4 ms·

As a European dev I want apple to fail super hard and implode. They used to be so cool and make slick hardware for their nische but now I'm happy to use worse h

As a European dev I want apple to fail super hard and implode. They used to be so cool and make slick hardware for their nische but now I'm happy to use worse hardware as long as they disapear from the face of the earth.

gear54rus 3y ago
They ain't never been cool. The shit practices they are trying to defend were there from day 1 and are baked into their DNA. Treating their users like stupid animals that don't know what's good for them is what they do. And they will fight tooth and nail to continue to do it. Even as EU tries to kick their predatory ways out of them. To think there's a hardware thing in 2024 that does not allow its owner to compile and install arbitrary software while still calling itself a smartphone is just laughable. It's a good thing people are starting to wake up to this even on legislative level.
- amelius 3y ago
  > Treating their users like stupid animals that don't know what's good for them is what they do. The problem I have with that is that they are selling a ContentFilter as an integrated part of their OS, when it can be a separate, optional part, and even offered by a third party. Also, they equate AppStore == ContentFilter, which are clearly two separate concepts.
- pb7 3y ago
  Most users are stupid though. Reminder that a US congressman once grilled Google's CEO about whether Google was tracking his iPhone's precise location. And this one was smart enough to con his way into Congress. "I have an iPhone, and if I move from here and go over there and sit with my Democrat friends, which would make them real nervous, does Google track my movement?" -- Ted Poe https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/google-ceo-pichai-grilled-over-companys-location-tracking-capabilities/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/google-ceo-pichai-grilled-o...
  - jeroenhd 3y ago
    > "I have an iPhone, and if I move from here and go over there and sit with my Democrat friends, which would make them real nervous, does Google track my movement?" -- Ted Poe The thing is, if this was a real life situation, and he would seek out and politically collaborate with/stalk and listen in on his Democrat friends, there's a good chance Google would know. Not because of a digital AirTag Google installed on his phone, but because of the tracking and data analysis Google has access to. The indirection and hidden mechanisms Google (and other data trading companies) use are impossible to comprehend for normal people, and they're banking on that to continue being allowed to do that.
    - pb7 3y ago
      The point was that he has no idea where the boundaries around between Apple and Google and what is within the realm of possibility of abuse and what is strictly impossible without him tapping "accept" via a system prompt. It is not possible for Google to track his location without him granting permission to do so on his iPhone. It is not possible to get precise location data without a prompt and a blue system indicator. It is not possible to get repeated location data without iOS eventually notifying you of the background activity (even the stock Weather app is not immune to this). All of this is because Apple has fine control over the system.
  - deminature 3y ago
    Google does track your movement with alarming levels of detail, just not to that level of granularity. https://support.google.com/maps/answer/6258979?hl=en&co=GENIE.Platform%3DAndroid https://support.google.com/maps/answer/6258979?hl=en&co=GENI...
amelius 3y ago
Yes, that's the way I feel too. I learned to program on an Apple ][ that I loved, before Jobs started his nefarious business practices. Woz's Apple was cool. Jobs' Apple makes me feel like they want to enslave developers, or at least milk them to the last drop.
- deminature 3y ago
  It's only turned really cynical under Cook, chargers no longer included, cables sold separately from chargers to nickel and dime customers, refusal to adopt standards like USB-C unless threatened in court, refusing to pay patent license fee for blood O2 monitoring on the Apple Watch and trying to scalp all the talent from the company instead, anti-competitive behavior in the EU. Jobs version of Apple was pretty benign compared to the win-at-any-cost Cook version of Apple.
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    HN will call all that as "innovation"
  - mission_failed 3y ago
    Nonsense. Adobe had a flash to ios system ready to go to allow all flash apps to run, and Jobs deliberately blocked it from working, leading to the eventual death of flash. Jobs was one of the main bastards behind screwing over engineer's pay. Under Jobs we had soldered ram and ridiculous upgrade prices, changing magsafe port sizes just because, dropping OS support for official Apple modems when the majority of the world still had dialup, flaking cases and dodgy screens and phones that have to be held the right way, water sensors that react to humidity and void warranty, locking down ios upgrades to prevent downgrading, ebook price fixing...
