Abazigal
Contributor
Your point being…that one slip up here and there somehow negates all the benefits of years and years of App Store billing?
Apple Intelligence Features Not Coming to European Union at Launch Due to DMA
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spazzcat
macrumors 601
Bugs happen I am sure it has already been addressed and refunds issued.
Some interesting remarks from the German Anti-Trust Office. They seem to be increasingly worried about how AI technology could lead to an even more dominant position of "Big Tech".
winbuzzer.com
It seems the DMA was just the beginning. I would expect even more "pesky" regulation on the national or EU level.
German Antitrust Chief Warns AI Threatens Open Ecosystems in Tech - WinBuzzer
According to Andreas Mundt, AI technologies might turn into "closed shops" where users remain trapped within a single provider's ecosystem.
winbuzzer.com
It seems the DMA was just the beginning. I would expect even more "pesky" regulation on the national or EU level.
laptech
macrumors 601
What I find comical is people who are in support of Apple saying Apple should be allowed to do what they want with the things they make due to the fact that people complained at car manufacturers doing what they wanted to do with servicing and spare parts which resulted in the car manufacturers being told no. The fact that Apple and others doing what they wanted to do with servicing/repair and replacement parts and them being told no which resulted in the Right to Repair Bill being introduced.
The EU brings in the DMA and low and behold we are having people complaining at the EU because they are telling Apple and others that they cannot do want whatever they want to do. It seems to me people are very quick to defend Apple when it does not financially affect them (money out of your pocket) BUT as soon as Apple introduces something that causes users to pay for something out comes the moans and complaints. Hypocrites I think people call them.
The EU brings in the DMA and low and behold we are having people complaining at the EU because they are telling Apple and others that they cannot do want whatever they want to do. It seems to me people are very quick to defend Apple when it does not financially affect them (money out of your pocket) BUT as soon as Apple introduces something that causes users to pay for something out comes the moans and complaints. Hypocrites I think people call them.
To play the devil advocate, it's not hard from the perspective of the naive consumer to regard Apple as largely a good force in the tech sector.
- They have arguably the best track record regarding privacy of all Big Tech companies
- Tight integration of hardware, software and creates an ecosystem that mostly works, even if there are problems
- Decent long term support of older hardware, especially for iPhones and iPads, means that you can use your hardware for many years, somewhat offsetting the high price of Apple gear
On the other hand Apple's conduct toward competitors and app publishers is really easy to dismiss and hard to quantify for the individual. The negative consequences are long-term and quite abstract.
Then there are of course commenters, who are just ideologically opposed to government intervention. This seems to be a very popular opinion in the US in some circles, less so in Europe I think.
Pesky or not, those regulations are pro-consumer. The Big Tech's so-called AI would manipulate what the consumer might see or not.Some interesting remarks from the German Anti-Trust Office. They seem to be increasingly worried about how AI technology could lead to an even more dominant position of "Big Tech".
German Antitrust Chief Warns AI Threatens Open Ecosystems in Tech - WinBuzzer
According to Andreas Mundt, AI technologies might turn into "closed shops" where users remain trapped within a single provider's ecosystem.
It seems the DMA was just the beginning. I would expect even more "pesky" regulation on the national or EU level.
When you have a government you can't trust.
When you have governments you can trust.
surferfb
Contributor
My point was it's a new feature, using new private (or if you prefer, undocumented) APIs, with presumably significant security components given the requirement for T2/M Series Mac and Two-Factor authentication on the user's iCloud account, so I don't think we can compare it to the QuickTime mirroring the previous commenter mentioned.
Per the DMA, Apple is REQUIRED to give others access to that functionality if requested. I am quoting from Article 6, Section 7 of the DMA, which I have been told repeatedly, on this very thread, is unambiguous in its meaning (despite also being told repeatedly that you can't go by what the law SAYS, you have to go by the spirit of the law). Emphasis below is mine.
That is pretty clear to me - Apple is required to offer "access for the purposes of interoperability" to the feature. Apple could have plenty of perfectly legitimate reasons to not to want to do that. Just off the top of my head:
- They are still polishing the API and want to have it in a better state before committing to supporting it as a public API
- The EU has told them privately they will have to offer access to the feature and Apple wasn't planning on having to do so, so they need more time to implement
- They have security or privacy concerns with it working on non-Apple hardware
- Adding support for others' access is lower on the priority list and they just haven't gotten around to it yet
I'm not happy about that. My guess is Apple isn't either. I think everyone at Apple truly wants to make the best devices possible and delight its customers. I know lots of you disagree and think all they care about is money. But even if you think that's all Tim Cook cares about, I bet you can agree that the engineers who worked so hard on these features are bummed the EU is missing out.
