Facebook making their own phone is their choice. Apple has a lot of cash, it can buy an island and establish its own country "if it wants laws that it likes," because, otherwise it is not happening.
As a practical matter how would you choose to pay with the credit card number or the debit card number with a passive chip? The iPhone has a screen and software allowing you tell the chip, “I would like to pay with this account.” Credit cards are cheap pieces of plastic with essentially no interactivity. They also come with your account and it’s exceedingly commonly to carry around more than one, unlike a smartphone.
And here’s the admission that this argument is nothing more than an extraordinarily poorly thought out attempt at justifying the anti-competitive actions of Apple.
Are we talking about the Facebook phone from a number of years ago or something new that I’m unaware of? If it’s the former I’m not sure how @pastrychef pointing at a failed device supports the argument of the market needing and successfully supporting more smartphones/OS’s. It would seem to me to do the exact opposite. 🤷♂️
In the magnetic stripe days, hybrid cards were common here in NZ, with one card linked to multiple accounts. An account selection step appeared on the terminal before the PIN prompt.
So it doesn’t matter if something is general purpose and locked to the hardware maker then, it’s just smartphones you have a beef with? You don’t seem to know how NFC works in a smartphone or how Android utilizes its hardware, but you’re sure it can’t work with a point of sale machine?
Where?
Actually I hadn’t considered selecting the account from the POS. If this is something folks in the EU are really clamoring for, then the EU should look into implementing universal credit cards.
Passive in that it’s a piece of plastic without a screen or any interactivity. I’m not sure how to spell it out further.
Yes I’m aware that Apple Pay uses tokenization. Is the chip in a credit card capable of the same thing? If so, then like I said the EU should look into universal cards. Though at that point it probably makes more sense to just fully throw the cards into the smartphone which has already subsumed other practical objects for many people like computers, GPS’s, MP3 players, etc. I mean that’s Apple’s end goal with the Wallet App anyway, right? To replace your physical wallet with a digital one? They’re now to the point of implementing state ID’s. There’s not much left that a physical wallet can do that a digital one can’t at that point. Carry cash maybe? But even certain phone cases will take care of that for you. Of course digital wallets eventually supplanting physical wallets is all the more reason for the EU to act on this now making sure Apple can’t unilaterally tell folks what they can and can’t keep in their wallet and can and can’t do with it.
That was the point of the clearly flippant quoted comment, wasn’t it? Come on, don’t start getting disingenuous now.
How many folks need to clamour? I’m not sure a lot of folks are really clamoring for opening the NFC in iPhone…
I would personally say not many if it’s reasonably anti-competitive to not offer such a thing. But I’m not the EU so I don’t get to make the decisions.
Again, are credit card chips capable of that? If so, is it anti-competitive to not allow the chip in a credit card to be used by other issuers? If you want to make that argument I’m all ears.
That’s the spirit. Stamp those feet over Apple getting taken to task for their anti-competitor behavior.
What part wasn’t thought through? Is some piece of this law somehow unworkable? Or is it just that you don’t like the law and are lashing out over it?
Yep. That’s what’s scary. Not many people call something anti-competitive and boom! entirely new business landscape. It’s this kind of apparatchik nonsense that brought the Soviet Union to its knees.
Not many people calling Apple’s actions anti-competitive? As a proportion of the general population, sure, almost certainly. As a proportion of the people paying attention to and having an interest in the topic? You’re going to need to back that assertion up with some data.
Nice deflection.
I did, actually. And more important than my thoughts on the issue, the EU did as well.
This seems more like projection of how you feel about the EU lol.
Like I said earlier, we have a fundamental disagreement over what it means to be anti-competitive. So be it, I’m not losing any sleep over it. The interesting part is that EU regulators seem to agree with me and not you.
Apple is free to innovate. They can simply no longer use their innovations alongside their substantial market power to disadvantage other competitors to their benefit in unrelated markets in which they participate. They can also no longer act as both player and referee.
I would expect the EU to give Apple a temporary extension if Apple is able to show it earnestly tried to comply but didn’t yet have enough time to fulfill all the requirements. If the EU doesn’t, then I’ll call them out as being unreasonable, however it won’t change my position on the underlying goals of the law.
Sure, you can choose to see it that way. I see it as a message to “stop abusing your powerful position in the smartphone market to advantage yourself in other markets.” Apple wants to develop cool features for their phones to offer a superior phone than Samsung? Cool, have at it, innovate away. Apple wants to use those cool features they developed for their phones to keep banks from doing things like offering their own digital wallets to compete with Apple’s? Now we’ve got a problem.
