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> a forced dismantling of Apple's vertical integration consumers continue to deliberately choose "deliberately choose" is too strong when you are picking the l

> a forced dismantling of Apple's vertical integration consumers continue to deliberately choose "deliberately choose" is too strong when you are picking the lesser evil. > Apple should be allowed to benefit from the sweat they invested and sell a mobile console appliance, while others should be allowed to make build-your-own mobile compute. Put another way, there's room for an iPad Pro 13 and a Frame.work Laptop 13. None of these should be forced to break their model to accommodate one of the others'. Is the sweat of the literal biggest company in the world by market cap more important than the sweat of the users paying thousands of dollars for devices they can't control? These guys don't need protection of their vertical integration, they are not selling hardware at a loss. I don't like Google nor Apple, so I'm not picking between them, I'm picking the users side. What I'd like is to be able to put a different OS on my phone. We've seen what happened with Asahi Linux and the M Macs, if the iPhone were not locked down we would have a proliferating open source OS community around it and everyone would benefit directly and indirectly.

vanjajaja1 3y ago
> .. everyone would benefit directly and indirectly. The question here for me is does this 'everyone' include the entity that made, invested & owns the device in question (im assuming no), and if its acceptable to force them to do something against their wishes for something they own then why don't we just force them to hand over billions of dollars directly to users as well (both forms of theft to me.)
- danShumway 3y ago
  > The question here for me is does this 'everyone' include the entity that made, invested & owns the device in question Yes. Apple heavily benefits from market standardization and interoperability: from transportation, to currency, to electricity, to the web. That standardization prevents other companies from heavily abusing Apple in ways that would probably have prevented the company from ever rising to the prominence it is today. Apple the company benefited from antitrust when it was younger, particularly antitrust around Microsoft. Without that market interference, it is not clear that Apple would have survived long enough to launch an iPhone in the first place. Now that Apple is as powerful as it is today, in a few areas it would like to avoid interoperability and it would like the ability to lock-down the market and to lock down devices that consumers own -- extracting additional value from those consumers against their will after the device has already been purchased by restricting the user's freedom to control their own devices. But what's good for the goose is good for the gander. It's enormously hypocritical for a company that was historically an underdog that benefited dramatically from interoperability between computing ecosystems to now claim that no one else should get the same benefits.
  - carlosjobim 3y ago
    How can your arguments not be used to also force airlines to make your favourite pickle sandwich on every flight or to force McDonalds to serve Pepsi and not only Coke? These are also giant businesses who "benefitted from electricity", so they owe you big time, right? Or just Apple?
    - danShumway 3y ago
      > These are also giant businesses who "benefitted from electricity", so they owe you big time, right? Or just Apple? If you mean, are businesses other than Apple subject to antitrust law, the answer is yes, they obviously are. That's not really a gotcha, that's just how the US/EU markets have always worked. > not be used to also force airlines to make your favourite pickle sandwich on every flight Whether or not an airline serves pickles is not an antitrust concern. There's this idea people bring up where if the market is regulated in any way at all, then suddenly all bets are off and nobody has any freedom. But it's just plain silly, it's a ridiculous way to think about regulation. It's like saying, "Oh, you support laws? Cops should be able to pull you over for speeding? So what, they should also be able to come into a restaurant, steal your food, and then slap you?" No, of course not, because those are different things and our society is capable of looking at different actions and judging them differently depending on context. Heck, you want to get wild -- we are even capable as a society of deciding that individual regulations are good or bad on a case-by-case basis based on their likely effects and side-effects. So saying "the government has the authority to interfere with business practices when businesses are harming the entire market" is not carte-blanch permission for the government to do literally anything it wants. It's a specific category of regulation, one that is well-established within US and EU law. But yes, if an airline was engaged in anticompetitive activity we would as a country be justified in regulating it. In fact, airlines are regulated today. It's not theoretical, we force airlines to follow rules to prevent excessive customer abuse. We force airlines to follow safety regulations. And yes, part of the reason why we can force them to do that is that airlines are a part of a regulated market where they benefit from regulations, and as willing participants in that market who have benefited from that market, they can't just randomly decide, "no, I'm not part of the market now when you want to regulate me, I've decided that I'm suddenly now a completely independent entity that's divorced from the rest of the economy."
- ncallaway 3y ago
  > entity that made, invested & owns the device in question They made have made and investors in the device, but they sure as shit don’t own it once they sell it to me. It’s absolutely ludicrous that anyone can describe their relationship to a device as “ownership” after the sale. We’ve given up so much as consumers. We’re in such an abusive relationship that we can’t even _see_ what a normal and healthy consumer relationship with these companies would actually look like.
  - autoexec 3y ago
