> “The CAT also ruled that app developers passed on 50% of the overcharge to consumers.”
This is complete nonsense. App companies set price based on willingness to pay. If Apple allows custom payments alongside IAP, you might get a temporary gap (naturally <30%) to steer people towards in-house payments, with harder refunds etc. But as soon as they're no longer required to adopt IAP their own prices will go back up to exactly what they were.
The vast majority of Apple's app/IAP revenue is from "mobile game" companies. You think they won't enjoy a 42% increase in iOS revenue (1/0.7=1.42) by keeping prices at a level consumers have already accepted for years? There's no "lower sales" tradeoff, customers are used to those prices.
> Everything is becoming more expensive often for no reason.
- For food, this was caused by supply shocks. First COVID, then Ukraine, now tariffs and the trade war. And on top of that, excessive price-setting power in some highly concentrated sectors of the food industry.
- For housing, this was caused by a supply shortage, i.e. bad housing policy. A housing shortage gives property owners price-setting power, which allows them to keep raising the price. However, while we've made it very easy for owners to profit, we've made it harder for developers, feeding the shortage.
- For healthcare, we decided to let many middle-men profit. A decent portion of spending could be cut without harming pharmaceutical innovation or new drug development.
These problems all have causes, and the cause is bad policy that benefits a minority while harming the country. And "tax the rich and give to the poor" does not fix these; the government is gonna need to get involved in directly fixing these broken markets, not just giving money to the poor so they immediately hand it over to the existing rent-seekers.
Immigration isn't the issue. Population growth is actually down compared to historical levels. Immigration numbers (and births) are lower than they have ever been and housing costs are higher than they have ever been.
For a nation built and made immensely great by immigrants, I truly fear the type of propaganda that is able to turn all of their social and economic problems on immigrants.
I know Europe has been consumed by this rhetoric, but I feel Americans should know better, knowing their history. Incredible how the powerful can shift the blame on the guy making minimum wage, and the entire populace laps it up like complete morons. It is frightening to see the how mass media can easily brainwash a whole country in the span of a few years.
Deceiving people at global scale is by now a solved problem; despite believing we are the smartest and most well-read and rational in history, humanity as a whole is on aggregate really, really dumb.
That's definitely true. I've also seen online reports of Tahoe memory leaks in other apps like PowerPoint. It's unlikely that all these apps independently gained memory leaks at the same time by coincidence.
Both those sites existed - either in practice or in concept - for well over a decade now. If the giant mega corporation behind those products is blaming WebKit, maybe they should instead devote some engineering resources to just work around the bug.
Testing in non-Chrome browsers should identify anything like this before stuff ships. It is legitimately not hard to do.
- browsers having to go through Apple means slower updates (including for bugs or security), not needed on Mac or any other platform
- Apple forces every alternative-engine browser to use a pretty broken framework that Safari does not use, not needed on Mac or any other platform
- Apple's restrictions on alternative engines in the EU are a vast list of malicious compliance[0], making those engines a theoretical academic exercise, so they're definitely still fucking you as a consumer.
- Companies forking over more margin and control to Apple mean they have to make up for it in other ways.
- Apple and Google wielding so much control removes overall choice and competition from the market.
- I sure hope Apple and Google only ever have my interests at heart because they have all the keys to the kingdom and could really screw me over.
- I wish I could do XYZ with my phone. Too bad...
- I wish there were more diverse phone SKUs. It used to be wildly competitive and we used to have all kinds of innovation because it wasn't so winner-take-all. Where's my eink low power open source phone with gpio and thermal sensors, etc.
- My car and phone feel like frenemies.
- There's still no good alternative OS for phones. Probably because it'd be impossible to make money and compete against titans.
- The company that removed manifest V2 is now forcing app signing? I wonder if they'll limit web browsing options and ad blocking soon.
- Why do I have to de-Google my phone with every update? They have tyranny of defaults (that lay people can't adjust) and just reset the defaults back to themselves every time you upgrade. Or give you scare walls and alerts asking to be default again. Lay people are probably stuck with this.
- "Google News" legitimately has half page ads and popups and that's the default experience. It is physically impossible to even read the news.
Consumers in a general sense don't know much of how the world works - safe radiation exposure, food safety, drug dosing thermodynamics, household electrical wiring, airborne particulate, airline maintenance...
This is why we have a government regulatory regime to protect them. The government has to strong arm companies out of bad behavior, because consumers do not understand.