This has been going on for too many days and I feel like I'm arguing with a brick wall, so I really should stop, but to clarify one more time:
If you want the EU to be able to tell Apple that they can't offer features and not give competitors the ability to have access to/offer the same features, you're not allowed to complain and say Apple is "throwing a tantrum" when they decide they either can't immediately offer the feature to competitors on Day 1 or, decide they would rather not offer the feature in the EU than be forced to offer it to competitors.
What I am MOST concerned there are new features that won't be built because Apple decides it's not worth it to further fragment the OS and offer it only in some parts of the world and not others. Remember the EU only represents 7-8% of Apple's revenue, and they've already spent significant engineering resources to support this law only to be told "try again." If stuff is borderline, Apple might just decide not to bother for anyone because it isn't worth the ROI. And, because we'll never know what we don't get, I'll never be able to point to the DMA and say "See, I told you so".
surferfb
Contributor
My hunch is the Venn diagram of people who support right to repair being mandated by law and people who support the DMA is pretty close to a circle.
laptech
macrumors 601
Well the above clearly has it's advantages BUT the disadvantage and it's a big one is that because the majority of what Apple does is closed off to everyone else, Apple is able to command a premium price from it's users and whilst this may sit pretty with US users it does not sit pretty with EU users hence why the EU steps in on their behalf.
I mean I'm pretty dissatisfied that my iPhone 2G running iOS 1.1 had a better terminal environment than my iPhone 14 Pro running iOS 17.5.1. That's Apples direct fault. I concede that I'm a power user and that my wishes don't align with the majority, but I want to point out that there are very legitimate reasons people are happy the DMA is finally pushing Apple towards enabling power users to do their thing.
surferfb
Contributor
I totally get that!
Honestly, it may come as a surprise to a lot of you given how anti-DMA I am, but I am a power user and would benefit from a lot of the features being opened up. I just have a problem with a company being forced to do this when, in my opinion, there is already plenty of completion in the market, it's going to make iOS more complex and worse for most users, and I think the unintended consequences will make everyone's life worse in the long run both inside and outside of the EU.
I also think Apple has a lot of blame here, and even though I disagree with forcing them to do so, I think it would have been in their own interest to open up the App Store and steering stuff years ago; my guess is the regulations wouldn't be so draconian now had they done so.
I also think if Nokia was still a major player in the space, or there was a big European tech company like Google or Microsoft, the DMA wouldn't exist at all, but that's a whole other story.
vantelimus
macrumors 6502a
Apple doesn’t own you. It doesn’t try to own you. That is just your dishonest hyperbolic rhetoric. It has no verity in the real world.
Regardless of how you parse it, you mischaracterize Apple as having some power over you, but you are in favor of power-hungry politicians abridging your rights online. At least you know Apple wants to make money and is willing to innovate and create real value to entice you to make a free-will choice. Those politicians aren’t your mommy and daddy. They have political power as their ambition. You already have declared that you are happy for them to abridge your freedom of expression. You won’t have a choice. They can and will use coercion and violence to force your compliance.
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vantelimus
macrumors 6502a
The problem is that these politicians know nothing about tech or AI. AI is not going to destroy the world. AGI is not on the horizon in any sci-fi sense. It doesn’t take a large company to create or deploy models. The tools necessary to create models are freely available. The cost to create and deploy AI is diminishing quickly, removing capital as a barrier to market entry. Many models are freely available as open source. Meta’s Llama3, an excellent LLM, can be run free for personal use and integrated into products with less than 1 million users without paying a licensing fee. This is not an environment where Google and Amazon will shut everyone else out. It is likely to be an environment where people will be surprised that Google and Amazon do not become dominant, with companies like Anthropic and OpenAI taking the lead.Some interesting remarks from the German Anti-Trust Office. They seem to be increasingly worried about how AI technology could lead to an even more dominant position of "Big Tech".
German Antitrust Chief Warns AI Threatens Open Ecosystems in Tech - WinBuzzer
According to Andreas Mundt, AI technologies might turn into "closed shops" where users remain trapped within a single provider's ecosystem.
It seems the DMA was just the beginning. I would expect even more "pesky" regulation on the national or EU level.
That aside, the politicians also seem to know nothing about markets. Fear that big tech companies will rule ignores the long history of behemoth tech companies that are no longer with us or are a pale image of their former dominance… IBM, Sperry-Rand, General Electric, Burroughs, CDC, Cray, RCA, Shockley, Fairchild, DEC, Wang, Data General, Xerox, Tandem, Sun, SGI, Compaq, HP, Motorola, Altavista, Yahoo, Excite, Oracle, Intel, etc. etc.
Money and capital do not guarantee continued success or dominance. The record of human history is 100% against continued dominance by a single company. Unfortunately, human history is also replete with short-sighted people fearing what they don’t understand and equally short-sighted politicians who will use that fear for personal gain. Let’s not pretend that in a world-wide era of rising fear-stoked nationalism and protectionism that politicians are the good guys looking out for our well being.
