teejay2012

This story reminds me of my first 'Mac' which was actually an Atari ST computer with a dongle called Spectre created by the legend David Small that plugged into the ST cartridge port. Worked amazingly well to emulate a Mac Plus, but required original 128K ROMs that would physically plug into the dongle plus a Macintosh Operating System 6.0.8 disk . There was a lot of exclusionary, 'you are on your own' text  which transferred the problem of obtaining the Apple ROMs to the purchaser. Despite rumblings of legal challenges, Data Pacific who marketed the dongles was never shut down. I guess the market was too small for Apple to care. I am not sure of the market for vintage Nintendo game ROMs, or why financially Nintendo would care. But I suspect they do care.

Short of sharing data with the government or law enforcement, the main and perhaps only reason to track data, is for understanding you as a customer better. When is the last time that you felt that something you did on an Apple app led to targeted ads? Now compare that to doing a Google search on ANY device or posting something on  Instagram or Facebook... it is uncanny that all of a sudden you start seeing personalized  ads. I may be naive on this I will admit. Apple should outline what they are tracking and for what, but I doubt it will be nefarious or to target you as a customer.

A question of DMA and DOJ but against Amazon in music ? Unlikely until Apple cases are settled. Interesting that no one seems to care about the Kindle market share and predatory behaviour of Amazon in ebooks. That aside, the market seems to shaping itself without regulations and consumer choices reflect sound quality, equipment quality and other factors, as well as integration. It is only on integration that Apple seems to be ahead, and that should be allowed in what seems to be a mostly free market.

Apple should have remedied the anti steering, as this was the ONE point that they lost on in US federal court with the Epic case. So it was not going to go away in the EU either. Why Apple resisted goes along with their naturally obstructive nature I guess. But the EU claiming this harms EU companies like Spotify when 99% of their paid users signed up through the web seems a stretch. Apparently signing up on the web is not a closely guarded secret. No. The real issue for the EU is that Apple still insists on charging 'something' for  subscriptions regardless of the path and the EU want it to be 'nothing'. That is also a stretch but the EU will still keep fining Apple. I had wondered if there will be an EU court pathway for an appeal like as in the Irish-Apple tax case, where EU regulators lost?  As for some comments here that Apple should 'just leave' the EU, why would you want that if you owned an iPhone? That would be a disaster imo for users and Apple. I suspect they actually do not own an iPhone and have no standing in this debate, except to stir the pot with hyperbole and illogical comments.

charlesn said:

Apple will never buy Masimo. Its market cap is $7.5 billion and the largest acquisition in Apple history was Beats, at $3 billion -- and THAT deal made a lot of sense for many reasons. Masimo makes no sense for Apple. One part of its business is hospital grade monitoring devices, especially pulse oximetry--and the other part, bizarrely, is high end audo equipment. It paid over a billion dollars in 2022 for Sound United, an umbrella audio company that bought up higher end brands like Bowers & Wilkerson, Denon, Marantz, Classé and others. Sound United had established sales channels for major retailers like Best Buy, which Massimo wanted to leverage for its consumer watch. Seems like a helluva lot to pay for sales channels, though, and investors sent Masimo stock down by over 30% on this news and the stock has never recovered. 

Agree that price for Sound United seemed steep. Despite the bravado of its CEO, shareholders would not be pleased if Masimo bought pricey channel for their Watch that Apple will then say they infringed (albeit design patent which are weak), and if Masimo lost despite spending over 100 million on legal fees. You wonder why this was not settled before all this, as both had something to lose and both had something to trade with.