He also left out the part where the dev kit costs $100/year
Probably because you don't need it. The dev tools are free to download and use. You only need a developer account if you want to sell your app in the App Store.
and that you need at least a $1500 Mac to run it on.
A $500 Mac mini bought brand new would suffice, or, even better, buy a used Mac for cheaper.
Hell, I was given an early MacBook Air a few years back. It'd resale used for maybe $100 at this point, but it'd be more than enough if all you wanted to do was compile the occasional app. Given that you already paid $700+ for the phone, paying an extra $100 for a machine that can compile code for it isn't exactly a big ask.
They'd have to be, since they haven't been programmed to suffer from delusions of grandeur yet. But illusions? That's apparently right up their alley already.
Come again? While iOS may be a walled garden, macOS has no meaningful restrictions on what you can run. If you can download it, you can run it, regardless of source, author, or whether they're registered with Apple. I'll grant that the default setting these days is to disallow unsigned apps (i.e. apps not signed by a registered Apple developer), which makes sense as a default, given that this is an OS being used by untrained masses, but for someone such as yourself, you can easily bypass the restriction on a permanent basis by simply toggling the relevant security settings in System Preferences (or you could bypass it on a one-off basis via the context menu for the app).
Perhaps you're confused about the Mac App Store and think it's the only way to download apps for Mac? Again, while that sort of thing may be true on iOS, that's never been the case on the Mac.
Google could say they deleted the listings. As long as there is no way to access those listings from Canada, they would be compliant.
Not true. Read the article. It specifically says that for Google to comply, they need to de-index the listing globally. The court was very specific in how Google was to implement the injunction against it.
you should consider the intent of the court.
For the sake of argument let's consider it. Straight from the horse's mouth, the stated purpose of the case was to decide...
Whether Google can be ordered [...] to globally de-index websites of distributor [...] — Whether Supreme Court of British Columbia had jurisdiction to grant injunction with extraterritorial effect
In other words, they explicitly set out to rule on whether the injunction against Google could apply "extraterritorially" (i.e. beyond the court's authority), and they decided that it could. There was nothing accidental or incidental about the ruling applying internationally. It was neither the side effect you've claimed it was, nor, as you just suggested, was it left to Google to choose how to implement the injunction against them.
Does the fact that they made it clear they knew they were imposing their laws outside their borders have any effect on your thinking?
You can't compare that to Americans traveling to Canada to buy beer. Canadian bars aren't subject to US law and aren't doing any business in the USA.
Sure I can. After all, Google France SarL, Google India Private Limited, and Google Japan Inc. aren't doing business in Canada and thus shouldn't be subject to Canadian law, right?
Google is doing business in Canada.
Are they? You glossed right over the distinction I made about branches. While it's true that "Google" is in Canada, it's not Google proper. Instead, it's Google Canada Corporation, one of their many subsidiaries. While that subsidiary may be subject to Canadian law, Google's worldwide subsidiaries are no more subject to Canadian law than Canadian bars are subject to American law.
Courts in other countries would end up all saying the same if the company had the money and time to sue in every country.
A) No, they wouldn't. This exact sort of issue has been going through courts around the world, with different outcomes in different jurisdictions. Some hold that search listings are themselves infringing on IP rights, others hold that search listings are protected as free speech, and others land somewhere in the middle.
B) Even if what you said were true, that isn't a valid excuse for skipping due process in those other countries. Trademarks may be recognized internationally, but it's still the responsibility of the trademark holder to assert their rights in each of those jurisdictions.
It's not an attempt to impose laws to other countries. It's a side-effect.
Whether they intended it or not doesn't matter. What matters is that they specifically demanded a global extent to their ruling, meaning that the ruling goes well beyond their authority as a national court.
Why is it their responsibility? That's like asking what Canadian bars are doing to make sure that not a single American under the age of 21 is able to cross the border for a beer, given that the drinking age is lower in Canada. Canadian bars have no obligation to enforce American law. On what basis would Google's branches not in Canada have an obligation to enforce Canadian law?