Beautyspin
macrumors 65816
They do not want Apple to be constrained. They want Apple to compete. And compete fairly.
vantelimus
macrumors 6502a
Don’t be too sure about that. “Right to repair” has much wider support than the DMA, which is tantamount to “no right to your own intellectual property”.
Beautyspin
macrumors 65816
I seriously believe that is what Apple does.
Their review process seems to consists of reading the news about scam apps and then terminating the accounts of the developers of the offending apps. And they also release some bogus reports at the end of the year stating that they have saved users billions of dollars by stopping fraudulent apps in the app store, because people will ask the same question you asked.They say nothing about AGI destroying the world. The statement is from the anti-trust office, and they are only concerned with the competitive landscape in consumer and B2B it services. I think they have a point.
I think, if Big Tech wasn't mostly American, the FTC or the DOJ would have already stepped in and done something about their dominant position in the market, but that's a whole other story.
vantelimus
macrumors 6502a
I don’t buy it. The DMA is a law that assigns a special status to Apple, requiring it to give any competitive advantage it has to others. It absolutely constrains Apple. It reduces Apple’s incentive to invest and innovate since other companies must be given access to that innovation. Let those other companies invest and innovate on their own instead of being parasites unjustly living off of Apple’s investments.
I7guy
macrumors Westmere
lol. There is always some minor random glitch somewhere where the poster tries to render a statement meant to be general in nature still false. Great internet debating tactic.
spazzcat
macrumors 601
The EU is taking Apple's ability to compete away by making just them another version of Android.
edit: Companies compete by being different not just the same thing is a different wrapper.
AppliedMicro
macrumors 68040
I just thought the timing was funny.
That said, there are also benefits of decentralising your software licensing needs.
...just as I truly want others to make the best software possible and delight their customers.
Here’s the thing: Apple deciding on everything themselves alone, keeping exclusivity on what they want and charging anything can get away (because „they invented the platform“ or whatever) does not yield the best products for customers.
I‘m not saying a completely free and open system does either - the optimum balance is somewhere in-between. And Apple‘s draconian „You can‘t say this or that, mention prices and include links …at all“ is far beyond well-balanced.
No problem at all:
They can simply grant access to businesses and developers in other parts of the world, too.
Nothing preventing them from only doing it in the EU.
So? Is there?
There is but one alternative operating system that’s relevant - and that has only one store that has (mostly) all of the relevant apps for the average comsumers. Or me.
Doesn’t sound like „plenty“ of competition to me.
AppliedMicro
macrumors 68040
Wrong.
They retain huge competitive advantages by making the hardware to their software, supplying the pre-installed App Store (or AI assistant) and what not.
Wrong.
Because that‘s what locking out competition and not having to compete fairly does.
Why invest in creating a better, more powerful music streaming service or AI assistant - when you can just laugh in competitors‘ faces and tax them 30% of their revenue?
spazzcat
macrumors 601
Notice how they are not currently planning on rolling out AI to the EU. There is no incentive for them to go to the hassle of getting it approved. This will be ongoing and more companies that are impacted by DMA will do it in the EU. The EU countries will have less functionality and features than the rest of the world, but hey, you have third-party app stores.
surferfb
Contributor
I think we've established on this (and many other threads on the same topics) that my opinion is that the fact Android (which allows anyone to install whatever they want, through any store that they want) exists and has like 70% market share in the EU, is sufficient competition to Apple's approach. Particularly when Apple has long advertised its closed, integrated approach as a reason to choose Apple over the competition. If users or developers don't like Apple's rules, they can switch over to Android, where they can pick a device by any number of manufacturers with any number of flavors of Android. And in fact, in this very thread we have numerous members of this Apple fan site saying they're switching to Android because of this. So yeah, in my opinion there is plenty of competition.
We've also clearly established that your opinion is that "iOS users" and "Android users" are two separate markets (despite the fact that the platforms do the same thing, and it is easy to switch between the two), and therefore iOS is a platform that should be regulated as if it had a monopoly. I disagree with that, but luckily for you, the EU takes your side.
Because Android exists and if they make a superior product people will switch to Android. We've had people in this thread say "Apple not rolling out Apple Intelligence means they're going to get left behind in Europe because Europeans will choose other phone manufacturers." So why do you and others keep saying there will be no competition if Apple is allowed to continue to run the App Store and its platform the same way it has for the past 15 years? History is absolutely littered with companies that were on top of the world one minute and then relegated to has-beens within 5 or 10 years. No reason to think the market won't take care of it itself without the EU dictating how Apple designs its software, particularly when it has such a strong competitor in Android.