Marvin

Appleish said:

This article was written in various places about Pixelmator, Sketch, etc a few years back. How'd that go?

Less than one hour of freelance time pays for the power and Dozens of apps/services I receive with my Creative Cloud subscription each month. 

Adobe is the industry standard and is comparatively cheaper than back when you bought upgrades each year or so for each separate application.

Nobody looks at your resume and says, "Oh, Wow! They use Canva!"

Recurring revenue is the only way companies can operate at scale, especially with cloud services.

Serif who made Affinity is only 90 people and they have 3 million users. $18 iPad, $70 Mac, $165 for the Suite. Their reported yearly revenue was $60m in 2022, roughly 1m sales per year.
Canva is a subscription company with 170 million users, 3500 employees, $2 billion revenue/year.

Serif = $60m per year standalone purchases, no cloud services
vs
Canva = $2b per year subscription with cloud services

Adobe revenue is $19b per year and they have 30,000 employees, 10x the size of Canva

Standalone software is great in the short-term but after the sales dry up, the company still has to pay staff and when a big new development comes along like AI, they can't adapt quickly enough because they don't have the staff to do it.

With the operating costs of the Serif team, there won't be an immediate need to make their products subscription based but Canva has AI features and cloud services that require recurring revenue so if they integrate them, those features will need a subscription.

None of the products from Adobe, Canva or Serif are expensive when they are used for business.

Calamander said:

Marvin said:

appledapple said:

in clamshell mode, you cannot use touch ID, which I do for all of my passwords. I don’t understand. If you open it up, I’m guessing that one of the displays stops working I was excited for two monitors, but this is a dealbreaker. It’s a dealbreaker for meif you don’t use touch ID then NBD 

There's a keyboard with Touch ID:

https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MMMR3LL/A/magic-keyboard-with-touch-id-and-numeric-keypad-for-mac-models-with-apple-silicon-us-english-black-keys
https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MK293LL/A/magic-keyboard-with-touch-id-for-mac-models-with-apple-silicon-us-english

Never considered this - thanks for that info. It means if I ever actually install a large screen setup at home, I will get one of the apple keyboards. 

It's $50 extra for the touch ID, but considering it's plug and play and considering the complicated security protocol which links touch ID to the T2 security chip on the Mac, it's also something basically only Apple would do. 

The security nerd in me does wonder whether it could be hacked though... ie, whether I can attach a hack keyboard with fake touch ID to access your secure data on the T2 chip by posing as an external Touch ID device.  The onboarding process will have to be pretty secure to prevent this. 

The pairing setup security is described here, there are encryption keys paired between the keyboard and Mac:

https://support.apple.com/guide/security/magic-keyboard-with-touch-id-secf60513daa/web

"Before a Magic Keyboard with Touch ID can be used for Touch ID operations, it needs to be securely paired to the Mac. To pair, the Secure Enclave on the Mac and the PKA block in the Magic Keyboard with Touch ID exchange public keys, rooted in the trusted Apple CA, and they use hardware-held attestation keys and ephemeral ECDH to securely attest to their identity. On the Mac, this data is protected by the Secure Enclave; on the Magic Keyboard with Touch ID, this data is protected by the PKA block. After secure pairing, all Touch ID data communicated between the Mac and the Magic Keyboard with Touch ID is encrypted by AES-GCM with a key length of 256 bits, and with ephemeral ECDH keys using NIST P-256 curve based on the stored identities. (Normal keystrokes are exchanged using Bluetooth security in the same way that any Bluetooth keyboard does.)

AllM said:

avon b7 said:

Tommy-2514 said:

First, Isn't there a precedent? Compare the security of Google's Play Store to Apple's.
Let's see the numbers. No of malware, spams, etc. 

Second, what the EU wants is to provide the option for everyone and his dog to upload an app to anyone's phone.
How the heck does this not raise security concerns? 

The DMA/DSA is not a security directive per se. 

Apple used whatever spin it could to try and protect its favourable situation. That is understandable but was never going to win flavour within the EU because it wasn't dealing with the problem the EU was tackling.

The infamous 'core technology fee' was questionable from the get go. The chances of it passing the sniff test were slim but Apple tried anyway. Very probably rubbing people up the wrong way in the process. 

However, we have to wait and see how the EU responds officially. 

You say the EU wants to provide options and that's correct. 

An option is not an obligation on users in this case. If you have reservations about third party app stores or direct downloads, alternative browsers, different Wallets etc don't use them. 

I'm sure Apple won't allow you to install something 'accidentally'. 

