Soldering new chips won't add the missing address lines needed to address more RAM. Right now, the big limitations seem to be that laptop CPUs aren't designed to handle a sensible amount of RAM.
Additionally (and apologies for forgetting to add this yesterday), the real issue is not whether the author can deliberately write it in a portable way and reuse some of the code on another platform, but rather whether it is possible to write an app in such a way that the purchaser can then install that same app on the other platform without buying it again for the other platform. As long as that isn't possible, there's effectively no overlap between the iOS app market and the Android app market, making them separate markets in practice.
All the things you say are correct except for where you conclude that this means the behavior isn't anticompetitive. What makes something anticompetitive is the result in practice, not whether or not it is technically possible for a company to avoid it. In reality, a number of companies tacked on a 30% markup for their subscriptions so that they could sell them in the app, because a sizable percentage of users primarily used the service through their app rather than through the website. The result was that iOS users paid a lot more than Android users, who were offered the option to pay the cheaper amount with a credit card using the companies' normal merchant account systems. Q.E.D.
However, no developer if forced to use Apple and in-app subscriptions.
That's completely and utterly irrelevant from a legal perspective. Yes, technically, you can create a bad user experience by refusing to allow your app to do anything until the user looks up your website in Google, goes to it, and buys a subscription. However, the app can't even link to your website to buy a subscription; Apple's rules deliberately ensure that the user experience for anyone who dares not give them their cut is as bad as humanly possible.
An antitrust violation need not require a complete inability to purchase something in another way. It merely needs to be sufficiently difficult that the net effect is a significant number of users paying more for the same service solely because there are not multiple app stores on iOS. As long as they can show that a significant number of people paid more on iOS, and that the primary reason for that overpayment was because Apple's rules made it highly inconvenient to offer services to iPhone customers without paying an exorbitant percentage of their subscription fees to Apple, then Apple is clearly in violation of the law. This really isn't even a legal grey area. Apple is absolutely, fundamentally, and incontrovertibly on the wrong side of the law—so much so that I'm shocked anybody is even attempting to argue the other side. This should be an open-and-shut case if they argue it correctly.
Oh, and next time have a look at all the free Apps on the App store, obviously there is nothing to prevent developers from giving away their work. In fact most of my Apps on my IOS devices were free.
You're right. There's nothing preventing developers from giving away their work... other than, you know, not getting paid for their work, and having to spend a hundred bucks a year for the right to give away their work for free.... The existence of free apps is completely orthogonal to the issue at hand.
I suspect what's going on is a bit more insidious than mere corruption. Construction companies bid low so that they'll win the contract. Then they charge the actual construction costs as cost overruns. What's needed is an incentive to encourage companies to bid a realistic estimated cost, rather than a completely unrealistic underbid just to win the contract. Something like, say, not paying for overruns and holding the company to its original bid price.
Really? If so, what the heck are the state's lawyers smoking when they write these contracts? That should be downright easy to prevent with proper contract language. Just specify as part of the contract terms a maximum overage—say 1% of the contract—beyond which any remaining work must be rebid, with the original contractor held in material breach of contract and ineligible to bid on any government contracts for a period of one year for the first occurrence, five years for the second, 25 years for the third, etc., with the only exception to that ineligibility being for acts of God grossly in excess of what could reasonably be expected (*). So the contractors would have the option to say, "We were wrong," and back out at that point, but it would come with a penalty that's big enough that they would do so only when there's no other option.
(*) For example, a major snowstorm in Tahoe is never a reason for an overage, because any competent construction company should have built the cost of several snowstorms into their budget anyway, whereas a major snowstorm in San Francisco would be considered an act of God grossly in excess of what could reasonably be expected, because it hasn't happened since 1932.
To break it down further, here's the chain of arguments the plaintiff is stringing together:
1) Apple never added support for other app stores
2) As a result, the App Store had a monopoly on app stores
3) As a result, there was less competition between apps
4) As a result, app prices were inflated
5) As a result, customers paid higher prices
6) Ergo, Apple harmed customers by never adding support for other app stores
The App Store doesn't just deal in apps. It also deals in in-app purchases, which includes subscriptions. When you add those in, no link in your chain breaks down.
In a far away bizarro world, a fictional version of you cries out, "But wait! iBooks have to be rewritten for Apple's platform, are locked to Apple's platform, are sold through Apple, and switching to alternatives would require purchasing additional hardware, so it makes no sense to treat them as part of the more general eBooks market. They're their own iBooks market."
