Posted by thm 2 days ago
I had to do some hunting to figure out how a thread about AirPods descended into arguments about life expectancy and pensions. This is where it began. Please take care to avoid starting flamewars like this in future. We all have to consider the consequences of what we post, and it's against the guidelines to post inflammatory rhetoric for precisely this reason.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Source: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/americans-are-generally-richer...
Having a big house and more money doesn't mean you have a better life; this seems to be the main point of the article you linked, but your comment seems to imply that you missed that point (though I could be misreading). Case in point, this quote from the blog:
> I could go on, but the pattern is pretty clear. The U.S. in general is less healthy and less safe than Europe.
No, I didn't miss the point; there's excellent data in that article for people who think the US is a great place to live, and people who think Europe is a great place to live. That's the beauty of the article, and the crux of my point: both of those groups can be correct – there's no single "this is the greatest place to live for all human beings, periodt" out there. The article concludes:
> But as one final thought, I’d like to offer the hypothesis that life is just about equally as good in all developed countries. There’s personal preference, of course — if you want a big house and a lawn, you might prefer America or Canada, whereas if you want national health insurance and lower crime rates, you might prefer Japan or France. But in terms of where the average person would want to live given the choice, I think all these rich countries are in the same ballpark.
https://www.insee.fr/en/statistiques/serie/001745304
https://www.kidsdata.org/topic/294/infant-mortality/table#fm...
Anyway, my point is those numbers are comparable when there are countries like Mexico, Brazil and India out there with an infant mortality rate of 11, 12.5 and 25 deaths per thousand, respectively.
(For the record I don't think the US is a better place to live than the EU, I just don't think it's worse either.)
Come on, are you going to make my argument so easy? Twice of two drops of nothing is four drops of nothing. You're nitpicking numbers that frankly don't make a difference because they're too close to matter. But don't argue with me, argue with the author of the article where you can see all of the data and comparisons for yourself.
The US infant mortality rate is shameful. Not as shameful as its poverty and homelessness rates but still shameful anyway.
I'm just not interested in nitpicking superfluous numbers with you. You've got the data in front of you showing that outcomes are, by and large, the same across the US and Europe, but you've decided to plant some jingoistic flag on a molehill of miniscule differences when there are countries in your own union with equally "shameful" results.
Please don't waste my time further by harping on these minute differences, I won't respond.
It doesn’t. A significant share of the EU budget actually goes toward helping the poorest members in catching up.
> You've got the data in front of you showing that outcomes are, by and large, the same across the US and Europe
Sorry but the data shows the reverse of that. I’m not wasting your time. You are in denial.
The US has high consumption but garbage metrics of approximately everything else. The GINI coefficient is extremely high. The infant mortality rate is poor. Life expectancy is bad for an OCDE country. Homelessness is so high you could believe it’s a developing country. Imprisonment rate, awful, literacy rate, very poor for a developed nation, social mobility, very low, the list goes on and on.
The USA is paradoxical in that it’s the only rich democracy which actually doesn’t take care of its population.
I’m glade you have the privilege of being rich there and I know you have been indoctrinated from birth into believe the US is exceptional, still, the numbers don’t actually look that good when you look at them.
This and social benefits are becoming unaffordable as the economy falls behind.
This is nonsense. The stock market had been propped up by FAANG. But with AI we have a few trillion dollars of value being created by new entrants (e.g. OpenAI, xAI, Anthropic) and legacy companies newly stepping on FAANG (e.g. Oracle, Perplexity).
It may all be a fever dream. But like the dark fiber of the 90s, it should—worst case—leave behind a lot of energy and datacentre infrastructure. (If Washington would get out of the way.)
Yeah OK, cool I guess
Right now using the valuation technique that tge value of a company is the net present value of all future returns * some multiple, we don’t know if any of them will ever be valuable.
This metric has nothing to do with whether a company is public or private.
Nobody ever knows what a company is worth other than the people buying and selling it in an M&A transaction at that precise moment. Public markets just have more transactions than private markets—the mechanism of price discovery is similar, if not the same.
> if all of the private companies “worth billions” went under, only VCs would be harmed
I’d be shocked if it didn’t take out the banking system.
