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Dan Moren, writing last week at Six Colors:

Lately you can’t throw a digital camera without hitting a story on
the various regulatory and legal challenges Apple’s been facing.
While some have decried these actions as interference in the
internal operations of a company, there’s one salient detail that
I think those opinions often overlook.

Regulation works.

Here are just a handful of examples from the past few months of
Apple changing its policies due to regulations — or, in some
cases, the mere threat of regulation.

I’d change “regulation works” to “regulation can work” or “regulation sometimes works”. But there’s no question we’re seeing results. Moren cites three recent examples:

New rules announced by Apple in January for game streaming services.
New rules this month eliminating the ban on game emulators in the App Store.
Changes last week in the Self Service Repair program regarding used components.*

These changes are all wins. But they’re also all low-hanging fruit. Apple has no self-interested reasons to fight against any of them, and regulatory scrutiny forced the company to stop ignoring them. It’s the same with how the Japan Fair Trade Commission’s investigation led to Apple loosening its anti-steering rules for “reader” apps worldwide in 2021. That might not have happened at all without the regulatory scrutiny, and certainly wouldn’t have otherwise happened when it did. But it was the lowest of low-hanging fruit: Apple, to my eyes, lost nothing by loosening those anti-steering provisions.

The real regulatory rubber hits the road on the issues that are against Apple’s own interests, or detrimental to the experience of users (which is, effectively, against Apple’s interests — Apple is in the business of making its users happy).

* The parts-pairing stuff is complex. Right-to-repair advocates often wrongly assume that Apple’s repair policies are geared toward making money — either turning a profit on the repairs and replacement parts directly, or by implicitly encouraging users to buy brand-new devices to replace broken ones rather than fix them. That’s just not the case. Repairs are not a profit center for Apple. The complexity Apple is trying to manage is guaranteeing that supposedly genuine replacement components are in fact genuine, and that stolen devices can’t be mined for black-market components. Last week’s changes seem to manage a good balance of all these factors.

 ★ 

Dan Moren, writing last week at Six Colors:

Lately you can’t throw a digital camera without hitting a story on
the various regulatory and legal challenges Apple’s been facing.
While some have decried these actions as interference in the
internal operations of a company, there’s one salient detail that
I think those opinions often overlook.

Regulation works.

Here are just a handful of examples from the past few months of
Apple changing its policies due to regulations — or, in some
cases, the mere threat of regulation.

I’d change “regulation works” to “regulation can work” or “regulation sometimes works”. But there’s no question we’re seeing results. Moren cites three recent examples:

New rules announced by Apple in January for game streaming services.
New rules this month eliminating the ban on game emulators in the App Store.
Changes last week in the Self Service Repair program regarding used components.*

These changes are all wins. But they’re also all low-hanging fruit. Apple has no self-interested reasons to fight against any of them, and regulatory scrutiny forced the company to stop ignoring them. It’s the same with how the Japan Fair Trade Commission’s investigation led to Apple loosening its anti-steering rules for “reader” apps worldwide in 2021. That might not have happened at all without the regulatory scrutiny, and certainly wouldn’t have otherwise happened when it did. But it was the lowest of low-hanging fruit: Apple, to my eyes, lost nothing by loosening those anti-steering provisions.

The real regulatory rubber hits the road on the issues that are against Apple’s own interests, or detrimental to the experience of users (which is, effectively, against Apple’s interests — Apple is in the business of making its users happy).

* The parts-pairing stuff is complex. Right-to-repair advocates often wrongly assume that Apple’s repair policies are geared toward making money — either turning a profit on the repairs and replacement parts directly, or by implicitly encouraging users to buy brand-new devices to replace broken ones rather than fix them. That’s just not the case. Repairs are not a profit center for Apple. The complexity Apple is trying to manage is guaranteeing that supposedly genuine replacement components are in fact genuine, and that stolen devices can’t be mined for black-market components. Last week’s changes seem to manage a good balance of all these factors.

Read More 

Everything is coming up Milhouse this week for Riley Testut. Juli Clover for MacRumors:

Game emulator apps have come and gone since Apple
announced App Store support for them on April 5, but now
popular game emulator Delta from developer Riley Testut is
available for download. […]

Delta is an all-in-one emulator that supports game systems
including NES, SNES, N64, Nintendo DS, Game Boy, and Game Boy
Advance. It works with popular game controllers, and supports
cheats, save states, backups, syncing, and more. As this is
Testut’s longtime project, it is more polished and feature rich
than other emulators that have popped up. […]

Delta can be downloaded from the App Store for free, and it does
not collect information or include ads. The app is available in
the United States and other countries, but it is not available in
the European Union where it is instead being offered through an
alternative app marketplace.