Except that:
You can download a free Kindle app to read Kindle books on iOS devices
You can download a free Nook app to read Nook books on iOS
You can download a dozen other apps to read arbitrary books in half a dozen other variants of ePUB and other formats
So the barrier there is purely one-way. Books from Apple's store are usable only on their platform, providing a barrier to leaving the platform, but there's no barrier to buying from other stores (apart from the headache of having to use Safari to purchase them on the device because of Apple demanding a cut if they allowed you to purchase books through competitors' reading apps, but we'll ignore that antitrust issue for the purposes of this discussion). Thus, at least if we're talking about folks using iOS devices, the iBooks Store is part of the broader market, because there's no additional barrier to buying books from a different source.
Also, there's very little barrier for the publishers, either. With the exception of interactive books (which didn't really even exist as a platform before iBooks), no book requires a rewrite to be used in iBooks. Yeah, various readers (including iBooks) often require specific workarounds to make books look good, but I distribute the exact same eBook for Nook, iBooks, Kobo, and half a dozen other ePUB-based readers through B&N, the iBooks Store, Kobo Store, Google Play, and others. The only distributor that gets a different edition is Amazon, because the workarounds required for making older E-Ink Kindles display something acceptable also resulted in an ePUB that doesn't pass validation. But even there, with negligible effort, you could take my ePUB bought from the iBooks Store, convert it, and assuming you can tolerate a little wonky formatting, you could read it on an Amazon reader. And you can take the Kindle edition and read it on an iOS device just by downloading Amazon's free Kindle app.
So there's a broad fungibility to eBooks that doesn't exist for apps, with the possible exception of middleware-based abominations, and even then, you have to re-buy the app to run it on a different platform, because the app developer (not the user) installs the app-specific code on top of the middleware. In other words, the app market and the eBook market are nothing alike.
If Developer A are making $100, Apple does not stop any other developer from creating a competing App and selling it for $0.
No, the need to run a business and not a charity prevents other developers from doing that.
Apple has real costs, server space, power, user accounting, data transmission, etc. These are real costs, and yet you still get free Apps.
Your point? Just because it is theoretically possible to distribute an app for free doesn't mean the lack of competing app stores doesn't drive the price up. For example, if there were a competing app store right now, Netflix, Amazon, and all the other subscription-based services would have left the iOS App Store already, because those other app stores would no doubt let them provide customers with access to their own internal billing and payment system, which is, frankly just as trustworthy as Apple's, but costs much, much less money to those businesses. And in the end, Apple would be forced to allow it as well, or else customers would enable those other app stores and start spending some of their money to buy apps through those services instead of Apple's iOS App Store.
Instead, because those alternative stores don't exist on iOS, some of those services have chosen to require a subscription prior to installing the app, and the rest have chosen to add a sizable surcharge to cover Apple's rather considerable subscription overhead. So many iOS users who buy through Apple instead of going to the company's website directly end up paying a lot more. Worse, Apple has rejected apps that attempt to tell people about the cheaper rate available when buying direct. If even a single user subscribed to those services through Apple, then that's proof beyond a reasonable doubt that consumers end up paying more as a direct result of the lack of other app stores.
That's only partially true. In that specific case, things only work because somebody else rewrote 99% of the code in your app on the other platform. What you're doing at that point is basically using somebody else's app, and writing small bits of code to control limited aspects of its behavior.
The result is almost invariably so horrible to use that nobody will do so, and the exceptions can usually be rewritten as a web app more easily. Worse, it usually ends up being easier to rewrite it from scratch without trying to use cross-platform middleware layers even if you can make it work. Or at least that has been my experience with similar sorts of cross-platform app development environments on other platforms.
They are arguing that App prices are higher and therefore the consumer is harmed because of Apples restrictions. THAT is patently false because it is the developer who sets the price, not Apple.
Actually, that's not entirely true. To some extent, the need to break even sets the price. Because Apple controls the only access to the platform, Apple takes a cut of revenue. If the app developer wants to turn a profit, they must charge a high enough price on iOS to make up for the money that they give to Apple. This is particularly problematic when it comes to subscription revenue, where they have to pay Apple on an ongoing basis. That does, in fact, raise prices for consumers, as has been demonstrated repeatedly.
The root cause is fundamental to the very nature of CPU power management to extend battery life, and can't be fixed, but it can be ameliorated somewhat.
Fundamentally, CR was complaining about the difference between maximum and minimum battery life. That difference is caused by the OS shutting down unnecessary CPU cores and reducing the core voltage of cores when not in use or only just barely in use. The only way to "fix" that difference would be to do less power management, but if you did that, instead of getting 2.5 to 20 hours, you'd always get 2.5 hours, or you'd get 2.5 to something considerably less than 20 hours. Either way, that sort of fix clearly wouldn't help users at all.
