ianbetteridge.com

ianbetteridge.com, 12 days ago to random

Websites That Forbid Other Websites From Linking to Them – Pixel Envy:

Some of these are even more bizarre than a blanket link ban, like Which? limiting people to a maximum of ten links to their site per webpage. Why would anyone want to prevent links?

I can actually answer this one: it’s an attempt (albeit pointless) to prevent sites linking in a way which Google will define as spammy. Low-quality backlinks used to be a bit of an SEO nightmare, and you used to have to disavow them as toxic in Google Search Console. More than ten links to the same site from a single page is classic link spam, hence Which?’s attempt to stop it.

https://ianbetteridge.com/2024/04/27/why-do-people-try-and-forbid-linking/

ianbetteridge.com, 12 days ago to random

1. Who among us has not been surprised by needing people to do things
   =====================================================================

Spotify’s Daniel Ek is shocked, shocked I tell you, that laying off 1,500 workers has actually made the efficiency of his company worse. It’s almost as if those people did things which were, perhaps, important to the business. Seriously though, if you allowed your company to hire 1500 people who weren’t actually needed, then you’re a bad leader and should pay the price for that. What actually happens because capitalism, is that the leaders get a bigger bonus for “taking the hard calls” even when it was their decision to approve those hires in the first place.

2. Just how bad are the tech barons?
   ====================================

Bad enough to want to subvert democracy and establish their own dictatorships. Balaji Srinivasan is one of the worst, but he’s not alone in this endeavour: Marc Andreessen is equally awful. As an internet veteran, I always feel I should apologise that we didn’t spot these men — and it’s always men — were this terrible a lot sooner. But we were all carried away in fever dreams of tech utopianism for a while. Sorry.

3. Remember, a sustainable society is a bad society
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Speaking of Andreessen — yes, I know you don’t want to, but to stop things going completely to shit, we must — this article about a dinner with him is full of moments of hilarity and absolute horror. Here is a man with few redeeming qualities, who used government funding to create a web browser which he turned into a large pile of cash for himself, railing against the government. You might as well print t-shirts with his chubby, milk-fed face on it and the words “why you should be a communist” on them.

4. Speaking of cheating
   =======================

The part of me that loves sensational counter-narratives would love this story to be true. Qualcomm cheating on the benchmarks for its upcoming “nearly as good as Apple’s chips, no really, this time we’re not lying” Snapdragon X Elite would be a fantastic scoop. But I don’t believe it. Why not? Simply because the stakes are too high, and the rewards too low, for it to be worth Qualcomm doing it. As soon as the new ARM-based Windows computers come out, everyone will benchmark them, and if they don’t perform anywhere near as well as touted, the company will not get another chance.

5. That sound you hear is your old iPhone being shredded without mercy
   ======================================================================

When you trade in an iPhone for recycling, it’s basically shredded. Why? Because Apple desperately wants to avoid parts from old phones getting back into the market to be used for repair by third parties, who will do the job more cheaply than Apple. Why does it want that? Because it wants you to buy a new iPhone, rather than getting your perfectly good one repaired. If there isn’t a more obvious symbol of why the present system is broken and isn’t going to stop climate change, I don’t know what it is.

6. I feel seen
   ==============

I posted about this one all over the social medias but reading it back again it still hits home. I’m in the home stretch of my career, too, and the best advice I can give anyone is to realise early on that some day your career will end. Don’t get so drawn into it that you have no idea what to do when it does – or how to wind it down gently.

7. The man who killed Google search
   ===================================

It’s a beautiful shared truth that Google’s search has, for the last few years, been getting worse. You’ll hear it from experienced SEOs, publishers, and normal users too. But why has it happened? Ed Zitron wrote a good piece which not only explains the “why”, but accuses the “who”. The key question now is: How does Google get out of this mess – and, in fact, does it even want to?