- ambigious7777 3y ago
  I feel like that maybe Apple's ideas or innovation has begun to run dry. Now they're just trying to milk every single penny before they become a background player.
sreejithr 3y ago
Stop this bureaucracy in the EU and build something for a change. Shipping for EU is stupid hard. And you guys are declining in economy. Pretty soon, there won't be any economic arguments to continue doing business in EU with all the cost of this bureaucracy involved.
- flessner 3y ago
  1) You can predict the future economic state of the EU as well as the next person 2) Most of the "bureaucracy" that hits small to medium sized companies is the GDPR, which any business with the slightest of integrity should have no problem to follow
  - xvector 3y ago
    You can easily use the dearth of meaningful consumer technology companies in the EU and their absurd overindexing on regulation as a predictor of what the EU's economy will look like. While the rest of the world dives into technology and AI, the EU will become a backwater, because the EU does not know how to craft regulation that balances innovation and "consumer good." It literally only focuses on the latter at all costs. And as technology eats the world, this will be the death of the EU.
    - MrDresden 3y ago
      Tell me, how do you see life being in the Consumerism States of America in the future where the handful of mega corporations, that will have been allowed to behave and merge for monopolistic dominance with impunity for decades, will have such power and size that their employees will work in horrifying conditions for wages that barely (if even) can support them, all the while making the very few individuals at the top richer than any individual or group ever would need to be. All in the name of innovation. You'll have plenty of shiny consumer items to select from (most if not all actually designed and manufactured over seas to keep costs down of course). And if you are good litle drone you might just keep the current job long enough to scrounge together enough to buy the shiny item, so that it will signal to everyone that you are truly one of the pack that everyone around you so desperately needs to feel as being a part too. This isn't some scifi reality that won't come to pass. What worker protection do tech workers in the US actually have? How about the conditions in Amazon's 'fulfillment centers' (this term is down right Stalin-esque btw)? UPS drivers? How many mergers have there been in the aeronautical sector since WW2 (hint, used to be 50+ companies and now there are 5). And what is currently happening with the US airline manufacturer (the singular other manufacturer of its size compared to the EU' Airbus)? I could go on, and on, and on but am hoping that you are smart enough to get the point I'm making.
buzzert 3y ago
You don't have to wait for Apple to fail? You can use free software phones today. The Librem 5 is a good example.
- bsimpson 3y ago
  Isn't that the one that's super expensive, ships like an unreliable Kickstarter, and lives in a Linux ecosystem that's just a sad replica of old smartphones?
  - buzzert 3y ago
    Yep!
xvector 3y ago
As an American dev I can't wait to see tech companies leave the EU and leave it in shambles as the EU realizes it never learnt how to innovate, only legislate and rent-seek from our companies. Frankly, the region needs us far more than we need it.
- Scoring6931 3y ago
  If it wasn't for Turing your job might not have been a thing. If it wasn't for Tim Berners-Lee, we might not have been here having this discussion. Hint: neither is/was American. Just to throw some examples.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - xvector 3y ago
    What modern consumer-facing companies have come out of the EU in the past 20 years, besides Spotify? How is that list looking compared to the US? That's all the evidence you need that the EU has seriously fucked up with regards to encouraging tech innovation. A lack of tech innovation has terrifying implications for the EU long-term, such as reduced QoL, brain drain, economic decline, etc. - all of which are already in progress.
    - cromka 3y ago
      It’s an interesting bias, that people use consumer facing European tech products and don’t even know it. Just have a look: https://media.licdn.com/dms/image/C4E12AQFqW-dnIUTj2w/article-inline_image-shrink_1000_1488/0/1591170579988?e=1713398400&v=beta&t=o0DY5NcgWlNWnMouZ9DrZ4xknJLyYBVDxoJ698um8TU https://media.licdn.com/dms/image/C4E12AQFqW-dnIUTj2w/articl... Majority of educational software is European. That list above is missing Duolingo. A giant undoubtedly. Hey, did you know Gitlab was European, too? Or Skype? Or Waze? Or Booking.com? Or Skyscanner? Or even flightradar? PS. I didn’t limit this to EU only.
      - 3y ago
BeFlatXIII 3y ago
I just wish they weren't the _only_ company making decent hardware. They've made the only laptop trackpads worth a damn since at least 2009, if not earlier, and PC OEMs seemingly have ZERO desire to catch up. They'd prefer to invest in gimmicks like touchscreens.