What Apple fixed was a single source of high power consumption; CR's test tickled a performance bug in Safari, and Apple fixed that bug. By modifying their OS to ensure that the benchmark no longer causes Safari to use more CPU, Apple essentially coded to the benchmark rather than improving overall battery life (except for people who use Safari in a broken configuration). That fix might satisfy CR, but it still doesn't address the more fundamental underlying problem, which is that worst-case battery life on these laptops is worse than in previous models.
The cause for the more general battery life regression is that the battery got smaller in the current generation of laptops, but the CPUs aren't significantly more efficient to make up for it. Any users who experience bad battery life on the new hardware (including the ones who had bad battery life because of this Safari bug) would have also had bad battery life on older hardware, but it wouldn't have been as bad because of the larger battery in the previous model.
What CR should have complained about was that even though the best-case battery life went up, the worst-case battery life went down. As a result, anyone experiencing poor battery life because of high CPU usage in other apps is still having the same problems as in previous OS versions. And that can't be fixed in software, because it is caused by the battery being too small.
They fixed the superficial bug, but they didn't fix the root cause. The same underlying hardware deficiency still exists, and even if Safari doesn't tickle that bug, other CPU-hungry apps (e.g. Lightroom) do and always will, because the battery life under load is still about 25% less than it was in previous models. That root cause can't be fixed in software; the best you can do is pressure app developers to use less power, which isn't always possible (e.g. Lightroom).
If by "performs as advertised", you mean "performs as advertised while running Safari", you are technically correct—the best kind of correct. Now let's see benchmarks on Pro apps, which a Pro machine is supposed to be designed around.
... having control over your own platform does not mean you have a monopoly, since they look at the market as a whole...
I reject that assertion from a legal perspective. An app for Android is not fungible with an app for iOS. It requires spending many hundreds of dollars for a consumer to switch from one platform to the other, which would be required if you want to run apps from the other store. Thus, there is a huge barrier to switching platforms, even if you ignore the loss of data that can't easily be ported, the headaches of having to learn a whole new UI paradigm, and other non-financial barriers.
At some point, a market becomes sufficiently disjoint such that it can no longer be considered a single market, and I maintain that the Android app market and the iOS app market meet that criterion and then some. After all, not a single app can exist in both markets without basically rewriting it, not a single device can use an app written for the other market, and not a single consumer can use apps in both markets without owning multiple pieces of hardware. As a result, apps in the iOS app store cannot usefully compete against apps in the Android market, because it would take an utterly absurd change in the price of an iOS app for it to be cheaper for consumers to spend a grand on a new phone and then buy the app on Android or vice versa.
Calling "apps" a single market is just as laughable as calling firewood the same market as natural gas. After all, you can heat your house on both of them, but your heating system cannot burn both; your furnace burns natural gas, and your fireplace or wood stove burns wood. So we shouldn't consider PG&E to have a monopoly on the natural gas market, because you can always sell your condo and buy a house that has a fireplace and burn firewood instead. See how utterly ridiculous that exact same argument sounds when the dollar figures are scaled up by only a couple of zeroes? And arguably, the app market distinction is even greater, because many houses have both a fireplace and a furnace.
Why, then, do you you believe that those completely disparate app markets should be seen as a single market? That just doesn't make any sense at all from a legal perspective, even though people keep claiming otherwise. If firewood and natural gas are separate markets, then iOS apps and Android apps are separate markets, too.
That's only true if app stores could select what apps they sell. Since you can't download Amazon Video anywhere but Amazon Underground, and you can't download Samsung Gear apps anywhere but the Samsung store. Sure, you can say that the Gear isn't an android watch, but most consumers can't tell the difference since it requires an android phone. A lot of apps are exclusive to one app store. So unless you are willing to only use a fraction of the quality apps you can't limiot yourself to one app store.
That logic is irrelevant. You have the choice to only use "a fraction of the quality apps". Nobody is forcing you to use Amazon Video if they don't want to make it available in the Play store, and if most of the potential user base said, "Screw you" to Amazon and then refused to install a separate app store just to use their app, they would be forced to either make their products available through more than one store or fail, replaced by some other company that does. The reality is that most of the apps that most people use are available fairly broadly, so as the GP said, nobody is forcing you to use another app store. You're choosing to do so because it gives you an advantage.
The problem here is that Apple isn't letting the market decide whether those other app stores matter; instead, it is interfering with the free market in a way that actively harms consumers and developers in a number of ways. More on this in a moment.
