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The EU made Apple adopt new Wi-Fi standards, and now Android can support AirDrop

arstechnica.com

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Re: The EU made Apple adopt new Wi-Fi standards, and now Android can support AirDrop

#201

Post by roenxi »

scbzzzzz wrote: post #195
roenxi wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They tax and control everything, lock down distribution, prevent you from operating without rules. You seem to be arguing that the EU should be doing that though. What about those of us who quite like the way Apple does things right now? I'm happy to pay extra for a lot of your dot points, I quite like someone to be acting as a firewall between my device and the unfettered soup that is stuff out on the internet. Ap…

>> Apple is so successful is because they know how to create a great phone experience. I disagree, may be they were at some time. Now they are successful because the walls of the well are so high. It is insanely difficult for us frogs to jump. Happy that governments are trying to bring those walls down >> I am happy to pay extra for a lot of your dot points. Good for you because you trust them. Problem is I am not. I…

> The security you are thinking is a believable mirage. There are several users who have lost thousands of dollars to scammy appstore in app purchases/subsciptions and apple is doing shit to stop this.

And the plan to make this the consensus view is to ban Apple-style curated app stores. That seems to be cheating. When Apple convinced me their App store model was better than the alternative they had to use, y'know, persuasion.

Nokia sorta died, but at the time back in the 2000s Apple had to get through the entire phone industry to establish the iPhone. If the Europeans had any idea how to manage this sort of ecosystem they'd still be running the show. They had an amazing market position to begin with. They flubbed it because no-one in the entire continent seems to know how to run an app store! Now they're legislating their bad ideas in. It is a very European approach to commercial innovation and success.

Re: The EU made Apple adopt new Wi-Fi standards, and now Android can support AirDrop

#202

Post by scbzzzzz »

systemtest wrote: post #181
usrnm wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple also helped develop USB C more than a decade ago, they still had to be forced to actually use it in their phones. There is no contradiction here

Apple used USB-C on the iPhone 15 and 16 without being forced to do so. If Apple was indeed forced to use USB-C they would have postponed it to the 17. Do you also think Apple was forced to use USB-C on the iPad and MacBook?

Apple cerifies/recieves licensencing fee for every thunderbolt cable. Apple only did move to usb-c when backlash is so high and eu law will certainly pass.

It is good for their pr to advertise that they moved to usbc because they wanted to rather than forced to by a government.Apple still tries/atleast tried to control usbc cable usage for iphones. Cables need to get certified.

Apple supported usbc on mac because it is superior and the impact to their revenue is very low. It is also jump from usb-a to usb -c

Re: The EU made Apple adopt new Wi-Fi standards, and now Android can support AirDrop

#203

Post by cyberax »

itopaloglu83 wrote: post #151
notyourwork wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who is stopping someone from competing against ASML?

Who’s stopping anyone from competing with Apple? Let’s force ASML to open up its manufacturing line and cancel their patents for squandering innovation, but wait they’re an incredible company that dominated the field with their hard work and diligence, so it’s not fair for them. Similarly, the open markets should apply to everyone, not just dominant American firms. Though, I’m not saying they’re innocent and I think…

ASML provides their devices to any (eligible) company.

If you want an Apple analogy, imagine ASML requiring that they get 30% of all the income generated by devices that use ASML-produced chips.

Re: The EU made Apple adopt new Wi-Fi standards, and now Android can support AirDrop

#205

Post by cyberax »

JustExAWS wrote: post #147
morshu9001 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They had Macs on USB-C for like 7 years before the iPhone. It was going to stay like that. Mac on USB-C meant more dongles to sell, iPhone on Lightning meant cable fees and control.

There were hundreds of devices on Amazon that never paid Apple a fee to use Lightning. And as far as USB C on Macs, are you complaining that Apple used an industry standard port?

No, there weren't. Lightning cable have an authentication chip, and while it was cloned towards the end of the lifecycle, most accessories still utilized official chips.

Re: The EU made Apple adopt new Wi-Fi standards, and now Android can support AirDrop

#206

Post by cyberax »

anamax wrote: post #112
KK7NIL wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> USB-C is a worse mechanical connector for a device plugged in thousands of times over its lifetime. USB-C connectors are usually rated for 10k cycles. Do you have any evidence that lighting connectors are rated for more cycles than that? > The female port of a USB-C connector has a relatively fragile center blade. Lightning's layout was the opposite which makes it more robust and easier to clean. This is very weak…

> This is very weak a priori arguing. I could just as well argue that USB-C has the center blade shielded instead of exposed and so is more durable. The unshielded Lightning center blade is on a $5 connector. If it breaks, I'm out $5 and it's reasonable to have spares. The shielded USB-C center blade is part of an expensive device. If it breaks....

At the same time, if the springs on the iPhone-side connector loosen and can't hold onto the cable, you have to replace the whole phone and not just the cable.

So Apple had to use pretty strong springs, resulting in a lot of friction on the pins. That made them easier to damage, so they had to switch from gold to a crazy super-resistant rhodium-based alloy for contact coating.

Re: The EU made Apple adopt new Wi-Fi standards, and now Android can support AirDrop

#207

Post by fmajid »

I've ditched AirDrop for LocalSend, which is universally cross-platform (iOS, macOS, Linux, Android) and works very well. It's not a complete substitute, it doesn't work in the case of completely casual sharing between devices that are not connected to a shared WiFi network, however.