    > but they sure as shit don’t own it once they sell it to me. Are you really sure about that? Apple can, at any time, and without any permission from you, remotely access your device and make changes including : reverting settings you've intentionally configured Adding software Removing software Changing the way already installed software works Disable features you're using Enable features you don't want View/modify/delete "your" files Restrict your access to access certain files/features/software Brick your entire device In what way really is the cell phone in your pocket "yours"? Your ability to use a cell phone you paid for is entirely dependent a company granting you permission and you are totally powerless to prevent them from revoking that permission if they wanted to. "Your" device is already filled with encrypted storage and software you can't access but others can, along with chips from companies like Intel, Qualcomm, Broadcom, etc. that you cannot access, modify, or control but which can be remotely accessed to execute code on "your" device or transmit data collected from "your device" without your knowledge or consent It really doesn't matter if your phone is apple or android. Under no sane definition of "ownership" do you own your cell phone. You are, at best, a low privileged user of someone else's system. It doesn't matter how benevolent the true owners of "your" cell phone are. It doesn't matter if they've never cut you off from your device entirely, or if every update they've ever silently installed has been something you approved of after the fact. It doesn't matter if they never do anything you object to with their device. It's still their device. They allow you to use it after you paid for it because it's profitable for them that you do use it and for no other reason. Sure, your cell phone manufacture can't come into your home and take the brick of plastic metal and glass you paid for away from you, but it doesn't matter because they don't have to do that. They can take all of it's functionality away from you without ever physically touching it and if they ever do it'll be left useless to you for anything other than scrap or parts.
- abirch 3y ago
  We vote with our dollars. We can buy devices that are open if it's important. Not sure how it's theft if we opted in. Please consider this if you value a device that is yours https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/ https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/
  - ThatPlayer 3y ago
    Or we vote with the government, and this is what they're doing.
- greiskul 3y ago
  > owns the device in question Users owns the device. Why would you think Apple does? And Apple forbids users from using devices that the user owns in ways that the user wants to. Why are users forbidden from programming html rendering?
  - autoexec 3y ago
    > Users owns the device... Apple forbids users from using devices that the user owns in ways that the user wants to. If apple is able to prevent users from doing things they want to on a device, that device belongs to apple and not to the users.
    - danShumway 3y ago
      Are you talking about ownership from: - a moral perspective - a legal perspective - a "might makes right" perspective Because all of those are different things. People are not saying that they practically own an iPhone in the sense that they control it; they are saying that they are the moral and/or legal owners of an iPhone and it's messed up that Apple is still allowed to exercise a "might makes right" kind of ownership over a device that the user purchased, essentially overriding and stealing ownership back from the user. Be cautious about talking past each other in these situations. Apple's exertion of control is the thing people are complaining about here, and that exertion of control is not a legal or moral doctrine that dictates whether Apple should have that control. If I get sued for stealing someone's car, and I tell the judge, "but it's not his car, it's mine. Look, I have it and I have the keys and he doesn't and I can drive it and he can't, so by definition it belongs to me", well... that's not an argument that's going to get me very far legally with that judge even though technically, sure, that is a definition of ownership. I don't think if Apple ever gets sued for antitrust the lawyers are going to be arguing, "but the consumer doesn't own their iPhone because we can remotely brick it, so by definition we own it." Again, not wrong, that is technically a definition of ownership. But it's just not what people here are talking about.
- matheusmoreira 3y ago
  > something they own That's just the thing. The whole idea that they should be able to own the iPhone is nonsense. They shouldn't be able to own the hardware after they sold it to you.
compiler-guy 3y ago
> What I'd like is to be able to put a different OS on my phone.... if the iPhone were not locked down we would have a proliferating open source OS community around it and everyone would benefit directly and indirectly. There are plenty of Android phones available for that. The OS choices are technically interesting, but not suitable for anyone but the most dedicated techie. I probably wouldn't call the situation "proliferating" either. At least not on a level where everyday people would see the benefit. But in any event, developing a well-functioning phone OS take billions of dollars, especially when it comes to regulatory things like radio use. And even more especially when it comes to phone companies certifying the phone for use. Opening the iPhone wouldn't make any difference there, with things on the Android side as strong evidence of that.
- kobalsky 3y ago
  > Opening the iPhone wouldn't make any difference there, with things on the Android side as strong evidence of that. I'd say that projects like Ahahi Linux are evidence of the contrary. The hardware standardization that an open iPhone would bring to the table would be fertile ground for OSS. Android is a clusterfuck of abandoned and shitty drivers and hardware that no one cares to reverse engineer due to fragmentation and fast obsolescence. It's the Internet Explorer 6 of mobile hardware and software, it's misery.
shepherdjerred 3y ago
> "deliberately choose" is too strong when you are picking the lesser evil. Lesser evil of what? There are plenty of Android phones/tablets, and there are _many_ flavors of Android. There are _so_ many Linux/Windows laptops. People choose Apple both because it's a good experience, and because the alternatives suck. The answer to the problem is _not_ to make Apple's products worse
- davidodio 3y ago
  People installing what they like on their devices doesn’t change how your device works
  - pietro72ohboy 3y ago
    No amount of repetition is going to convince such people. Their entire argument is predicated on an absolutely erroneous belief that sideloading or user modifications will somehow ruin the experience of people who don’t wish to modify their phone knowing fully well that more setting for users won’t diminish the experience for other users. They’re literally playing stupid to defend a corporation and its practices.
    - shepherdjerred 3y ago
      You're welcome to share your thoughts, but please don't just assume what others are thinking.
  - shepherdjerred 3y ago
    I don't have a strong opinion about sideloading applications. What I'm more concerned about is Apple being forced to allow non-WebKit browsers in the App Store. Apple requiring the use of WebKit on iOS is the only thing stopping Chrome from having a complete monopoly, aside from Firefox with its 5% marketshare.
    - Doe-_ 3y ago
      I am equally terrified of Chrome's dominance in the browser market. I don't agree that forcing WebKit on iOS is the solution, however. The law should seek to break Chrome's monopoly, not enforce another.
matheusmoreira 3y ago
> We've seen what happened with Asahi Linux and the M Macs, if the iPhone were not locked down we would have a proliferating open source OS community around it Yes!! I want this so much.