You’re describing the annihilation of trillions of dollars of pension, endowment and retirement wealth; to say nothing of the effects on municipal, state and federal payroll finances; to say nothing of the asset-backed loans tied to these assets and purchases they make from public companies and their employees’ spending.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/11/private-equity-wants-a-large...
The article claims pensions, on the other hand, as one of the leading investors in private equity.
The term retirement plan is radically different from pensions.
By way of example, your local teachers union pension is probably massively invested to private equity. Your tech worker 401k is not.
but how would these airpods really be able to know you're in the EU? this should be easily hackable
It’s enormously difficult to ship any interesting feature that integrates hardware and software. The EU wants Apple to happily accept a burden that makes it harder to produce the products that made it popular in the first place.
I’m disappointed the EU won’t be getting these features (at least not quickly) but I’m hoping the citizenry realizes who’s to blame here
I recommend you to read the ruling [0] and form your own opinion.
> The EU wants Apple to happily accept a burden that makes it harder to produce the products that made it popular in the first place.
No, the EU mandates that Apple cannot implement OS features for the sole benefit of its own hardware-offering in a different market, because this is not fair competition. They are not required to foster new HW ecosystems for each feature, they just have to provide access to such OS features under equal conditions:
"By mandating an equally effective interoperability solution, the legislator acknowledged that the implementation of interoperability does not always need to (and potentially cannot always) be the same for the gatekeeper and third parties, but interoperability must be granted to the same feature under equal conditions."
Granted, Apple generally doesn't do that last part unless forced. I think some kind of timeline on the DMA requirements would be more reasonable. e.g. you have two years to make a feature publicly accessible before fines start accruing.
For a hobbyist? Sure! For a company with half the smartphone market and a trillion dollar market cap? EU doesn't mandate that they define a new standard and support it indefinitely.
Apple is not required to develop or maintain any feature against their will. The DMA is not written like that, it is much more objective and industry-agnostic.
The EU demands that features implemented in the OS to be used by Apple accessories must be made equally available to competing accessory vendors.
Especially when the user finds out the reason.
Certifying devices to make sure they're safe for users, like "this cable is certified as compatible, it won't set your iphone on fire", seems fine.
Requiring your app to be "certified by apple to sell ebooks", and then only granting that certificate to Apple Books, not the Kindle app, that seems anti-competitive.
If the industry wants better open standards, they the participants should develop those standards and build devices that implement those standards.
What Apple does outside of such standards is nobody else's business - as long as they correctly implement and support the industry standards.
which is the point here.
If they made a new feature, something AR based, they are totally allowed to build that and keep it relatively private for a few years. What they can't do is when competition appears, actively keep them off their platform. For example if a device manufacturer manages to make an AR device that works well with android, but its impossible with apple and apple have significant market share, then that would be illegal.
The point of this is to stop thiefdoms and to keep innovation. You're allowed to have a competitive advantage, you're not allowed to build a monopoly.
(if we look at defence, budgets are still very high, but the rate of innovation has plummeted compared to other industries. Its only now with the spur of VC cash into non-traditional backgrounds are we seeing innovation again)
It is, if we're talking about features designed to boost sales of your other products while preventing competitors from offering those features.
Look, even if they're able to compete fairly, those competitors might remain inferior options for other reasons. But Apple having to compete will make their products better. All of their best achievements came from fierce competition as the underdog. Apple's current situation is not good for it.
Must they get these passed in the standards committees first?
--> If iOS introduces non-standard changes to Bluetooth and Wi-Fi to compete against Android, this does not concern the DMA.
--> If iOS introduces non-standard changes to Bluetooth and Wi-Fi to create a product of ANOTHER market-segment (Headphones, Watches, Routers,...) they are required to provide interoperability for other brands than Apple as well.
The reason is simple: iOS has such a critical size that it is anti-competitive behavior for Apple to modify iOS in order to beat the competition on e.g. headphones.
Yes, apple did the R&D to figure out how to let their watch filter notifications by app, and it must have cost them so much to be able to filter notifications that it has to be locked into their watch. That's not them being intentionally anti-competitive, it's just R&D costs, sure, I'm sure it cost a ton to make that private API.
The more cogent argument is that if apple doesn't want to spend money making their phone work with smartwatches, they do not have to make it work with smartwatches.
They want it to work with watches so users buy the phone.
If they want it to work with _only_ their watch, then sure, they make more money, but they also harm the user and market in the long-term by making it so competitors aren't on an even playing field.