Canada's attempt to unilaterally impose its own laws in other countries is in no way similar to trademarks, which are protected by mutual agreements enforced via treaties between nations.
Canada has no basis for enforcing rulings beyond its jurisdiction, so Google has no obligation to comply with the Hobson's choice you've outlined.
It makes no sense to demand that companies only do search or advertising
No one is demanding that, and I have no idea how you reached that incorrect assumption. European law simply demands that if you do both, you need to not abuse your position in one to give yourself an advantage in the other.
This is equivalent to saying that [...]
No, it's not like your analogy at all. You're saying that TV network A is getting in trouble for not showing ads for TV network B's shows, but that's not at all what's happening here. What's happening here is that TV network A commands 90% of viewership and also owns a fast food chain that they prominently advertise on their network during primetime hours. Meanwhile, they're burying the ads for competing fast food chains so that they only air during non-primetime hours. As such, European law dictates that they're unfairly leveraging their dominance in TV to gain an unfair advantage in fast food.
Similarly, Google is alleged to have been promoting their own services that are unrelated to search ahead of those offered by their competitors. Dominating search and advertising is not a problem, but using that dominance to prevent others from competing with you in unrelated markets absolutely is a problem.
Who forces anyone to use Google in the first place?
Consumers are forcing retailers to use Google.
Your confusion is stemming from the fact that you're thinking of this backwards: you're approaching it from the consumer side, rather than the retailer side. Consumers have free choice in regards to what search engine they use, but the fact that 90% of them have chosen Google means that stores have no choice. They are forced to advertise through Google if they want to stay in business. European law dictates that companies cannot use their dominance in one market to give themselves an unfair advantage in another market, which is exactly what Google is doing when it uses its dominance in search to give its store ads a leg up above those of competing stores.
That's the exact one I had in mind. Looks like it's been updated since the last time I installed it and has addressed some of the missing features and bugs I was speaking of, so thanks for the link!
Bingo. For my part, it's because Hangouts doesn't play nice with other chat clients, such as Pidgin, whereas GTalk played nice with all of them, given that it was built on an open protocol, XMPP, rather than the proprietary protocol Hangouts uses. While it's possible to get Hangouts working in Pidgin by using some extensions that are buggy and missing key features, it's an inferior experience to what I had with GTalk.
If you're talking a 50-story building of grade A office space, you're not going to have just one elevator shaft. You'll have banks of elevators, potentially as many as 30, simply because you're limited to one car per shaft. Using your math, 30 elevators would mean 180,000 sqft of floor space (i.e. $180,000,000 at $1000/sqft).
With this new technology, the limit of one car per shaft is broken.
Suddenly, you can replace those 30 shafts with just four: one to go up, one to go down, one for entry and exit, and one for reloading (i.e. replacing cars in use so that each floor always has a car ready to be used). You'd only need one elevator door per floor, since the car could switch to the up or down track after you boarded. And because there'd always be an elevator waiting for you, you wouldn't need a waiting area at all.
Removing the 10' waiting area reduces the footprint of each shaft from 120 sqft per floor to just 40 sqft per floor, and when you couple that with reducing the number of shafts from 30 to 4, we see the total footprint shrink from 3,600 sqft per floor to just 160 sqft per floor. Across 50 floors, that'd mean going from 180,000 sqft to just 8,000 sqft, or going from $180,000,000 of floor space to just $8,000,000, saving you $172,000,000 of floor space.
All of which is to say, while sideways movement does open up novel possibilities, such quickly traveling between adjacent skyscrapers, the most valuable use for sideways movement will likely be having cars simply move between adjacent tracks. Doing so lets you break all sorts of assumptions that hold back traditional elevators.
While I agree with your side, I disagree with your logic. Microsoft is within the jurisdiction of the US courts, and US courts are allowed to issue warrants demanding that organizations hand over items in their control. That's all that the warrant demands, so I'd suggest that the warrant itself is perfectly legal.
