EsquireCats

Today is iPhone pre-order day, the busiest and most commercially important day of the year for the apple website. Yet the front page is now in dedication to qe2.

This earns them quite some respect in my view, to prioritise humanity over profit.

There is a vocal minority that has been busy trying to frame app tracking transparency as a means for Apple to bolster ads inside the app store, and simultaneously implying that Apple uses data improperly to generate those ads.
However Apple only produces ads based on what the user specifically searches for, via a typical keyword bidding system. Suggestions are similarly built without peeking on the user outside of the app, such as correlating data sources against the user.

An important distinction here is that “tracking” ads are not based on what you did inside the app, but instead based on places you may have visited around the internet, your physical location over time, purchases made on entirely different platforms and even the content of your text messages. That is what Google and Facebook do to serve ads and it is done in a measurable way to watch the impact from an ad impression through to an eventual purchase.

The “windfall” for apple is merely being the only provider of ads inside their own store front. All forms of direct (i.e non-creepy) advertising have seen improvements since the introduction of app tracking transparency. 

This is plain silly and shows a limited understanding of technology. If the EU really want to control a smartphone, they're big enough to fork Android and produce their own phone, they don't need to be designing iOS/iPhone by legal proxy.

A fair chunk of the requirements merely attempt to bring iOS into parity with Android, despite their differences being meaningful for numerous reasons - app stores are a good example. If consumers have to shop around to a myriad of providers and utilise a variety of payment methods only the big guys win.

I really don't see why the EU needs to be so heavily involved here, it seems the objective is to merely service EU companies that have failed to innovate or compete on merit. This is a failure to understand that even with these accomodations: those companies will still fail, to use paypal's complaint as an example: paypal predates the iPhone and opening NFC doesn't make Paypal suck less. Paypal's problem isn't lack of NFC, it's because their service is garbage.

Always sad to see how other companies are still playing the “make it the same but give it a twist” game when it comes to designing their devices. You can see apple’s design solutions through all of the accessories. Why can’t a company as big as google actually differentiate and offer something new.

Ever since USB-C launched numerous voices including Kuo have repeatedly claimed that Apple only keep the lighting connector to protect a revenue source inside of the MFi program. Despite the mountain of evidence to the contrary and that the bulk of Apple's MFi program is based around wireless technologies and protocols e.g. GymKit, Hearing Aids, MagSafe, HomeKit, AirPlay, FindMy, CarPlay and Authentication to list a few examples.

Switching now to USB-C is the result of accessories being largely driven by wireless connections. Swapping earlier would merely produce unncessary landfill and breed resentment across both consumers and manufacturers of lightning-based devices.

Mandates for micro USB and then later USB-C solved the problem of budget manufacturers which made a new plug for every phone/device they built. That's not a problem that Apple has ever had.