I hope you're right! I truly fear you're not though, which is why I'm so passionate about this.
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Apple Says New EU Interoperability Rules 'Bad for Our Products and Our Users'
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Completely agree.
And your wording of "brilliant business maneuver" and "forcing open the market" is very apt. Cause that's what it took, that's what he overcame, considering the anti-consumer state of cellular telecommunications in the U.S. market back then:
"Wireless carriers in the United States (...) view total control over customers as their inherited birthright.
(...) They do everything they can to keep power firmly in their own hands. It is entirely at the carriers’ discretion to permit, or disable, the features that a factory loads into the newest phones. They also decide which software can be installed and how it may be used.
(...)
In most European and Asian countries, a customer can switch carriers in a few seconds by removing a smart card from a cellphone and inserting a different one from a new provider. In the United States, wireless carriers have deliberately hobbled their phones to make flight to a competitor difficult, if not impossible."
When Mobile Phones Aren’t Truly Mobile (Published 2007)
Wireless carriers in the United States are spiritual descendants of dear Ma Bell: they view total control over customers as their inherited birthright.
👉 And if only you liked mobile carriers as much as you like Apple, such anticompetitive and anti-consumer business conduct is exactly what detractors of the DMA like you and @surferfb and others would defend and advocate for:
- "Carriers deserver to be compensated for their IP investment in infrastructure"
- "Only cellular carriers can keep us all safe. If they have to open up their networks just think about the dangers to security and privacy"
- "Oh, but that carrier has only a 30% share of the market, so any regulation is total overreach"
Consumers in Europe did not have to put up with the same degrees of bull****. Carrier activation, carriers locking out devices purchased elsewhere, etc. We had (and still have) an interoperable cellular market that allowed change of carriers and independent purchase of phone.
Wanna know how, if anyone revived and (re-) introduced such business models to Europe? None other than Apple that re-foisted that crap upon Europe, when they began distributing carrier-locked phones through exclusivity contracts with European telcos from 2008 on (I still remember it vividly).
👉 You guys are defending and advocating for anti-competitive and anti-consumer business conduct
Arbitrary restrictions, limitations, locking out of the competition, charging commissions etc. - that benefit no one except incumbent firms, only further entrenching their market position. And that certainly does not encourage innovation.
Brand me as "socialist" or whatnot (which I'm far from).
Decry European overregulation (which there's more than a shred of truth to) as much as you want.
Such unregulated anti-competitive and anti-consumer conduct by the biggest firms is not appreciated in Europe.
You can keep that to yourself on the other side of the pond and indulge in your proclamations of economic superiority.
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Continuity is one of those features that is easy to take for granted. It is one of the things that just works. But it is so low key that Apple doesn’t get the credit for it that they deserve. I use features of it every day and have for years. Apple first started rolling it out in 2014. Google finally got around to adding their “game changing” “Cross-Device Services” last year.
The road to Hell is paid with good intentions or well meaning politicians. And in this case, I don't think we can be sure of the politicians are close to well meaning.
Over reaching and controlling, yes. This is nothing more than socialism.
Not it doesn't. It means apple must give it to them for use in competing products. No R&D required. UE makes stealing the product not only legal but mandatory.
I appreciate your passion on it all .... I'm truly having a hard time caring about some of this tech stuff right now, as you can imagine
You evidently don’t know what socialism is or means.
It doesn’t. Apple can restrict functionality of AirDrop to only work with (at least one) their own products.
Side note: both have been reverse-engineered anyway.
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Getting riled up about tech is keeping me from getting riled up about other things 😂
It’s truly amazing the amount of people that comment ‘Socialism this’, ‘Capitalism that’. They have no idea what any of it is, or how it pertains to them or indeed whichever country they’re from. That’s the internet for you.
That it has already been stolen is not a defense in real countries (not EU). You leave out the fact that Apple is required to handhold their competitors as they learn to use the stolen technology against Apple. It's completely and utterly ridiculous.
Yep as you know, but most of the other regular posters don't, the current upheaval in the US government is directly impacting me in a very real way - to the point that I'm needing to look at changing careers. Yelling at the EU for making (what I see as) a massive mistake is a nice distraction to take my mind off of things. Apologies in advance if it seems like I'm making it personal or something like that.
What’s completely and utterly ridiculous is some people’s inability to understand what’s actually being asked of Apple, and yet shouting out their opinion on it from the rooftops with such gusto.
Also, I think offending entire nations full of people by decrying their country is ‘not a real country’ says an awful lot about whomever may say such things.
Yet these types of posters are just blissfully unaware of their own ignorance. It’s not a surprise, considering the type of place the world has become, but it’s sad nonetheless.
That’s a shame for you. Good luck, sincerely. Things are getting messed up.
It’s not “stolen” if Apple keep the rights to it.
It’s not used “against” Apple when that means interfacing with Apple’s products.
And handholding isn’t required for what has been documented already.
It has ZERO to do with making Apple products better. This is the EU blackmailing Apple to give away their tech to their competitors or face fines or worse from the EU.
Classic case of the EU trying to socialize, or worse, the European countries at the expense of free enterprise.
It means I can use my iPhone with a (fully functional!) smartwatch of my choice. That option makes my iPhone better even if I do not use it because now Apple has to make a better Watch.
This is just like how some people use weird, wavy ergonomic keyboards with their Macs. They will argue up and down about how ergo keyboards make using their desktop better.
It also means you get fewer features because Apple has no incentive to spend significant resources to develop them if they have to give them away to competitors who didn't spend money to develop them and can undercut them on price.
Which makes for a worse phone and watch. The competitors won't get to steal the features because they don't exist, and it's not like they're coming up with them on their own. Everyone loses!
We wanna be free, we wanna be free to do what we wanna do. And we wanna get loaded. And we wanna have a good time. And that’s what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna have a good time. We’re gonna have a party.
So you think Apple will suddenly stop caring about their own products? Is that honestly what you think? The EU mandate Apple write an API so that non Apple Watches can interact properly with an iPhone, and so they’ll just give up on Apple Watch - not only that but give up on the iPhone too? I wish you people could hear yourselves. It’s quite something.
I'm also failing to understand this a bit.
There is still plenty of money to be made, even if forced to allow interoperability.
Honestly, what Apple really needs is to be forced to actually compete, in so many areas.
I absolutely think a lot of the “nice to have” features will go away, yes. The ROI won’t be there, or the privacy concerns of third party companies having access to certain data means the feature won’t get released.
Like iPhone mirroring. There’s a reason that not available in the EU and it’s not spite.