That said, because the data is housed elsewhere Microsoft is incapable of producing it. As such, while it may be a lawful warrant, Microsoft should not and cannot be compelled to produce the data. The proper way to deal with that is through the local courts in the foreign jurisdiction.
Kidding aside, if they're no longer mining free users for useful information, it becomes nothing more than a vehicle for delivering ads. Given that Gmail is a gateway into the Google ecosystem for a lot of people, I seriously doubt that they'd kill it entirely, but I wouldn't bet on seeing any more major increases to the storage space allotted for the free tier.
I have one broadband ISP providing service at my suburban address. The price I'm paying for their lowest-tier 50 Mbps plan with a 250GB cap has gone up nearly 50% in the last two years because they're the only place in town offering broadband speeds. The next closest is the DSL ISP, which offers 3 Mbps. That's not a typo.
Every time I finish dealing with the ISPs around here, I have to check the calendar to confirm that I am indeed living in 2017, just because it feels like I'm stepping back in time whenever I have to deal with them.
$2 for a dozen? Aldi is selling them for $0.79/dozen, and Kroger had a special recently for $0.55/dozen.
I've received eggs from friends who raise their own chickens to save money on that sort of stuff, and there definitely is a taste difference in favor of those eggs, but for us and most people, it's not worth paying any extra at the store except perhaps for special occasions. And by the time you get down to $2 eggs, I can't tell any difference at all between them and the $1 eggs you can get elsewhere.
While Amazon is at the very bottom of the top spenders and Google is in the thick of it with big telecom and pharma, Apple is conspicuously missing. That's been true historically as well, since Apple has NEVER been a big spender when it comes to lobbying. They're routinely outspent by virtually all of their competitors, and while they have significantly increased their spending in recent years (roughly doubled from 2011 to 2016, bringing them to $4.67B last year), they're still nowhere close to their peers. Even Amazon, at the very bottom of the list, is spending nearly 3x what Apple is.
Moreover, Apple is talking about repatriating hundreds of billions of dollars ($200B, if memory serves), with potential taxes in the dozens of billions. If Apple was getting the "8x deduction" that you pulled out of your ass, simple division tells us that they'd need to be spending somewhere between a few hundred million and a few billion on lobbying in order to even make a dent on their taxes, which should put them so far off the top of that list that even the most ardent Apple apologist would be forced to acknowledge their shameless spending. Instead of that, however, they're so far down the list that I can't even find a number for where their spending is ranked. It's not even double-digit millions, let alone billions.
You make this argument because it is Apple, and not a "dirty" oil company
Facts are facts, regardless of the messenger's biases. If the argument is invalid, say why it's invalid. As it is, you've basically said that they are "guilty" of a crime you made up and that they deserve to pay because they can afford lawyers, lobbyists, and better accountants than you can, none of which are actually a crime.
Exactly. This bug would have happened regardless of Apple's move to 64-bit given that it's a flaw in the site's design that would affect any 32-bit architecture. Apple's move to 64-bit hardware and OSes is the reason newer iPads support the site at all, otherwise the site would be broken across all iPads.
Also, why Chess.com doesn't just switch to unsigned ints and/or migrate to GUIDs is beyond me. You could just map the existing integers to GUIDs and then use GUIDs going forward. 32-bit OSes and CPUs have no problems dealing with 128-bit GUIDs, and it's unlikely that they'd ever encounter this problem again in the next few thousand years.
I know this might be regarded as antediluvian but I use gPodder and do not participate in the Apple iTunes walled garden. If I cannot get a RSS feed [...]
There isn't a walled garden with Apple podcasts.