8. And speaking of dreadful corporate behaviour
   ===============================================

HERE’S GOOGLE AGAIN! Like lots of corporations, Google had rules about how its suppliers treated their workers. Unlike plenty of corporations, as soon as that became a problem, it changed the rules so it could work with suppliers who paid worse wages, didn’t provide health insurance, and so on. Google, of course, is blaming someone else – in this case the National Labor Relations Board, which ruled that these rules meant Google was effectively a co-employer of its partners’ staff. Blaming other people is, of course, standard corporate behaviour these days. Corporations who want to take responsibility for their actions are a dying breed – if they ever existed at all.

9. I will laugh so hard I’ll poop
   =================================

Could Tesla go bankrupt? Motorhead neatly avoids Betteridge’s Law by adding “The odds are rising” on to this headline, but I would have been willing to extend an indulgence to them because yes, Tesla could indeed go bust. The company has a weak product pipeline – the Cyberdog… sorry Cybertruck is a distraction – and its share price has collapsed because it’s no longer considered a growth stock. This is why Musk is desperate to pivot the company so it’s seen as an AI leader, which would hitch it firmly on the latest bubble of excitement rather than the old hat that is electric vehicles.

10. And speaking of Elon
    ========================

Former US secretary of labor Robert Reich points out the obvious: that what Elon Musk indulges in isn’t capitalism. Essentially, it’s extortion.

https://ianbetteridge.com/2024/04/26/ten-blue-links-gosh-is-that-the-time-edition/

ianbetteridge.com, 20 days ago to random

AppleInsider: –”EU’s antitrust head is ignoring Spotify’s dominance and wants to punish Apple instead“:

Speaking to CNBC the EU’s Margrethe Vestager said her office was continuing to investigate Spotify’s complaint that it is being prevented from reaching its audience. Spotify is currently the leading music streaming service in the world, while Apple Music is variously in fourth or fifth place.

Repeat after me: Spotify is not a gatekeeper. Apple is. Special rules apply to gatekeepers to stop them using their market power in one area to distort a free market in another.

This is not rocket science, and I’m at the point where I think if a journalist is getting it wrong, they’re simply propagandising for Apple, Meta, or Google.

https://ianbetteridge.com/2024/04/19/did-iqs-drop-sharply-while-i-was-away/

ianbetteridge.com, 20 days ago to random

John Gruber in 2020 on the tracking industry led by Facebook:

The entitlement of these fuckers is just off the charts. They have zero right, none, to the tracking they’ve been getting away with. We, as a society, have implicitly accepted it because we never really noticed it. You, the user, have no way of seeing it happen. Our brains are naturally attuned to detect and viscerally reject, with outrage and alarm, real-world intrusions into our privacy. Real-world marketers could never get away with tracking us like online marketers do… Just because there is now a multi-billion-dollar industry based on the abject betrayal of our privacy doesn’t mean the sociopaths who built it have any right whatsoever to continue getting away with it. They talk in circles but their argument boils down to entitlement: they think our privacy is theirs for the taking because they’ve been getting away with taking it without our knowledge, and it is valuable. No action Apple can take against the tracking industry is too strong.

John Gruber in 2024, on the EU’s actions which limit Facebook’s ability to track users:

What makes this all the more outrageous is that many major publishers in the EU use this exact same “pay or OK” model to achieve GDPR compliance — and none offer a free alternative with non-targeted ads. Don’t hold your breath waiting for Der Spiegel to offer free access without ads. Christ, they don’t even let you look at their homepage without paying or consenting to targeted ads. And Spotify quite literally brags about its ad targeting. But Spotify is an EU company, so of course it wasn’t designated as a “gatekeeper” by the protection racketeers running the European Commission… They’re not saying “pay or OK” is illegal. They’re saying it’s illegal only if you’re a big company from outside the EU with a very popular platform.

