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EU approves legislation to regulate Apple, Google, Meta, and other tech firms

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Re: EU approves legislation to regulate Apple, Google, Meta, and other tech firms

#371

Post by baxtr »

Negitivefrags wrote: post #353
Retric wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple makes peanuts from the App Store relative to phone sales. After they upped the cut for developers to between 70% and 85% and CC companies still get their cut, add customer service and app reviews and it simply isn’t that profitable. What they benefit from is selling 1,000$ phones at a 30+% profit margin, because for the average consumer they simply work better. Which actually aligns incentives between customers…

A quick Google suggests Apple made 64 billion from the App Store in 2021 of the 378 billion in total revenue. Some fairly large peanuts! And that revenue is basically pure profit as it doesn’t require the creation of any actual physical hardware either.

Is this pre 30% or after? Also: how much does it cost to run the App Store globally? Do have the numbers?

Re: EU approves legislation to regulate Apple, Google, Meta, and other tech firms

#372

Post by Nasrudith »

pchristensen wrote: post #248
superb-owl wrote: post #5

This is huge. Forcing Apple to allow app side-loading, third-party payments, etc is going to wrest away control of the iOS ecosystem (and eat pretty heavily into their revenues [1] [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/10/apple-implies-it-generated-r... I hope some of these regulations spill over into the U.S. and the rest of the world.

For many (most?) users, Apple's restrictions, especially sideloading, protect users from bad actor app owners (looking at you, Facebook). To me, allowing sideloading is like allowing chemical weapons to be used in war. Yes, it's a new tool and capability at your disposal, but it's also available to every powerful and unscrupulous participant.

More like a chemistry lab to everyone. Most won't even touch the thing because it requires too much knowledge and is intimidating. Some will doubtlessly use it to "make meth" and get burnt or blown up. But some will also use it to produce better understanding or accomplish a task on their own using their own expertise.

Re: EU approves legislation to regulate Apple, Google, Meta, and other tech firms

#373

Post by samatman »

hyperpape wrote: post #280
cycomanic wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can we stop pretending that Apple has the users best interest in mind? They just want to be the gatekeeper for lucrative applications/functions so they can charge for it. That they somehow convinced apple users that it's somehow in their interest just shows how good their marketing is.

Apple is a company, and it’s interested in making profits. Right now, its methods of making profits are slightly more aligned with what privacy conscious users desire than some other companies’, and that’s good. Apple absolutely needs to be checked in other ways—-the fact that it’s selling advertising while setting policies that hurt other advertisers stinks to high heaven. Let antitrust rake them over the coals for…

I don't agree with the second paragraph at all.

Apple sets a restrictive and privacy-centric set of rules for advertisers, which it then follows. The fact that this is a problem for other advertising companies is an indictment of those companies and their bleak surveillance-enabling business model.

Contrast this with the "use WebKit or go home" rule, which, like it or not, is favoring Apple's product over others. It's not like these advertising policies are "be headquartered in Cupertino", it's "if you want to track our users you must ask them first".

Re: EU approves legislation to regulate Apple, Google, Meta, and other tech firms

#374

Post by caramelcustard »

Closi wrote: post #361
caramelcustard wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"They just want to be the gatekeeper for lucrative applications/functions so they can charge for it."...on the platforms that they have developed, invested in and are maintaining, which also don't hold a market majority around the world. "...they somehow convinced apple users..."...by making a product that fits Apple users' needs in a market that always had lots of competition, meaning that those who for whatever rea…

You don’t have to be the market majority for your actions to be anti-competitive.

That's not the point. "Anti-competitive practices are business or government practices that prevent or reduce competition in a market.". The point of me mentioning that Apple is not the market majority was to emphasize that even with their current positions, Apple isn't capable of effectively reducing competition in the market of electronic devices, as is already proven not by legislative bodies but the market.

Re: EU approves legislation to regulate Apple, Google, Meta, and other tech firms

#375

Post by Karunamon »

caramelcustard wrote: post #297
Jcowell wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disagree. “Trivially easy” must be set in common sense to the average consumer. It must be something that they can do easily without any guides or tutorials. Changing my name on Xbox is trivially easy. This[1] is not. [1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/xbox-apps/devki...