Unlike Stitcher and the other closed podcasting ecosystems that I vehemently oppose, Apple's podcast ecosystem (if we can even call it that) is nothing more than the world's largest directory of externally hosted RSS feeds for podcasts. That's it. They provide some default clients you can use, but the RSS feeds are all hosted elsewhere, and there's nothing about either the clients or the directory that locks you in (other than an inability to export your subscriptions, I suppose, though that feature isn't exactly common in podcast clients anyway). In fact, because Apple doesn't host any of the feeds itself, other podcast players, such as Overcast, have been able to bootstrap their own directories by scraping Apple's podcast directory for feeds.
In terms of their actual announcement, what's happening here is that they are adding some new fields that their clients will parse if the podcaster chooses to add those fields to their RSS feed. Podcasters who do so will be able to tell Apple's clients how the podcast should be listened to. Obviously, because the podcasters are hosting their own feeds, other clients will have the same access to that same data, so any other clients that would like to parse those fields will be able to take advantage of them to accomplish the same thing.
On the reverse side, Apple's podcast clients will begin providing some analytic data back to podcasters. Again, nothing about that locks the podcasters or the listeners into Apple's ecosystem, though it does make listens that occur via Apple's clients more valuable to podcasters and advertisers, since they'll be able to pull numbers out of them.
The part of the Apple comparison I was most interested in was the claim about profits. They're trying to tell us that topping $1 billion in sales (i.e. revenue) for the first time was sufficient to top Apple's profits in 2008-2010, right as the iPhone was gaining traction? I'm not buying it.
In the fourth quarter of 2009 alone, Apple posted profits of $1.67 billion on $9.87 billion in revenue, which would already be enough to top LEGO's sales numbers for the entire year. I don't see how one billion in annual sales could have resulted in LEGO topping Apple's quarterly profits, let alone their annual profits.
Slashdot Mirror
He also left out the part where the dev kit costs $100/year
Probably because you don't need it. The dev tools are free to download and use. You only need a developer account if you want to sell your app in the App Store.
and that you need at least a $1500 Mac to run it on.
A $500 Mac mini bought brand new would suffice, or, even better, buy a used Mac for cheaper.
Hell, I was given an early MacBook Air a few years back. It'd resale used for maybe $100 at this point, but it'd be more than enough if all you wanted to do was compile the occasional app. Given that you already paid $700+ for the phone, paying an extra $100 for a machine that can compile code for it isn't exactly a big ask.
What next? Illusions of grandeur?
They'd have to be, since they haven't been programmed to suffer from delusions of grandeur yet. But illusions? That's apparently right up their alley already.
Apple is a walled garden that nobody wants.
Come again? While iOS may be a walled garden, macOS has no meaningful restrictions on what you can run. If you can download it, you can run it, regardless of source, author, or whether they're registered with Apple. I'll grant that the default setting these days is to disallow unsigned apps (i.e. apps not signed by a registered Apple developer), which makes sense as a default, given that this is an OS being used by untrained masses, but for someone such as yourself, you can easily bypass the restriction on a permanent basis by simply toggling the relevant security settings in System Preferences (or you could bypass it on a one-off basis via the context menu for the app).
Perhaps you're confused about the Mac App Store and think it's the only way to download apps for Mac? Again, while that sort of thing may be true on iOS, that's never been the case on the Mac.
Google could say they deleted the listings. As long as there is no way to access those listings from Canada, they would be compliant.
Not true. Read the article. It specifically says that for Google to comply, they need to de-index the listing globally. The court was very specific in how Google was to implement the injunction against it.
you should consider the intent of the court.
For the sake of argument let's consider it. Straight from the horse's mouth, the stated purpose of the case was to decide...
Whether Google can be ordered [...] to globally de-index websites of distributor [...] — Whether Supreme Court of British Columbia had jurisdiction to grant injunction with extraterritorial effect
In other words, they explicitly set out to rule on whether the injunction against Google could apply "extraterritorially" (i.e. beyond the court's authority), and they decided that it could. There was nothing accidental or incidental about the ruling applying internationally. It was neither the side effect you've claimed it was, nor, as you just suggested, was it left to Google to choose how to implement the injunction against them.
