verne arase

xRAHx said:

My conclusion:

Apple's management is perfectly free to leave the EU market or ship more or less worthless "light" versions of Apple technology into the EU, but Apple would not only lose access to a huge market, it would also lose access to the knowledge and support of a highly skilled workforce in the EU that not only uses Apple technologies, but also develops highly innovative technologies that Apple buys and puts an Apple label on.

Vestager is not a lone wolf, but is acting in line with the wishes of the 27 national governments in the EU, including Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Poland, Romania, Netherlands, Belgium, Greece, Czech Republic, Austria, etc. 

The de facto influence of the EU goes far beyond this, because many non EU-member states in Europe cooperate closely with the EU for economic reasons or because they want to become members of the EU.

It is clear that China is now the world's economic leader, which is currently mainly due to the fact that it has the largest population. China is currently developing into the new sole (?) superpower. But in China, the government is not democratically elected. And all people and company managers in both the America and Europe need to think carefully about whether they want to be dominated by China and its vassals in Russia, North Korea and Iran in the near future.

Demographically speaking, China will be disappearing in the next ten years - probably sooner.

When you're a primarily agrarian society, you have lots of kids because you need the free labor to work the land and they're your retirement program.

When you industrialize and move into cities, kids are an expense - and if you're China and had a mandatory one child policy - you're waaayyy below the 2.1 children per family needed to sustain the population. China has overcounted their population by at least 100 million and their demographic pyramid shows they've got a rapidly aging workforce going into retirement with a very small number of children to support them all.

Russia's not far behind because no one wants to have kids in Russia, and the European powerhouses are following close on their heels behind Russia.

Germany's industries were all based on cheap Russian gas and a lot of that industry is trying to relocate to the United States where cheap gas still exists.

The saving demographic grace in the United States is the suburbs where US citizens continued to have kids, and the transition from agrarian to urban took place over a longer span of time.

Y'all ought to watch some Peter Zeihan on geopolitics - it can be quite illuminating.

BTW, Peter thinks that Apple is going away because they constantly made the wrong choice by staying in China, but being that Apple is one of the richest companies in the world I'm betting that they can bribe enough officials to keep the door open long enough for them and much of their supply chain to make their escape.

blitz1 said:

Point taken. Nice to see that the EC stays sharp as a knife against companies taking competition laws lightly.

if Apple won’t make Apple Intelligence aka OpenAI with an Apple layer, then users can still do without the layer

Not sure what you're saying here.

Apple Intelligence runs using an Apple Small Language Model on device. I that fails, the request is forwarded to Apple's Private Cloud Compute running on Apple Silicon servers running an Apple Large Language Model in Apple's data center which feature stronger SoCs and more memory on custom operating systems which have been stripped of even the ability to write data to disk (so there's no logging). Once the request has been satisfied it is scrubbed from the server.

If PCC fails and believes that a 3rd party LMM can solve the problem - currently only OpenAI's ChatGPT - and if the user has enabled ChatGPT, the user is prompted to see if he/she wants the request passed to the 3rd party AI provider. If so, the 3rd party provider is sent the minimal amount of data along with the request on an encrypted anonymized link and the result is returned to user. OpenAI has agreed not to log the request.

Apple Intelligence is not AKA OpenAI - OpenAI is just a 3rd party AI provider, the same way Google search is a 3rd party search provider.

jdiamond said:

godofbiscuitssf said:

Apple is also part of the RISC V consortium. As soon as Apple announced Macs as having “Apple Silicon” and not “ARM-based CPUs” I knew it’d be a possibility that they’d always remain open to other ISAs.  If RISC V continues on its current trajectory— and continues to attract all the talent — it may happen by 2035–40. 

I completely agree.  Apple's not going to get caught again being tied to an ISA.  The agreement with ARM is likely just to guarantee terms on Apple using ARM for the next 20 years - Apple could drop at any time like they did with Imagine and GPUs.

Apple doesn't license processor IP from ARM - just the Instruction Set Architecture.

AFAIK, there is nothing in the ISA that limits Apple - in fact it's rumored that ARM designed ARMv8 at Apple's request so Apple could create Apple Silicon's deep pipeline out-of-order execution model (which ultimately resulted in the up to eight simultaneous execution unit of Apple's Firestorm processor).

There's nothing magical about an instruction set - provided it doesn't limit deep pipelining by doing old-gen stuff like ARMv7's inclusion of condition code execution in every other instruction.

The only advantage of something like RISC V is licensing - and Apple's already got all that covered.

gatorguy said:

lowededwookie said:

Didn’t Apple already open up the iMessage protocols but the industry didn’t care?

Nope, not as far as I know. It was promised when first announced, but Apple reneged, as is their right of course.

You're thinking of FaceTime … Apple may have thought about doing iMessage at one time but no promises were ever made.

Let's not kid ourselves … this is all about protecting Spotify.

Spotify has been tugging on mommy's sleeve for quite some time, and this is the EU/EC political response.

So … who is the EC protecting?

The EC has a long history of protecting EU consumers and EU companies … and that's all they seem to care about.

The artists who compose and make the music that Spotify is based on? They can go pound sand.

Spotify pays the lowest royalties in the business, and has actually sued the artists for asking for a bigger cut of the pie. So the content creators - the ones who make the music which is at the core of the streaming business - get no protection from those capitalizing on their work.

If they wanted to, the EC could come up with regulations to protect the artists and establish a minimum payment for steamed music back to the artists - but the EC doesn't care about them. They're just the creatives: the force behind the whole business.

As long as the consumers get cheap music and Spotify can distribute it at minimum wage, the EC is happy.

And that, my friends, is why the EU countries have dropped from the European Center of intellectual property development into an also ran block of bureaucratically connected counties.

There is no longer any respect for the rights of the creators.