cmelbye

> Apple can't control what applications get uploaded to the third party stores

Is this actually true? I don't know how I would find the answer to this question without paying a team of lawyers to analyze the 40,000 word Digital Markets Act. However, my guess is that it's more nuanced.

Structurally, I think the developer program will be unchanged. iOS will still require code signing using a certificate issued by Apple. It will also continue to have sandboxing and restrictions that prevent apps from using private APIs. Apple will continue to require developers to accept an agreement and reserve the right to revoke access in the event of a violation.

As dictated by the DMA, legal agreements like the App Store guidelines will become more permissive and new public APIs will be introduced to support certain use cases that were previously reserved for Apple. But this does not mean Apple can't control their platform anymore.

The fee to set up a developer account is $99/year. The biggest apps on the store and the smallest pay the same fee. A fixed fee helps to equalize the barrier to entry, and everyone likes that. On the other hand, App Store's cost structure is not fixed. Spotify costs Apple vastly more than an app with 1000 installs. This needs to be accounted for.

> Nothing about the streaming or value delivered is in any way related to the App Store.

Entirely incorrect. By taking a percentage of transactions, App Store is incentivized to help apps grow. From day one, getting featured on App Store has driven serious business outcomes for developers. This has only grown over the years, especially after Apple started to focus on marketing apps more deliberately with the "For You" tab.

That's a service that they provide "for free". You get an email from Apple saying that they'd like to feature your app, send over some creative assets, they write an article, and suddenly you're getting a lot of "free" installs. This is only one example of the value that apps get "for free" from Apple and the App Store. And again, this levels the playing field between big and small developers.

Of course, nothing is actually free. Apple is a business and not only needs to be compensated for the value that they provide, but they also need to make a profit. That's why they take a cut of transactions.

An alternative model would be to charge for all of this à la carte. All promotion would be paid for directly. Bandwidth would be metered and invoiced. WWDC sessions locked behind a paywall. Maybe that would even add up to be less than 30% of revenue. Certainly big developers would like it -- up and coming competitors would have a much tougher time competing than today.

> $8 is way more than the profitability of an ad supported user.

I don't think so. Twitter's ARPU from advertising in Q2 2022 was around $4.50. ARPU from advertising in the US was more than $14.

Users likely to subscribe at $8/month (power users in western countries) are more valuable than average for advertising.

No ads for $8/month would probably be a very bad idea.

Autopilot is basically worthless to me. I use it for a couple minutes at a time at most. The first time it slammed on the brakes on an empty highway, taking me from 70 to 40, I completely lost faith.

TikTok will make $11B in ad revenue this year. It is their business model. This is twice as large as Twitter's business, and a third of Instagram or YouTube.

That ship has sailed. Spraying chemicals into the atmosphere to modify the weather happens around the world already, including in the US.

Facebook policy is to require a real name for every user. I'm struggling to see how that's relevant here.

If you want to tweet under an anonymous pseudonym -- great! We are talking about an optional verification feature for a subset of users who are at risk of impersonation. These people choose to participate in this program because they want their identity to be clear and legitimate.

Because I didn't have a physical SIM. The phone was lost.

I give it a year before they dip their toes into Creative Suite integrations.

So government ID + some reputable source (news article, etc.) that links your real name to your professional name, and then it can’t change.

The usual: My account password, two factor auth, account security PIN. Additionally, an SMS is sent to the number that’s being transferred giving a chance to block (with a timeout to auto-approve if the device is lost).

I haven’t explored it but I would assume there is also an optional “high security mode” lock — something like requiring account changes to happen in-store with physical ID.

Have you tried eSIM? It’s dependent on carrier, of course, but it’s actually an incredible UX.

My partner lost his phone (and SIM) recently and I was able to transfer his T-Mobile line to a different iPhone in a few minutes using eSIM. It was totally automated using the T-Mobile website — enter the IMEI then scan a QR code with iPhone camera.

I saved a trip to the store to get a new SIM card and didn’t have to talk to a human.

Could they simply disable the ability to change display names for verified users? It must match the government-issued ID / business documents / etc. that were used to verify in the first place. If you want to change it, send updated verification documents.

This takes away an avenue for self-expression (people will often change their display names based on trends, etc.) and might have edge cases (like transgender people whose preferred names may not match government ID cards) but it seems like it would be a step in the right direction...

I've noticed that the language parsing of these knowledge/assistant queries is a bit strange sometimes. A more subjective example is "10 lakh in USD". This isn't a perfectly formed query -- lakh is not a currency but a unit in the Indian numbering system. However, I think most humans would assume that I'm talking about converting Indian rupees and this is reflected in the organic search results. Google understands that I'm trying to convert currency but for some reason decides that I meant "10 lakh Euro in USD".

Yes it’s very common. https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-fu...

