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Folding iPhone & under-screen Face ID rumored arrival date pushed back -- again
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Neil Young tries excusing his return to Spotify by saying Apple Music is now as bad
"Hopefully Spotify will turn to Hi Res as the answer and serve all the music to everyone," [Young] wrote. "Spotify, you can do it! Really be #1 in all ways. You have the music and the listeners!!!! Start with a limited Hi res tier and build from there!"
Neil Young's quixotic crusade for audio sound quality has always unintentionally been kind of entertaining. I had a good laugh reading a profile interview when he was promoting his Pono player, and he said his favorite place to listen to music was in his '59 Lincoln Continental convertible. Even with its engine replaced by an electric motor, there's little chance even the most discerning audiophile would be able to distinguish lossless audio from anything but the most highly compressed, low-bitrate sources.
I do get and support his protest against Spotify's choice to bankroll a sloppy disinformation vector like Joe Rogan, so with that exclusive contract ending and availability of Rogan's nonsense going wide again, I'd agree with Young that this renders his Spotify boycott moot.
But then, in this quote above, Young misses the boat on achieving his dream for the spread of lossless audio. He says, "Start with a limited Hi res tier and build from there!" This strategy is exactly why lossless and spatial audio formats were going nowhere until Apple Music got into it. Making people pay extra to access the better-quality format dooms it to niche market fringes. (Adding to that the requirement for specialized hardware like Young's Pono player narrows the market even further.) This creates a negative-feedback death-spiral. It limits demand, which in turn limits incentives for producers artists and labels to make content available in those formats, which in turn frustrates the people who are paying extra for very limited content, etc. For instance, I tried and soon cancelled Tidal when they embraced Dolby Atmos before Apple did. There was very limited content available (with no sign of much more than a sparing trickle to come) and their interface for finding it was even worse.
Inexplicably, this self-defeating approach remained, well, self-defeating until Apple Music made lossless and spatial audio formats available to its subscribers at no extra charge and available on hardware they already owned. There is definitely still a high-end audiophile market where people pay top-dollar for gear that produces real and often imagined next-level acoustically pristine audio content, but Apple is largely responsible for making better audio widely available to the rest of us.
Since Apple embraced lossless and spatial formats at no extra charge, available content has boomed. This surely benefits Spotify doing more, but it would still be dumb for them to charge a premium to access it. Why pay Spotify more, when you can get it from Apple for less? Why would Spotify invest in their own back-end hardware, software and bandwidth to accommodate it, when a premium tier limits their market for it?
I guess you can lead a crazy horse to water, but you can't make it drink. -
EU antitrust chief remarks about $2 billion Apple Music fine ignores Spotify dominance
More generally, this should be yet another lesson on why pursuit of market share dominance isn’t necessarily a sound business practice.Spotify doesn’t want to pay Apple for its platform and notoriously underpays the artists and songwriters who create its content and yet, while dominating streaming music market share, still can’t seem to turn a profit.One wonders if others will eventually have to fill the gap when Spotify goes out of business. -
'Verifiably untrustworthy' Epic Games iOS app store plans in EU killed by Apple
tmay said:gatorguy said:You don't know? You must be one of the only members here who doesn't understand what it is.
Assuming you were being honest with the question, It would be better for you, and coming with with less distrust of the messenger, if you looked for yourself. Here's some starting places, first from Apple itself.What is Apple's brand identity?Simplicity. Creativity. Humanity. They call these their three lenses, and, according to Tor Myhren, VP of Marketing Communications at Apple, “If a product is not made up of these things, it's not Apple”.
Then these descriptions pertain to how those outside of Apple perceive it:
https://www.bynder.com/en/blog/the-worlds-most-valuable-brand-apples-secret-to-success/
https://medium.com/@hmmd.yousuf/is-apples-brand-identity-a-blueprint-for-modern-marketing-success-cb6c5c5f1d47
https://www.amati-associates.com/digital-products/brand-positioning/apple/
There's a finely crafted and highly favorable emotional connection that I believe Apple management is currently harming. Much, maybe most, of Apple's consumer value is based on brand perception.
I posted Steve Sinofsky because he had previously dealt with the EU, and understood developing operating systems.
The EU DMA is arguably not finely crafted, so is anti ethical to Apple.