Some people who have Apple and Google stock will voice opinion against regulation. Or people who really love their devices and don't understand the harms.
But the fact is that this Titanic command of markets damages the robustness of the economy. Google and Apple are doing massive harm.
Capitalism should be hard. It should be a treadmill. You shouldn't be able to coast.
We like the market. We like evolutionary pressure. Giants this large, however, are an ecological hack that get to escape the same algorithm we subject every other company to. They created an artificial and illegal means to prevent themselves from facing competition. They're an invasive species picking on ecosystems that literally cannot fight back.
It's a good thing that new companies can (or could) threaten old companies. It's a renewing forest fire, a de-ossification. It rewards innovation capital rather than institutions.
Apple and Google have found a way to forever avoid this by wedging themselves in as "owners of mobile computing". These two companies own it. Period. You don't. Consumers don't. No other company can even enter into the arena. You play by their rules.
Antitrust enforcement has never been more needed. We've had two decades of devices we really only rent and don't own. Devices that strangle consumer control over how we spend our time and money.
If America doesn't do it, foreign countries seeking sovereignty should.
As a consumer I definitely want my browsers to always be up to date and be able to address 0day bugs as soon as the browser vendors are aware. Any potential delays on fixing security issues make me nervous.
I suggest that everyone here stop submitting Feedback Assistant/Radar reports. Let teenagers, college students, adults and old people buy a new Mac, experience the bugs and lack of polish and let it affect Apple's brand, consumer's preferences, and their market behavior. Apple is too big to care about anything other than market consequences. Apple is fully aware that no one likes the Radar system, that no one feels their reports count, they had an executive do a sort-of mea culpa years ago but nothing changed.
My AirPods keep going silent on my new Tahoe Mac and require a disconnect and reconnect. Will I report it? No. (Besides, if you report bugs like that, Apple collects a map of your entire filesystem, every path and filename). Apple shouldn't have fired their QA team. Let them deal with any brand damage, they've earned it. I mean, did Apple really not test their new OS with Slack, Zoom or VSCode? Really? Reckless.
> I suggest that everyone here stop submitting Feedback Assistant/Radar reports.
We need an equivalent of the "Windows UX Taskforce” but for macOS/iOS (it was a website that pointed out and laughed at all the UI/UX flaws in Windows)
They have like ~15% market share. Thats really tiny after all these years. I bet those people are mostly people who have been burned by Windows. What do you expect them to go to? Linux?
it already is for me at least, because steam proton is excellent and distros are polished enough (still lacking in some edge cases, but windows is lacking more in other aspects)
From a Windows end-user perspective, the entity to blame for apps breaking after a Windows upgrade is Microsoft, even if the app was doing something it should not have [0].
SwiftUI is still broken for any non-simple apps, almost a decade after its introduction. Completely unacceptable for big apps. Look at OmniFocus, who inexplicably became early-adopters of it, and it's had a bunch of UI glitches and inconsistent behavior requiring app restart (like you select one list item, but the inspector shows you details for another list item) ever since.
Apple only has itself to blame for Electron's popularity.
Okay. So your point was not really: "I disagree on moral philosophy, responsibility and the attribution of guilt", it was: "I support Apple's centralized control on all apps you can run, but I don't want to be criticized for the moral implications of state control, censorship and authoritarianism, nor do I want to defend my position on the merits". That's cheap.
I don't know if that's necessarily a charitable interpretation of the comment, keeping in mind the HN commenting guidelines. Despite differences in opinion we should give everyone the chance to state their view, no matter what it is, as long as it generates "curious" discussion.
It's more like: "I support Apple's centralized control on all apps you can run, as long as that monopoly is only used to squeeze out competition and not for censorship."
Of course government censorship becomes a lot easier if you only need to put pressure on one company.
This is complete nonsense. App companies set price based on willingness to pay. If Apple allows custom payments alongside IAP, you might get a temporary gap (naturally <30%) to steer people towards in-house payments, with harder refunds etc. But as soon as they're no longer required to adopt IAP their own prices will go back up to exactly what they were.
The vast majority of Apple's app/IAP revenue is from "mobile game" companies. You think they won't enjoy a 42% increase in iOS revenue (1/0.7=1.42) by keeping prices at a level consumers have already accepted for years? There's no "lower sales" tradeoff, customers are used to those prices.
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