Does the fact that they made it clear they knew they were imposing their laws outside their borders have any effect on your thinking?
You can't compare that to Americans traveling to Canada to buy beer. Canadian bars aren't subject to US law and aren't doing any business in the USA.
Sure I can. After all, Google France SarL, Google India Private Limited, and Google Japan Inc. aren't doing business in Canada and thus shouldn't be subject to Canadian law, right?
Google is doing business in Canada.
Are they? You glossed right over the distinction I made about branches. While it's true that "Google" is in Canada, it's not Google proper. Instead, it's Google Canada Corporation, one of their many subsidiaries. While that subsidiary may be subject to Canadian law, Google's worldwide subsidiaries are no more subject to Canadian law than Canadian bars are subject to American law.
Courts in other countries would end up all saying the same if the company had the money and time to sue in every country.
A) No, they wouldn't. This exact sort of issue has been going through courts around the world, with different outcomes in different jurisdictions. Some hold that search listings are themselves infringing on IP rights, others hold that search listings are protected as free speech, and others land somewhere in the middle.
B) Even if what you said were true, that isn't a valid excuse for skipping due process in those other countries. Trademarks may be recognized internationally, but it's still the responsibility of the trademark holder to assert their rights in each of those jurisdictions.
It's not an attempt to impose laws to other countries. It's a side-effect.
Whether they intended it or not doesn't matter. What matters is that they specifically demanded a global extent to their ruling, meaning that the ruling goes well beyond their authority as a national court.
Why is it their responsibility? That's like asking what Canadian bars are doing to make sure that not a single American under the age of 21 is able to cross the border for a beer, given that the drinking age is lower in Canada. Canadian bars have no obligation to enforce American law. On what basis would Google's branches not in Canada have an obligation to enforce Canadian law?
Canada's attempt to unilaterally impose its own laws in other countries is in no way similar to trademarks, which are protected by mutual agreements enforced via treaties between nations.
Canada has no basis for enforcing rulings beyond its jurisdiction, so Google has no obligation to comply with the Hobson's choice you've outlined.
While that may be true, why are you okay with that being their only choice?
Search is not a market. Selling advertising is.
False dichotomy.
It makes no sense to demand that companies only do search or advertising
No one is demanding that, and I have no idea how you reached that incorrect assumption. European law simply demands that if you do both, you need to not abuse your position in one to give yourself an advantage in the other.
This is equivalent to saying that [...]
No, it's not like your analogy at all. You're saying that TV network A is getting in trouble for not showing ads for TV network B's shows, but that's not at all what's happening here. What's happening here is that TV network A commands 90% of viewership and also owns a fast food chain that they prominently advertise on their network during primetime hours. Meanwhile, they're burying the ads for competing fast food chains so that they only air during non-primetime hours. As such, European law dictates that they're unfairly leveraging their dominance in TV to gain an unfair advantage in fast food.
Similarly, Google is alleged to have been promoting their own services that are unrelated to search ahead of those offered by their competitors. Dominating search and advertising is not a problem, but using that dominance to prevent others from competing with you in unrelated markets absolutely is a problem.
Who forces anyone to use Google in the first place?
Consumers are forcing retailers to use Google.
Your confusion is stemming from the fact that you're thinking of this backwards: you're approaching it from the consumer side, rather than the retailer side. Consumers have free choice in regards to what search engine they use, but the fact that 90% of them have chosen Google means that stores have no choice. They are forced to advertise through Google if they want to stay in business. European law dictates that companies cannot use their dominance in one market to give themselves an unfair advantage in another market, which is exactly what Google is doing when it uses its dominance in search to give its store ads a leg up above those of competing stores.
That's the exact one I had in mind. Looks like it's been updated since the last time I installed it and has addressed some of the missing features and bugs I was speaking of, so thanks for the link!
