AppleZulu

DAalseth said:

quakerotis said:

you wanted your comic book villain?

Huh, what’s the word. You know, for someone working inside the government, trying to use government contacts, and coercion, to get them to restrict competition, to benefit that persons company. To use the tools of government to establish athemselves in control of an abusive monopoly.

There’s a word for that. Corr…corru…something. 

The corruption here is monumental. To use one of Trump’s favorite phrases, “it’s like you’ve never seen before.”

Musk is a guy with billions of dollars in US government contracts across a dozen departments annd agencies. Now he’s been given license to dig into every one of those agencies with the power to fire employees and cut off funding (while the GOP Congress shrugs at this unconstitutional usurpation of their power and authority). So what do you think it means when one of Musk’s companies “requests” one of those threatened agencies to take actions to give him advantage over a competitor?

Before anyone tries to respond with some sort of tortured rationalization, imagine the paragraph above with the name “Soros” substituted for “Musk,” and see if your rationalization still suits you before you post it. If it feels wrong if someone you don’t like is doing it, then you should probably realize it’s also wrong when your preferred characters are doing it. 

The lawsuit is frivolous and should be dismissed. 

The irony is that the double standard that causes Apple to be the sole target of the lawsuit is the same double standard that caused them to make the early ads in the first place. 

Popular media has been obsessed with artificial intelligence over the last couple of years, with a lot of companies pushing half-baked AI models built on stolen IP, and lots of reporting and internet chatter about AI but containing very little understanding of what AI is or does. At the same time, Apple was first staying low-key about machine learning, until they got uncharacteristically spooked by the degree of hype out there, re-branded it as Apple Intelligence and made some announcements of what is coming in the pipeline. 

The double standard is found on the one hand with the public's acceptance and low expectations with regard to other companies unleashing truly over-hyped, unfinished AI garbage on the public, and on the other hand suing Apple for not delivering ahead of schedule their own version, which comes with an expectation of much higher quality and useful relevance.

Are the delays in question the result of Apple fumbling the development process, or simply from getting out over their skis with an earlier-in-the-process than usual announcement about what they're developing? The iPhone was famously announced in a presentation held together with duct tape and spit, and demonstrations teetering on the edge of catastrophic failure. Only time will tell if this is really all that different from that.

Is this any different than the percentage of games currently released that were announced at mid-year '24 for other platforms? If a 64% on-time rate is in the ballpark for other platforms, then this story isn't a commentary on Apple "taking gaming more seriously." Without that comparison, it's a pretty dubious exercise to draw any conclusions about it at all.

charlesn said:

michelb76 said:

Hampered by Apple anticompetitive stuff so it will suck using this with iOS. https://ericmigi.com/blog/apple-restricts-pebble-from-being-awesome-with-iphones
It will probably integrate fantastically with Android, so pick your poison.

From the link: "Apple claims their restrictions on competitors are only about security, privacy, crafting a better experience etc etc. At least that’s what they tell you as they tuck you into bed. I personally don’t agree - they’re clearly using their market power to lock consumers into their walled ecosystem."

It's really hard not to laugh out loud. Apple has ALWAYS been about a walled garden. Not a bug, but a feature. And for years and years (and years) it was roasted for this approach while Apple buyers were ridiculed as stupid sheeple being led to certain slaughter because Apple and its walled garden were doomed in the face of Windows and Android freedom! Funny thing: consumers voted with their wallets for the walled garden and made Apple the most successful consumer electronics company in history. Another funny thing: the competitors stopped predicting doom for the walled garden and are now wailing--with apologies to Pink Floyd--to tear down the wall! Now the walled garden, because it has become so successful thanks to consumers choosing it, is "anti-competitive." Oh, give me a break and tough luck! If you like the freedom of an open system, you have plenty of other choices which, collectively, outsell Apple by a lot. Have at it! Just leave me and my choice to buy into the walled garden alone. 

It's amazing, really, that after all these years, people still don't get this. With the noted exception of that time when Steve Jobs was in exile, the closed system has been integral to Apple's business model. This is because they view a device and operating system as a single unit. Develop both together and through limiting of variables and intentionality of design, it just works. What a novel concept. This isn't an anti-competitive scheme. For a very long time, the commitment to this model meant Apple was sacrificing easy paydays because all that stuff developed for Windows and their much larger market share didn't work on a Mac, and Apple's market share was small enough that Mac-compatible versions of many things just didn't get made. For so many years, Apple's competitors mocked the closed system and boasted how you shouldn't buy a Mac if you want to be able to run all the different software that wasn't available for Mac.

All these years later, and Apple is continuing to do the exact same thing, but now competitors are complaining that it's unfairly excluding them from the walled garden. They want in, but ignore the fact that mandating that Apple move to the Windows/Android business model would forcibly lower Apple's quality and destroy the reason for wanting in in the first place.

Apple customers choose the walled ecosystem because they want the quality, security and data privacy. People who don't care about that can choose the competition. 

Hilariously, when the first season of Ted Lasso was announced, the peanut gallery here pronounced it DOA, because, they proclaimed, the original Lasso short-form gags on NBC couldn’t possibly be sustainable for a full episode, much less a series.