385 karma · joined October 18, 2013
Yes, because we can have a functional, productive society based on a legal system where the foundational principal is, “We’ll write laws so vague that we can just say they mean whatever we want them to mean after people and companies try to follow them”.
No, app developers want to write their code once. A consistent look is just a byproduct of that desire.
I’m also glad you didn’t mention anything about the customer, because ostensibly the app developer is doing this so they can deliver customer value faster, but at the cost of having an application that doesn’t fit into the native operating system. “Consistent look of their application across various OSes” usually means “invent your own custom look and behavior that isn’t standard for any OS”, which means customers have to spend extra time and effort to learn your bespoke UI customs rather than just use the ones they already know from their OS (gives the finger to Visual Studio Code).
The end result is that nobody gets to have an application that looks and feels like their chosen OS, and nobody gets to have a cross-platform application that looks and feels like other cross-platform applications unless they’re from the same vendor (and even then, it can be iffy).
> And users wouldn't be able to help each other because Mac user would know different interface/look from Linux user.
Not really. Customers can handle reasonable variations between software running on different operating systems. They do it today, for applications that work across different operating systems. Even when such an application takes most of its cues from another OS, there’s at least some deference to the native platform design in terms of menu design or control behavior.
What it would mean for the app developer is that they actually have to understand the design systems for the different OSes in order to build a design that can reasonably adapt to Mac/Linux/Windows. That’s why the “one design fits all” approach is so appealing when it comes to look and feel. You don’t have to understand anything. You don’t have to care about the native platform at all. There’s no extra work involved. You do whatever you want, the way you want it, and then throw it over the wall at the customer to deal with.
Also, to your second point, because of the EU, everybody* who currently uses Lightning will be replacing all of their cables eventually. That’s money out of pocket sooner or later. Maybe it’s easier to swallow when it’s $12 every three months instead of $100 all in one go, but the sum doesn’t change.
But, by the same token, the laws as put into place outline none of the specifics of how that should actually function. All the EU did was wave its hand, say “browsers, please” and assumed that magically a perfect outcome would occur.
Well, now that lack of clarity is biting the EU in the ass, because it left Apple a ton of wiggle room. What Apple has announced of 17.4 changes is essentially a lawyer’s answer to the actual legal requirements imposed on them, not the ones the EU were implying.
Shitty USB-C cables are ludicrously cheap. Quality cables are merely not expensive, and when you have to replace them in quantity [1], it leads to a decent amount of money having to be spent to replace otherwise perfectly fine non-USB-C cables and a whole bunch of electronic waste as those now-obsolete cables make their way to the trash bin.
— [1] I easily have over a dozen and a half Lightning cables between the ones in my bedroom, my living room, my laptop bag, and my home desk. At ~$10-12 for a pair of braided Anker USB-C replacements, I’m looking at nearly a hundred dollars to replace them all.
I find it helps to remember that the corporation is not in it to help needy children, but to launder your extra pennies into being able to claim charitable donations on behalf of the company and consequently reduce their tax bill.
When you look at it as corporate greed, feeling like a jerk disappears.
It's not in contention: it's both of those things. It's just that some people want it to be exclusively one of those things.
So to be clear: if Apple printed on every iPhone box, "This phone is 30% cheaper on Apple.com", you feel that Amazon, Walmart, Best Buy, %LOCAL_TECH_STORE%, etc. should be legally obligated to stock those iPhones?
So you think it's OK that Walmart doesn't want to sell a product that says, "Hey, don't buy this from Walmart", but you think it's wrong for Walmart not to want to sell a product that links to a website, where the website says, "Hey, don't buy any more of our stuff from Walmart"?
What business in their right mind would want to sell or stock a product that comes with a label that says, in effect, “Don’t spend your money here, go somewhere else”?
Which is why you don’t see successful messaging companies rushing to open their systems.
What company wants to spend the effort to build a successful messaging platform, only to open it and see some nobody come in with feature parity _and_ the ability to reach/convert every single one of their customers?
Open protocols would have worked great if that’s what was mandated _before_ these established products were in the market. Now, it’s going to be an uphill fight all the way, and companies are going to do the absolute bare minimum—-not just what they can get away with technically, but what they can get away with legally (e.g., Apple adopting RCS so they can point to RCS as the common messaging denominator, thus avoiding opening up iMessage itself).
Citation?
Apple lets anyone who buys their devices use any messaging service they want, with no OS-level restrictions on the capability of those messaging services (that is, a third-party app can effectively take the place of iMessage with no loss of device or app functionality).
Apple happens to provide a first-party messaging service which any user is able to completely ignore in favor of one of its many competitors, and many, many do (see literally every place other than the United States).