I wonder what happened to turn John’s attitude from “no action Apple can take against the tracking industry is too strong” to defending Facebook’s “right” to choose how it invades people’s privacy? Or is he suggesting that a private company is entitled to defend people’s privacy, but governments are not?

And John’s second point about Spotify fundamentally misunderstands the nature of antitrust law in general and the EU gatekeeper system specifically. In competition, actions which are legal when you’re not a monopoly become illegal when you are a monopoly.

In particular, Apple – and Facebook – are gatekeepers because they “are digital platforms that provide an important gateway between business users and consumers – whose position can grant them the power to act as a private rule maker, and thus creating a bottleneck in the digital economy”. Spotify is not in that position. Der Spiegel is not in that position. Different rules apply – as they do to Tidal (not an EU company), and of course to the New York Times.

This really is not difficult to understand.

But underneath this in part is John’s feeling that EU antitrust law is all an EU conspiracy to attack American companies. That would be news to Daimler, fined over a billion euros for an illegal cartel. It would news to Scania, fined 880m euro. To DAF, fined 715m euro. To Phillips, fined 705m euro. And so on. The EU fines European companies big sums of money all the time for breaking competition law.

The entire point of the EU is to create single, competitive markets. It does not allow big companies to “own” markets because free markets (in the EU’s eyes) are good, and privately owned ones that allow big companies to stop being capitalists and act like feudal lords are bad. Facebook, Apple, and the rest have been doing this in digital for a long time, and the EU has decided it’s going to stop.

https://ianbetteridge.com/2024/04/19/what-a-difference-four-years-makes/

ianbetteridge.com, 21 days ago to random

Nearly thirty years ago I reviewed my first product. It was a Lexmark solid ink inkjet printer, created for designers to do lower-cost but higher quality proofs than were possible on the regular inkjets, expensive colour laser printers, or super-expensive Chromalin machines of the time.

Its launch was also the first press conference I went to. I remember nothing of the event, but I do distinctly remember meeting some of the trade press journalists from the magazines about printing (trade press was VERY large) who promptly took me down the pub. I spent a happy couple of hours getting paid to drink in the middle of the day, and realised I had found my ideal job.

I have no idea how many products I have reviewed over the years, but it’s likely to be several hundred single reviews and even more if you count group tests. All of which makes me think that I know a bit about reviewing.

Unlike Daniel Vassallo:

https://ianbetteridge.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/screenshot_20240417_183216.png?w=575“First, do no harm” is not a principle that can or should ever be applied to reviews. “First, tell the truth about the product”, on the other hand, is absolute the reviewer’s mantra. You owe nothing to the people who made the product. You owe everything to the people who might consider spending their hard-earned money on it.

Ben Thompson hits the nail squarely on the head:

“Who, though, is to blame, and who benefited? Surely, the responsibility for the Humane AI Pin lies with Humane; the people who benefited from Brownlee’s honesty were his viewers, the only people to whom Brownlee owes anything. To think of this review — or even just the title — as “distasteful” or “unethical” is to view Humane — a recognizable entity, to be sure — as of more worth than the 3.5 million individuals who watched Brownlee’s review.”

Vassallo has taken something of an online beating for this. The idea that telling the people who ultimately pay your wages – those who read your content or watch your videos – the truth about a product is “almost unethical” is indicative not just of Vassallo’s views, but those of the tech executives who have grown up in the last 20 years. The fact that the Humane AI Pin is a lemon is not MKBHD’s fault.

But Vassallo is really just expressing a view that’s part of the present Silicon Valley/venture capital paradigm. Why make a great product when you can make a so-so product and erect moats which turn into monopolies, locking customers in? The Rot Machine is real, and once you buy into it as a business model is not love of great products but a mastery of the mechanisms of stopping people going elsewhere. Customers become users, and who owes users anything? They just use what you supply, and should be grateful for it.