Do you just kinda believe anti-competitiveness doesn't exist?
Should apple be allowed to make it so you can't communicate with android users at all to increase sales (which they already more-or-less did)? Should they intentionally make it so you can't play the music you purchased on non-apple devices by breaking "iTunes for windows"?
1. Api designed for internal use could take shortcuts and let’s say use secrets that are and should be internal, or run things as root or something.
2. Proper API maintenance includes at least documentation and some kind of update path/schedule. Internally it’s simpler. (E.g. you must be sure not to leak secret stuff in docs)
But in the end I agree with the notion that these changes for Apple are not a huge burden. (Existing behaviour is anticompetitive)
I see no reason it cannot be a private entitlement similar to the other sensitive entitlements on iOS.
This isn't exposing business logic, this is an operating system vendor deciding what it exposes to vendors. There is clearly an API that the apple watch is using to communicate with the OS, why shouldn't other vendors be allowed to access this?
If you're astounded by hackers asking practical questions, maybe you should stop carrying water for corps and see how your back feels. Let's talk shop, what are the roadblocks Apple faces here?
This prevents Apple the platform provider and gatekeeper from giving preferential treatment to Apple the Smartwatch/Headphones/Payment/Entertainment provider
What Apple do slightly differently is that they half-ass the standardization, and then chuck it in the trash. Amounts of efforts spent is within the ballpark.
[0] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/bundleresources/en...
[1] https://developer.apple.com/support/compare-memberships/
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Apple makes money by selling devices. With giant profit margins, at that.
So why should they be able to charge developers in addition to consumers?
Apple also benefitted from third-party developers writing software for its platform. Remember the "there's an app for that" ads?
I think developers deserve to be treated fairly by Apple, not exploited four different ways. Because to develop for Apple you need:
1. Buy Apple hardware, because Apple doesn't provide cross-platform development tools (unlike Android or even Microsoft).
2. Pay $100 a year just to be able to publish the software.
3. Pay 30% of the app income to Apple (this changed only recently).
4. Have to endure odious restrictions imposed only because Apple wants to keep control of its platform.
This is among the biggest fictions of this crazed argument. Spotify, the company that whines about Apple the most, pays Apple $0 (sorry, $99) for building the entire market for consumer mobile internet upon which their business depends.
You mean, Apple leeches that glomped onto Spotify success to prop up the iOS market share? When not having Spotify meant that people might end up moving to Android? And yet they still required Spotify to pay 30% up until 2022, when the "reader app" exemption was made?
Remember when Apple offered Spotify private APIs for subscription control to work around the iOS App Store piss-poor subscription management?
That Spotify?
The parent is right. Resorting to catch-22s proves how utterly indefensible your stance is.
Net sales: $119575 billion, net income $33916. Margin: 28%
I agree on both side some money needs to be exchanged in terms of features and Apple cant have it all to themselves. But currently it doesn't seems both side is listening and no middle ground. One side wants it all for free, the other side dont want their money and wants to keep everything themselves.
It's bizarre that you're even framing this conversation in this way - who are you to say how Apple is allowed to behave, and how anti-competitive they deserve to be on the EU market? Are you under the impression that corporations like Apple should wield more power than world governments?
They shouldn't and they don't, but they think they can bully the EU into submission. They wouldn't dare pull this crap in China, they make every concession to be allowed access to the Chinese market. Yet the EU is expected to ask dear Apple for permission to be allowed to regulate their destructive anti-competitive behavior? Insanity.
More like that governments shouldn't dictate such terms and let the market decide - they should just prevent collusion and regulatory capture monopolies.
This is the opposite, an organically grown market share.
It was found to be exactly NOT an organically grown market share in Headphones and Smart Watches.
The DMA identified that Apple owns a significant portion of the playing field for those market (iOS), and modified them to ensure a competitive advantage ONLY for their brands.
This is being rectified now, at least for the EU.
Is there any reason why you're picking your words so carefully as to include "regulatory capture monopolies" but exclude "anti-competitive behavior" as the umbrella term?
Regulating anti-competitive behavior is precisely what the EU is doing with the Digital Markets Act. The EU recognizes that a company does not need to be a monopoly to have severely detrimental effects on the free market.