Let me guess, you want to complain about how users shouldn't have to work to install apps the main store doesn't want to sell.
No, it has nothing to do with work. It has to do with Apple deliberately making it harder and harder for Cydia to even be possible, in ways that directly harm consumers.
We're complaining that users shouldn't be forced to wait for potentially weeks or months after a new OS update comes out before a jailbreak (that shouldn't even be necessary) becomes available.
We're complaining that as a result, users have to choose between running those apps and leaving those phones vulnerable to attacks on security holes fixed in that OS update, which could easily result in those phones becoming part of a botnet that, in turn, harms people who didn't install Cydia and may not even own an iPhone.
We're complaining that Apple's strict control allows for unfair competition by preventing any apps that have functionality similar to the functionality on the phone, thus harming developers and consumers alike.
Either one of those by itself should be enough to get a judgment against Apple in any sane universe. There is no valid technical reason why Apple could not trivially allow a configuration profile payload to add support for a third-party app store in a manner that fully maintains security (assuming that the third-party app store prevents malicious apps, anyway). Apart from a few extra lines of code to allow multiple app store root certificates, it should literally be a matter of installing a certificate in the right place. The only plausible reasons are either anticompetitive or are bizarre control-freak reasons.
Really now.. Tell me, do you fix your own car? Do you grow your own food? Can you repair a toilet main? Do you know how to build a house or even a deck?
Speaking as a city dweller, in order: Often. Occasionally. Sure, but I won't (eww; it was gross enough re-plumbing my garbage disposal). And yes, in theory, but in practice, I don't have time to do so.
A lot of people in rural areas can be pretty self-sufficient, or at least sufficient in a small community. I live in an urban area. Urban folks panic when their iPhone loses signal and whine that government needs to protect them and make sure nobody jams their precious cell signal in a movie theatre.
I don't think that's really true. I've actually had conversations with other people about woodworking tools in the past couple of weeks in the heart of the Bay Area. Yes, there are plenty of people I know who fit your description of urban folks, but there were plenty of folks back in rural West Tennessee who also fit that same description, and in approximately the same proportions.
No, the main difference I've seen between folks who live in cities and folks who live in the country is that the people who live in the cities have more things to occupy their time, and aren't willing to spend it on those other things to save a few bucks unless it also saves them time.
For example, I do minor car repairs because I can mail order a part late at night, and I can do the work myself in half an hour at my convenience; the only alternative requires working around the repair shop's inconvenient schedule and potentially wasting hours of my time waiting for a repair to be finished, or worse. The only thing I have less patience for than other people wasting my time is repair shops that charge $300 an hour for labor and then screw around with my car for a week claiming that they haven't been able to find the problem, all the while trying to scare me into replacing my car, which they conveniently sell.
Similarly, I occasionally grow a little food for fun, but I recognize that I have neither enough space nor enough time to grow enough food to be meaningful. There are too many other demands on my time, and land costs too much. BTW, fun fact: Did you know that you can grow pole beans indoors in a planter box? The crop yield per seed sucks, but they'll grow right up your venetian blinds. But I digress.
All of those smug commenters turned out to be wrong.
Actually, I don't remember anybody saying that it was entirely a hardware problem. It was very obvious from the very beginning that it was both. If it were purely a hardware problem, it would run down quickly all the time. The fact that it only happened when certain apps were running meant that software was causing excessive CPU utilization, which resulted in the battery running down much faster than you would ordinarily expect when running a typically power-thrifty app such as a web browser. And if it were purely a software problem, the remaining time estimate would be wrong, but the computer would continue to operate.
Clearly, it is also not only a software problem. If the hardware had been designed with a proper 100 Wh battery instead of the inadequate 75 Wh battery that they ended up using, then the worst-case battery life for the new MacBook Pro would be a few percent better than the worst-case battery life for the previous generation. Instead, as this software bug so clearly demonstrated, it is possible for CPU-hungry software to burn through the battery in only about 75% of the time that it took on the previous model, because as we all correctly pointed out, the battery is too small, and the CPU isn't significantly more efficient than it was in previous generations.
It is unfortunate that Consumer Reports retracted their complaint. As a result, no doubt a bunch of Apple apologists who don't actually understand how CPU power management works will falsely trumpet that there's nothing wrong with the hardware, when in reality, that couldn't be farther from the truth. The software bug exposed a fundamental design flaw in the hardware. The only thing that the software update fixed was the behavior of a single app (Safari). Although users who never run anything but a web browser can now rest easy in blissful ignorance, power users will still hate this new laptop because they'll still get three-quarters as much battery life as they did in the previous model, give or take a few percent. That's the harsh reality.