vanjajaja1 3y ago

> .. everyone would benefit directly and indirectly. The question here for me is does this 'everyone' include the entity that made, invested & owns the device in question (im assuming no), and if its acceptable to force them to do something against their wishes for something they own then why don't we just force them to hand over billions of dollars directly to users as well (both forms of theft to me.)

danShumway 3y ago
> The question here for me is does this 'everyone' include the entity that made, invested & owns the device in question Yes. Apple heavily benefits from market standardization and interoperability: from transportation, to currency, to electricity, to the web. That standardization prevents other companies from heavily abusing Apple in ways that would probably have prevented the company from ever rising to the prominence it is today. Apple the company benefited from antitrust when it was younger, particularly antitrust around Microsoft. Without that market interference, it is not clear that Apple would have survived long enough to launch an iPhone in the first place. Now that Apple is as powerful as it is today, in a few areas it would like to avoid interoperability and it would like the ability to lock-down the market and to lock down devices that consumers own -- extracting additional value from those consumers against their will after the device has already been purchased by restricting the user's freedom to control their own devices. But what's good for the goose is good for the gander. It's enormously hypocritical for a company that was historically an underdog that benefited dramatically from interoperability between computing ecosystems to now claim that no one else should get the same benefits.
- carlosjobim 3y ago
  How can your arguments not be used to also force airlines to make your favourite pickle sandwich on every flight or to force McDonalds to serve Pepsi and not only Coke? These are also giant businesses who "benefitted from electricity", so they owe you big time, right? Or just Apple?
  - danShumway 3y ago
    > These are also giant businesses who "benefitted from electricity", so they owe you big time, right? Or just Apple? If you mean, are businesses other than Apple subject to antitrust law, the answer is yes, they obviously are. That's not really a gotcha, that's just how the US/EU markets have always worked. > not be used to also force airlines to make your favourite pickle sandwich on every flight Whether or not an airline serves pickles is not an antitrust concern. There's this idea people bring up where if the market is regulated in any way at all, then suddenly all bets are off and nobody has any freedom. But it's just plain silly, it's a ridiculous way to think about regulation. It's like saying, "Oh, you support laws? Cops should be able to pull you over for speeding? So what, they should also be able to come into a restaurant, steal your food, and then slap you?" No, of course not, because those are different things and our society is capable of looking at different actions and judging them differently depending on context. Heck, you want to get wild -- we are even capable as a society of deciding that individual regulations are good or bad on a case-by-case basis based on their likely effects and side-effects. So saying "the government has the authority to interfere with business practices when businesses are harming the entire market" is not carte-blanch permission for the government to do literally anything it wants. It's a specific category of regulation, one that is well-established within US and EU law. But yes, if an airline was engaged in anticompetitive activity we would as a country be justified in regulating it. In fact, airlines are regulated today. It's not theoretical, we force airlines to follow rules to prevent excessive customer abuse. We force airlines to follow safety regulations. And yes, part of the reason why we can force them to do that is that airlines are a part of a regulated market where they benefit from regulations, and as willing participants in that market who have benefited from that market, they can't just randomly decide, "no, I'm not part of the market now when you want to regulate me, I've decided that I'm suddenly now a completely independent entity that's divorced from the rest of the economy."
ncallaway 3y ago
> entity that made, invested & owns the device in question They made have made and investors in the device, but they sure as shit don’t own it once they sell it to me. It’s absolutely ludicrous that anyone can describe their relationship to a device as “ownership” after the sale. We’ve given up so much as consumers. We’re in such an abusive relationship that we can’t even _see_ what a normal and healthy consumer relationship with these companies would actually look like.