What technology companies hate is that good reviewers have power. And they wield that power not for the company’s investors and shareholders, but for the people who have to work hard and earn money to buy their products. Excellent reviewers can even end up helping improve the products, as Walt Mossberg often did:

“XM is only one of dozens of companies that have redesigned products in response to Mossberg’s unsparing criticism. RealNetworks overhauled its RealJukebox player. Intuit revamped TurboTax. Mossberg even forced Microsoft to scrap Smart Tags, which would have hijacked millions of Web sites by inserting unwanted links to advertisers’ sites. Few reviewers have held so much power to shape an industry’s successes and failures.”

No wonder this generation of tech entrepreneurs would rather that reviewers shut up and gave them four stars.

https://ianbetteridge.com/2024/04/17/on-the-fine-art-of-technology-reviews/

ianbetteridge.com, 1 month ago to random

John Gruber: More on the EU’s Market Might:

If they follow through with a demand that Photos be completely un-installable (not just hidable from the Home Screen, as it is now), this would constitute another way that the EC is standing in as the designer of how operating systems should work.

A lot of commentators seem to have the same issue as John: that it’s weird that a governmental body can or should define how products should be designed.

But governments mandate how products are designed all the time, and not just in the EU. Take another market which is pretty big: cars. All cars have to feature safety equipment, which varies from region to region but will broadly include everything from seatbelts to crumple zones. Cars have rules for emissions, for fuel efficiency, all of which are designing how a car should work.

John then kind of hits the nail on the head:

Why stop there? Why not mandate that Springboard — the Home Screen — be a replaceable component? Or the entire OS itself? Why are iPhone users required to use iOS?

To which the obvious answer is why indeed?

I paid Apple £1099 for my last iPhone. It made a handsome profit on it, probably between 30-40%. At that point, Apple should no longer be able to stop me from doing what the hell I want with the product I purchased. So yes, the fact that it does exactly that is problematic.

Apple doesn’t do that on the Mac I’m typing on. Why should it have that level of control over the iPhone I bought?

And yes, I know the “well you bought an iPhone and you knew that was part of the deal ha ha” argument. That argument is weak, because people’s needs evolve and what people want evolve. Maybe now I’m super-happy with the way that Springboard works. And perhaps in a year’s time Apple will introduce a new version, which sucks. But I won’t be able to replace it with a third party alternative, despite the phone being a year old, despite it being perfectly good.

Because, of course, I don’t own my phone, despite that money I paid for it, despite that margin Apple got.

The EU isn’t just concerned with today. It’s really taking Steve Jobs’ advice and listening to the Wayne Gretzky quote: it’s skating to where the puck is going, not where it’s been. Its aim is to ensure that two very large companies don’t own the market for smartphones to such a degree they can determine everything that happens in those markets, to their advantage. The EU is a capitalist body: its obsession is keeping markets open, and it will do anything it needs to do to make sure that happens. They can act now, or they can act later when the adjustments required – both for big companies, third parties and consumers – would be far greater.

The obvious solution would be for the European Commission to pass a law banning targeted advertising. But I suspect they haven’t done that, and won’t, because so many publishers in the EU use targeted advertising (along with “pay or OK” subscription offerings). They don’t want to eliminate all targeted advertising, just Meta’s (and Google’s), but that’s hard to put into written law while claiming not to be targeting very specific American companies.

The EU prefers not to ban products outright. Remember, it’s a capitalist body. It loves markets! But it’s not like it hasn’t pushed targeted advertising hard to try and get the balance between a useful product and people’s privacy. Laws affecting it include:

• the ePrivacy Directive (Directive 2002/58/ED).
• a little thing called the GDPR (Regulation (EU) 2016. You may have heard of it.
• the eCommerce Directive (Directive 2000/31/EC).
• the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive (Directive 2005/29/EC).
• the Directive on Misleading and Comparative Advertising (Directive 2006/114/EC).
• the Audiovisual Media Services Directive (Directive (EU) 2018/1808).
• the Consumer Rights Directive (Directive 2011/83/EU).