So no, the experts weren't wrong. You just didn't understand what we said.
This is true only up to the point where some C*O recognizes the pattern and decides to build a device that meets people's needs without all the dongles. That's what is known as "disruptive innovation". And when that happens, suddenly the market shifts. That's how Apple got to where it is, and there's nothing stopping some other company from doing the same.
Given that micro-USB is the flakiest jack I've ever dealt with, I'd be shocked if they finally figured it out. Each progressive iteration of USB has had more problems than the last, because the contacts are too small to be reliable.
What makes 1/8" mini plugs awesome is that the contact surface alone is about as thick as an entire USB-C connector. For something that's constantly being bumped, you can't beat large contact surfaces for reliability.
I tried hosting a site with them, and found that all the stupid WordPress hosting on the same site resulted in horribly inconsistent performance, with requests frequently taking only two or three seconds to send back the data, but waiting twenty or thirty seconds to *start* sending data.
I asked them to move me to a server that was less overloaded with bloated WP instances, since my site was a trivial static content site. They said no. I pulled the plug and got a refund.
To make a long story short, after trying other shared hosting providers with mostly poor luck, I now have a Mac Mini colocated in a data center in Wisconsin.
This. I can easily afford $35 a month, but for $8–12 a month, Netflix provides me with enough content to fill the available TV viewing time in my busy life. What could some other streaming service possibly offer that would be worth spending 3–4x as much per hour of viewing?
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Soldering new chips won't add the missing address lines needed to address more RAM. Right now, the big limitations seem to be that laptop CPUs aren't designed to handle a sensible amount of RAM.
Their marijuana data will vanish in a puff of smoke?
Additionally (and apologies for forgetting to add this yesterday), the real issue is not whether the author can deliberately write it in a portable way and reuse some of the code on another platform, but rather whether it is possible to write an app in such a way that the purchaser can then install that same app on the other platform without buying it again for the other platform. As long as that isn't possible, there's effectively no overlap between the iOS app market and the Android app market, making them separate markets in practice.
All the things you say are correct except for where you conclude that this means the behavior isn't anticompetitive. What makes something anticompetitive is the result in practice, not whether or not it is technically possible for a company to avoid it. In reality, a number of companies tacked on a 30% markup for their subscriptions so that they could sell them in the app, because a sizable percentage of users primarily used the service through their app rather than through the website. The result was that iOS users paid a lot more than Android users, who were offered the option to pay the cheaper amount with a credit card using the companies' normal merchant account systems. Q.E.D.
That's completely and utterly irrelevant from a legal perspective. Yes, technically, you can create a bad user experience by refusing to allow your app to do anything until the user looks up your website in Google, goes to it, and buys a subscription. However, the app can't even link to your website to buy a subscription; Apple's rules deliberately ensure that the user experience for anyone who dares not give them their cut is as bad as humanly possible.
An antitrust violation need not require a complete inability to purchase something in another way. It merely needs to be sufficiently difficult that the net effect is a significant number of users paying more for the same service solely because there are not multiple app stores on iOS. As long as they can show that a significant number of people paid more on iOS, and that the primary reason for that overpayment was because Apple's rules made it highly inconvenient to offer services to iPhone customers without paying an exorbitant percentage of their subscription fees to Apple, then Apple is clearly in violation of the law. This really isn't even a legal grey area. Apple is absolutely, fundamentally, and incontrovertibly on the wrong side of the law—so much so that I'm shocked anybody is even attempting to argue the other side. This should be an open-and-shut case if they argue it correctly.
You're right. There's nothing preventing developers from giving away their work... other than, you know, not getting paid for their work, and having to spend a hundred bucks a year for the right to give away their work for free.... The existence of free apps is completely orthogonal to the issue at hand.
Really? If so, what the heck are the state's lawyers smoking when they write these contracts? That should be downright easy to prevent with proper contract language. Just specify as part of the contract terms a maximum overage—say 1% of the contract—beyond which any remaining work must be rebid, with the original contractor held in material breach of contract and ineligible to bid on any government contracts for a period of one year for the first occurrence, five years for the second, 25 years for the third, etc., with the only exception to that ineligibility being for acts of God grossly in excess of what could reasonably be expected (*). So the contractors would have the option to say, "We were wrong," and back out at that point, but it would come with a penalty that's big enough that they would do so only when there's no other option.
(*) For example, a major snowstorm in Tahoe is never a reason for an overage, because any competent construction company should have built the cost of several snowstorms into their budget anyway, whereas a major snowstorm in San Francisco would be considered an act of God grossly in excess of what could reasonably be expected, because it hasn't happened since 1932.