- autoexec 3y ago
  > but they sure as shit don’t own it once they sell it to me. Are you really sure about that? Apple can, at any time, and without any permission from you, remotely access your device and make changes including : reverting settings you've intentionally configured Adding software Removing software Changing the way already installed software works Disable features you're using Enable features you don't want View/modify/delete "your" files Restrict your access to access certain files/features/software Brick your entire device In what way really is the cell phone in your pocket "yours"? Your ability to use a cell phone you paid for is entirely dependent a company granting you permission and you are totally powerless to prevent them from revoking that permission if they wanted to. "Your" device is already filled with encrypted storage and software you can't access but others can, along with chips from companies like Intel, Qualcomm, Broadcom, etc. that you cannot access, modify, or control but which can be remotely accessed to execute code on "your" device or transmit data collected from "your device" without your knowledge or consent It really doesn't matter if your phone is apple or android. Under no sane definition of "ownership" do you own your cell phone. You are, at best, a low privileged user of someone else's system. It doesn't matter how benevolent the true owners of "your" cell phone are. It doesn't matter if they've never cut you off from your device entirely, or if every update they've ever silently installed has been something you approved of after the fact. It doesn't matter if they never do anything you object to with their device. It's still their device. They allow you to use it after you paid for it because it's profitable for them that you do use it and for no other reason. Sure, your cell phone manufacture can't come into your home and take the brick of plastic metal and glass you paid for away from you, but it doesn't matter because they don't have to do that. They can take all of it's functionality away from you without ever physically touching it and if they ever do it'll be left useless to you for anything other than scrap or parts.
abirch 3y ago
We vote with our dollars. We can buy devices that are open if it's important. Not sure how it's theft if we opted in. Please consider this if you value a device that is yours https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/ https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/
- ThatPlayer 3y ago
  Or we vote with the government, and this is what they're doing.
greiskul 3y ago
> owns the device in question Users owns the device. Why would you think Apple does? And Apple forbids users from using devices that the user owns in ways that the user wants to. Why are users forbidden from programming html rendering?
- autoexec 3y ago
  > Users owns the device... Apple forbids users from using devices that the user owns in ways that the user wants to. If apple is able to prevent users from doing things they want to on a device, that device belongs to apple and not to the users.
  - danShumway 3y ago
    Are you talking about ownership from: - a moral perspective - a legal perspective - a "might makes right" perspective Because all of those are different things. People are not saying that they practically own an iPhone in the sense that they control it; they are saying that they are the moral and/or legal owners of an iPhone and it's messed up that Apple is still allowed to exercise a "might makes right" kind of ownership over a device that the user purchased, essentially overriding and stealing ownership back from the user. Be cautious about talking past each other in these situations. Apple's exertion of control is the thing people are complaining about here, and that exertion of control is not a legal or moral doctrine that dictates whether Apple should have that control. If I get sued for stealing someone's car, and I tell the judge, "but it's not his car, it's mine. Look, I have it and I have the keys and he doesn't and I can drive it and he can't, so by definition it belongs to me", well... that's not an argument that's going to get me very far legally with that judge even though technically, sure, that is a definition of ownership. I don't think if Apple ever gets sued for antitrust the lawyers are going to be arguing, "but the consumer doesn't own their iPhone because we can remotely brick it, so by definition we own it." Again, not wrong, that is technically a definition of ownership. But it's just not what people here are talking about.
matheusmoreira 3y ago
> something they own That's just the thing. The whole idea that they should be able to own the iPhone is nonsense. They shouldn't be able to own the hardware after they sold it to you.