Let's see... How much should Apple pay to the European Union to be allowed to sell devices there? I say 50% of gross income?
They violated the law, so they deserve to be properly disciplined for that.
Someone at Apple did math on this and it's not worth their time to make this feature interoperable just for the EU market. That's because of this law. They wouldn't have even considered it without the law.
If they refrain from distorting the market in their favor (and instead "retreat and rally up the userbase") the DMA seems to work surprisingly well so far...
The procedures with the EU are quite interesting here, Apple was exchanging extensively for more than a year on how to reach compliance, then the decision [0] was made.
There are also separate procedures for the specification of compliance and investigating (non)compliance.
This gives Apple little room to argue on violation of the DMA later-on, because they were actively involved in defining the criteria beforehand.
So it's possible that they currently just need to find a mode to achieve launch-parity for EU on such features, and they're not there yet.
[0] https://ec.europa.eu/competition/digital_markets_act/cases/2...
There are a few clear precedents where Apple held a feature back in the EU, then shipped later and/or exposed a path others could plug into:
Apple Intelligence: Announced as “not at launch” in the EU in 2024, then rolled out to EU users with iOS 18.4 in spring 2025 (most features). One carve-out remains: Live Translation with AirPods
NFC access for third-party wallets (HCE): After an EU antitrust case, Apple committed to open iPhone NFC (“tap-to-pay”) via Host Card Emulation, let users set a default non-Apple wallet, support Field Detect/Double-click flows, etc., so a genuine “build a platform others can plug into.” The Commission made these commitments legally binding for 10 years.
With iOS 17.4 Apple created EU-only entitlements for non-WebKit engines (e.g., full Chromium/Gecko), so browser makers can ship their own engines on iPhone/iPad in the EU.
Home-screen web apps (PWAs) reversal: Apple initially said PWAs would go away in the EU for 17.4, then reversed and kept them—implemented on WebKit with the usual security model.
Alternative app distribution (marketplaces + web distribution): In response to the DMA, Apple shipped EU-only APIs/entitlements for third-party app marketplaces and later web distribution (direct from developer sites) with notarization, installation, backup/restore hooks, etc.
Tap to Pay on iPhone (SoftPOS): Apple’s merchant “no extra hardware” payments feature expanded across EU countries and is designed for platforms like Adyen/Stripe/Mollie to integrate via SDKs
On the other hand, what is to prevent another ear bud manufacturer writing an iPhone app their ear buds connects to that provides translation? Is this really a hardware feature in the phone? If it’s just software at the phone end, as long as other manufacturers have the feature access to implement this themselves, surely that’s their problem? Why should apple offer translation software as a service to other companies for free? I can see the argument for hardware but not software that others could implement themselves on iPhones.
The only one clearly DMA related with EU specific unlocks are:
* app store
* browser engines
The DMA could have been just an app store regulation. It seems to have had its intended effect there. Very very unproven outside of it. At best you've shown no harm other than delay in some areas.
I'm assuming NFC lawsuits are separate from the DMA but could be mistaken. But in any event NFC payments already existed and aren't a new feature apple decided to release under the DMA.
The upside for the user is to have a larger variety of devices to choose from, each with similar interoperability with his Apple device.
The upside for the market is that all vendors are technically able to compete on the same terms. Apple is not allowed to operate a market, invite others to compete but also participate as a player with preferential treatment.
This is already decided for the existing features of Airpods, Apple Watch, etc. Apple is trying to rally its userbase against the EU by withholding new features now, in hopes that they can secure their skewed playing-field
That is the dream of the dma. It has not been proven to be the reality.
The reality could very well be that EU users just don’t get features. Apple doesn’t have to play ball.
But no, the goal is not to make consumers better off, but citizens and nations better off. And their interests do not stop at $PRODUCT. Namely, they probably don't want a slow slide into serfdom to foreign corporations that abused their market power.
So your belief is that, if DMA didn't exist, Apple still would not ship this feature in the EU?
It's fine if Apple decided to refrain from its anti-competitive behavior in the headphone market because it's not economically viable to have this feature as a generic OS feature.
They know best and are free to do that.
There are huge hosts of software and hardware that work better because of an ecosystem of interoperable components. That’s not anticompetitive, it’s the benefit of good design with compounding returns.