It’s not like the EU hasn’t investigated targeted advertising, and (unfortunately in my view) the issue isn’t targeting in itself but the ways Meta (and separately Google) have been implementing it. This is the point that John highlights Thierry Breton making:

But the DMA is very clear: gatekeepers must obtain users’ consent to use their personal data across different services. And this consent must be free! We have serious doubts that this consent is really free when you are confronted with a binary choice. With the DMA, users who do not consent should be provided with a less personalised alternative of the service, for example financed thanks to contextual advertising. But they do not have to pay.

The EU told Meta explicitly that its contract with users was a problem. Rather than change the contract substantially to stop violating the law, it chose to offer a different contract for paying customers. The point isn’t that a paying option is or is not popular: it’s that Meta has tried to evade what the courts have explicitly told them to do.

As American companies are learning, the EU does not like companies that try and do an end run around the law. This appears to have dawned on Apple, which has already – in the space of a few weeks! – widened its plans to comply with the DMA and DSA. Perhaps not enough, which is why the EU is investigating them. But the mood from Apple has definitely started to change from sullen evasiveness to being more open to compliance. It’s not yet at the point of working to make a good compliant product for its customers, but it’s getting there.

One other point of course: Breton’s comments are demanding that Meta implement a system in a way similar to that which Apple forced them to do on iOS. App Tracking Transparency made Meta, and all other app makers, ask if the app could track them – and Apple didn’t give a damn that it would cost Meta $10bn. Apple also wouldn’t have accepted an opt-out where Meta charged you if you opted out of ATT. John’s argument seems to be that it’s fine for Apple to do things to protect the privacy of its customers, but it’s not OK for the EU to do the same for everyone.

Consider too that if Meta goes along with this interpretation by the EC of the DMA’s requirements, and offers a vastly-less-lucrative free-of-charge option to use Instagram and Facebook without targeted ads in the European Union, there’s nothing to stop regulators and legislators around the world from demanding the same. Conceding to this might mean not just generating only a fraction of Meta’s current revenue in the EU, but generating only a fraction of its current revenue worldwide.

To which I can imagine Breton giving something of a gallic shrug. Because, again, the point of the EU – its very purpose – is to ensure that markets are free and open. The idea that a single company should determine what markets can and cannot be open is an existential threat to the EU.

Breton — after casting a stink eye at Google for presenting its own hotel, flight, and shopping recommendations in web search results, and at Amazon for promoting its own Amazon-branded products (a shocking practice for a retailer — good luck ever finding Kirkland products at Costco, Up & Up at Target, or, say, Ol’ Roy dog food at Walmart, right?)…

Let’s just pause at this point and remind ourselves that Google has 91.62% of the search engine market, and repeat – again – that the rules of what you can and can’t do as a business change when you have a dominant market position.

(Aside: the FTC and other antitrust bodies are, in fact, casting their eyes on the likes of Walmart too. And in Europe, many retailers and non-tech companies have fallen foul of antitrust rules. It’s not just about tech.)

On to our scheduled programming:

Turns out, though, that actual users don’t agree that removing longstanding features from Google search results is somehow for their benefit. I’m guessing they’d see even less benefit if entire popular services and products are removed from the EU market.

Leaving aside that John is linking as “proof” to a Reddit thread with precisely nine comments on it, most of which are from US users and none of which sound particularly outraged, this misses the point of antitrust action entirely, doubly so in the EU. So, for what feels like the 900th time, I’ll explain it:

The point of antitrust action is to ensure that markets remain competitive, because over time competition spurs innovation and ensures prices are optimal.

That’s it. That’s all. It’s not about immediate prices – although over time, competition lowers them. It’s not about “making customers happy” – although, over time, competition leads to happier customers, because it spurs innovation.

