avon b7

Marvin said:

avon b7 said:

"Apple's "good faith efforts to engage" with the European Commission."

I think this takes the biscuit.

It's fine for Apple to disagree with the EU but to 'comply' with a requirement that expressly goes against anti-steering tactics by imposing a seperate system that effectively imposes the same financial burden on developers under a different name is not engaging in good faith efforts.

Apple is really earning itself a bad name here. 

Apple is still entitled to a commission when a link is used.

A law that requires Apple to allow free linking to outside payments undermines the entire App Store business model.

This would be like a government deciding that Amazon is so big that nobody can realistically compete with them so they should be forced to allow people to list products on Amazon that link to their own stores without paying Amazon anything.

These arguments have been justified due to Apple having exclusive control of the platform but in the EU they already allowed 3rd party stores and they allow certain companies to operate exclusively controlled stores.

It's the biggest companies that are trying to take advantage of this. Microsoft owns Minecraft and Candy Crush, they could drop in-app purchases, link out to a Microsoft payment portal to topup coins in their accounts. Apple has to curate 1.5 billion customers and direct their traffic to Microsoft games without receiving anything in return. That's not a justified ruling.

If they want to make a fairer ruling to make the system more competitive like lower fees so be it but destroying their business model entirely is not the way to go about it and just serves as another example of technologically illiterate public officials wrecking businesses. They have no right to dictate to a company that they should offer a service to competing billion-dollar companies for free. It's high time the EU Commission had some 3rd party oversight because their interference in business is getting way out of control. Handling B2C issues is fair enough like data privacy concerns but they have no right to pick winners in B2B issues.

From the resolution:

"The New Business Terms do not comply with Article 5(4) of Regulation (EU)

Chock_Mossley said:

MassiveAttack said:

He is right. Apple is not as innovative as Apple was before. 
Apple Intelligence = Apple Incompetence. 

But will Nothing still be around in 7 ~ 10 years? 
I dunno.

It’s not like EVERY OTHER tech company’s first attempts at AI haven’t been dumpsters fires. They held off on what they did, because they didn’t want a put a glue on pizza debacle. That said, I’m fine if they never release it. AI is a smoke show that isn’t going to get much better than it is now and it’s all based on stealing from others

You'd have to define 'dumpster fire'. 

Perplexity Pro has suited my needs very well. AI in language translation, NLP, NLG, image/video creation/manipulation is amazing and constantly improving. 

LLM's in industry are having a massive impact on almost everything they touch (with the huge exception of customer service Chatbots). 

"Apple's "good faith efforts to engage" with the European Commission."

I think this takes the biscuit.

It's fine for Apple to disagree with the EU but to 'comply' with a requirement that expressly goes against anti-steering tactics by imposing a seperate system that effectively imposes the same financial burden on developers under a different name is not engaging in good faith efforts.

Apple is really earning itself a bad name here. 

9secondkox2 said:

MassiveAttack said:

Apple can´t afford to continue with their tiny uprades from WWDC to WWDC. 

WWDC 2024 was a disaster after Apple has failed to deliver what Apple promised. 

Google I/O was an "All or nothing" event with survival instinct to overcome risk of their existence. Google made a great job with I/O. 
Open AI steps up with Jony Ive to open a new chapter. 

After those revolutionary steps from others, people clearly expect from Apple to responde with similar steps. 

In Apple’s defense, they e kind of perfected everything except their nascent ai. Hard to make massive shifts when you’re already doing it right. 

How Google has stayed afloat is a mystery considering its constant throwaway projects and throw things against the wall to see if they stick approach. It makes sense they fully bore in on what stuck. Bevause they do t have much in the way of great things outside of the search engine snd the entrenched Gmail. 

Open ai HAS to do something. Competitors are getting way better and closing in. They need a differentiator. Hiring Ive is a Hail Mary shot. The amount of money going into that move is quite insane. Will see how it turns out. So far the only guarantee is jony just got rven more filthy rich. Lol. 

Apple is in refining mode as they figure out revolutions. 

It's far from perfected. MacOS is not iPad OS (or vice versa) even though some (myself included) think iPad OS should already have far more power and cross-OS functionality. 

This part of the article is spookily reminiscent of HarmonyOS (which debuted in 2019).

"An apparent theme for WWDC 2025 will be consistency and unification. This should mean that users will experience similar interfaces, UI elements, and maybe even features, when they use the same functions across different devices and operating systems."

A surprise? Not really, as basically every year for the last few years, Apple has introduced features that are core conceptual ideas of HarmonyOS.

The missing part was a HarmonyOS native desktop OS but that shipped last week on the Matebook Fold and MateBook X and the initial results are spectacular from a cross device perspective.

Prior to that HarmonyOS cross-Pc device services were an addition to Windows. Windows is now gone and HarmonyOS is running from the (formally verified) kernel up. 

Everything melds into one look and feel running across multiple devices, including cars. And all under just one name: HarmonyOS. 

It will need polish for sure because the desktop version only launched this week but under the hood, the system was designed to run seamlessly on multiple devices and share hardware from all those devices. 

Back in 2019, Huawei pulled up a screen of Apple's device systems and made a statement about them being 'siloed' and about that being a problem whereas HarmonyOS, through its core design had no siloes. Everything would interconnect to everything else. Security, filesystems, authentication... 

A simplistic overview from 2019:

https://www.huaweicentral.com/harmonyos-here-are-the-four-technical-features-that-defines-this-operating-system/

Last week they pulled up the same slide but this time there was another column for the desktop version. Again it was compared to Apple's 'siloed' arrangement. 

The question now therefore must be is the similarity to HarmonyOS design goals only 'skin deep'?: an OS-spread with a more 'harmonised' UI or is it a complete re-working of the underlying frameworks that bleed up into the user interface?

One would think that WWDC might answer that question. 

Even Trump must know that nothing substantial can be done in this term so I can only imagine this is just some kind of damage limitation exercise with two possible outcomes in his mind.

To strongarm Tim Cook into announcing more on-shoring or to say that Apple and others aren't doing their part (in spite of tariffs) and then to start his usual blame game.

He'll say it's not his policies but US companies not doing enough. All completely oblivious to the fact that everything is of his own doing.

In a 'damned if you do and damned if you don't' scenario, Apple and everyone else should take the hit, short term (up to the end of Trump's term) and pass the tariff's onto consumers and label the increase as such.

The EU should do the same and apply reciprocal tariffs.

China has already stood it's ground and it looks like the EU is doing the same but in a politically different manner. 

I doubt that stand-off would last long and Trump will blink, just like he did with China. 

In such an unstable period, we might actually see Republicans begin to take a stand and push for changes in approach (with mid-term elections very much on their political horizons). 

The idea of impeachment for gross mismanagement of policy or similar (both foreign and economic) surely must be something worth looking at. I know it's been whispered from time to time. 

For Apple, as I've said for a while now, the perfect storm has emerged. Partly its own fault and partly out of its control. 

It has plenty of room to reduce margins to stimulate sales in other world regions and offset a unit sale decline. Shareholders would have no option but to understand and swallow that bitter pill. 

Any further concessions to Trump are likely to be met with further unreasonable demands.