And given how many companies want to use the iPhone for nefarious means I like the fact that Apple is looking after me. Many other users feel the same.
A curation service that forbids people from using competing services (or making their own decisions without any curator) is a monopolist trying to control a new market.
edit:
A manufacturer looses control of their product after the first sale[1].
If you don’t like Apple’s policies you are free to buy an Android device.
The free market is great isn’t it? It’s surprising what intelligent people can do without giving the government more power.
Alan Turing and Alanzo Church.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church%E2%80%93Turing_thesis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_completeness
However, my use of the term is an explicit (my previous [2]) reference to these important talks by Cory Doctorow about the War on General Purpose Computing, which I strongly recommend watching/reading:
I wonder how difficult it would be to make a purely electromechanical decision table. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_table )
You can implement the entire relational model with about 8 operators and graph transformations, mostly distribution. You can add math functions as virtual tables, e.g. join against the times table to do multiplciation.
I wrote a paper on how this works, and while it was about ten years ago, I'm pretty sure you could do the algebraic transformations needed with just a stack, so I think you could do it with a finite state automata.
But see my response to myself.
[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/t-sql/queries/with-comm...
The relational model is hugely expressive, and yet it is not Turing complete. So you have something that is plainly general purpose, but would be exempt from such a law.
That you can modify the relational model to make it Turing complete is irrelevant, it's already hugely expressive.
And that you'd typically run it on a machine that is Turing complete doesn't save you. If a manufacturer wanted to bypass that restriction, they'd design a system that is entirely dedicated to it.
They are general purpose computers; this does apply to most products with a processor. However, there are practical differences in what you can implement on an iPhone compared to a tiny embedded CPU with a few kB or MB of RAM.
> Apple isn’t selling a device that you can do with as you please
Transferring ownership of property is the very definition of "selling" something. If Apple want to restrict what people do with their device, they shouldn't be selling it. They can rent/license it, and a very different set of laws would apply.
> If you don’t like Apple’s policies you are free to buy an Android device.
I am also free to use the goods I bought in violation of those policies. That's what it means to own something.
> giving the government more power.
Who is giving the government which new powers? I'm talking about basic property rights.
So by that standard, an Apple //e with 128KB of RAM and 1Mhz processor wasn’t a general purpose computer?
Transferring ownership of property is the very definition of "selling" something. If Apple want to restrict what people do with their device, they shouldn't be selling it. They can rent/license it, and a very different set of laws would apply
So does the same rule apply to game consoles? My TV with an embedded Roku?
Whilst you might buy the phone, I believe you effectively "rent/license" iOS, no? Which means Apple are restricting not what you do with "your device" but "their OS". No ownership of iOS has been transferred.
(I know the two are intimately tangled and this is nitpicking but we're well into the legal nitpicking weeds here.)
You have a much greater ability to inspect any code / processes that run on a general purpose computer running Windows and the like. With an iOS device, you have it on trust that the app isn’t doing anything nefarious. In that context, Apple’s role as benevolent guardian as to what is and isn’t allowed makes more sense.
[1] "Which is similarly unacceptable, you own it, you decide what runs on it. Madness that it could ever come to this."
A cell phone is increasingly people's primary computer for everything. And many times their only computer!
Seriously, most people don’t need their phone to qualify as a computer under your definition. You’re actually being somewhat presumptuous when you infer that people must own at least one “proper” computer.
If China forces Apple to pull an app for protesters from those protester's primary computer, it's a huge issue.
And I reject the claim that the scale of the issue is different between a phone and a games console. Who are you to say that a games console can’t be used for secure communications by protesters? That is equivalent to saying that we should be more concerned about crackdowns against journalists than against political satirists.
Unintentional irony? You are apparently not aware that this is a perennial topic among car enthusiasts, because people noticed that small vehicles usually have much smaller tow ratings (if any) in the US than Europe, even though they seem to be mechanically the same. In the US, people use massive trucks to tow, and from what I've read, in Europe, they don't seem to need them.
And I can jailbreak an iPhone.
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You could also buy a proper truck suited to the task.
And you can buy a proper computer suited to the task.
Hypothetically the regulations might specify that the vehicle must be capable of safely towing the stated load without overheating at X incline at Y speed for Z time at A altitude, be able to stop in B meters, plus C overall safety margin. It's entirely reasonable and rational that the values of X, Y, Z, A, B and C might be different in Europe and North America.
Apple designs its iOS products to have a fully managed software-hardware ecosystem. That has a direct consequence of limiting libre freedom, but that doesn't mean Apple opposes the idea of giving customers freedom. They'll happily sell you a different computer with more freedom.
The car maker designs its subcompact crossover to have low cost and good fuel economy. That has the direct consequence of limiting towing capacity, but that doesn't mean the car maker opposes the idea of giving customers towing capacity. They'll happily sell you a different vehicle with more towing capacity.
Let's review:
Managed ecosystem <————> Able to execute whatever
Small and lightweight <————> Able to tow heavy loads
The analogy holds. More fundamentally I care more about customers having the right to choose the best product for themselves, rather than having @anoncake decide what's best for all of us.
> They'll happily sell you a different computer with more freedom.
Not one that fulfills the same purpose. Macs hardly fill the same niche as iPhones. If Apple sold both restricted and free iPhones at the same price, no one would object. Then customers would have a choice rather than Apple deciding what's best.
I'm sorry, but I don't think you understand how capitalism works. Apple isn't forcing anyone to buy an iPhone, other brands are available. And Apple isn't forced to make products which comply with your personal desires.
I’d be hard pressed to call Apple a monopoly given their market share, but obviously market dominance isn’t a black/white thing (since even a real monopoly may have 99% market share and 1% competition). By some metrics that are relevant to certain markets (like app store revenue) Apple may have a majority market share, which probably gives them quite a lot of leverage and ability to engage in anti-competitive behavior.
More broadly it’s a market dominated by two trillion dollar companies with big network effects, which is a reduced level of competition compared to most other things, and it may be harmful for consumer choice for competition to also be reduced in other markets (like non-OS software or marketplaces for such) due to tying products together.
I don’t personally have a strong opinion on this but I think there’s a reasonable case to be made for regulation on those grounds. The challenge would be finding rules that are simple and clear cut without micro managing what companies can build.
Vote with your dollars.
Apple takes away the ability to:
- see what the apps on your phone are doing
- let you prevent them from doing it.
The big one is networking. Apps can use the network without restriction. apps can link in SDKs that can contact any and all online advertisers. Apple does not allow firewall apps.
A console is a pure luxus good with many alternatives, one which is pretty open (the computer).
A phone is a by now pretty much necessary(1) equipment for the daily live majorly affecting it. With just two "viable" alternatives Android and iOs and a ecosystem+patent mess which make it close to impossible to create a 3 competitor (besides niche markets).
So it's ok if a game console is looked up, it's not if a phone is looked up. (EDIT: REMOVED misleading sentence)
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(1): Yes you can live with old style phones and I know even one person which does so. But it's a major impact onto your live making it hard in many often subtitle ways so not really viable for the general population. E.g. for Banks in the EU to buy anything over Credit Card which is not little risk (mid or higher amount, untrusted shop in Asia, etc.) it will enforce second factor authentication of the transaction. The gotcha is that for some (?many?most?) banks this can only be done through a phone app only available on iOs and _Unrooted_ Android, but not Windows or rooted Android or over a web interface or OS X or Desktop Linux. So basically you can't any longer properly use a credit card without a locked up smartphone with some (?many?most?) European banks...