compiler-guy 3y ago

> What I'd like is to be able to put a different OS on my phone.... if the iPhone were not locked down we would have a proliferating open source OS community around it and everyone would benefit directly and indirectly. There are plenty of Android phones available for that. The OS choices are technically interesting, but not suitable for anyone but the most dedicated techie. I probably wouldn't call the situation "proliferating" either. At least not on a level where everyday people would see the benefit. But in any event, developing a well-functioning phone OS take billions of dollars, especially when it comes to regulatory things like radio use. And even more especially when it comes to phone companies certifying the phone for use. Opening the iPhone wouldn't make any difference there, with things on the Android side as strong evidence of that.

kobalsky 3y ago
> Opening the iPhone wouldn't make any difference there, with things on the Android side as strong evidence of that. I'd say that projects like Ahahi Linux are evidence of the contrary. The hardware standardization that an open iPhone would bring to the table would be fertile ground for OSS. Android is a clusterfuck of abandoned and shitty drivers and hardware that no one cares to reverse engineer due to fragmentation and fast obsolescence. It's the Internet Explorer 6 of mobile hardware and software, it's misery.

shepherdjerred 3y ago

> "deliberately choose" is too strong when you are picking the lesser evil. Lesser evil of what? There are plenty of Android phones/tablets, and there are _many_ flavors of Android. There are _so_ many Linux/Windows laptops. People choose Apple both because it's a good experience, and because the alternatives suck. The answer to the problem is _not_ to make Apple's products worse

davidodio 3y ago
People installing what they like on their devices doesn’t change how your device works
- pietro72ohboy 3y ago
  No amount of repetition is going to convince such people. Their entire argument is predicated on an absolutely erroneous belief that sideloading or user modifications will somehow ruin the experience of people who don’t wish to modify their phone knowing fully well that more setting for users won’t diminish the experience for other users. They’re literally playing stupid to defend a corporation and its practices.
  - shepherdjerred 3y ago
    You're welcome to share your thoughts, but please don't just assume what others are thinking.
- shepherdjerred 3y ago
  I don't have a strong opinion about sideloading applications. What I'm more concerned about is Apple being forced to allow non-WebKit browsers in the App Store. Apple requiring the use of WebKit on iOS is the only thing stopping Chrome from having a complete monopoly, aside from Firefox with its 5% marketshare.
  - Doe-_ 3y ago
    I am equally terrified of Chrome's dominance in the browser market. I don't agree that forcing WebKit on iOS is the solution, however. The law should seek to break Chrome's monopoly, not enforce another.

matheusmoreira 3y ago

> We've seen what happened with Asahi Linux and the M Macs, if the iPhone were not locked down we would have a proliferating open source OS community around it Yes!! I want this so much.