gear54rus 3y ago

They ain't never been cool. The shit practices they are trying to defend were there from day 1 and are baked into their DNA. Treating their users like stupid animals that don't know what's good for them is what they do. And they will fight tooth and nail to continue to do it. Even as EU tries to kick their predatory ways out of them. To think there's a hardware thing in 2024 that does not allow its owner to compile and install arbitrary software while still calling itself a smartphone is just laughable. It's a good thing people are starting to wake up to this even on legislative level.

amelius 3y ago
> Treating their users like stupid animals that don't know what's good for them is what they do. The problem I have with that is that they are selling a ContentFilter as an integrated part of their OS, when it can be a separate, optional part, and even offered by a third party. Also, they equate AppStore == ContentFilter, which are clearly two separate concepts.
pb7 3y ago
Most users are stupid though. Reminder that a US congressman once grilled Google's CEO about whether Google was tracking his iPhone's precise location. And this one was smart enough to con his way into Congress. "I have an iPhone, and if I move from here and go over there and sit with my Democrat friends, which would make them real nervous, does Google track my movement?" -- Ted Poe https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/google-ceo-pichai-grilled-over-companys-location-tracking-capabilities/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/google-ceo-pichai-grilled-o...
- jeroenhd 3y ago
  > "I have an iPhone, and if I move from here and go over there and sit with my Democrat friends, which would make them real nervous, does Google track my movement?" -- Ted Poe The thing is, if this was a real life situation, and he would seek out and politically collaborate with/stalk and listen in on his Democrat friends, there's a good chance Google would know. Not because of a digital AirTag Google installed on his phone, but because of the tracking and data analysis Google has access to. The indirection and hidden mechanisms Google (and other data trading companies) use are impossible to comprehend for normal people, and they're banking on that to continue being allowed to do that.
  - pb7 3y ago
    The point was that he has no idea where the boundaries around between Apple and Google and what is within the realm of possibility of abuse and what is strictly impossible without him tapping "accept" via a system prompt. It is not possible for Google to track his location without him granting permission to do so on his iPhone. It is not possible to get precise location data without a prompt and a blue system indicator. It is not possible to get repeated location data without iOS eventually notifying you of the background activity (even the stock Weather app is not immune to this). All of this is because Apple has fine control over the system.
- deminature 3y ago
  Google does track your movement with alarming levels of detail, just not to that level of granularity. https://support.google.com/maps/answer/6258979?hl=en&co=GENIE.Platform%3DAndroid https://support.google.com/maps/answer/6258979?hl=en&co=GENI...

amelius 3y ago

Yes, that's the way I feel too. I learned to program on an Apple ][ that I loved, before Jobs started his nefarious business practices. Woz's Apple was cool. Jobs' Apple makes me feel like they want to enslave developers, or at least milk them to the last drop.

deminature 3y ago
It's only turned really cynical under Cook, chargers no longer included, cables sold separately from chargers to nickel and dime customers, refusal to adopt standards like USB-C unless threatened in court, refusing to pay patent license fee for blood O2 monitoring on the Apple Watch and trying to scalp all the talent from the company instead, anti-competitive behavior in the EU. Jobs version of Apple was pretty benign compared to the win-at-any-cost Cook version of Apple.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  HN will call all that as "innovation"
- mission_failed 3y ago
  Nonsense. Adobe had a flash to ios system ready to go to allow all flash apps to run, and Jobs deliberately blocked it from working, leading to the eventual death of flash. Jobs was one of the main bastards behind screwing over engineer's pay. Under Jobs we had soldered ram and ridiculous upgrade prices, changing magsafe port sizes just because, dropping OS support for official Apple modems when the majority of the world still had dialup, flaking cases and dodgy screens and phones that have to be held the right way, water sensors that react to humidity and void warranty, locking down ios upgrades to prevent downgrading, ebook price fixing...
ambigious7777 3y ago
I feel like that maybe Apple's ideas or innovation has begun to run dry. Now they're just trying to milk every single penny before they become a background player.

