YouTube said in a statement Thursday that it isn’t planning to launch a new app for the Apple Vision Pro, nor will it allow its longstanding iPad application to work on the device. YouTube, like Netflix, is recommending that customers use a web browser if they want to see its content: “YouTube users will be able to use...
My understanding is that it’s the reverse of this. The iPad app is available by default. They’re putting in the (minimal) effort required to proactively disable availability of the iPad app.
It's bad in principle because he obviously engaged in insurrection and is ineligible but from a practical standpoint it's great news for democracy. A toxic Republican candidate who by the election will most likely be a convicted felon and quite possibly already in prison is pretty much a best-case scenario for the country. Turnout matters and nothing is going to dampen Republican turnout like the top of their ticket being a convicted loser. We could very well be looking at a historic blue wave this year.
This seems like an entirely academic, theoretical technique with literally zero real world risk, and without any path forward to ever turn it into a practical attack.
Nobody is going to use it against you, but a state actor could use it against a specific target like a politician or military to develop a more accurate assessment of information they already have been collecting.
I read the whole article and I think even that is a ludicrous stretch. In order to get a vague image of your hand it requires either several minutes of projecting a precise black and white bright checkered pattern on the screen, or over an hour of subtly embedding varied brightness in a video. The checkered pattern represents a best/worst case scenario for this kind of attack, and even that is completely impractical for anything in the real world. This is literally zero risk for everybody. Forever.
That’s why it would need to be a small piece of a greater set of information. Imagine a person walking through an office and into a stairwell. If you know the person is there, and you know the stairwell is darker than the office, you could infer the appropriate location of the person in the building
That has nothing to do with the technique described in the article. It's also still quite a stretch. Holding up a piece of paper and casting a shadow on the ambient light sensor will also make it appear darker. Are they in the stairwell or is Bob from accounting stopping by to tell a "funny" anecdote and blocking the afternoon sun? If you've managed to compromise a device enough to access sensor data, you're not bothering trying to make sketchy assumptions based on the light sensor.
It's a commission for access to a lucrative market that Apple created. Apple gives away the developer tools and charges an extremely modest annual App Store fee, which also covers the review process and hosting. It's been common for platform creators to charge third-party developers in some capacity for many decades. Some do it by charging high costs for the developer tools, others by charging a commission based on sales. I don't think any strategy is necessarily better or worse than the other on a legal or moral basis; they're just business decisions. Previously Apple has combined the commission and payment processing costs into one fee. Apple made a decision on what they wanted to offer developers on that platform and Epic wasn't satisfied with it. They got a court to agree on what is ultimately a minor technical point in how Apple's deal is packaged so Apple is offering an alternative that they don't want to but complies with the law. It's, ultimately, a worse deal for the developer. Developers don't have a right to demand that some arbitrary percentage is the right one, tough. Apple offered a deal: take it or leave it. Developers are perfectly free to leave it.
No, we are discussing services not sold through their store and not using their payment provider. That is literally the topic of the post.
This is about purchases of virtual goods made by users of the app either directly in the app (30% combined commission and payment processing fees), or who click a link in the app to make the purchase using an external payment provider (27% commission). In all cases, these are sales originating from within the app.
Third party console games don't literally pay money to not use services.
I’m not sure if there have been any changes in the last few years (I doubt it), but developers paid Nintendo, Microsoft, or Sony a 15% “licensing” fee for physical media games sold for their consoles. That has been the basic business model for all consoles for decades.
I'm not sure if you're aware, but games consoles are a completely different market with completely different laws and standards governing them. Game consoles are not general purpose devices. They are closed platforms where you gotta sign lengthy NDAs and pay thousands just to get yourself a fucking dev kit.
iPhones are a closed platform. Ditto for iPad and Apple Vision Pro. They are essentially an app console. They have never been sold to consumers or presented to developers as anything else. For what it’s worth, almost all of the in-app revenue at the center of this discussion is gaming revenue. Everything else is a rounding error.
As a practical matter all they have to do is not proactively block their iPad apps from being available, which is the default.
Literally zero effort: Their iPad app is available for the Vision Pro and works perfectly fine.
Minor effort: Block the iPad app from being available.
Extra effort: make a specialized visionOS app that takes advantage of additional hardware features.
Why are they just outright stripping this feature instead of just paying the patent fee? (As in literally removing the chips, actually stripping it.)
They're not. Despite some misleading press coverage, Apple never remotely suggested they were removing any hardware. They're just going to start importing them without the "functionality." They're disabling it in the US via software while they go through the legal process. When it's all done, they can activate it for everyone.
As for why they're not paying, Apple's position is that their product does not infringe any patents, and this is not an outlandish position. Apple has already had most of Masimo's patent claims from a dozen total patents invalidated. The ITC ban is a result of a single patent still currently left standing that Apple believes should never have been issued and is working to have invalidated.