The App Store doesn't just deal in apps. It also deals in in-app purchases, which includes subscriptions. When you add those in, no link in your chain breaks down.
Except that:
So the barrier there is purely one-way. Books from Apple's store are usable only on their platform, providing a barrier to leaving the platform, but there's no barrier to buying from other stores (apart from the headache of having to use Safari to purchase them on the device because of Apple demanding a cut if they allowed you to purchase books through competitors' reading apps, but we'll ignore that antitrust issue for the purposes of this discussion). Thus, at least if we're talking about folks using iOS devices, the iBooks Store is part of the broader market, because there's no additional barrier to buying books from a different source.
Also, there's very little barrier for the publishers, either. With the exception of interactive books (which didn't really even exist as a platform before iBooks), no book requires a rewrite to be used in iBooks. Yeah, various readers (including iBooks) often require specific workarounds to make books look good, but I distribute the exact same eBook for Nook, iBooks, Kobo, and half a dozen other ePUB-based readers through B&N, the iBooks Store, Kobo Store, Google Play, and others. The only distributor that gets a different edition is Amazon, because the workarounds required for making older E-Ink Kindles display something acceptable also resulted in an ePUB that doesn't pass validation. But even there, with negligible effort, you could take my ePUB bought from the iBooks Store, convert it, and assuming you can tolerate a little wonky formatting, you could read it on an Amazon reader. And you can take the Kindle edition and read it on an iOS device just by downloading Amazon's free Kindle app.
So there's a broad fungibility to eBooks that doesn't exist for apps, with the possible exception of middleware-based abominations, and even then, you have to re-buy the app to run it on a different platform, because the app developer (not the user) installs the app-specific code on top of the middleware. In other words, the app market and the eBook market are nothing alike.
No, the need to run a business and not a charity prevents other developers from doing that.
Your point? Just because it is theoretically possible to distribute an app for free doesn't mean the lack of competing app stores doesn't drive the price up. For example, if there were a competing app store right now, Netflix, Amazon, and all the other subscription-based services would have left the iOS App Store already, because those other app stores would no doubt let them provide customers with access to their own internal billing and payment system, which is, frankly just as trustworthy as Apple's, but costs much, much less money to those businesses. And in the end, Apple would be forced to allow it as well, or else customers would enable those other app stores and start spending some of their money to buy apps through those services instead of Apple's iOS App Store.
Instead, because those alternative stores don't exist on iOS, some of those services have chosen to require a subscription prior to installing the app, and the rest have chosen to add a sizable surcharge to cover Apple's rather considerable subscription overhead. So many iOS users who buy through Apple instead of going to the company's website directly end up paying a lot more. Worse, Apple has rejected apps that attempt to tell people about the cheaper rate available when buying direct. If even a single user subscribed to those services through Apple, then that's proof beyond a reasonable doubt that consumers end up paying more as a direct result of the lack of other app stores.
That's only partially true. In that specific case, things only work because somebody else rewrote 99% of the code in your app on the other platform. What you're doing at that point is basically using somebody else's app, and writing small bits of code to control limited aspects of its behavior.
The result is almost invariably so horrible to use that nobody will do so, and the exceptions can usually be rewritten as a web app more easily. Worse, it usually ends up being easier to rewrite it from scratch without trying to use cross-platform middleware layers even if you can make it work. Or at least that has been my experience with similar sorts of cross-platform app development environments on other platforms.
Actually, that's not entirely true. To some extent, the need to break even sets the price. Because Apple controls the only access to the platform, Apple takes a cut of revenue. If the app developer wants to turn a profit, they must charge a high enough price on iOS to make up for the money that they give to Apple. This is particularly problematic when it comes to subscription revenue, where they have to pay Apple on an ongoing basis. That does, in fact, raise prices for consumers, as has been demonstrated repeatedly.
The root cause is fundamental to the very nature of CPU power management to extend battery life, and can't be fixed, but it can be ameliorated somewhat.
Fundamentally, CR was complaining about the difference between maximum and minimum battery life. That difference is caused by the OS shutting down unnecessary CPU cores and reducing the core voltage of cores when not in use or only just barely in use. The only way to "fix" that difference would be to do less power management, but if you did that, instead of getting 2.5 to 20 hours, you'd always get 2.5 hours, or you'd get 2.5 to something considerably less than 20 hours. Either way, that sort of fix clearly wouldn't help users at all.