As the manufacturing process and software becomes less complicated, there is a natural trend towards budget competitors (see: SaaS in 2025) that can replicate functionality they know has a market.
The idea that making it unappealing to make an integrated product is good for consumers — or anticompetitive — seems so wrong that it’s farcical. There are definitely cases where verticalization can harm consumers, but this opens the space for good competition. Perplexity wouldn’t exist if Google actually cared about search customers. Internet Explorer didn’t have to be regulated out of existence — by virtue of sucking, there is opportunity.
What they CAN'T do is maintain an environment where their products cannot be met with fair competition by other players, by intentionally giving advantages in the ecosystem only to their own brands.
Apple might not dominate the market for fitness trackers above 150USD today if they wouldn't have prevented others to achieve the same interoperability with their iOS ecosystem.
Apples featureset for wellness tracking was not competitive, neither in function nor in price. Fitbit and Garmin were better in doing that task, but they were not able to display message notifications, apps, etc. because the required interfaces in iOS were only available to Apple's Watch.
Maybe Apple would have beaten them in 2nd Gen, maybe competitors would have followed with equally tight iOS-interoperability in 2nd Gen.
Maybe Apple Watch would nonetheless be the leading Smartwatch in the market today. Or maybe it would be e.g. the Moto360 (google it) just due to Apple's "virtue of sucking" and insistence of doing rectangular watches.
We don't know, because none of the other players are able to compete on fair terms with Apple in this segment until today. And today Apple has such a leap-start that it's questionable whether this can still be rectified.
Let's not pretend like Apple isn't doing everything it can to turn its EU users against their government by complying with the DMA in the most obtuse, disruptive, and useless ways possible. They're risking fines and further punishments betting that they can ultimately subvert the democratic process that put in place laws that would require more developer and user freedom. To Apple, the threat of users owning their computers is an existential one.
Subverting democracy, to me, would involve things like dark money campaigns and lobbying.
The issue is that Apple isn't following the law. It's breaking it and then miming to its customers that its actions are on account of the law. That misrepresentation is meant to convince citizens of the EU that DMA is a bad law with consequences they don't support so that they pressure their representatives to get it removed.
It's Apple making a big show of directly harming consumers as part of a misinformation campaign to get policy that limits their power repealed. To me that reaches the bar for subverting democracy.
The law requires Apple to provide equal access to the iPhone hardware and software in marketplaces that it competes in.
That can be done in a manner that is either additive, by providing access to third parties (which is potentially a significant expense and liability) or subtractive, by choosing not to engage in the regulated activities at all, in that jurisdiction.
In this case they're merely being obtuse by refusing to provide an API to other device manufacturers. Unless you genuinely believe that the cost/benefit analysis of adding a new feature to their OS dictates that they basically freeze development unless they're able to recoup costs by tying it to their accessories, then you must conclude that they made the live transcription API Apple-only, and therefore not DMA-compatible, only to make EU citizens feel like their laws were depriving them of new features.
An organization interested in good-faith compliance would expose their internal API surface with some vetting process for access by interested parties. Then as the API becomes stable they would open it up more broadly. If accused of being anti-competitive by restricting access they could easily and correctly argue that they were working with potential competitors on that stable and secure API, and that their actions balanced the interests of market competition and security.
Of course, Apple is not interested in good-faith compliance. It's my belief that they should be made an example of so that they and other companies running the math in the future decide that proactive and good-faith compliance with regulations is more cost-effective than attempting to fight them.
Inventing a substandard product and using your market dominance in one area to ensure that nobody can compete with your substandard product is as far detached from innovation as you can possibly be. One size fits all solution with centrally planned development where one person knows best and competition isn't considered a driver of progress, isn't that a very communism-shaped approach to "innovation"?
I'm not even joking here and it's bizarre that I'm having to promote the good parts of free market capitalism to someone who claims to care about innovation.
That reminds me of Zukerberg's bluff saying he's going to leave the EU which lasted exactly one day.
But they were found to have already skewed the market with several Apple-accessory-exclusive iOS-features in the past (Proximity pairing, Watch-integration, etc.) and for those they have to provide interoperability now.
They worked with the EU for a year now on how exactly they should reach compliance, then the ruling was made, ordering them to make such interoperability features also available to other brands than Apple.
Now it seems that they try to rally their userbase against that ruling, in hopes to create a political climate that gets the ruling revoked again...