sreejithr 3y ago

Stop this bureaucracy in the EU and build something for a change. Shipping for EU is stupid hard. And you guys are declining in economy. Pretty soon, there won't be any economic arguments to continue doing business in EU with all the cost of this bureaucracy involved.

flessner 3y ago
1) You can predict the future economic state of the EU as well as the next person 2) Most of the "bureaucracy" that hits small to medium sized companies is the GDPR, which any business with the slightest of integrity should have no problem to follow
- xvector 3y ago
  You can easily use the dearth of meaningful consumer technology companies in the EU and their absurd overindexing on regulation as a predictor of what the EU's economy will look like. While the rest of the world dives into technology and AI, the EU will become a backwater, because the EU does not know how to craft regulation that balances innovation and "consumer good." It literally only focuses on the latter at all costs. And as technology eats the world, this will be the death of the EU.
  - MrDresden 3y ago
    Tell me, how do you see life being in the Consumerism States of America in the future where the handful of mega corporations, that will have been allowed to behave and merge for monopolistic dominance with impunity for decades, will have such power and size that their employees will work in horrifying conditions for wages that barely (if even) can support them, all the while making the very few individuals at the top richer than any individual or group ever would need to be. All in the name of innovation. You'll have plenty of shiny consumer items to select from (most if not all actually designed and manufactured over seas to keep costs down of course). And if you are good litle drone you might just keep the current job long enough to scrounge together enough to buy the shiny item, so that it will signal to everyone that you are truly one of the pack that everyone around you so desperately needs to feel as being a part too. This isn't some scifi reality that won't come to pass. What worker protection do tech workers in the US actually have? How about the conditions in Amazon's 'fulfillment centers' (this term is down right Stalin-esque btw)? UPS drivers? How many mergers have there been in the aeronautical sector since WW2 (hint, used to be 50+ companies and now there are 5). And what is currently happening with the US airline manufacturer (the singular other manufacturer of its size compared to the EU' Airbus)? I could go on, and on, and on but am hoping that you are smart enough to get the point I'm making.

buzzert 3y ago

You don't have to wait for Apple to fail? You can use free software phones today. The Librem 5 is a good example.

bsimpson 3y ago
Isn't that the one that's super expensive, ships like an unreliable Kickstarter, and lives in a Linux ecosystem that's just a sad replica of old smartphones?
- buzzert 3y ago
  Yep!

xvector 3y ago

As an American dev I can't wait to see tech companies leave the EU and leave it in shambles as the EU realizes it never learnt how to innovate, only legislate and rent-seek from our companies. Frankly, the region needs us far more than we need it.

Scoring6931 3y ago
If it wasn't for Turing your job might not have been a thing. If it wasn't for Tim Berners-Lee, we might not have been here having this discussion. Hint: neither is/was American. Just to throw some examples.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- xvector 3y ago
  What modern consumer-facing companies have come out of the EU in the past 20 years, besides Spotify? How is that list looking compared to the US? That's all the evidence you need that the EU has seriously fucked up with regards to encouraging tech innovation. A lack of tech innovation has terrifying implications for the EU long-term, such as reduced QoL, brain drain, economic decline, etc. - all of which are already in progress.
  - cromka 3y ago
    It’s an interesting bias, that people use consumer facing European tech products and don’t even know it. Just have a look: https://media.licdn.com/dms/image/C4E12AQFqW-dnIUTj2w/article-inline_image-shrink_1000_1488/0/1591170579988?e=1713398400&v=beta&t=o0DY5NcgWlNWnMouZ9DrZ4xknJLyYBVDxoJ698um8TU https://media.licdn.com/dms/image/C4E12AQFqW-dnIUTj2w/articl... Majority of educational software is European. That list above is missing Duolingo. A giant undoubtedly. Hey, did you know Gitlab was European, too? Or Skype? Or Waze? Or Booking.com? Or Skyscanner? Or even flightradar? PS. I didn’t limit this to EU only.
    - 3y ago

BeFlatXIII 3y ago

I just wish they weren't the _only_ company making decent hardware. They've made the only laptop trackpads worth a damn since at least 2009, if not earlier, and PC OEMs seemingly have ZERO desire to catch up. They'd prefer to invest in gimmicks like touchscreens.