What Apple fixed was a single source of high power consumption; CR's test tickled a performance bug in Safari, and Apple fixed that bug. By modifying their OS to ensure that the benchmark no longer causes Safari to use more CPU, Apple essentially coded to the benchmark rather than improving overall battery life (except for people who use Safari in a broken configuration). That fix might satisfy CR, but it still doesn't address the more fundamental underlying problem, which is that worst-case battery life on these laptops is worse than in previous models.
The cause for the more general battery life regression is that the battery got smaller in the current generation of laptops, but the CPUs aren't significantly more efficient to make up for it. Any users who experience bad battery life on the new hardware (including the ones who had bad battery life because of this Safari bug) would have also had bad battery life on older hardware, but it wouldn't have been as bad because of the larger battery in the previous model.
What CR should have complained about was that even though the best-case battery life went up, the worst-case battery life went down. As a result, anyone experiencing poor battery life because of high CPU usage in other apps is still having the same problems as in previous OS versions. And that can't be fixed in software, because it is caused by the battery being too small.
Says the person who doesn't even know enough to understand why he/she is wrong and I'm right.
They fixed the superficial bug, but they didn't fix the root cause. The same underlying hardware deficiency still exists, and even if Safari doesn't tickle that bug, other CPU-hungry apps (e.g. Lightroom) do and always will, because the battery life under load is still about 25% less than it was in previous models. That root cause can't be fixed in software; the best you can do is pressure app developers to use less power, which isn't always possible (e.g. Lightroom).
If by "performs as advertised", you mean "performs as advertised while running Safari", you are technically correct—the best kind of correct. Now let's see benchmarks on Pro apps, which a Pro machine is supposed to be designed around.
I reject that assertion from a legal perspective. An app for Android is not fungible with an app for iOS. It requires spending many hundreds of dollars for a consumer to switch from one platform to the other, which would be required if you want to run apps from the other store. Thus, there is a huge barrier to switching platforms, even if you ignore the loss of data that can't easily be ported, the headaches of having to learn a whole new UI paradigm, and other non-financial barriers.
At some point, a market becomes sufficiently disjoint such that it can no longer be considered a single market, and I maintain that the Android app market and the iOS app market meet that criterion and then some. After all, not a single app can exist in both markets without basically rewriting it, not a single device can use an app written for the other market, and not a single consumer can use apps in both markets without owning multiple pieces of hardware. As a result, apps in the iOS app store cannot usefully compete against apps in the Android market, because it would take an utterly absurd change in the price of an iOS app for it to be cheaper for consumers to spend a grand on a new phone and then buy the app on Android or vice versa.
Calling "apps" a single market is just as laughable as calling firewood the same market as natural gas. After all, you can heat your house on both of them, but your heating system cannot burn both; your furnace burns natural gas, and your fireplace or wood stove burns wood. So we shouldn't consider PG&E to have a monopoly on the natural gas market, because you can always sell your condo and buy a house that has a fireplace and burn firewood instead. See how utterly ridiculous that exact same argument sounds when the dollar figures are scaled up by only a couple of zeroes? And arguably, the app market distinction is even greater, because many houses have both a fireplace and a furnace.
Why, then, do you you believe that those completely disparate app markets should be seen as a single market? That just doesn't make any sense at all from a legal perspective, even though people keep claiming otherwise. If firewood and natural gas are separate markets, then iOS apps and Android apps are separate markets, too.
That logic is irrelevant. You have the choice to only use "a fraction of the quality apps". Nobody is forcing you to use Amazon Video if they don't want to make it available in the Play store, and if most of the potential user base said, "Screw you" to Amazon and then refused to install a separate app store just to use their app, they would be forced to either make their products available through more than one store or fail, replaced by some other company that does. The reality is that most of the apps that most people use are available fairly broadly, so as the GP said, nobody is forcing you to use another app store. You're choosing to do so because it gives you an advantage.
The problem here is that Apple isn't letting the market decide whether those other app stores matter; instead, it is interfering with the free market in a way that actively harms consumers and developers in a number of ways. More on this in a moment.
No, it has nothing to do with work. It has to do with Apple deliberately making it harder and harder for Cydia to even be possible, in ways that directly harm consumers.
Either one of those by itself should be enough to get a judgment against Apple in any sane universe. There is no valid technical reason why Apple could not trivially allow a configuration profile payload to add support for a third-party app store in a manner that fully maintains security (assuming that the third-party app store prevents malicious apps, anyway). Apart from a few extra lines of code to allow multiple app store root certificates, it should literally be a matter of installing a certificate in the right place. The only plausible reasons are either anticompetitive or are bizarre control-freak reasons.
It'll be golden, I tell ya. Absolutely Yuge.
That world you end up with after you push all us [expletive deleted] into the ocean isn't going to be as great as you think it is.