I don’t see how Ma Bell and iMessage are in any way analogous whatsoever.
iMessage is a private service, run by a private company, exclusively for customers who buy physical products from them [1], which does not in any way, shape, or form prevent any other messaging services from working on said products.
I simply do not understand how the FTC or the DOJ can come in and say, “Some third-party reverse-engineered your service to support devices you have implicitly said through years of non-support [2] that you do not want to provide this service to, so you now have an obligation and/or requirement to support third-party interoperation.”
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[1] iMessage is neither available on Android nor available on iCloud. Consequently, you must purchase or otherwise obtain an Apple hardware device to use iMessage.
[2] And, somewhat explicitly, through documents and statements during litigation.
In 2021, it claimed to be on track to shipping M-series-level chips in 2023. [1]
In 2022, it claimed to be on track to shipping M-series-level chips in 2023. [2]
Now, in 2023, it claims to be on track to shipping M-series-level chips in 2024. At least that date is still in the future, but I think it should be looked at skeptically in light of their past unfulfilled promises.
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[1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/16/22785181/qualcomm-next-g...
[2] https://www.pcworld.com/article/1382740/qualcomm-dubs-nuvia-...
Citations? Because from what I have found [1], Qualcomm only claims it’s 7% faster than a non-Pro, non-Max M2 in single-core. It’s 50% faster than the M2 in multi-core but that’s using 50% more cores
And all of this on a system with a TDP almost 4 times that of the M2 system, meaning it’s consuming a lot more power to get essentially the same performance.
All of this on a chip that’s coming out in 2024 at the earliest, when Apple will be introducing the M4 series — two generations down the road from what the Elite X is performing at.
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[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/news/snapdragon-x-elite-outperf...
Your analogy is flawed.
This is a private railroad company, who built their own private national railroad system, saying that if you want to use their railroads, you have to use their infrastruture (signals, switching, yards, etc.) and to do that, you have to pay a per-trip fee.
Your argument really is, “How is it legal that I am not allowed to use their private railroad track system unless I also use their switches/signals/yards/etc. that carry fees?”
Yes, because as you said, there are knock-on effects.
With a first-party app store, I know I can easily cancel subscriptions, and from a single place; that the payment option isn’t going to be some no-name payment processor or that I’m not going to told it was one price on the screen and then charged another price in the backend; that at least one third party has done at least some minimum level of verification that it’s not malicious; that it isn’t circumventing privacy controls; that app updates occur in one place instead of having to individually launch and update each app (e.g., Sparkle); that, while app review has non-trivial flaws, it does catch certain kinds and amounts of crapplications, and tends to have a second-order consequence of improving platform consistency.
So while I may pay more and/or the developer might earn less, installing apps the old-fashioned way carries way more risk. The days of implicit trust that someone random Joe’s apps will behave themselves and act like good platform citizens are over.
One study [1] in the US released in 2020 found almost 90% of people admitted to speeding, but I don’t think anyone would say that speeding is now approved by the authorities and consequence-free.
[1] https://www.thezebra.com/resources/research/speeding-car-ins...
Even in the absence of payments, Apple would still be entirely within its rights to set Google as the default search provider, which is why the lawsuit isn’t about Apple. It’s about the set of things that Google has done to inhibit search competition, only one of which is paying Apple for default placement.
“Windows has a lock on PC gaming because macOS isn’t available for PCs. Of course, macOS would have to radically chamge to be even remotely usable as a gaming competitor to Windows.”
If macOS is that bad for gaming, no gamer is going to use it even if it was available for PCs.
The problem vis-a-vis uBO that in 2018, Safari switched its extension framework. It no longer supports the WebExtensions framework, instead using a native (proprietary) implementation. The new framework requires extensions to be packaged as apps, and is less featureful in terms of what extensions can do and access than the older framework. Consequently, uBlock Origin decided not to support the new extension framework (https://github.com/el1t/uBlock-Safari/issues/158).
You mean like web apps partially or completing ignoring platform-specific appearances, conventions, or behaviors?
Let’s not pretend that native apps are the only ones that struggle to work correctly cross-platform. While core logic may be portable in web app, frequently web UIs are happy to make a one-size-fits-all interface. While that may be acceptable in a web page, it is neglectful and insulting in a web app that wants to be treated as a peer of native apps.
Cities contain large quantities of people -- that's why they are called population centers. Large numbers of people generate lots of votes. As compared to locations with fewer amounts of people, cities will have an outsided influence on the outcome of elections.
How else do you want it to work? Normalize vote weight by acreage?
Can you elaborate on the difficulty of .NET? (Purely curious!)