking at B2C companies as if they matter more, when in reality the vast majority of commerce (but not profits) is B2B.

Re: Apple vs the Law

#383

Post by aryehof »

simonask wrote: post #46

As a European, I have to say I am generally impressed with the EU in these cases. I'm from a country that's rich and capable, but with a GDP a fraction of Apple's market cap. There is no chance that national laws and entities would be sufficient to protect my consumer rights from corporations this size. The EU is fundamentally a centre-right, liberalist, pro-business coalition, but what that means is that it is pro-c…

Don’t overestimate Apple versus your economy. Its real value (book value) is about 60 billion. It might have a speculative value in the trillions, but speculative value is just well… speculative.

Re: Apple vs the Law

#384

Post by tsimionescu »

carlosjobim wrote: post #277
cess11 wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this a joke? The EU is the product of large industrialists institutionalising their liberalist, capitalist values as an international bureaucracy. It hardly cares about unions beyond what the ECHR and ILO treaties demands, i.e. it's obviously not left wing. If it was inherently left wing it wouldn't have the kind of parliament it has, but rather something like Yugoslavia or the DDR did. It's also not conservative,…

The Soviet Union had large industrialists and so does China. Large companies and large industry is the defining aspect of both socialism and capitalism.

The Soviet Union and China are/were not and have virtually never been socialist countries - they are/were state capitalist economies.

Socialism means "corporations are owned by the people working in them", as in co-ops. State-owned corporations under brutal dictatorships are in no conceivable way "worker-owned". They all called themselves socialist just as they called themselves democratic - as in, basic propaganda.

This is very relevant in a discussion of left-wing VS right-wing economies. The Soviet Union and China are firmly in the right wing in reality, just as much as Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy were. They just had different propaganda.

A small note: state owned companies under actual Democratic societies is a more complex topic on the left-wing VS right-wing debate, that I won't go into here.

Re: Apple vs the Law

#385

Post by grishka »

itopaloglu83 wrote: post #375
stale2002 wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> . Apple is granting Spotify access No. Those users control themselves. They are not Apples users. They own their own device and they are free to do whatever they want with the hardware that they own. > the platform still belongs to Apple No actually. The device is owned by the user. > billions of Apple customers They aren't Apples. They own their own device. > e but that's not the contractual agreement they had wit…

You must be thinking this is all wrong. I completely understand and agree with your sentiment, but we're talking about what the contract says. I'm not allowed to install any software I want on my car's computer, the platform belongs to them. They don't provide the tools, libraries, the know-how, or even sue the people who share it online. And similarly, according to Apple's EULA the devices cannot run any app that is…

You keep comparing appliances to general-purpose devices. You also act like the "accept to continue" legalese actually matters to anyone but the legal department that wrote it. Please stop.

When someone buys a car, they usually don't expect to run third-party software on it. They use it to get to places. They expect to use the built-in entertainment system to listen to music and maybe use CarPlay or Android Auto, and that's it.

When someone buys a smartphone, they expect to be able to install apps on it. That's the smartphone thing, that's what sets it apart from dumbphones. Third-party apps are what sells smartphones.

> Apple devices are successful because they provide a great value.

Uh sorry??? It may have been true 10 years ago, but an iPhone costs around $1000 now. That's outrageously expensive for what it is. You can say that about midrange Android phones, but definitely not about iPhones. You pay this much and still don't get to actually own the damn thing.

> for example they didn't allow apps to run continuously in the background so that users can have all day battery life

How is that related to the app store? Android does that as well. An app only gets to run in the background if it starts a "foreground service" which shows a persistent notification.

Sandboxing apps and enforcing their behavior does not require limiting what the user can do with their own device.

> This requires continuous work to keep it running

It absolutely does not. If iOS stopped getting updated 5 years ago, no one would've noticed. It's been a finished, feature-complete product for a long time.

Re: Apple vs the Law

#386

Post by fmajid »

thedevilslawyer wrote: post #237
fmajid wrote: post #225

FWIW, I was speaking yesterday with a friend who works on Big Tech antitrust at the European Commission, and he surprised me by telling me he considers Apple the worst of a rum lot, followed by Meta, Amazon then Google.

Makes sense. Google's stranglehold on phone/browser have alternatives for consumers, who generally don't choose them). Apple and Meta enforce staying in walled-gargens - all or nothing.

They have a staff of 7, and Google just hired 1,500 lawyers, on top of those they already had, to fight them. Interestingly, he was complimentary of the Trump administration’s efforts, including seeming no-brainers like vetting expert witnesses for conflicts of interests (e.g. Carl Shapiro, who he claimed did actual perjury).

Re: Apple vs the Law

#387

Post by cess11 »

saubeidl wrote: post #250
cess11 wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Today is Srebrenica remembrance day so I'll sneak in a OT link to the BBC documentary The Death of Yugoslavia here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsBTkAXnPZs

It is quite unfortunate what happened when ethnic nationalism won out over brotherhood and unity, but to be clear, I don't think that has anything to do with the economic model

Marxists usually apply a discourse regarding political economy because they perceive economy and ideology to be inseparable, and I'd expect Tito to also have done so. Yugoslavia as an entity was tightly coupled with the person of Tito and lacked mechanisms for keeping local governments in cooperation in his absence.

I'm sympathetic to the yugoslavian project and consider it an important source of inspiration and knowledge, but I don't believe fortune had anything to do with what happened afterwards.

Re: Apple vs the Law

#388

Post by hnlmorg »

scarface_74 wrote: post #349
hnlmorg wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Name a bigger EV manufacturer in America.

It’s not just America. We are talking about the world. Tesla is trying to compete globally and sales are declining globally.

Yeah sales are declining, but they’re still the second biggest EV globally.

Saying “Tesla aren’t one of the biggest EV manufacturer” is clearly rubbish.

Re: Apple vs the Law

#389

Post by saubeidl »

cess11 wrote: post #387
saubeidl wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is quite unfortunate what happened when ethnic nationalism won out over brotherhood and unity, but to be clear, I don't think that has anything to do with the economic model

Marxists usually apply a discourse regarding political economy because they perceive economy and ideology to be inseparable, and I'd expect Tito to also have done so. Yugoslavia as an entity was tightly coupled with the person of Tito and lacked mechanisms for keeping local governments in cooperation in his absence. I'm sympathetic to the yugoslavian project and consider it an important source of inspiration and know…

I also don't believe fortune did. I believe western capital, threatened by the success of the Yugoslav project, bankrolled nationalist extremists in a successful ploy to destabilize systemic competition.

Re: Apple vs the Law

#390

Post by jb1991 »

resource_waste wrote: post #216
jb1991 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am certainly not surprised that Apple is employing a lot of legal tricky to work around judgments. But what does surprise me is that there’s a very common attitude in forums that somehow Apple is the only company doing this, or they’re doing it worse than any other company.

Apple is a very stylish kind of company. Their public perception matters more because when you use an Apple product, it creates an image of you. If I buy a Google phone, no one is going to comment on it. If I buy an Apple, or a Tesla, or luxury vehicle, people are going to comment on it. If Apple is known to be scummy and you buy it, it makes you look bad. I think we are seeing that with Tesla now, I doubt too many l…

I’m not sure where you live but this is a rather strange perspective. Apple is a lifestyle company? I think for every person I know that has an android phone, there are three or four with iPhones, where I live. Doesn’t make a very convincing case of some specific kind of a lifestyle niche.

Then, among the developers I know, nearly none of them are actually writing apps for Apple devices, approximately half using MacBooks.

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