Steve Sinofsky,Android has the kind of success Microsoft would envy, but not Apple, primarily because with that success came most all the same issues that Microsoft sees (still) with the Windows PC. The security, privacy, abuse, fragility, and other problems of the PC show up on Android at a rate like the PC compared to Macintosh and iPhone. Only this time it is not the lack of motivation bad actors have to exploit iPhone, rather it is the foresight of the Steve Jobs vision for computing. He pushed to have a new kind of computer that further encapsulated and abstracted the computer to make it safer, more reliable, more private, and secure, great battery life, more accessible, more consistent, always easier to use, and so on. These attributes did not happen by accident. They were the process of design and architecture from the very start. These attributes are the brand promise of iPhone as much as the brand promise of Android is openness, ubiquity, low price, choice.
I give credit to Google for attempting to recreate some of the same brand promise of iPhone with the Pixel.
Steve Sinofsky,
Sure, nothing bad will happen; the EU has this...The lesson of the first two decades of the PC and the first almost two decades of smartphones are that these ends of a spectrum are not accidental. These choices are not mutually compatible. You don’t get both. I know this is horrible to say and everyone believes that there is somehow malicious intent to lock people into a closed environment or an unintentional incompetence that permits bad software to invade an ecosystem. Neither of those would be the case. Quite simply, there’s a choice between engineering and architecting for one or the other and once you start you can’t go back. More importantly, the market values and demands both.
That is unless you’re a regulator in Brussels. Then you sit in an amazing government building and decide that it is entirely possible to just by fiat declare that the iPhone should have all the attributes of openness. By all accounts there seemed to be little interest in the brand promise that presumably drew a third of the market to iPhone. In the over 60 pages of DMA, there’s little mention of privacy (just 7 times), security (9 times), performance (3), reliability (once), or battery life (0), or accessibility (just 3). I would acknowledge one section about halfway through the 100 goals of one part of the DMA there is deference to these issues though note the important caveat about defaults:
(50) Furthermore, in order to ensure that third-party software applications or software application stores do not undermine end users’ security, it should be possible for the gatekeeper to implement strictly necessary and proportionate measures and settings, other than default settings, enabling end users to effectively protect security in relation to third-party software applications or software application stores if the gatekeeper demonstrates that such measures and settings are strictly necessary and justified and that there are no less-restrictive means to achieve that goal. The gatekeeper should be prevented from implementing such measures as a default setting or as pre-installation.
The iPhone was designed with that issue addressed at its core. The original iPhone was such a closed system thst it didn't even include an App Store. There was no way to add third-party software at all. When the App Store was introduced, it was as a tightly controlled, sandboxed and pre-screened portal for the introduction of third-party apps. The design was not a monopoly, it was to create a fully secure networked personal computing device.
While Android followed on seeking to replicate the look and features of an iPhone, they at the same time chose to follow the MS Windows model of creating an operating system that would run on an unlimited number of third-party hardware devices. That model by default must be open to third-party developers of both hardware and software. That opens the gates for both innovation of new features, bells and whistles and also stripped-down, cost-cutting hardware, but it comes at the cost of lowered device and system security and increased possibilities for compatibility issues, crashes, etc.
By having both, this offers consumers the choice of which they'd prefer.
Forcing Apple to become like Android by switching to open architecture takes away consumer choice. The same would be true if regulators looked at Android's security flaws and forced them to close their system so that apps could only go through the Google Play store, and Android would only work on Google phones. Forcing one to become the other reduces consumer choice. Full stop. -
'Verifiably untrustworthy' Epic Games iOS app store plans in EU killed by Apple
9secondkox2 said:beowulfschmidt said:9secondkox2 said:jmaximus said:Why does Apple assume they have monopoly on security? It is a rather faulty assumption that none else can make a secure or even more secure App Store.DMA will overrule this and allow fair competition on the platform.
Look around. There is literally no one that does what apple does and keeps a commitment to security and privacy. No one. It’s a rather massive deal.There never was unfairness in the platform. All the eu is doing is trying to force socialism in a capitalistic company. Recipe for disaster. Robbing the platform provider to pay openly hostil developers is not a viable solution to a problem that never existed.More fascist than socialist. Socialist would be if the EU nationalized Apple and took the company away from the shareholders, making EU the owner.Requiring a company not owned by the government to do business as the government demands is a hallmark of fascism. Benito would be proud.