Bingo. For my part, it's because Hangouts doesn't play nice with other chat clients, such as Pidgin, whereas GTalk played nice with all of them, given that it was built on an open protocol, XMPP, rather than the proprietary protocol Hangouts uses. While it's possible to get Hangouts working in Pidgin by using some extensions that are buggy and missing key features, it's an inferior experience to what I had with GTalk.
If you're talking a 50-story building of grade A office space, you're not going to have just one elevator shaft. You'll have banks of elevators, potentially as many as 30, simply because you're limited to one car per shaft. Using your math, 30 elevators would mean 180,000 sqft of floor space (i.e. $180,000,000 at $1000/sqft).
With this new technology, the limit of one car per shaft is broken.
Suddenly, you can replace those 30 shafts with just four: one to go up, one to go down, one for entry and exit, and one for reloading (i.e. replacing cars in use so that each floor always has a car ready to be used). You'd only need one elevator door per floor, since the car could switch to the up or down track after you boarded. And because there'd always be an elevator waiting for you, you wouldn't need a waiting area at all.
Removing the 10' waiting area reduces the footprint of each shaft from 120 sqft per floor to just 40 sqft per floor, and when you couple that with reducing the number of shafts from 30 to 4, we see the total footprint shrink from 3,600 sqft per floor to just 160 sqft per floor. Across 50 floors, that'd mean going from 180,000 sqft to just 8,000 sqft, or going from $180,000,000 of floor space to just $8,000,000, saving you $172,000,000 of floor space.
All of which is to say, while sideways movement does open up novel possibilities, such quickly traveling between adjacent skyscrapers, the most valuable use for sideways movement will likely be having cars simply move between adjacent tracks. Doing so lets you break all sorts of assumptions that hold back traditional elevators.
Some people just want to watch the world burn...
While I agree with your side, I disagree with your logic. Microsoft is within the jurisdiction of the US courts, and US courts are allowed to issue warrants demanding that organizations hand over items in their control. That's all that the warrant demands, so I'd suggest that the warrant itself is perfectly legal.
That said, because the data is housed elsewhere Microsoft is incapable of producing it. As such, while it may be a lawful warrant, Microsoft should not and cannot be compelled to produce the data. The proper way to deal with that is through the local courts in the foreign jurisdiction.
Kidding aside, if they're no longer mining free users for useful information, it becomes nothing more than a vehicle for delivering ads. Given that Gmail is a gateway into the Google ecosystem for a lot of people, I seriously doubt that they'd kill it entirely, but I wouldn't bet on seeing any more major increases to the storage space allotted for the free tier.
This. So much.
I have one broadband ISP providing service at my suburban address. The price I'm paying for their lowest-tier 50 Mbps plan with a 250GB cap has gone up nearly 50% in the last two years because they're the only place in town offering broadband speeds. The next closest is the DSL ISP, which offers 3 Mbps. That's not a typo.
Every time I finish dealing with the ISPs around here, I have to check the calendar to confirm that I am indeed living in 2017, just because it feels like I'm stepping back in time whenever I have to deal with them.
Oops, that was supposed to say $4.67M, not $4.67B. Off by a few orders of magnitude with that number there.
$2 for a dozen? Aldi is selling them for $0.79/dozen, and Kroger had a special recently for $0.55/dozen.
I've received eggs from friends who raise their own chickens to save money on that sort of stuff, and there definitely is a taste difference in favor of those eggs, but for us and most people, it's not worth paying any extra at the store except perhaps for special occasions. And by the time you get down to $2 eggs, I can't tell any difference at all between them and the $1 eggs you can get elsewhere.
The problem is that these large companies hire expensive lawyers and lobbyists to make the rules. Apple is also guilty of this.
Here's a list of the top lobbying spenders last year. Notice anyone missing?