Disagreeing with your disagreement. How "easy" a tech-related task is to accomplish is determined by the users skills and experience, as well as software/hardware usage patterns that they've learned over the years. Official guides/tutorials for enabling/disabling various functions exist for Google Play/AppStore too. Does that mean that one of the easiest ways to acquire apps that have ever existed is...not easy? Beca…

If you're expecting the user to follow a tutorial to do some thing, that thing is already a niche of a niche.

Re: EU approves legislation to regulate Apple, Google, Meta, and other tech firms

#376

Post by astrange »

robonerd wrote: post #325
ksec wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Can we stop pretending that Apple has the users best interest in mind? Well they did , at least during Steve Jobs's era.

Steve Jobs was an asshole who always put money first. But even if you disagree with that, he's been dead for more than a decade. It's time to move on.

Disney buying Pixar made Jobs more money than anything he ever did with computers.

Re: EU approves legislation to regulate Apple, Google, Meta, and other tech firms

#377

Post by seti0Cha »

smoldesu wrote: post #350
dijit wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be perfectly fair here, you're responding as if "productivity" means "Code" and that's not exactly true. For the overwhelming majority of people: coding is not productivity. What is? Checking email, jotting down notes, recording meetings and transcribing/dictating them, joining meetings and having reliable video/audio. Being able to respond to an email with a little drawing is _absolutely_ a killer feature for pro…

> I wont comment much on the statement you can't actually code on an iPad, technically you can That's not coding on an iPad, since the code is not being interpreted/compiled on-device. You're right that an iPad can remote into a build server for "development", but so can a $6 Raspberry Pi.

I don't know why I should give a rat's ass what CPU is doing the work as long as the work can be done. Your point seems kind of pedantic in a world where a vast amount of code executes in the cloud or is intricately tied up with networked services so that a freestanding computer is of little value.

Re: EU approves legislation to regulate Apple, Google, Meta, and other tech firms

#378

Post by microtherion »

squarefoot wrote: post #335
ksec wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Can we stop pretending that Apple has the users best interest in mind? Well they did , at least during Steve Jobs's era.

You probably meant Wozniak, not Jobs.

It's not that Wozniak wished users ill, but, for all his technical skill, there's little evidence that he had a particularly good understanding of what users wanted or needed — his post-Apple career is basically marked by flop after flop.

Now, of course, it's all different, and his blockchain surely is going to revolutionize the world: efforce.io /s

Re: EU approves legislation to regulate Apple, Google, Meta, and other tech firms

#379

Post by cercatrova »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #360
cercatrova wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. Bailouts were loans, not free money. The US government made money on those loans due to interest.

That's a nice comforting story to believe in. I hope for you it's true. Over here the bailouts were a massive transfer of public to private wealth that led to a decade of "austerity", closed hospitals, collapsed pension schemes and general misery for the poorest people in society.

> Early estimates for the bailout's risk cost were as much as $700 billion; however, TARP recovered $441.7 billion from $426.4 billion invested, earning a $15.3 billion profit or an annualized rate of return of 0.6%, and perhaps a loss when adjusted for inflation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Economic_Stabilizati...

Where is "over here," Europe?

Re: EU approves legislation to regulate Apple, Google, Meta, and other tech firms

#380

Post by Klonoar »

orangecat wrote: post #254
ericmay wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kind of. So the primary issue is that Apple collectively bargains on behalf of customers against developers. So if you take something like privacy rights, Apple can say "hey, we've got all of these users and if you want to participate in the ecosystem you have to not track their data" - as an example. Now what happens is that companies like Facebook and others who really want to get your data without that pesky Apple…

It absolutely blows my mind that people are rallying the pitchforks around Apple for "monopolistic corporate scaremongering" Meanwhile it blows my mind that on a site called Hacker News, people are not only enthusiastically handing control of their computing environments to a megacorporation, but insisting that everyone else should do the same.

Where do you think you are?

This site started is effectively a Y-Combinator watercooler. Just because it has the term “Hacker” doesn’t mean what you think it means.

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