I think there's a very good chance Apple succeeds and Masimo is left with no relevant patents. If they go through everything and Masimo is still left with something, at that point Apple can negotiate with them on a reasonable fee, and they'll be doing so from a position of relative strength. Masimo was obviously hoping an ITC ban would cause Apple to blink and pay whatever Masimo wanted. Clearly that didn't happen and Apple would prefer go for total vindication.
If you are a developer, what right does Apple have to seeing your finances for all purchases made in the app that they sold on their store?
It's a commission for sales that came from the app, meaning from Apple's platform, where they have roughly one billion above-average income users with a reputation for buying apps and subscriptions.
It's also worth keeping in mind that there are different ways of monetizing platforms, none of which are necessarily morally better or worse than the other. Microsoft's IDE, Visual Studio, is $45 or $250 per user per month (so $4500 annually for a team of ten). Xcode, Apple's IDE, is free. A business can offer its apps on the App Store, which also serves the files, for a grand total of $99/year.
I won’t shed any tears for Amazon etc having to give Apple a huge chunk of cash
Amazon doesn't have to give Apple a huge chunk of cash though. Apps don't pay anything to Apple for real-world stuff being sold. Amazon pays nothing for the tens of billions of dollars purchased every year from iPhones. The only thing they pay Apple for is if someone uses the Prime Video app to buy or rent something or subscribe to Prime Video, but who does not already have an Amazon account (with saved card) that they're signed into. We're probably talking a number measured in the thousands of dollars. Uber, for example, pays Apple nothing other than their annual developer account fee (or fees, assuming they have multiple accounts).
this sounds like a way to frustrate small developers who don’t have a whole team to devote to their finances.
Nobody is going to actually use this program so there's no real world extra accounting cost. Previously Apple charged 30% for a combined payment handling and commission. A court determined they had to let developers handle their own payments so Apple complied and said the commission is 27%. It's invariably cheaper to just stick with Apple's 30%.
Everyone always wants more money. Developers would love to pay less; Apple would love to make more. The 30% max fee (in practice less for many developers) has been pretty successful for everyone involved. I think people can quibble over the "right" number, but I don't think it's wrong that there's a sales commission for access to a profitable platform.
Prior to the App Store, boxed retail software generally had a 50% cut.
Also, you can call it a duopoly, but Apple didn’t leverage market share into this 30% cut; it started when they were closer to 1% of the phone market, and the policy has only ever gotten cheaper (second year of subscriptions and small business program) and more permissive. They offered a closed platform and competed their way to the top based on the product. Developers are given the chance to sell to a huge market of high-end hardware with aggressive consumer uptake of software updates, making it a very attractive platform. Apple wants a commission. It’s not exactly outrageous of them.
Part of me thinks there may be, but the way you sometimes see them used interchangeably also makes me think that consumer has taken on much of the same meaning as customer. Maybe depends on from which context you’re speaking, i.e. out/in business?
Customers pay; consumers use. Sometimes they're the same, often they are not.
Ad-supported services: If you search for something on Google, you are a consumer. Google's customers are the companies paying for sponsored links at the top of your search results.
Kids toys (and other gifts): The kid in the sandbox playing with a Tonka truck is the consumer of the product but their parents (grandparents, etc.) are the customers.
"Enterprise" solutions: Corporate IT departments are usually the customer, though they may never use the product. Other employees are the consumer, but they had no choice in buying it so they're not the customer.
This article really resonated with me. I currently have a 2019 16" i9 MacBook Pro and looking for what the M3 upgrade would be was really frustrating. No clear path and all of the options cost way more than my current machine.
I work with drones, which means I work with 4K video. I'm a photography writer, which means I work with photos. I'm just the kind of creative who ought to have a MacBook Pro.
Not really. This honestly isn't that complicated, and editing 4K video isn't particularly taxing by modern standards. They should get the 15" M2 MacBook Air. Probably spring for 512GB storage. It's $1,499 and it's a certain to be a big upgrade over their current Mac. Problem solved.
This is advertising. It's not the most worst example, but it's still fundamentally an ad.
Revenue is absolutely the wrong metric to use. If you had $100 of revenue and $99 in costs, you have only $1 left to pay your fines. Amazon did not earn enough to pay its fines in 1 hour and 50 minutes because most of that that money was used to buy and deliver the products, plus various other expenses. The blog post is misstating the numbers by over an order of magnitude for some of the companies. If you're going to do it, do it right at least. The profit numbers are just as easy to come by as revenue.
Amazon doesn't even pay a dividend. Do you think suppliers are just gifting their products to Amazon? Amazon is a pretty low-margin company on the whole.
