flydog

georgie01 said:

Obviously the right decision, and I hope the ‘heads up’ to Apple by the judge that their argument may not be the best one will help in their preparation for the upcoming court case. 

aderutter said:

My understanding was that Apple was going to pull Epic’s enterprise developer account for violating terms of the enterprise account agreement. 

If so, the problem with what the judge has done is that it leaves the question of when and how Apple can enforce it’s agreements with ALL enterprise customers. Does this mean all enterprise developers that have third party customers themselves can safely ignore the enterprise agreement and do whatever they like? I.e. enterprise accounts are for deploying applications within the enterprise organisation and are not for distributing applications to third parties. Can enterprise developers now violate this fundamental agreement without worry?

I don’t expect Epic’s partial win to last long, Epic may have temporarily swayed the judge by conflating the two separate issues (Fortnite and Unreal) but I expect sanity to prevail eventually.

GeorgeBMac said:

According to Reuters, Apple got blasted for its App Store policies in "terse" exchanges between the judge and Apple's lawyer:

"During a terse exchange with Apple counsel Richard Doren at a hearing on Monday, the judge said she saw “no competition” to Apple’s App Store on the iPhone.

“The question is, without competition, where does the 30% (App Store commission) come from? Why isn’t it 10? 20? How is the consumer benefiting?” she asked.

Doren replied that consumers had choices when deciding to buy an Android device or an iPhone.

“The competition is in the foremarket,” he said, reiterating an argument that has been central to Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook’s defense during Congressional antitrust hearings.

Gonzalez Rogers replied that there was “plenty of economic theory” to show that switching brands imposed costs on consumers.

She at one point muted Doren in the virtual proceedings."

Essentially the judge called Bull on what she sees as Apple's bullshit contention that the iPhone has not created a monopolistic market that it exploits with the App Store.

My personal thoughts on it are that Apple needs to go beyond (or drop) its claim that it has not created any sort of monopoly and iPhone users are free to go over to Android and claim (correctly) that the Apple Store is an integral part of what makes the iPhone private, secure and stable.

Based on a review of the current limited record before the Court, the Court cannot conclude that Epic has met the high  burden of demonstrating a likelihood of success on the merits, especially in the antitrust context

mike1 said:

What would be the real or perceived benefits of changing the connector on the iPad to USB C compared to Lightning?

Other than making the multitude of charging cables I already own useless, of course?