It’s understandable that people with a American view of antitrust based on recent history might not get this. The focus in US antitrust since the early 1980s has been on prices, thanks to the noxious influence of Robert Bork. In Borkian antitrust, all that mattered was prices, and, in his weird head, monopolies led to lower prices for consumers. That this went against pretty much every economic theory since (and including) Adam Smith didn’t matter.

Thankfully US antitrust bodies appear to have cottoned on to how bizarre Bork’s approach was and are abandoning it. But if you haven’t been paying attention to antitrust history and have grown up since Reagan, you probably don’t understand the change.

In a footnote, John notes this:

One obvious solution would be to show more ads — a lot more ads — to make up for the difference in revenue. So if contextual ads generate, say, one-tenth the revenue as targeted ads, Meta could show 10 times as many ads to users who opt out of targeting. I don’t think 10× is an outlandish multiplier there — given how remarkably profitable Meta’s advertising business is, it might even need to be higher than that. But showing that many ads would be such a bad experience that I suspect it would land Meta right back where they are today with the paid subscription option, with the EC declaring it non-compliant because users don’t want it.

And here’s the thing: that’s fine. It’s fine because, instead of having a business model reliant on invading people’s privacy, largely without their consent or even any kind of transparency, Meta would be forced to compete without doing those things. It would be forced to make a product which respected people as people, instead of exploiting its undoubted market power.

I am totally fine with that.

Maybe 10 ads would be enough to maintain its current level of profits. And maybe that would make users unhappy. And maybe then another company would come along and offer a similar service with five ads, and people could choose to use it because it’s a better experience.

And that might push Facebook to make its service more efficient, or lower its margins, so it could offer five ads too. Perhaps it could charge a higher price for them because it found technical ways to do better targeting while staying within the bounds of the law. Or maybe Facebook would die and be replaced by something else, just as MySpace, FriendFeed, and all those other early services fell by the way side because they weren’t as good an experience as Facebook.

That’s how competition works. Not by lock-ins, tying, bundling, “walled gardens” (that you can’t easily leave). All of those things are symptoms of a market out of control. The EU, which up till now has mostly confined itself to measures like GDPR which just ameliorate the symptoms, has decided it’s going to try curing the disease itself.

https://ianbetteridge.com/2024/04/01/antitrust-meta-apple-and-more/

ianbetteridge.com, 3 months ago to random

There is always a point in every Robin Hood film where Robin stops robbing the rich to feed the poor and doffs his hat to King Richard, stepping back and allowing the monarch to take his rightful place as “protector of the realm”. In a feudal system, the lord must prevail because the lord is the peasants’ only true guarantee of peace.

I have had this in mind since Apple announced its response to the EU’s Digital Markets Act. The rules Apple published are constructed precisely to make alternative methods of distributing apps both unattractive to customers and both toxic and unprofitable for developers. Tonally, it’s also a big “fuck you I won’t do what you tell me to” to the EU, one of the most bitter and resentful public statements I have seen. It reminds me of Bill Gates’ sullen deposition to regulators when Microsoft was being investigated back in the 1990s – and we all know how that case ended up.

It amazes me how quickly successful, rich companies and people turn into sulky teenagers the moment even the most minor demand is made of them. Success, it seems, breeds little character of worth and encourages a kind of childishness which most people grow out of by the age of 21. Usually, I would expect that from Elon Musk or Donald Trump, but it seems Tim Cook has had a dose of it too.

Rich people gonna rich. But what amazes me more is how many cheerleaders they have. Now Apple has always had cheerleaders — lord knows, at times I’ve even been one of them — but the latest wave of online criticism of those of us who would very much like Apple to allow us to use the computers we bought in the way that suits us, rather than the way that suits Apple, strikes me as different. Louder. More vocal. More focused on the idea that not only is wanting this stupid, but that it’s somehow a threat to other people’s security.

And as we all know, when people feel their security is threatened, they act a little weird. Moral panics, and all that.