The reality is that, if Apple conforms non-maliciously, they're proving that the law is reasonable and they can do it while remaining profit. Um, that's a huge problem.
They require the plausible deniability of "oh we can't do this, it's too expensive!" Otherwise, other governments (US) might look to implementing similar laws. So, it's a long con. They're burning lots of money, now, with the hope it allows them to continue their anti-competitive behavior for longer. If they're REALLY lucky, they might even stall out the EU and get the EU to backtrack on their laws. That's the golden scenario.
Thats would involve exposing public api ie “a burden”
A duelist was found to arrive with a gun to a knife-fight and is asked to either allow everyone a gun or use a knife.
Now we're arguing that it's a burden to him because bringing a gun is his innovative approach to win knife-fights, and making it a gunfight or keeping it a knife-fight is hindering the innovation he brings.
Apple OWNS the terms for this fight. If they believe that their fights should evolve to be gun-fights then all players should have guns.
It was decided that they can't continue restricting guns while shooting all knife-duelists, at least not in the EU.
The EU stepped in and said that they can't distort duels like that any longer
Why don't the other players make their own smartphones and smartphone OS and then "implement OS features for the sole benefit of its own hardware-offering"?
Is it fair to force another player to let you hijack their ecosystem?
With iOS Apple owns the playing field where all accessory vendors compete, and Apple competes on the same field. There is no healthy competition possible if Apple puts the finger on the scale to ensure it always wins.
Was that an unearned position due to regulatory capture or something, or did people buy their stuff, even if it's more expensive?
Is it even a dominant position with no recourse? (last I heard Android has more share in the EU and the world). Did they collude with Google and other smartphone vendors to not allow them to build and allow similar features themselves?
>With iOS Apple owns the playing field where all accessory vendors compete, and Apple competes on the same field
Isn't that playing field their own OS and device ecosystem, they build?
> Isn't that playing field their own OS and device ecosystem, they build?
That playing field is their own OS, and the entire ecosystem of all accessory brands.
That's not an answer, it's a decree.
Others can make their own phones and headphones just for their own devices, did Apple stop them?
Doesn't mean it's an answer to the issue why that should be the case.
Not very convincing.
Also, you're confusing markets here. We're not talking about the smartphone market. We're talking about the market of apple accessories.
Apple solely controls that market and also participates in it. Its a true monopoly.
Don't see how it relates to competition but it doesn't matter: Apple competitors should have the same access to the system as Apple does.
Also, don't be naive: this is about money and being able to sell airpods at insane margins by giving them unfair advantages that aren't given to com[etitors.
My sony headphones claim they do all kinds of magic stuff through the app, but I guess that's not a realtime feature, more like a regularly scheduled calibration
So... Apple?
My headphones certainly don't have trouble connecting to a device of any manufacturer without loss of functionality, but some of the "citizenry" seems to fall for marketing materials saying only apple can do things securely and in an integrated manner
This is more of an iPhone / iOS feature which uses the airpods as the microphone and audio output.
Right, so why can’t I connect my non-apple Bluetooth mic + audio output and get the same functionality?
Either it’s an airpods thing and it should work airpods + any host device; or it’s an iPhone thing and should work with any iphone + audio device
Exactly. And Apple intends to keep it that way ;)
But, they won't, because they rely on that moat to keep competitors out. It's exactly the same at the lightning cable.
Many of those standards are objectively poor. I don’t want to live in the world where what we are allowed to use is defined by the lowest common denominator of mediocre engineers.
Mediocrity über alles is what you are tacitly advocating for. I’ve been part of many standards processes where the majority democratic outcome was low-quality low-effort standards that were extraordinarily wasteful and inefficient because the people making the standards didn’t care, it was all about what was expedient for them. This is the default state of humanity. No one should be forced to comply with that garbage by regulatory fiat if they don’t want to.
Okay, fine, I already covered for this. If your new protocol is really the bees knees, then open it, problem solved.
> No one should be forced to comply with that garbage by regulatory fiat if they don’t want to.
They're not.
Lighting was an incredible boon in an era of micro usb, people just seem to forget how shit everyone else was. Now we have usb-c where companies are required to supply the port but doesn’t have to follow any actual specification, yay for standards.
Okay, if their hardware is esoteric, open the protocols for interacting with hardware.
