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Apple claims to have three distinct web browsers in the EU complaint
- stranded22 3y agoAs a user, I’d have thought Mac safari and iOS/ipad safari are different browsers, BUT all are using the same WebKit. And iOS/ipad is more integrated than Mac OS as I cannot change the browser engine grr.
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoHilarious that Apple thought this would work.
- meiraleal 3y agoJust check the amount of people in this thread that stopped by to say they believe it
- jeroenhd 3y agoThey also claim to have three app stores so their tablets aren't subject to the DMA, because they haven't been able to sell enough products to hit the 45M mark on some of their range. Just Apple doing Apple things. I'm sure it's all just a distraction to give them more time before they have to comply.
- nextos 3y agoIt is a shame, as the iPad could become a much better product with a little more openness.
- ravetcofx 3y agoEven if they let you run the MacOS " finder/quartz shell" only when keyboard and mouse is connected and restricted to the App store, it would be a big improvement
- afavour 3y agoIMO the biggest example of this is multiple users. Why can’t the iPad use multiple logins? Well, actually, it can… if you’re a school. But the rest of us are locked out of that functionality.
- KolenCh 3y agoWhy? Better product for whom? I want to agree with you but I think the market has spoken for the majority. We are just the minority and I have made peace with this fact.
- nextos 3y agoMore content creation, programming, etc. The iPad won the tablet wars, but it is still a small niche product compared to PCs. Note how Apple is trying to claim their iPad customer base in EU is relatively small (< 45M) to avoid being regulated.
- KolenCh 3y agoBut I think you didn’t answer my question. How exactly to make it a better product? What is a better product? There are tablets that can do those kinds of work better, but is it a better product? As an end user, we definitely would be think of “best product for me”, a population of size 1. And even if we expand that to include “people like me”, often the population is still very small. I really wish there’s a market to make things best for this smaller bubble of population around me, but for the product to exist and thriving it has to be commercially successful. Also the smaller the volume the more expensive it is. (Eg like the VR computer that runs Linux which is still in development, that thing is in a price range that many people would have want one don’t think it’s worth that amount of money.) There’s a lot of complaints on how dumb the iPad is since day 1, but no one has convinced me yet their vision is indeed better than Apple’s (which not only includes features sets, form factor, UX, etc but also how the mass market would adopts that and make the whole ecosystem thriving.)
- nextos 3y ago> How exactly to make it a better product? What is a better product? I meant a better product for programmers. There are lots of discussions on HN about this topic, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36530607 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36530607. In short, it would be great to be able to code locally with less limitations. Surface Go et al. are pretty good for this purpose. The iPad isn't. I realize it is a niche market. Or maybe not? Lot's of K-12 students use iPads.
- zappb 3y agoThey are separate things. If the EU meant to regulate based on brands or feels, they would have written the law as such.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- EMIRELADERO 3y agoThe regulatory commission ended up ruling that it's all just one app store (for the purposes of the App Store service itself) and opened a market investigation (for iOS/iPadOS distinction). I wouldn't say it's decided they're "separate things" just yet.
- RandomBK 3y agoYour honor, what you see as "Chrome" is actually 2^x distinct browsers, with x being the number of A/B test groups currently deployed. Each distinct combination of features represent a distinct product experience and thus a distinct product. We therefore submit that the HHI of the browser market is actually <10, which economists say represent a near-perfect competitive market.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- thayne 3y agoTimes the number of OSes it is built for.
- sokoloff 3y agoIf you asked me (in the software field, but never working at Apple), I’d 100% agree that Safari on iOS and macOS are two different products. I would not make the same conclusion about iOS and iPadOS versions.
- MBCook 3y agoWhy do you say iOS and macOS are different?
- modeless 3y agoPersonally, it comes down to the input method. The entire UI is different because the input method demands it. The version of Safari on Vision Pro will be different too. But the iPhone and iPad versions are practically the same. Of course whether macOS and iOS Safari are different enough to qualify as separate things depends entirely on context. I don't know the context here, but it seems unlikely that Apple's argument makes sense.
- sokoloff 3y agoMy experience as a daily user of both is that a touch-driven browser running on a battery and CPU limited device with a small screen where that engine is the only approved engine in the platform feels substantially different as a product than a mouse-driven one on a far less constrained system and where other browser engines are explicitly permitted. I can’t say the extent to which there’s source-level sharing, but from a product angle, I think of them as a different product, same as I think of Outlook Web Access/O365 as different from the fat-client Outlook mail client or Word being a different product from Excel even though they’re commonly sold in a bundle. (I’m not claiming to be definitively correct here, just admitting that I agree in one key area with Apple’s argument.)
- simondotau 3y agoOther than sharing a rendering engine (which itself behaves very differently based on the target OS) they're clearly very different pieces of software. Arguably Chrome and Edge are significantly more similar.
- 3y ago
- quyleanh 3y agoWait. Besides browser, how about sideloading app? I thought we should see something when iOS 17 released, but there is nothing, isn't there? There are only 4 months left.
- ChrisArchitect 3y ago[dupe] More discussion yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38123216 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38123216
- crazygringo 3y agoSorry, what's the context here? There are situations where they absolutely count as three different pieces of software, and there are contexts where it makes no sense at all to distinguish them. But a random tweet with zero context... I don't have the slightest idea what this is about.
- summerlight 3y agoDMA defines core platform services (CPS) as a unit of antitrust regulation. Apple tried to split Safari and App store into multiple different CPS so user counts of some of those products won't exceed the regulation threshold (45M).
- lxgr 3y agoHow rude to leave out the Apple Watch (emails can render a web view, which is the only way to log onto captive portals)!
- 3cats-in-a-coat 3y agoThey said it because the EU complaint was so incompetently written it doesn't address the distinction of browser and engine.