But then I remember another characteristic of feudalism: many people are most comfortable when there is a feudal lord to protect them and make decisions for them, and so vociferously attack when anyone suggests that, perhaps, the existing social order needs to change.

That’s not simply because they long for the attention of the rich and powerful and see protecting them as a way to gain favour. Feudalism survived by ensuring that the peasants were always helpless, always in need of protection, and of course always threatened. The lord protected you from anarchy. Unable to imagine another world being possible, the peasant can only support the lords’ right to rule because to do otherwise would mean either a more cruel lord, or dangerous lawlessness.

As we move into technofeudalism, where instead of owning technology we rent it, those old peasant instincts are resurfacing. There is a big, bad world out there of hackers, thieves, scammers, and other ne’er-do-wells, and only feudal lord Apple can protect us from it.

“But You have to protect people”

I have some sympathy for the argument that people require protecting. We still get, on a weekly basis, scam calls on our landline from people claiming to be from Microsoft, wanting to “sell” my now-departed in-laws protection for their PC. My father-in-law had dementia, used a computer, and managed to sign up to every kind of dubious data gathering exercise known to man. We are on many lists. I have become very used to calmly asking the person at the other end of the line whether their parents know they attempt to steal old, vulnerable peoples’ savings for a living.

Having protections available is a good thing. Having them as the default on very widely used devices like smartphones is also a good thing. But having no ability to turn them off, no matter what? Not so good.

Having protections doesn’t mean everyone has to use them. Those who want to opt-out should be able to do so. No one is suggesting that the App Store should be closed down, and anyone who wants to be protected by Apple should be able to carry on.

But then there’s the protection argument again. If it can be turned off, the argument goes, then bad people will persuade the vulnerable to do just that.

All of which is a good argument for “parental control” systems, which allow the vulnerable to be protected by someone they know, but not a good argument unless you believe that everyone out there is stupid and needs feudal lord Apple to protect them.

Ah.

I’m not going to link to the original post or put a name on it because I know the person who wrote it means well, and they are by no means the only one making much the same argument:

I get what you’re saying and that’s fine for nerds, but the average punter isn’t able to decide that, is terrified of tech, and doesn’t even know what software is. They are the sorts of people who will tell you their password if you tell them it’s for a survey The result of them making such decisions is very predictably going to be like hyenas around a corpse

I fundamentally disagree with this view, which I find exceptionally patronising towards ordinary people, bordering on misanthropic. Back when the iPad was launched, Cory Doctorow wrote eloquently about why he wouldn’t be buying one:

But with the iPad, it seems like Apple’s model customer is that same stupid stereotype of a technophobic, timid, scatterbrained mother as appears in a billion renditions of “that’s too complicated for my mom” (listen to the pundits extol the virtues of the iPad and time how long it takes for them to explain that here, finally, is something that isn’t too complicated for their poor old mothers).

Unfortunately, it looks that Apple has been very successful in persuading people that not only is “your mom” too stupid to understand what software is, they’ve persuaded a lot of them that the non-existent “mom” is actually the majority of people.

But this is also a view of human relationships to technology which is self-perpetuating: if you never bother to teach people how to do something, such as protecting themselves against scams, unsurprisingly they never become particularly good at doing it. Likewise, if you never let your children play outside, guess what happens?

Learned helplessness is a thing, and it always benefits the most powerful.

And, as Dan Moren points out, Apple’s dire warnings of terrible consequences should you be foolish enough to allow an application to be installed from any other source than the App Store are pretty hilarious when you consider that they are implementing the same system of notarisation which keeps Mac apps free of malware. Evidently, Apple believes that someone who spends £1000 on a computer is significantly more tech-savvy and able to look after themselves than someone who spends £1100 on a smartphone.

Unless, of course, ultimately Apple believes it’s for the best if Macs are as locked down as iOS.

Hmm.