> Should they give away every hardware design needed too?
Yeah probably. It would be a lot better, more like x86. We would actually get repairable phones instead of landfill fodder. But that's a different issue.
> Lighting was an incredible boon in an era of micro usb, people just seem to forget how shit everyone else was. Now we have usb-c where companies are required to supply the port but doesn’t have to follow any actual specification, yay for standards.
And then it became a cheap scam, whereby Apple made a few dollars off of every single lightning cable produced by anyone on Earth due to licensing.
Also, as for USB-C - doesnt matter, still better. My chargers work across multiple devices. Yes, there's some standards noncompliance, this is still a huge improvement over ZERO cross compatibility.
ARM and phone manufacturing is a hot mess in comparison. We're still trying to reverse engineer M series MacBooks and iPhones are off limits. Android is also not open source, no AOSP does not count.
There would be a lot more competition in the space if the hardware had proper specs, like x86 does.
It’s great that documentation exists, but it doesn’t make for competition. ARM is at least licensing out to more than two manufacturers.
However, I'm happy with the decision. Sure, they are not available right now. But it's worth it for the long term picture. Imagine if this would be yet another Apple/Google-only market.
The tradeoff is right IMO.
And the users here on HN saying "it's expensive/difficult to give the same access to competitors" are beyond naive if they think this isn't about protecting the margins on the airpods by giving their own products access to the system competitors don't have.
One consequence of the DMA is that you can't build certain products because there is no way to recoup the development cost.
No, but that's how Apple continuously tries to frame it.
By the ruling of the DMA, Apple is not allowed to develop a free feature in iOS (!!!) in order to recoup the cost by restricting it to their own brands and crushing the competition with it in ANOTHER product-segment.
They could easily make this live translation feature a separate app using publicly available iOS-APIs. Every competitor would be able to develop and provide the same feature.
Ah, not integrated enough for them? Fair enough, then their integration needs to provide interoperability for competitors.
Instead they are trying to rally their userbase against the DMA in hopes to create a political climate in their favor.
Features like that can sell the phone, that's where you recoup the costs obviously, yet it seems like the only focus is keeping airpod margins lol.
Poor, poor Apple…
You recoup the costs by *selling more iphones* because they have functionality the competition does not have.
Investing in your platform is not "giving it away for free", it's making sure consumers have reasons to buy your products and not competitors.
If tomorrow Samsung phones offer this out of the box, and any earbuds maker can access it Samsung will gain sales and users that would've looked at iPhones for this feature won't.
The lengths people will go to justify nonsensical margin-protecting walled garden business choices is insane.
However:
1/ There are obvious downsides to the lack of competition.
2/ In this case, the proprietary protocol that AirPods use is not revolutionary R&D, to say the least! Any competent software engineer can create a new protocol superior to bluetooth if they can drop compatibility with bluetooth.
Hard disagree.
The time and resources it takes to lock down an ecosystem are far greater than not locking it down.
Apple loses the forced bundling but they'll do fine without it and it's a good thing for everyone else.
Have you ever built a software product with an API? Would you say it was trivial upfront and ongoing to build and support this API?
"Can not" as in "unable because Apple doesn't allow that". All Apple needs to do is whitelist access to certain APIs and provide minimal documentation.
> A barely hacked-together API that's hard to use without constantly pinging the team who implemented it - entirely normal for the first release of a big new feature - wouldn't be enough.
Oh, so Apple can't be bothered to be held to the same standard as, say, automotive developers?
I would have more sympathy for Apple if they behaved ethically, respecting developers and users. They absolutely do not behave ethically, preferring to exploit everything they can.
Turnaround is a fair play, so I'm going to shed zero tears if Apple is forced to spend a couple hundred million dollars (at most) adapting their internal documentation for their APIs.
This is NOT expected from Apple and explicitly noted in the ruling.
They are simply not allowed to restrict OS features from competitors in order to frame them as Apple accessory features, because this distorts the competition in this accessory market
I'm not asking for them to do any work beyond that level for non-Apple devices. If those devices need to run fancy code to make the feature work, that fancy code isn't Apple's job.
(But if the feature just needs to listen to the microphone feed, then I do expect it to work out of the box with any headset. (The firmware updates they're doing to older airpods are not clear evidence one way or the other whether it actually needs on-headset support.))