It's not outlandish enough to have his attorneys sanctioned for making a frivolous argument, but only because criminal defendants are allowed to grasp at straws. It's a deeply unserious argument with no textual or historical support and isn't going to pass muster among even the worst judges. It's not even going to meaningfully delay his trial. It's just fodder for his political supporters so he can pretend that he isn't a criminal because apparently l’etat, c’est moi.
No, it will never go away because it's a legitimately good feature that was introduced in order to extend the useful life of older devices with degraded batteries. Old batteries can't always consistently deliver the same power as newer batteries. Before "Batterygate" your phone would just shut itself off in the middle of whatever you were doing. That's the baseline experience. To prevent this, Apple developed a software update to, when and to the extend needed, dynamically throttle power demand in order to stay within the limits of the battery. On a full charge at room temperature, even a degraded battery may still be able to support full unthrottled performance, but if it gets too hot, or if your battery is low, it might not. Even then you may still be able to do stuff without any throttling, but if you do something that requires a spike in power consumption, it might need to be temporarily throttled then, through some combination of slightly slower performance (often not even noticeable) or a slightly dimmed screen. The more degraded your battery gets, the more it will need to throttle.
There are no scenarios where a sudden shutdown is actually preferable to throttling. This was a pro-consumer move that make old iPhones more usefull. It's a shame that Apple was bullied into adding the ability to disable the throttling feature.
I’m not sure why the entire phone experience needs to be slowed down by some percent for every phone of a particular model.
It's not. The throttling is dynamic based on current battery state and current power demands. If you're doing stuff that's low-demand, you probably won't be experiencing any throttling at all. If you do something demanding, only then does it slow down, and only to the extent needed. It may be as simple as dimming the screen brightness a bit while taking a video. Or maybe you've edited some video and need to export it. Instead of, for example, the five seconds that it would have taken, it will slow the processor down and take ten seconds. And then when you're back to just scrolling web pages, the throttling may be gone again. The more severely degraded your battery is and the lower its charge level, the more you'll experience throttling, but you'll only experience throttling at the moments when, without it, your phone would have instead just shut itself off. It comes and goes as needed.
Do you happen to know a good source for information on this?
Apple released detailed whitepapers and information about it when originally proposed but they shelved it so I don't think they're still readily available.
One in a trillion sounds like a probability of a hash collision.
Basically yes, but they're assuming a much greater likelihood of a single hash collision. The system would upload a receipt of the on-device scan along with each photo. A threshold number of matches would be set to achieve the one in a trillion confidence level. I believe the initial estimate was roughly 30 images. In other words, you'd need to be uploading literally dozens of CSAM images for your account to get flagged. And these accompanying receipts use advanced cryptography so it's not like they're seeing "oh this account has 5 potential matches and this one has 10"; anything below the threshold would have zero flags. Only when enough "bad" receipts showed up for the same account would they collectively flag it.
And I was under the impression that iPhones connected to the iCloud sync the pictures per default?
This is for people who use iCloud Photo Library, which you have to turn on.
British inventor seeks to take $18bn bite out of Apple in bitter patent war (www.theguardian.com)
YouTube and Spotify Won’t Launch Apple Vision Pro Apps, Joining Netflix (www.bloomberg.com)
YouTube said in a statement Thursday that it isn’t planning to launch a new app for the Apple Vision Pro, nor will it allow its longstanding iPad application to work on the device. YouTube, like Netflix, is recommending that customers use a web browser if they want to see its content: “YouTube users will be able to use...
Trump remains on Wash. GOP primary ballot after judge’s ruling (mynorthwest.com)
I find this unsurprising but disappointing nonetheless.
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Apple’s biggest critics are big mad about the new 27 percent App Store tax (www.theverge.com)
Apple Watch imports banned in America - Patents issues! (www.cnn.com)
Apple watches are seen on display at the Apple Store in Grand Central Station (Michael M. Santiago/Getty Imag)
Don't expect iPhone apps to get cheaper now that you can pay for them outside of the App Store (bgr.com)
Apple's New App Store Policy Is Petty As Hell - Aftermath (aftermath.site)
Is there a difference between customers/consumers?
Part of me thinks there may be, but the way you sometimes see them used interchangeably also makes me think that consumer has taken on much of the same meaning as customer. Maybe depends on from which context you’re speaking, i.e. out/in business?
The M3 MacBook Pro range is so sneaky that I'm thinking of ditching Apple (www.digitalcameraworld.com)
This article really resonated with me. I currently have a 2019 16" i9 MacBook Pro and looking for what the M3 upgrade would be was really frustrating. No clear path and all of the options cost way more than my current machine.
Big Tech has already made enough money in 2024 to pay all its 2023 fines (proton.me)
What is the likely outcome of the presidential immunity argument currently being used in courts?
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Noob Question: Is It safe to send newborn photos through WhatsApp? If it's not, why?