FWIW, I would actually ask around and ask people what their experience in this area is like on Android because if it were only half as bad as people here say, those users would be clamoring to get over Apple’s garden wall. 

That isn't happening, is it? 

The reality is that there are possibly users wanting to get out but are effectively locked in. After all, those two words have been emailed around at Apple. 

My last iPhone was an iPhone 4.

Android flavours ever since and using multiple app stores and direct downloads. 

Not a single problem. 

I hate to make it conspiratorial, but doesn’t it look like this Vestager lady is trying to desensitise the users to the possible installation of governmental spyware?

They have been proposing backdoors for a while now and will keep pushing it until they get closer to what they want:

https://www.techradar.com/news/spain-seeks-to-ban-encryption-leaked-document-reveals
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/05/eu-commissions-new-proposal-would-undermine-encryption-and-scan-our-messages

They want to get around end-to-end encryption to allow scanning private communications like Signal, WhatsApp, iMessage, encrypted email services. The easiest way for them to do this is to get code onto the device. A lot of EU governments have been using Pegasus for spying:

https://cybernews.com/news/nso-group-sold-spyware-to-14-eu-governments/
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/IDAN/2022/732268/IPOL_IDA(2022)732268_EN.pdf
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/meetdocs/2014_2019/plmrep/COMMITTEES/PEGA/DV/2023/05-08/REPORTcompromises_EN.pdf

"several EU governments admitted to having bought Pegasus from the NSO Group, while EU citizens were targeted by their government, or by foreign governments or authorities."

"Most, if not all Member State governments have bought spyware, in principle for law enforcement and security purposes. However, there is ample evidence of abuse of spyware in several Member States for purely political purposes, targeting critics and opponents of the parties in power, or in connection to corruption. Investigative findings link Pegasus and other surveillance spyware to various human rights violations by governments, ranging from monitoring, blackmailing, smear campaigns, intimidation and harassment."

Same thing the Indian government has been doing. The last thing they want is a security warning telling the targets what's going on.

There will be official government app stores that will be required for digital ID, health ID and while they won't say they are tracking anything, just phoning home regularly with network info will be able to do location tracking on everyone using it.

timpetus said:

macxpress said:

timpetus said:

Notably speedier unless you need to run Windows software that isn't compatible with Windows on ARM, in which case I guess the solution is switching to Windows or buying two laptops? I don't know for sure, but I'd bet that's a large portion of the Mac power users who are still using an Intel Mac. 

Unless they're using Bootcamp I doubt using Parallels is any faster on an Intel Mac versus an M series Mac. In my testing of Windows 11 in Parallels on an M1 MacBook Pro it was more than adequate. 

My understanding is the AS Macs can't run regular Windows at native speeds. My Intel MBP allowed me to play several Windows games using PlayOnMac without even having to use Bootcamp or purchase Parallels. I have no free way to accomplish the same on my M1 Max MBP, so when it comes to this use case it was a downgrade. Not that I'm unhappy with my new machine, just pointing out that AS isn't 100% upgrade with no downsides for those still using Intel Macs.

PlayOnMac is based on Wine, same as Crossover.

https://www.playonmac.com/wine/

Crossover runs on Apple Silicon and supports hundreds of games, should be the same or more than PlayOnMac, they integrated Apple's DX12 toolkit to support modern games:

https://www.youtube.com/@macprotips/videos

https://www.codeweavers.com/crossover

and there's an alternative launcher here:

https://heroicgameslauncher.com/

hmlongco said:

If Microsoft can buy Blizzard/Activision then Apple should just buy Epic.

Not only could Apple then bring. the Unreal Engine (and games) to the Mac, but it could also use Epic's "MetaHuman" technology to fix the god-awful Vision Pro avatars....

Apple can only buy from the owners. The owners of Epic are Tim Sweeney who is suing them and Tencent.

Microsoft bought Activision because Activision's shareholders wanted it to be bought.

Unreal Engine and games are available on the Mac like Layers of Fear (Lumen, Nanite, Niagara, no ray-tracing), Apple worked with the team on the game:



Apple has a right to protect their OS from malicious actors just as Microsoft has a right to block malware in Windows with anti-virus software. Apple has a right to revoke licenses to malicious developers and Epic has demonstrated repeatedly this is what they are.

Apple has to be careful to maintain control over side-loading. In the EU, it's not such a big deal but if this makes its way to China, operators there would block Apple's official store and replace it with local ones like they do with Android. Tencent (major owner of Epic) is one of the interested parties in this outcome.