The same reason they endure the burden of safety certification and employment requirements: it’s the law. It’s not exactly a new concept.
And yes, it also happens to be a good law that promotes competition and curbs anti-competitive abuses.
Seems easy enough to me, all they have to do is expose and document an api.
It's ok to wait longer for a product to make sure it's safe instead of the ol' "move fast and break things". Having ever new "interesting" stuff to play with to feed our endless boredom is not the only thing worth caring about.
What made it popular were the nice new features. Regardless of how difficult it was for the organization, that is no concern for the user. Taking this easy way allowed them to be faster than others. Sacrificing usability - also making more expensive by lock in - for users of the future!
Of course then they wouldn't get the ecosystem lock-in they want. In theory. But I know plenty of people who buy Airpods "because" they're "the best", without ecosystem integration considerations.
But if it is internal, then you control both ends of the API, and can change them in tandem.
And yes yes plenty of things go wrong in the EU, I know. Still prefer this over Americas lack of laws and ease of bribing a president.
Well... yeah? I mean, that's the point. Once you are so big you act as a gatekeeper to a platform, the standards change.
Also let's be clear here: there's minimal actual technology inside those pods. The translation is happening on the phone and the stuff going over the air is audio. Yes, it would be harder to specify an interface for third party headset devices to interact with. It certainly wouldn't be impossible, and I think making that a cost of being a platform gatekeeper seems very reasonable.
You could always put environmental audio through Whisper, attain audio trance crypt at 51010 per cent Word error rate, put that transcript through machine translation, and finally TTS. Or you can put audio directly through multimodal LLM for marginal improvements, I guess, but ASR error rate as well as automatic cleanup performance don't seem to have improved significantly after OpenAI Whisper was released.
Was this post the output of such a pipeline, by chance?
For the EU, the issue is that Apple intends to recoup this investment through premium-pricing a different product in another category - one that has many low-cost competitors.
Wouldn't this best be resolved by productising the Apple LLM? Earphone API becomes open, as required by EU. However, use of the Apple LLM would be controlled by license. Earbud competitors could either license Apple's LLM, perhaps on a FRAND basis, or they could install their own LLM on an iOS device. Apple may bundle its LLM but must allow users to uninstall Apple's LLM, to free up space for alternatives.
In short, this isn't and shouldn't be about access to IOS for earbuds. EU is right in this. It's about monetising access to the Apple LLM, for which Apple deserves a revenue stream.
They already tried that with the "Core Technology" fee, and the EU smacked them for it. So doing what you propose is probably a non-starter.
Let’s be serious for a moment. They sell iPhones with enough margin to recoup that investment.
i know some people like to jump at solving technical problems, but sometimes yall need to chill and read the problem twice to be sure the problem is technical to begin with.
As far as I know, Apple is unique in delivering inference on such a tiny device. For this they deserve a reward. The question is how. Like the EU, I don't believe Apple-only premium-priced locked-down earbuds is the right way.
do you even remember the topic you're commenting about? :)
Remember, half of the consideration here is to find a way for Apple to recoup it's investment in LLM. Without creating anti-competitive forces in another market. If you have a different suggestion, or if you think Apple doesn't deserve compensation, make your case.
They could easily make this live translation feature a separate app using publicly available iOS-APIs. Every competitor would be able to develop and provide the same feature.
Ah, not integrated enough for them? Fair enough, then whatever further integration they see fit needs to provide interoperability for competitors.
That's exactly the stance of the EU DMA.
This isn't rocket science: audio goes into mic => STT engine => translation model => TTS engine => audio comes out of speaker. As a fellow hacker here, you could piece together something like this in a weekend on your computer for fun.
As for your question though: they can charge a subscription for using their LLM if they want, or charge for this specific app/feature of iOS. Or just be like me: whenever I'm about to execute on a business plan, I ask myself: "Is this business plan economically feasible without breaking the law?" And if it is not, then I do not do that plan. So far I haven't been cited for illegal conduct by any unions of dozens of countries, so it appears this tactic works.
your post doesn't even get close to the subject
Perhaps the issue you seem to be having is that there's nuance in a position which tries to see an issue from both sides. Whatever is the problem with your comprehension, I advise you to reflect on the fact that others in this thread seem to get it and some have raised valid counterpoints or added relevant information.