20/20 Hindsight is 20/20

In retrospect, Dan Gillmor was right:

A few months ago, when Apple introduced its iPad Pro, a large tablet with a keyboard, CEO Tim Cook called it the “clearest expression of our vision of the future of personal computing.” That was an uh-oh moment for me. Among other things, in the iOS ecosystem users are obliged to get all their software from Apple’s store, and developers are obliged to sell it in the company store. This may be Apple’s definition of personal computing, but it’s not mine.

At the time, I shrugged off Dan’s arguments. Wasn’t there room for a powerful computer, but incredibly easy to use? Where there was never going to be a worry about malware? I think I saw the iPad as just a tiny step on from the Mac: the real computer for the rest of us.

I was wrong. Dan was right. As was Cory Doctorow in 2006. As was Mark Pilgrim the same year.

Apple isn’t a bunch of evil geniuses wanting to rule the world. Ultimately, Apple is driven by the same forces as every public company: the demand from “the market” for continual growth. As anyone with a passing interesting in compound growth will tell you, that becomes significantly harder as a company gets bigger. For Apple, 10% revenue growth in 2004 meant adding just $800 million. By 2014, that required an additional $18 billion. In 2024, that will require $38 billion.

There are no more devices as big as the iPhone to be launched, no more hardware markets worth tens of billions of dollars which Apple can magic into existence to keep their share price growing (and no, Apple Vision Pro is not it). So the only way of keeping that revenue growth rolling is to squeeze more from customers, and to ensure that not one cent of current revenue slips from the feudal lord’s fingers. And that includes the tens of billions of dollars of revenue it makes from the App Store.

The only way for Apple to keep growing is to not only retain the control — and thus revenue — it has, but to tighten the screws and get more control. To ensure you can’t buy an iPhone without also paying them a monthly tithe for storing photos. To ensure that no application gets sold without Apple getting a cut. The role of the feudal lord is one that Apple is choosing to play because it makes more money that way.

Turning points…

I have never been one to entirely excuse Apple its control-freakery, but I’ve also respected them and liked the products they make. I’m started writing this on an M2 MacBook Air, and it’s the best laptop I have ever owned in many ways, not least the battery life. Without Apple’s determination to do its own thing, to “own the whole widget” as Steve Jobs would have said, that battery life wouldn’t be possible.

But: the Mac model of (relative) openness is not the one which Apple has chosen to pursue. Instead, its focus is on keeping things closed, reducing developers to digital serfs paying a tithe to the feudal lord whose land they are allowed to plough. And of course, ensuring that its customers, who pay a handsome margin to the company simply to buy its products, cannot choose what they do with those expensive devices.

Just as the release of the iPad Pro was a turning point for Dan Gillmor, Apple’s response to the Digital Services Act feels like one for me.

I started writing this on the MacBook Air, but I’m finishing it on a ThinkPad X1 Carbon running Fedora 39 Linux. I’m using the same tools to write on both: Obsidian, configured just how I like it, even down to using LanguageTool to proof it.

The MacBook Air will almost certainly be the last Apple product I buy. When the time comes to replace my iPhone, maybe towards the back end of this year, I’ll look for something I can install a de-Googled version of Android on.

I’ve been playing with a Pixel 6 running Graphene, which even lets you install Google’s apps on it, but restricts them and prevents them from doing the full range of spying on you. I like that idea: taking a dangerous but handsome animal, and ensuring you can admire its beauty while stopping it biting you.

Perhaps one day Apple might let me do the same with the device I paid them a thousand pounds for. But I’m not going to hold my breath.

And no, I am not switching fealty from the Apple feudal lord to the Google one. I love this, from Dave Megginson:

When Apple fleeced and Google spied,
Where, then, should our loyalty lie?

The answer to that is simple: to people. Not to feudal lords, no matter what colour their flag.

Image by Clickrbee

https://ianbetteridge.com/2024/01/27/some-thoughts-on-apples-response-to-the-eu-dma/