Yeah. For one thing, most of us can swim.
Speaking as a city dweller, in order: Often. Occasionally. Sure, but I won't (eww; it was gross enough re-plumbing my garbage disposal). And yes, in theory, but in practice, I don't have time to do so.
I don't think that's really true. I've actually had conversations with other people about woodworking tools in the past couple of weeks in the heart of the Bay Area. Yes, there are plenty of people I know who fit your description of urban folks, but there were plenty of folks back in rural West Tennessee who also fit that same description, and in approximately the same proportions.
No, the main difference I've seen between folks who live in cities and folks who live in the country is that the people who live in the cities have more things to occupy their time, and aren't willing to spend it on those other things to save a few bucks unless it also saves them time.
For example, I do minor car repairs because I can mail order a part late at night, and I can do the work myself in half an hour at my convenience; the only alternative requires working around the repair shop's inconvenient schedule and potentially wasting hours of my time waiting for a repair to be finished, or worse. The only thing I have less patience for than other people wasting my time is repair shops that charge $300 an hour for labor and then screw around with my car for a week claiming that they haven't been able to find the problem, all the while trying to scare me into replacing my car, which they conveniently sell.
Similarly, I occasionally grow a little food for fun, but I recognize that I have neither enough space nor enough time to grow enough food to be meaningful. There are too many other demands on my time, and land costs too much. BTW, fun fact: Did you know that you can grow pole beans indoors in a planter box? The crop yield per seed sucks, but they'll grow right up your venetian blinds. But I digress.
Actually, I don't remember anybody saying that it was entirely a hardware problem. It was very obvious from the very beginning that it was both. If it were purely a hardware problem, it would run down quickly all the time. The fact that it only happened when certain apps were running meant that software was causing excessive CPU utilization, which resulted in the battery running down much faster than you would ordinarily expect when running a typically power-thrifty app such as a web browser. And if it were purely a software problem, the remaining time estimate would be wrong, but the computer would continue to operate.
Clearly, it is also not only a software problem. If the hardware had been designed with a proper 100 Wh battery instead of the inadequate 75 Wh battery that they ended up using, then the worst-case battery life for the new MacBook Pro would be a few percent better than the worst-case battery life for the previous generation. Instead, as this software bug so clearly demonstrated, it is possible for CPU-hungry software to burn through the battery in only about 75% of the time that it took on the previous model, because as we all correctly pointed out, the battery is too small, and the CPU isn't significantly more efficient than it was in previous generations.
It is unfortunate that Consumer Reports retracted their complaint. As a result, no doubt a bunch of Apple apologists who don't actually understand how CPU power management works will falsely trumpet that there's nothing wrong with the hardware, when in reality, that couldn't be farther from the truth. The software bug exposed a fundamental design flaw in the hardware. The only thing that the software update fixed was the behavior of a single app (Safari). Although users who never run anything but a web browser can now rest easy in blissful ignorance, power users will still hate this new laptop because they'll still get three-quarters as much battery life as they did in the previous model, give or take a few percent. That's the harsh reality.
So no, the experts weren't wrong. You just didn't understand what we said.
This is true only up to the point where some C*O recognizes the pattern and decides to build a device that meets people's needs without all the dongles. That's what is known as "disruptive innovation". And when that happens, suddenly the market shifts. That's how Apple got to where it is, and there's nothing stopping some other company from doing the same.
Given that micro-USB is the flakiest jack I've ever dealt with, I'd be shocked if they finally figured it out. Each progressive iteration of USB has had more problems than the last, because the contacts are too small to be reliable.
What makes 1/8" mini plugs awesome is that the contact surface alone is about as thick as an entire USB-C connector. For something that's constantly being bumped, you can't beat large contact surfaces for reliability.
Since 2006, they've had the ability to convert your own adult cells into pluripotent stem cells. Why the heck would you extract them from an embryo?
I tried hosting a site with them, and found that all the stupid WordPress hosting on the same site resulted in horribly inconsistent performance, with requests frequently taking only two or three seconds to send back the data, but waiting twenty or thirty seconds to *start* sending data.
I asked them to move me to a server that was less overloaded with bloated WP instances, since my site was a trivial static content site. They said no. I pulled the plug and got a refund.
To make a long story short, after trying other shared hosting providers with mostly poor luck, I now have a Mac Mini colocated in a data center in Wisconsin.
This. I can easily afford $35 a month, but for $8–12 a month, Netflix provides me with enough content to fill the available TV viewing time in my busy life. What could some other streaming service possibly offer that would be worth spending 3–4x as much per hour of viewing?