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Apple and friends should be _required_ to document their protocols. It would improve competition and benefit everyone in the long run.
by toxik 6y ago
Apple and friends should be _required_ to document their protocols. It would improve competition and benefit everyone in the long run.
- meibo 6y agoAbsolutely. Some smart person at my local school district decided that all rooms be fitted with Apple TVs(a great budget decision, especially since they're used exclusively as cast targets and have no accounts), which now only about 30% of students and about 70% of teachers can use because you need Apple clients to use them. This is in Europe, so Android has a relatively large userbase, especially for students. The same smart person worked out a great deal during Covid that lets "disadvantaged" families buy an iPad for only 500€ so they can participate in online schooling.
- mensetmanusman 6y agoThat is insane. I love my iPad and have used them in research for over 10 years. But I also have kids. It should be illegal to purchase glass tablets for education. If Apple wants the education business, they should release a plastic touch screen version with a plastic backing (kids throw things, they can cut people in fights). It’s sad when wealthy parents with too much time on their hands join these decision making committees and end up fighting for large corporations; and in this case, hurting the poor.
- thebigman433 6y agoSchools almost always have decent cases on the iPads, and the backs are metal, so there isnt any issue with that breaking. With a decent case, there is a pretty low chance of the screens cracking at all. We rolled them out in an elementary school and had zero issues with screens cracking or general durability of the actual iPad. Also, there is almost no other option. If you think there is a competitor with similar usability, support, specs, and is the same price, you should let some school IT people know, because Im sure they'd appreciate it. Also if kids are cutting themselves because they are throwing iPads at each other while fighting, you have serious other issues going on.
- mensetmanusman 6y agoDecent cases are on the order of $100. If iPads + essentials are ~$500, it’s no surprise chromebooks are doing so well.
- thebigman433 6y agoCases are less than 100$ for a good one. The iPad itself is only 300 for schools, so even if youre spending 100$ on a case, you're still only 400$ all in, and this is assuming you didnt get a grant from Apple that provides a significant discount beyond that. Chromebooks have seen some impressive growth, but I dont think its going to sustain itself. The quality of the 300-500$ chromebooks is atrocious. They have to be replaced at least yearly, and the usability of this is very poor.
- spacemanmatt 6y agoParent of students with school issued iPads, here. I hate iPads now, but I liked them before the schools standardized on them. The bluetooth keyboard clamshell case they issued was balls. The restrictive app and network policy enforced by the district was balls. The litany of apps students were required to use beyond instructional materials was boggling. They essentially assumed students would be great petty bureaucrats and they were wrong.
- wlesieutre 6y agoI don't know what country specifically or how iPads are priced there, but just picking Germany at random the iPad's list price starts at 379€. Quite a deal they've got going...
- laurent92 6y agoPCs with a javascript console, GCC and Word-Excel (if not LibreOffice or just a browser) also start at 350€. It’s for pupils. People who will make tomorrow’s world. We don’t want to give them a read-only world.
- djrogers 6y ago> We don’t want to give them a read-only world One pan make many valid arguments about iPads vs PCs, and open vs walled gardens, but calling an iPad a 'read-only' device is NOT one of them. My brilliant 12 year old daughter is an artist (both 2 and 3d, depending on her whims), and uses an iPad as a creative device that literally has no peer from other, more open ecosystems. My 14 year old son learned the basics of coding on an iPad, and can use his for writing, math homework, and an incredible level of creative output programming various robotics devices he has. An iPad does live in a walled garden, but it is far from a read-only device.
- chanmad29 6y agoTangent: Do you see any downsides of your kids using this technology vs writing/painting on paper?
- djrogers 6y agoNo, I really don't. The kinda of things my daughter does on an iPad aren't possible on paper, and use a part of her brain that she doesn't trigger when she uses pen or paint and paper. Also, she does both.
- drewzero1 6y agoCan you recommend any creation apps? I'm trying to make my iPad more useful to me than the browser and video watching device it currently is, but have had a hard time finding good apps for art and coding.
- swiftcoder 6y agoEven just legislation to safeguard adversarial interoperability would be a big help, so that companies like Apple can't wield DRM laws to shut down reverse engineering.
- laurent92 6y agoI’m all for “protocols should mandatorily be free” but then, how does Apple “guarantees authenticity” of the opposite device, to ensure it doesn’t brick it or gets bricked by it? I’m half serious, it’s always the excuse used for applying DRM to any device (even the famous orange juice presser, Juicero, now bankrupt, which only works with DRM’ed oranges, to ensure it doesn’t intoxicate the consumer), so should law also mandate that a device producer who doesn’t respect the specs is liable for the bricked iPhone?
- Wowfunhappy 6y agoIf an improper Airplay implementation could brick an iPhone, what's to say a hacker couldn't do the same (whether or not you've opened up the protocol, because anything can be hacked)? Or even just a network screwup, or a random bitflip. Which is to say, airplay shouldn't be capable of bricking an iPhone, and if it can, that's a critical issue which needs to be fixed.
- tshaddox 6y agoI think a better example for AirPlay would be a third-party AirPlay server that (either maliciously or incompetently) exposes content streamed from the user's iPhone on the Internet publicly.
- Wowfunhappy 6y agoYou could do that with an Apple TV too. The Apple TV has HDMI out—who knows where that signal is going! Of course, the user needs to enable screen mirroring first, but they'd have to anyway. If the iPhone can be made to send a video signal over Airplay without user interaction, that's a serious vulnerability which Apple needs to address immediately.
- nr2x 6y ago100% agree, an elegant solution to anti-trust would be prohibition on exclusive API access for any add-on products (watch, airplay, etc). I'm not that worried about the AppStore as an end-user as I like knowing I'm not downloading malware, that they are enforcing strong privacy requirements etc, but if I want to buy a non-Apple watch it should have complete compatibility with Apple Fitness, otherwise there's zero room for an honest case to be made that there isn't an abuse of dominance in one area (iOS/iPhone) to create dominance in another (wearables).
- zepto 6y agoIn this situation, as soon as Apple makes changes to any of their protocols, that would also be seen as anti-competitive behavior. How would you propose to deal with API changes?
- nr2x 6y agoLike any other API they already make public for iOS/macOS: clear communication and deprecation timelines.
- zepto 6y agoIt’s worth noting that newly introduced Apple technologies are notoriously poorly documented. See SwiftUI as an example. Half of the api surface was undocumented at release. Surely that would give them a competitive advantage. As for deprecation - why wouldn’t they deprecate as soon as they have a software update for their own supported devices?
- Aaargh20318 6y agoDocumenting the protocols would do little. You could have a completely documented protocol, as long as it requires some form of secret access key they won’t tell you there would be little you could do with it.
- acct776 6y agoThat just takes a crowd, and time
- laurent92 6y agoSure the DVD and HDMi encryption keys are now public, but I doubt a long-enough encryption key will necessarily be cracked.
- tinus_hn 6y agoThey’d just block third party implementations using patents.