Naiyas

CheeseFreeze said:

quench said:

So Epic agreed to the contract because they know Apple has an enormous base of customers. Then epic got greedy and thought they could be dishonorable and cheat the company (Apple) that helped them become a worldwide sensation.
epic you suck for your dishonesty, lying to customers when you blamed Apple for the situation that you forced onto itself, stealing from the company that made you extremely wealthy. 

I don’t care what quality games you produce, I will not support a greedy, lying, stealing company ever again.
I'm done with you epic!

And you don’t think Apple is greedy? Charging 500% of the retail price for storage in your new iMac, or soldering the SSD in your motherboard because then you’ll buy a new iMac sooner when it dies? And still 30% in 2020 on app purchases, while the vast majority of developers are drowning and disappearing in the offerings of millions of apps? 

This is not 2009 when your app actually was discoverable on the App Store. 30% for essentially hosting your game and not getting any service out of Apple for anything else (except MAYBE getting your game on their release stream - discoverable for what, like, 3 days maybe?), and then having to PAY for advertisements on the App Store on top the 30%... That is killing developers. 

Do you know how much devs are SPENDING and risking before that game launches? Do you have any idea about the economics of it all? I guess you don’t. 

Well, I do, I have released over 40 games on the App Store - both licensed IP’s and games for marketing purposes, some successful and some not, and I can tell you the App Store today is a shit show because of the sheer amount of content. 

Top tier earners keep earning because they BUY their users with their earnings. Hundreds thousands per day. You have no chance of turning the tides in your favor. It’s a mess.

Epic is one of the exceptions - they are incredibly successful - but they are fighting the PRINCIPLE here and that’s not just for themselves. They don’t need Apple’s iOS revenue. They want CHANGE. Their philosophy in revenue sharing with developers for their own tools is much more developer friendly. They are much more values driven here. Apple is in fact the greedy one here. It’s not a coincidence they reaches a 2 trillion market cap here!

There’s several examples of Apple being greedy.
Stop defending Apple like it’s some exception to the rule and that it’s some kind of amazing company that is out there to help developers rich. They don’t care about that. They care about their own valuation.    

As a developer myself, admittedly not for games, I’m very familiar with the problems the App Store has for developers, and the thousands of dollars it takes to build an app that will attract buyers. But to promote that this “battle” between Epic and Apple will help us is disingenuous.

1. Epic want to have their own store on iOS.
2. Epic want to have their own store on iPadOS.
3. Epic want to have their own store on tvOS.

Thats it.

@OutdoorAppDeveloper ;
I recall reading that there was a drop in orders with suppliers for every iPhone in history around 3 months after initial release… it’s called the sales cycle and it happens every year.

I actually suspect, and am partially concerned, that certain APIs could become subject to usage commissions in future. There is already plenty of telemetry data that is sent to Apple from our devices and some of it is clearly around what APIs are used and how often so they know which ones to drop over time. It wouldn’t take much to modify this telemetry and add app ID information with it and merge this data into a billing system.

This would be largely transparent to the end user, just as the telemetry data is already today.

I’ve refrained from commenting on this “reveal” for some time because I wanted to have a proper think about it. My view still isn’t fully developed but it runs down the following line…

There are many bad things in the world that occur when you embrace freedom of the individual and we accept those risks… freedom of speech implies that someone (somewhere) will find what you have to say offensive, but to limit it actually makes the world a worse place to live because you push the perceived hate underground and it will therefore manifest itself in other ways.

Privacy is another one. By executing this algorithm on your phone (ignoring the legal stuff around T&C etc) you are effectively having an illegal search performed on your private information or property. The reason may be valid in this instance, CSAM, but it is never the less an illegal search of your personal property taking the view that you are guilty (the act of conducting the matching search) until proven innocent (the lack of matches found).

Whilst I can get behind the reason, I just can’t get behind the method of execution. It’s very much like “curation creep”.  We see on the App Store things like porn apps being banned. Do I want them? No. Is that a good enough reason to ban them entirely? Not sure, but it’s Apple’s store and they are free to make that choice as store owner. But forcing a privacy invading search of your photos onto your phone is a step too far in my opinion. Search my iCloud Photo library on your servers by all means to ensure compliance with the service’s T&C, but to operate it on “my” phone… not convinced.

If this is how they want to go then perhaps they should treat all iPhone users like employees of Apple and provide iPhones to us for a small fee with the premise that we never ever own it ourselves. That way at least they have the clear legal right to search the phone just like your employer does when they give you a work device.

avon b7 said:

What Epic did in the US had nothing to do with the EU but what Apple was claiming it would do now had a lot to do with the EU. 

