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Apple to kill Epic’s accounts on Friday the 28th

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Re: Apple to kill Epic’s accounts on Friday the 28th

#751

Post by nodamage »

woofie11 wrote: post #740
ChrisLomont wrote: post #702

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Antitrust doesn't require a monopoly. Yes, it does. https://www.justice.gov/atr/monopoly-power-and-market-power-...

Did you read the link you just posted? Seriously. It clearly states what I said, and contradicts what you said. As per YOUR LINK, you don't need a monopoly for antitrust; just "the ability to raise prices above those that would be charged in a competitive market." Apple unambiguously has this with their app store.

Not all antitrust violations require monopoly power, that is true. For example, price fixing is illegal even if the companies involved do not have monopoly power.

However, several of the claims Epic made in their lawsuit do require proving that Apple has monopoly power, which is going to be a difficult argument with their current 46% market share.

Re: Apple to kill Epic’s accounts on Friday the 28th

#752

Post by dependenttypes »

the_jeremy wrote: post #575
Waterfall wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you find him wrong about?

A direct quote of RMS from his website[0]: The nominee is quoted as saying that if the choice of a sexual partner were protected by the Constitution, "prostitution, adultery, necrophilia, bestiality, possession of child pornography, and even incest and pedophilia" also would be. He is probably mistaken, legally--but that is unfortunate. All of these acts should be legal as long as no one is coerced. They are illegal…

I do not think that whether you think that people should be prosecuted for thought crimes has much to do with him being right on wrong.

Re: Apple to kill Epic’s accounts on Friday the 28th

#753

Post by jkulubya »

ChrisLomont wrote: post #701
WindyLakeReturn wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This seems like pretty straightforward break of the terms of use to me. And closing the account is retaliation. I think people are giving different meanings to words, with moral judgment tied to some of these meanings, and these meanings are causing confusion. Let's take the word discriminate. Is it wrong if I discriminate when hiring someone? Many will say yes, but because they are thinking of specific forms of dis…

>And closing the account is retaliation. What good is a terms of use if that use cannot be rescinded upon breaching the terms?

Implicit in your question is that the terms are valid. Epic will make the case that they’re not.

And if they succeed, then the terms will be worth nothing, and Apple would have to explain why they go around signing illegal agreements that for example allow them to punch people in the face.

If Epic fails, then yeah, the legal terms say for example that the punishment for what Epic did is a punch in the face, and Apple is just enforcing that legally.

Re: Apple to kill Epic’s accounts on Friday the 28th

#754

Post by ulkesh »

bob1029 wrote: post #291

Can someone give me compelling reasons for disallowing side-loading of applications on iOS? Hypothetically, if side-loading were to be allowed it could be buried under a configuration+confirmation flag for security reasons just like with Android or Windows 10. Thinking more abstractly about this, I already do "sideload" iOS applications when I sign them with enterprise/developer certs and perform OTA installs from sy…

It’s very simple: support. Apple does not want to take any more needless support calls than they have to. When you run a trillion dollar company that handles, I would speculate, tens or hundreds of thousands of active support tickets, and consider adding in a virtually unsupportable mode in your appliance (keeping in mind that iPhones are considered an appliance to Apple), I would hope you would choose the sane option.

Also, Apple prides itself on quality. Side loading, whether you agree with allowing it or not, degrades quality because Apple loses its end to end control. See Android phones as an example of this.

All that being said, sure I would love to have the option of side loading, but if I really care that much, I’ll jailbreak.

Re: Apple to kill Epic’s accounts on Friday the 28th

#755

Post by sneak »

ifmpx wrote: post #713
sneak wrote: post #601

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIK it is still possible to run entirely unsigned apps on macOS.

Sure, but for how long.

I expect development, offline, (and thus execution of novel/unsigned binaries) to remain possible on ARM Macs, so for at least the foreseeable future.

People have been claiming the iOS-style trusted/treacherous computing cancer will hit macOS “any day now” for most of a decade at this point, and it’s still not even on the horizon.

Re: Apple to kill Epic’s accounts on Friday the 28th

#756

Post by arvinsim »

krapp wrote: post #611
downvoteme1 wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not related to the poster but it is surprising that HN is becoming like Reddit where non conformist opinions are downvoted extensively.

Stop caring about pretend internet points.

Unlike Reddit, HN actually makes downvoted posts unreadable(unless you go to the pain of highlighting the text or changing the CSS).

Re: Apple to kill Epic’s accounts on Friday the 28th

#757

Post by ben-schaaf »

ChrisLomont wrote: post #700
laser wrote: post #694

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a lawyer, but presumably because there's US antitrust law, under which the courts may find Apple's contractual impositions to be illegal. They may also find they are legal, but if the court has any doubt they should grant Epic's request to stop retaliation.

I doubt this is antitrust. There's a zillion other places to sell a game (as Epic has shown). If you want to claim the entire market in question to be Apple products, I doubt that will get very far. Everything is a monopoly when you make your market hyper specific.

This isn't some hyper specific market. Mobile games are a $76 billion industry (and rising) with the overwhelming majority of users only having access through either the Google play store or Apple store.

Re: Apple to kill Epic’s accounts on Friday the 28th

#758

Post by JGM_io »

m463 wrote: post #687
grishka wrote: post #635

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why didn't they make it a subscription at this point? Pay $100 per month, or your iPhone would lock and demand that you return it to an Apple Store.

Too overt. Why not just keep slowing it down until it compares poorly and you upgrade to the new snappier version?

Owh wait they do

Re: Apple to kill Epic’s accounts on Friday the 28th

#759

Post by ulkesh »

tobyhinloopen wrote: post #454
theshrike79 wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A single human is smart, people are stupid. They’ll install ANYTHING, no matter how hard it is and how shady the site is. They can’t help themselves. Then their phone is rooted by a bad actor and spreading malware. Who do they blame? Themselves? The shady site? The creator of the trojan? Nope. Apple. They’ll shout from the rooftops how Apple ruined their life and business and remand restitution. The easiest and most…

People can “sideload” on mac os x and nobody is making a scene about their mistakes of mac os x being insecure.

Different market, different historical reasons, and typically a much smaller user base for MacOS than the iPhone.

Also, “sideloaded” apps on MacOS are most certainly suspect in Apple’s eyes, so much so they put opt-in requirements around them. While I do see that as an argument for allowing iPhone sideloading with similar opt-in requirements, you can at least understand the market is considerably different for iPhone users than for Mac users, even if there is an overlap between the two.

iPhones also, from a support perspective, are an order of magnitude (or close to it) greater than that of MacOS. Seems reasonable to me for them to keep their appliance locked down in this way.

Re: Apple to kill Epic’s accounts on Friday the 28th

#760

Post by glangdale »

danudey wrote: post #221
coldpie wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's all private, of course, but they're all generally in the 30% ballpark. There may be lower rates for big clients, but there's no way for us to know that. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/08/as-epic-attacks-apple...

In other words, Apple and Google are bad for taking a 30% cut, but Sony and Microsoft are not bad for taking a 30% cut plus having a (reportedly) vastly more onerous set of policies than Apple has.

When console makers start making the same profit margin on their devices as Apple does, as opposed to selling them at or even below cost, this argument will begin to make sense.
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