I remember looking at it about 20 (?) years ago and came back disappointed that I could not use it on my Mac.
Well, at least I was able to revive this feeling today... :-(
Even if you are right and everything is the same regarding surveillance and regulation: there are other important aspects that make the move to move european data out of the US worthwhile.
One-lane-roundabouts are very safe. I lived in Hannover (Germany) in the 80s and 90s, they had 2 or 3 lanes in the roundabouts. There were large signs that counted the accidents (200+/year) to raise awareness and during the trade fairs (anybody remembers Cebit?) the number of accidents peaked. Today they are all a lot safer because of a lot of traffic lights.
Cannibalize meant in this case to have product that will kill one of your other products (in this case the back then cash cow iPod would be killed by the iPhone).
This is outrageously wrong. Back in 2011, the pricing model for "an app in your pocket" was 99 cents. The universal pricing model of apps was a one-time fee and the pricing range was that of an mp3 roughly. 30% of that is a lot. App sales worked only in volume.
If you sold software over the internet, you had PayPal, which had a flat fee of $0.35 + 1.7% or so and if your shareware was $30, the transaction fee essentially was ~$1. Stripe had roughly the same fee when they launched. You had more traditional credit card merchants and when I inquired one in Germany back in 2010, it was more or less in the same ballpark (~10%).
In Europe, you could also just get money wired, which cost you something like 0-10 cents.
30% for payment processing were always extremely high.
Edit: The only thing where you had no other options was when you tried to sell stuff on the internet for $1, because the flat fee part of credit card processors would eat up all of that. Apple indeed helped here a little bit, because it was always 30% and no fixed part.
I was thinking about something comparable, where there is a digital storefront, payment processing, security, delivering, installing on all my devices and so on...
Steam comes to mind. They take 30% (and I think 5% for credit card or whatever).
So I do not think that "outrageously wrong" is characterizing my remarks adequately.
Steam is fundamentally different in very important ways.
Your phone is general purpose, steam is focused on a narrow band of market
The iOS store adds nothing but cost to the purchasing process, with hilariously terrible discoverability and sorting, steam makes navigating and discoverability breezy and easy
Your phone is arguably not an optional part of your life, whereas nobody ever missed an important call because they weren't on steam
Steam does not take any money from apps or companies for transactions it was not involved in. Here, and in other cases, the costs of doing business with apple extend to people who have no relationship with apple at all
It's not a "processing fee". It's an distribution/access/market fee for the captive audience that Apple has spent tens of billions developing and supporting.
If you think you can make any money selling software on the internet and paying nothing other than $0.35 + 1.7%, think again.
Yeah I heard this before, but no, it is mostly a processing fee. The reality is:
- Developers helped to make Apple the platform it is today.
- Apple had their 30% fee when the App Store was MUCH smaller. It's not like that fee came only after they had the audience.
- Apple will do zero marketing for you unless you are already successful.
- Apple doesn't earn money with the most popular free apps, but still hosts them. They could charge by traffic, by downloads, whatever, but they won't.
- Apple will charge you if you make money in the app. They will force you to use their payment processor if you want to make money.
So, it is 100% a processing fee and everything else either came later or isn't congruent with what they actually charge money for.
Just as an aside, everything here is true of Android as well, and I think the cut was higher (or there were more intermediaries taking a bit as well): I priced an app $1.47 in 2010 so I'd get about $1 on every purchase.
True, the Google cut was also 30%, but they didn't make such a fuss about "no links to website" and stuff like that. They didn't even have a review process for a long time.
Processing fees were way less than 30% before the App Store. And considering how overrun the App Store now is with junk apps there is basically no service Apple provides other than taking money.
Had to let this here: A TV clip on YouTube of an episode of “That’s Incredible”, featuring Apple co-founder Stephen “Woz” Wozniak (aged 38) running through a maze and nearly winning.
I dislike this dramatization in reporting of mundane facts.
So report the facts but sentences like "What Wei probably didn’t tell Cook is that Apple may no longer be his largest client" make it personal, they make you take sides, feel sorry for somebody, feel schadenfreude... (as you can observe in the comments)
There may be an arrogance that we're not vulnerable to these tactics because the topics of conversation are science and tech focused, rather than celebrity culture.
However this post and the comments really debunk that - here we have a clear example of the author turning these people into characters, archetypes of reality tv, and inviting the reader to have an emotional response to what is potentially interesting, but actually just the mundane business matter of dealing with demand spikes.
A normal conversation might take a step back, above the emotional baiting, and instead lament on how TSMC weren't able to develop sufficient supply capacity in time to maximise yield across not just these clients, but many others whom are looking to get involved in the AI hype train. Instead we're seeing something quite different, and quite uninformed. It's reading like a gossip post from an instagram thread.
I notice that HN is actually more vulnerable to these types of conversations. Maybe it's because HN likely weights towards an ASD audience, which has less experience in handling socially driven narratives. I do definitely see here more of the "one-sided" conversation that is typical of ASD.
Doesn't seem like LLM generated text to me. Even prior to ChatGPT some journalists preferred to write in a novel-style with extraneous fluff like that.
For the last time.. Word (the program very popularly used by many reporters across the world to write articles) automatically autocorrects hyphens to em-dashes according to the default loaded grammar rules for En-US. The existence of em-dashes in an article does NOT immediately imply GenAI slop.
A lot of people don't actually learn good writing at their fancy schools - but they do they learn the stylistic quirks that signal one went to the fancy school.
How do you think it got in the LLM training set in the first place?
> while Apple Music reached all-time highs in both listenership and new subscribers.
I'm assuming listenership is total subscribers.
It doesn't need to be "astounding". But it is significant, given the competition from Spotify and YouTube and other streaming services. When you're not the most popular service, it's genuinely a challenge to be on the growing side of things rather than the shrinking side or stagnant side.
It's as if Apple Music was a monopoly giving it's the default music application same as Internet Explorer was the default browser. I'll bet Apple Music is so integrated into the OS that it would be impossible to remove.
See my cousin comment, not a monopoly by market share, not even close. Spotify is the market leader.
There are no alternative Settings apps. But you can certainly use Spotify like I do and many others.
What does it being bundled with a bundle you chose to subscribe to have to do with anything? You can subscribe to iCloud without Apple Music if you want. It's cheaper.
I think it's just a bit of an obscure way of saying total subscribers. "${verb}ership" like "readership" meaning the number of subscribers + casual readers of a magazine [0], or "viewership" meaning a TV show's total viewers/ratings [1]
I don't think I've ever heard listenership in that same context though, so they might have just made that up. haha
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