Actually it does. You see if you are/were a developer you would find that the developer contract you sign to be part of the developer program has its legal foundation and authority in US law - therefore the contract is enacted via US law and any disputes are handled via the US legal system.

it doesn’t actually matter what country you want to do business in, as if you breach the contract under US law then you lose all rights to use Apples IP under the terms of the contract, that includes developing on their platforms.

if you can’t develop on Apple’s platforms you can’t get any certificates… you’re finished.

its been basic contract law since time immemorial, and no EU (or any other country’s) law can stop it from being so.

Done some work with Huawei previously. I never saw a Huawei employee who didn’t get their “free” or massively discounted Huawei phone, sell it/them off and buy an Apple iPhone. Even the Huawei executives I met had iPhones!

mr lizard said:

Parent hands child device with credit card linked to account, sets no child restrictions, then blames everyone and everything else when the child spends money. 

It’s Apple fault!
It’s TikTok’s fault!
It’s the TikTok creator’s fault!

It can’t possibly be my fault! 

But of course! In the age where personal responsibility has been replaced by a nanny state, it’s always someone else’s fault for not preventing your own actions from “hurting” you in some way.

And as education levels gradually fall we come ever closer to the crazy world created in the film Idiocracy.

timmillea said:   

What naive tosh! It is true that Apple sets prices in $US in the US. Overseas prices are based on the US prices plus local sales taxes plus a hefty margin for exchange rate variability, plus an extra profit margin, then rounded up to the next price point. 

The  example quoted by JP234 of the Mac Mini going from $699 to $599 in the US. That same Mac Mini M2 is £649 in the UK. At the current exchange rate of $1.2395/£ that is $804.43. 

Apple has always charged much higher prices outside of the US. For a high-end Mac, the difference in price will pay for a holiday to the US to buy it. 

Perhaps we should demonstrate the example drawn out above correctly as the comparative being drawn seems to imply that there is over $200 of additional profit on the UK price when it’s no where near that.

Base cost of mini: $599

This price includes no sales tax in the US. When the product comes to the UK pricing includes sales tax, but it also includes import duties. So what are these?

Import duty: ~10% adds ~$59.90

elijahg said:

StrangeDays said:

docno42 said:

elijahg said:

I notice the price is the same as before, so rather than dropping the price due to cheaper CPU and increasing accessibility for people, they're just absorbing the extra profit. Great, that's the Cook Way. ߙ䦬t;/div>

You aren’t buying a collection of parts, your buying functionality.

If you don’t think the value proposition works for you, don’t buy it.  Frankly I’m surprised they didn’t raise the price - this little thing called inflation means they are already grossing less just from that alone.  

If you want cheap crap there are plenty of other vendors to choose from out there.  Have at it.   I have no problem paying for a better experience.  I originally typed out paying more for a better experience, but comparing previous Air to this one you aren’t paying more for a machine that appears to be better in every way.

Yup - damn those greedy Apple bustards!

Lol yeah these dudes crack me up, they’re used to lemonade stand economics and that’s about it. No real world experience in product, don’t grasp value propositions, likely have never run a business, etc etc.. Just IT nerds doin what they do best — bitchin’. 

You're the one with no real world experience, if Macs are such great value why is it a Mac with almost identical specs to a Windows machine is so much more expensive? A Dell XPS is cheaper than a Mac, has the same specs and is cheaper. And surely if "running a business" is a way to know value proposition, every business would be full of Macs, but they aren't. Why do you think that is?

All TCO results from all companies that have a mixed deployment show that for equivalent spec'd Macs and PCs, Mac's come out better value. They last longer (that's a bigger denominator in the equation) and have less support costs (that's a lower addition to the numerator). So whilst they may cost more upfront, they cost far less per year of ownership compared to the equivalent PC.

AppleInsider said:

The proposed class is vast and includes anyone who purchased an iOS app or app license from Apple, or who made an in-app purchase, from Dec. 29, 2007, through the present.

One pretty fundamental flaw in their argument is they don’t even know when the iOS App Store started. If they can’t get that date right then how many other holes are there in their arguments.

Rayz2016 said:

However, I do have a problem with this:

Cook denied that certain larger developers are favored over others.

If Amazon didn't have to pay a 30% cut in its first year on the app store, then that sounds a lot like favouring a larger developer over a smaller one.

I don't take issue with that when you take into consideration the terms fo the agreement.

Amazon Prime Video (which is what I gather this deal was about) provided a feed of their entire content library to the Apple TV service as a condition of obtaining a 15% fee rather than 30%. If I recall from the keynote that this service was originally announced no pricing was announced or implied and so the "deal" sits outside of the general 30% App Store terms.

Effectively, Apple was prepared to pay (or rebate) Amazon 50% of the 30% fee in the first year to get the Amazon Prime Video content on their TV service. What developer can claim a volume of content like that as a negotiation point? On a financial point, I'll bet that in Apple's accounts, Amazon's fee was accrued at 30% with the 50% rebate in the associated rebates line, in much the same way as happens across almost every business.