Re: The EU made Apple adopt new Wi-Fi standards, and now Android can support AirDrop

#208

Post by fmajid »

star-glider wrote: post #5

I'm libertarian, but I have to say watching the EU torment Apple has been delightful and one of the stronger arguments for muscular regulatory action. The USB-C thing just made everything better. It cost Apple basically nothing---maybe a few million/year of profit, which for a company that's worth $3 trillion is nothing, and it made my and many other people's lives quite a bit more convenient. Same with this Airdrop…

iMessage escaped DMA because it has marginal market share anywhere outside the US. WhatsApp is the dominant messaging platform and is opening up:

https://developers.facebook.com/m/messaging-interoperability...

Re: The EU made Apple adopt new Wi-Fi standards, and now Android can support AirDrop

#209

Post by dwaite »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #172
notepad0x90 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I get there are a lot of people like you, but you did have the choice of just using android didn't you? Governments are not ways to enforce your personal preference or force it on others. Apple felt their lightning tech was better, isn't having better tech and an environment where different ideas can be explored better? EU is already anti-innovation, you don't succeed with startups easily there, it's precisely be…

The lightning tech wasn’t better, it could only do USB 2 speeds - yes I know there was one iPad that could do USB 3 with one special dongle - and it couldn’t even do video out well with the dongle. The video adapter had hardware to decompress a compressed video stream and convert it. Even before the EU mandate lightning was showing its age and they started replacing it with USB C on the iPads. You’ve had cheap Androi…

> yes I know there was one iPad that could do USB 3 with one special dongle - and it couldn’t even do video out well with the dongle. The video adapter had hardware to decompress a compressed video stream and convert it.

Those are two separate things.

These iPad models had USB 3.0 over lightning. Lighting however was designed to solve the 30 pin connector "alt mode" problem. USB-C recreated the "alt mode" problem.

In the original 30-pin iPod, iPhone and iPad days, you had multiple video out adapters to support RCA, VGA, composite, and so on. These were also _different_ with the different i-device models - the adapters were not backward compatible, so when they came out with a new higher-resolution model of dongle, it wouldn't work on older devices. Conversely, the complexity of supporting various hardware mappings onto the 30 pin connector meant that older dongles could get deprecated from new devices.

There weren't a lot of people who invested in video output for their I-devices, but for those who did this was a very frustrating issue.

So for lightning, they went to serial protocols. So rather than negotiate a hardware mode where certain pins acted like HDMI pins in a pass-through mode, they streamed a H.264 video to the dongle - the dongle then rendered it and used its own HDMI output support.

Since this was software negotiation, a newer dongle could support new video formats and higher resolutions while still supporting older devices. There were also examples of improvements pushed to more complicated dongles like the HDMI adapter via software updates. But fundamentally, the complexity of supporting a broad hardware accessory ecosystem wasn't pushed into the physical port - it could evolve over time via more complex software rather than via increasingly complicated hardware in every phone.

With USB-C we are back to guessing whether the connector is expecting the phone to support HDMI alt mode, DisplayPort alt mode, MHL alt mode, or to output a proprietary system like DisplayLink data.

USB 3.0 (which is what these iPads supported) never had these alt modes. It was USB-C which became a connector for (optionally) supporting a lot of other, non-USB protocols. The lack of USB-C support is why these iPads only supported video out with the lightning to HDMI adapter.

USB-C is decent, but it suffers quite a bit from there not being strong certification. This is partly why Thunderbolt 5 has shifted to becoming a compatibility- and capability- oriented certification mark. You know for example that thunderbolt 5 video will always work, because the cables have all the data pins and the devices are going to support DisplayPort alt mode.

Re: The EU made Apple adopt new Wi-Fi standards, and now Android can support AirDrop

#210

Post by scbzzzzz »

roenxi wrote: post #201
scbzzzzz wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Apple is so successful is because they know how to create a great phone experience. I disagree, may be they were at some time. Now they are successful because the walls of the well are so high. It is insanely difficult for us frogs to jump. Happy that governments are trying to bring those walls down >> I am happy to pay extra for a lot of your dot points. Good for you because you trust them. Problem is I am not. I…

> The security you are thinking is a believable mirage. There are several users who have lost thousands of dollars to scammy appstore in app purchases/subsciptions and apple is doing shit to stop this. And the plan to make this the consensus view is to ban Apple-style curated app stores. That seems to be cheating. When Apple convinced me their App store model was better than the alternative they had to use, y'know, p…

yes I agree, but we need to change with the age. in early 2000's it is hard to distribute apps/software, and 30% commission made sense.

now it is not, there are several people/companies who can make the app distribution better, efficient for all consumers. they can bring it down to a fraction (apple itself has by now bought it to a fraction of what it costs in 2000).only reason they are not passed down to consumer is because they made sure there is no competition (by force(google paying samsung to not develop its app store) or by design (Apple limiting 3rd party installs and discouraging webapps) - basically how a monopoly/duopoly behaves). it is bad for us consumers

if apple has developed all the tools libraries itself from scratch , put hardwork and sweat into it, i wont have a issue. we all know thats not the case and how much opensource tools helped.

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