While Amazon is at the very bottom of the top spenders and Google is in the thick of it with big telecom and pharma, Apple is conspicuously missing. That's been true historically as well, since Apple has NEVER been a big spender when it comes to lobbying. They're routinely outspent by virtually all of their competitors, and while they have significantly increased their spending in recent years (roughly doubled from 2011 to 2016, bringing them to $4.67B last year), they're still nowhere close to their peers. Even Amazon, at the very bottom of the list, is spending nearly 3x what Apple is.
Moreover, Apple is talking about repatriating hundreds of billions of dollars ($200B, if memory serves), with potential taxes in the dozens of billions. If Apple was getting the "8x deduction" that you pulled out of your ass, simple division tells us that they'd need to be spending somewhere between a few hundred million and a few billion on lobbying in order to even make a dent on their taxes, which should put them so far off the top of that list that even the most ardent Apple apologist would be forced to acknowledge their shameless spending. Instead of that, however, they're so far down the list that I can't even find a number for where their spending is ranked. It's not even double-digit millions, let alone billions.
You make this argument because it is Apple, and not a "dirty" oil company
Facts are facts, regardless of the messenger's biases. If the argument is invalid, say why it's invalid. As it is, you've basically said that they are "guilty" of a crime you made up and that they deserve to pay because they can afford lawyers, lobbyists, and better accountants than you can, none of which are actually a crime.
It isn't Qwest. These documents are from 2014. Qwest was bought out and rebranded in 2011. The NSA stuff they're known for was from the early 2000s.
Exactly. This bug would have happened regardless of Apple's move to 64-bit given that it's a flaw in the site's design that would affect any 32-bit architecture. Apple's move to 64-bit hardware and OSes is the reason newer iPads support the site at all, otherwise the site would be broken across all iPads.
Also, why Chess.com doesn't just switch to unsigned ints and/or migrate to GUIDs is beyond me. You could just map the existing integers to GUIDs and then use GUIDs going forward. 32-bit OSes and CPUs have no problems dealing with 128-bit GUIDs, and it's unlikely that they'd ever encounter this problem again in the next few thousand years.
I know this might be regarded as antediluvian but I use gPodder and do not participate in the Apple iTunes walled garden. If I cannot get a RSS feed [...]
There isn't a walled garden with Apple podcasts.
Unlike Stitcher and the other closed podcasting ecosystems that I vehemently oppose, Apple's podcast ecosystem (if we can even call it that) is nothing more than the world's largest directory of externally hosted RSS feeds for podcasts. That's it. They provide some default clients you can use, but the RSS feeds are all hosted elsewhere, and there's nothing about either the clients or the directory that locks you in (other than an inability to export your subscriptions, I suppose, though that feature isn't exactly common in podcast clients anyway). In fact, because Apple doesn't host any of the feeds itself, other podcast players, such as Overcast, have been able to bootstrap their own directories by scraping Apple's podcast directory for feeds.
In terms of their actual announcement, what's happening here is that they are adding some new fields that their clients will parse if the podcaster chooses to add those fields to their RSS feed. Podcasters who do so will be able to tell Apple's clients how the podcast should be listened to. Obviously, because the podcasters are hosting their own feeds, other clients will have the same access to that same data, so any other clients that would like to parse those fields will be able to take advantage of them to accomplish the same thing.
On the reverse side, Apple's podcast clients will begin providing some analytic data back to podcasters. Again, nothing about that locks the podcasters or the listeners into Apple's ecosystem, though it does make listens that occur via Apple's clients more valuable to podcasters and advertisers, since they'll be able to pull numbers out of them.
The part of the Apple comparison I was most interested in was the claim about profits. They're trying to tell us that topping $1 billion in sales (i.e. revenue) for the first time was sufficient to top Apple's profits in 2008-2010, right as the iPhone was gaining traction? I'm not buying it.
In the fourth quarter of 2009 alone, Apple posted profits of $1.67 billion on $9.87 billion in revenue, which would already be enough to top LEGO's sales numbers for the entire year. I don't see how one billion in annual sales could have resulted in LEGO topping Apple's quarterly profits, let alone their annual profits.