Not sure how this will make an iPhone harder to use. It might make it easier to use in some cases as people can use one app for messaging rather than multiple ones.
Websites choose how to comply with that law. I’ve seen good implementations and bad ones. Blame the websites with poor implementations. If the tech industry actually cared about the consumer experience they could have gotten together and created a standard where you could set global options on your device and have it automatically tell all websites that you visit what you want to happen with their various kinds of cookies. This wouldn’t be all that different from the existing ‘block all cookies’ functionality.
Well lucky apple then. NFT isn’t their technology. They license it. So Apple is preventing others from accessing someone else’s technology
You said it wouldn’t take many people clamouring in the EU to write a law, not me.
Deflection from what? I really think you’re not following the conversation…. You asked if it was possible for the NFC chips in credit cards to be multi-purpose, and I said yes. I doubt that the current cards were designed that way, but that’s because they aren’t being good socialists and are only thinking of themselves. Pass a law mandating it and the chips can be designed.
They are free to innovate but have been disincentivized from doing so.
Why would you expect that? The law specifically says 6mos when it’s clear how unreasonable that is from the outset and there’s a huge financial payoff for declaring them non-compliant. Remember the point here is to show the good people of the EU that they’re being tough against these foreign behemoths— there’s no points for reasonablness.
Don’t innovate if it takes you out of the box we’ve defined for you.
More choices always make things harder. Less default functionality makes things harder. A half dozen wallets accessing NFC and just as many Appstores to download them from.
Microsoft get away in two ways.
Why is it that consumers choose windows? Or macOS? But not Linux?
Apple is estimated to have more than 50% of revenue mobile apps. Accross smartphone platforms. Even in Europe.
Why would they be "necessary"?
If it were reasonably anti-competitive, then in my opinion no, it shouldn’t take many. However that last response you quoted in the series was in response to your implication that not many people were calling Apple anti-competitive when the EU enacted this law. If you weren’t saying that not many people were calling Apple anti-competitive, then I misinterpreted your comment.
I’m following the conversation just fine. The problem is you’re making proper arguments while simultaneously making snarky, disingenuous comments. If you want to have a coherent discussion, pick a lane.
Here’s a perfect example of what I said above. You first give a supposedly real answer of “yes the chips are capable of it” followed by:
A snarky comment saying “actually the current chips aren’t capable of it.” So which chips are we even taking about now, the ones that presently exist in everyone’s wallets or theoretical ones? And yet you have the nerve to accuse me of being the one being at fault for such a confusing back and forth.
Right, because everybody knows the smartphone market is completely worthless. Apple has been completely disincentivized from making billions of dollars trying to sell more phones than the Android handset makers. 🙄
Not sure what else you expect me to do. I have no more power to offer an exemption than I did to write the law lol.
The iPhone obviated the need for point and shoot cameras. Last I checked a smartphone isn’t going to be somehow replace bank accounts. But perhaps you could explain the physics on that one.
Did Apple do something I’m unaware of?
You don’t have to download other wallets. Use Apple’s.
We’ll see on this one I guess.
Are you telling me a cookie’s functionality can’t be categorized?
Before anyone (not you) get's too "creative" with their ideas again:
Eu haven’t ever called Apple a monopoly, monopoly is a legal business strategy. Anti competitive activities when holding a dominant and influential position isn’t legal
Well as the famous saying goes, vote with your feet and choose only developers in the AppStore. But you just want to force developers to use the AppStore even if it’s trash.
I think it’s your who’s out of touch. Nobody want to live in corporate dystopia.
It’s close to impossible as the private key is on your device only. Tour bank’s encryption works the same way
It sounds like you are technologically illiterate.
Eu will only come if you become a billion dollar company with massive market influence. Or 99.9999% of businesses will be unaffected
No need as such law’s already exist. Steam tried the same thing and was smacked as the end result was the same they just tried to cal it something else. Just how loot boxes are still gambling irrespective of what you call it.
You seem to live under the wrong perception of what eu tries to do or care for. They don’t care how many competitors there is. They only care that it’s a level playing field. And a new Apple in a garage will have equal opportunity as Apple the trillion dollar company.
They still would have bought it as iPhones have a thousand other reasons to buy it, compared to a random Samsung phone.
Again you’re mistaken. It’s all about how you compete, not with who you compete with.
You enforce it with money. More customers on the AppStore equals more developers. If iOS users love the AppStore then they will use it
They are completely separate options.
The EU is in terminal decline, and every year fewer EU citizens are able to afford Apple products. Apple shouldn't compromise in this case.
