macplusplus

svanstrom said:

macplusplus said:

dantheman827 said:

seanismorris said:

ArianneFeldry said:

How would consumers not win? Say Epic wins and they get the fee reduced, the ability for direct payments, or more hopefully, we get full sideloading on iOS. For the first situation we could get cheaper apps, as developers could reduce the price of the apps themselves or the price of In App Purchases, something good for the consumer. For the second we got proof that it would be better for the consumer, as the price of V-Bucks was cheaper with the option for directly purchasing the V-Bucks from Epic rather than through Apple's processor. For the third consumers wouldn't be beholden to the App Store. Stadia and Xcloud would be usable on iOS, Much more open source development could occur on iOS because developers wouldn't have to subscribe to a $100 fee to host their apps on the store. Hell, with sideloading we could get app stores that actually show off more than regurgitate the top apps of each category.

Sideloading isn’t a win for consumers, it introduces significant security risks.

I suppose macOS is a security risk then?

iOS and macOS are significantly different. On macOS you can build a whole application without using a single line of code from Apple, this is a full featured standardized UNIX operating system. You cannot do that on iOS, more than half of the code of an app belongs to Apple. Sometimes some curious developers dare to temper with those underlying undocumented and unpublished APIs and learn their lesson from Apple ! So this is not the phone Java of Y2K that makes an iOS app. To sideload an app into iOS you must first get a license from Apple to use that underlying code that you necessarily integrated into your app, and no law or government in the world can force Apple to give that license !

For those who don't want to use any line of code from iOS then there are web applications. Apple obviously do not charge anything for the sites the user browses. Steve Jobs' first insight was web applications and maybe he was right ?! Maybe the AppStore was a mistake and Apple must shut it down and replace the mainstream utility, productivity and entertainment apps with its own branded (or licensed) ones !

At the time the AppStore was the right thing, and it was required to get things going; but now… Web technologies/standards have evolved to the point where Apple seem to avoid implementing them just to force people into making "real" apps, and using the AppStore.

So that's where the real anti-competitive behaviour is; but no big companies want to take that fight, because they don't benefit from a real open solution.

dantheman827 said:

seanismorris said:

ArianneFeldry said:

How would consumers not win? Say Epic wins and they get the fee reduced, the ability for direct payments, or more hopefully, we get full sideloading on iOS. For the first situation we could get cheaper apps, as developers could reduce the price of the apps themselves or the price of In App Purchases, something good for the consumer. For the second we got proof that it would be better for the consumer, as the price of V-Bucks was cheaper with the option for directly purchasing the V-Bucks from Epic rather than through Apple's processor. For the third consumers wouldn't be beholden to the App Store. Stadia and Xcloud would be usable on iOS, Much more open source development could occur on iOS because developers wouldn't have to subscribe to a $100 fee to host their apps on the store. Hell, with sideloading we could get app stores that actually show off more than regurgitate the top apps of each category.

Sideloading isn’t a win for consumers, it introduces significant security risks.

I suppose macOS is a security risk then?

sirlance99 said:

If the top 100 apps that have a 30% tax applied to their subscriptions all pulled their apps together and made a joint statement to lower the Apple Tax, Apple  would have to compitulate. Apple would drop in stock price immediately and lose tens of billions of market cap. 

InspiredCode said:

macplusplus said:

danvm said:

macplusplus said:

danvm said:

macplusplus said:

danvm said:

macplusplus said:

Why would Apple leave that game streaming thing to Google or Microsoft while they can do it better than both? 

Because, as today, Google and MS are doing better than Apple in gaming.

Thanks to Apple Silicon Apple is already years ahead on that. Besides, they can offer that streaming to all game developers who sell in the AppStore without alienating them and maintaining the rich content already on sale.

I don't think that Apple Silicon is the magic cure to the issue Apple has with the gaming business.  

How so? MS couldn’t even maintain three Halo games on iOS !.. As they failed on mobile computing, they spectacularly failed on mobile gaming too. 

When I said MS and Google doing better,  was about their gaming cloud services.  The only thing that Apple have is Apple Arcade, and it looks like is not doing good.  
https://www.macrumors.com/2020/06/30/apple-arcade-game-strategy-shift/

The point is not the issue Apple you claim has with the gaming business, the point is Apple Silicon IS the cure to the game streaming issue on mobile by bringing in low bandwidth low latency high quality Metal rendering and high FPS.

Interesting how Nintendo had the worst performing console compare to the Xbox and PS4 (I think even even slower than Apple devices), and developed some of the best games in this generation.  This is an example on how hardware is not an excuse to perform well in the gaming market.

Apple Arcade is not a cloud service, it is a distribution model. Nothing runs on “Apple Arcade” everything runs on user’s device.