The problem is that it's insane to leave all of this for the website to implement correctly. It's a UX nightmare and it opens the door for a company to game the system, secretly ignore my privacy setting, etc. The EU solution is, of course, to turn a technical problem into a legal problem. Sue the company if their "Allow" button is too big or it doesn't work as advertised.

It should be a consistent browser-based preference that makes it impossible for a website to do something that I told it not to do. The problem with that is it requires innovation because cookies have inherent privacy design flaws. When you can't innovate, legislate.

From what I've seen of mobile games, in practice it means that it starts off fun and well balanced. Then after [x] minutes it starts to get a bit frustrating, and suddenly you're unable to make progress without sitting and waiting or banging your head against the wall. This presents a choice to the player. They can choose to put the game down until they unlock some power up that helps them pass the level. Or, they can pay money to receive the instant dopamine hit of getting back to the beginning of the "compulsion loop".

The real dystopia is that I'm 99% sure these games dynamically adjust durations, prices, and incentives based on the user's past behavior to extract as much money per hour of play as possible. Essentially a machine that identifies and preys on a person's weaknesses.

I think his point is that FSD is an inevitability and when it comes it will generally upend the way we think about cars. Manual driving may always be a thing but it would become more of a passion than a way to get to work in the morning. The vast majority of value would come from autonomous transportation and logistics.

Good luck winning a war if you're not censoring your enemy's propaganda.

This doesn't make much sense. At the highest level, America imports more than it exports. I struggle to look at that and call it a one way street.

It's a simple case of reciprocity. If China wants to ban American social media networks then America should obviously respond in kind.

The funny part is that JUUL discontinued their "fruity / sweet" flavors years ago. Meanwhile, that market has been taken over by dozens of competitors that have every dessert flavor you could imagine at every gas station in the country. These devices are single-use which means you throw away the entire device (including the battery) when it's empty. This is worse for the environment, easier for high schoolers to use discreetly and, importantly, enables evasion of regulations that were written specifically to target pod + rechargeable battery systems like JUUL.

Tobacco-flavored JUUL pods are mainly used by former smokers as an alternative to cigarettes. High schoolers are vaping hot pink, mint bubblegum flavored, one-time-use Puff Bars now. They won't even notice when JUUL is banned.

Apple didn’t design iPadOS to be “arbitrarily different enough to be called new.” They are incrementally building a new type of GUI from first principles. Mouse-based input took decades to evolve to where it is today.

Its okay to feel like this GUI doesn’t work well for your needs, but that doesn’t mean it was “arbitrary”.

Wait til you find out that "sick" and "ill" can also be synonyms for "really great".

That’s not the main message. No one cares that iPod touch is being discontinued. No one was buying them.

People see this news as the "end of an era" -- an era that began with Apple's reinvention in the early 2000s. That's the implicit message. There are two ways to interpret this:

1. Wow, what an iconic product. Come to think of it, we haven't really felt that way about a new Apple product in a while... Maybe this is not just the end of iPod, but of Apple's product innovation, too?

2. Wow, what an iconic product. Wild to think that we could only have 1,000 songs but even that was revolutionary. Apple changed music forever and they're still ahead of the industry with products like AirPods and Spatial Audio. I wonder what they'll do next?

Interpretation #1 is a very real risk to Apple’s brand. It's the job of their PR team to steer the message toward interpretation #2.

Whether or not that's true, the government should ban this type of business. Not support it with our tax dollars.

If you are audited by the IRS and they find that you overpaid, they will issue a refund. It's not a one-way street.

The problems you’re describing are problems of the internet, not decentralization. Few could’ve predicted what the initial rules of the internet would generate after a few decades. We can learn from the outcome and come up with new rules.

The point about how “people want centralized systems” reminds me of the initial response to Apple’s privacy strategy. At the time, it was met with skepticism, to say the least. Privacy wasn’t something that normal people obsessed over, and it came at the expense of wonderful features that were only possible through centralized archival of personal information.

Since then, a steady drumbeat of surveillance scandals, security incidents, and technological innovations have turned data retention into more of a liability than an asset.

Steam Deck has a very similar form factor and is way more open to hacking. It seems like the free market is working. Why should the people who develop products at Nintendo have to design around some politician’s law?

I don't think that's true. The paper says that a camera pose estimated by a SLAM system is required. ARKit implements SLAM and can easily provide camera pose for each frame through the ARFrame class. But there are countless other implementations of SLAM, including Android ARCore, Oculus Quest, Roomba, self-driving cars, and a number of GitHub repos (https://github.com/tzutalin/awesome-visual-slam).

16" MBP with M1 Max is the best performing Apple computer available, according to GeekBench. Some Mac Pro configurations outperform on multi-core benchmarks, but those start at $6,500 for rack mounted configurations.

The new MBPs are incredible machines and worth the money in engineer productivity. for an iOS engineer, I'm not sure of a better set up from Apple's current line up.