I know what Apple Arcade, and the issue is that is the only option Apple offers a part of the long list of IAP games in the App Store.  IMO, Apple don't have something better than xCloud or Stadia.  

No, they don't have as streaming but they DO have as native apps. Because they DO have better devices, much better than Celeron Chromebooks. What benefit would xCloud and Stadia bring to  iOS users other than making available all those old titles which already exhausted their commercial lifecycle as standalone products? How would a rendering made for Celeron Chromebook appeal to the owners of modern iPhones which shine with all their HDR, Dolby Vision, Metal 2 and alike? There are a lot of pirate streaming services on the web with their low quality crappy content, do you watch any of those or do you subscribe to a quality streaming service? If you want to play a game streamed for Chromebooks you don't need an iPhone, buy a cheap Android phone or tablet or a Chromebook, that's it...

danvm said:

Again, Nintendo didn't need Apple Silicon to bring some of the best games in the market.  Second, Apple perform well as a a platform in the mobile gaming market.  But they have not develop any games (a part from Chess in macOS).  And trying to push Apple TV haven't succeed.  These are some of the reason I think Apple is not doing good in gaming.  

That's another issue and a more broad one. Today Apple provides the best productivity computers and mobile devices that can make their owners decent game players too and also provides the best core support for gaming down to the Metal (of the GPU). Game studios develop, Apple publishes. Apple has performed that job fairly well.

Apple chips are great, but it isn’t trivial to port from an immediate mode renderer designed for GDDR6 memory to a bandwidth constrained—but fast—tile deferred renderer.  No doubt Apple GPUs are great, but the port is non-trivial.  Porting an older game like tomb raider (released 2013) would be easier.  The Xbox series x games that are streamed will be a decade before they could run on mobile.  By then the developer would have moved on. There are platform exclusives that can only be streamed. The file size is also a dealbreaker.  Even 7 year old tomb raider is large.  Streaming is the only way to go for this class of game.

Streaming is also a great way to access older games that will never be ported to modern hardware. 

AAA class games could be built from scratch for Metal, but there isn’t a large enough market for that right now.  Most development pipelines take years even if Apple were to subsidize starting a console class game store.  You would at least need something like streaming to bridge the gap.

linuxplatform said:

macplusplus said:

Why would Apple leave that game streaming thing to Google or Microsoft while they can do it better than both? Thanks to Apple Silicon Apple is already years ahead on that. Besides, they can offer that streaming to all game developers who sell in the AppStore without alienating them and maintaining the rich content already on sale.

Facepalm. Apple Silicon has absolutely positively nothing to do with streaming. Apple Silicon is hardware. Streaming is software as a service which is designed by nature to be inherently hardware agnostic.

Being able to offer video game streaming requires the very best cloud infrastructure, architecture and development. Apple has none of those. Instead, for years after Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, Google Play Movies and TV etc. existed, Apple only offered limited video streaming ability through iTunes. Apple Music was their first legit streaming app and they didn't even develop it ... they bought Beats and repurposed it. 

To give you an idea of how far behind Apple is on this, Google is offering Stadia and Microsoft is offering xCloud using their own cloud platforms - Azure and Google Cloud Platform - that have existed for ages (GCP since 2008, Azure since 2010). Nvidia is partnering with AWS to offer GeForce Now, sure, but it features their own cloud data center and virtualization hardware platform - Nvidia Grid - that they sell to Google and others. You should really check it out ... Nvidia GRID offers virtualized PCs, GPUs and applications. Where xCloud and Stadia are examples of software-as-a-service, Nvidia GRID is infrastructure as a service.

By contrast ... Apple doesn't even host or manage their own iCloud. Instead, iCloud is a product that relies on cloud services provided by Amazon (AWS) and Google (Google Cloud Platform). So does Apple Music and Apple TV+ by the way. If Apple had to rely on their own expertise or resources to pull off either, they would have no chance. And no, they aren't in the cloud hardware game with infrastructure as a service products - or even generic data center computing, storage or networking resources - either. There are some Apple advocates in the tech media - including a couple of articles I read a few months ago - that if Apple Silicon outperforms Intel hardware by a large enough margin, that would allow them to enter the cloud/data center hardware market. But what the writer doesn't realize is that the cloud's needs and Apple's offerings are the opposite. The cloud needs cheap, general purpose hardware and Apple only supplies expensive, specialized hardware. So given the choice between a faster option that costs $500,000 and you can only deploy on it what Apple allows, a data center will buy two alternatives that are slower but cost $350,000 and allows them to put whatever they want on it whenever they need it, and do so without giving it half a second's thought. 

And that is presuming that Apple is capable of building server-class ARM chips that are capable of outperforming Ampere and other ARM server vendors. That is, er, presuming a lot. Beating the Qualcomm Snapdragon/Samsung Exynos mobile chips and beating the ARM chips that already power the fastest supercomputer in the world are two very different things.