An incredibly polished, high-performance game emulator, available free of charge with no ads. That’s some old-school internet awesomeness. (App Store link.)

Now the questions is: Does Nintendo care? Nintendo recently shut down Yuzu, a popular open source Switch emulator. (David Pierce and Sean Hollister made a great episode of Decoder about this whole saga.) There’s a big difference between emulating the Switch — which is still current — and emulating classic consoles, but Nintendo still monetizes those classic consoles via emulation on the Switch.

 ★ 

Everything is coming up Milhouse this week for Riley Testut. Juli Clover for MacRumors:

Game emulator apps have come and gone since Apple
announced App Store support for them on April 5, but now
popular game emulator Delta from developer Riley Testut is
available for download. […]

Delta is an all-in-one emulator that supports game systems
including NES, SNES, N64, Nintendo DS, Game Boy, and Game Boy
Advance. It works with popular game controllers, and supports
cheats, save states, backups, syncing, and more. As this is
Testut’s longtime project, it is more polished and feature rich
than other emulators that have popped up. […]

Delta can be downloaded from the App Store for free, and it does
not collect information or include ads. The app is available in
the United States and other countries, but it is not available in
the European Union where it is instead being offered through an
alternative app marketplace.

An incredibly polished, high-performance game emulator, available free of charge with no ads. That’s some old-school internet awesomeness. (App Store link.)

Now the questions is: Does Nintendo care? Nintendo recently shut down Yuzu, a popular open source Switch emulator. (David Pierce and Sean Hollister made a great episode of Decoder about this whole saga.) There’s a big difference between emulating the Switch — which is still current — and emulating classic consoles, but Nintendo still monetizes those classic consoles via emulation on the Switch.

Read More 

Riley Testut:

I’m thrilled to announce a brand new version of AltStore — AltStore PAL — is launching TODAY as an Apple-approved
alternative app marketplace in the EU. AltStore PAL is an
open-source app store made specifically for independent
developers, designed to address the problems I and so many others
have had with the App Store over the years. Basically, if you’ve
ever experienced issues with App Review, this is for you!

We’re launching with 2 apps initially: my all-in-one Nintendo
emulator Delta — a.k.a. the reason I built AltStore in
the first place — and my clipboard manager Clip,
a real clipboard manager that can actually run in the
background. Delta will be FREE (with no ads!), whereas Clip will
require a small donation of €1 or more. Once we’re sure
everything is running smoothly we’ll then open the doors to
third-party apps — so if you’d like to distribute your app with
AltStore, please get in touch.

Exciting times for iOS users in the EU. Both of these things can be true:

The DMA is a bad law that, I believe, will result in more harm than good for most users.
For iOS power users and enthusiasts, alternative app marketplaces are going to be fun and useful. Right now there’s no better place to be an iPhone user than the EU.

(Also: How fun is the name AltStore PAL?)

 ★ 

Riley Testut:

I’m thrilled to announce a brand new version of AltStore — AltStore PAL — is launching TODAY as an Apple-approved
alternative app marketplace in the EU. AltStore PAL is an
open-source app store made specifically for independent
developers, designed to address the problems I and so many others
have had with the App Store over the years. Basically, if you’ve
ever experienced issues with App Review, this is for you!

We’re launching with 2 apps initially: my all-in-one Nintendo
emulator Delta — a.k.a. the reason I built AltStore in
the first place — and my clipboard manager Clip,
a real clipboard manager that can actually run in the
background. Delta will be FREE (with no ads!), whereas Clip will
require a small donation of €1 or more. Once we’re sure
everything is running smoothly we’ll then open the doors to
third-party apps — so if you’d like to distribute your app with
AltStore, please get in touch.

Exciting times for iOS users in the EU. Both of these things can be true:

The DMA is a bad law that, I believe, will result in more harm than good for most users.
For iOS power users and enthusiasts, alternative app marketplaces are going to be fun and useful. Right now there’s no better place to be an iPhone user than the EU.

(Also: How fun is the name AltStore PAL?)

Read More 

Amazing he found time for this amidst his campaigning and legal travails. But like many former presidents, he has a serious interest in history.

 ★ 

Amazing he found time for this amidst his campaigning and legal travails. But like many former presidents, he has a serious interest in history.

Read More 

Jason Kottke:

Ryan Gosling was on Saturday Night Live this weekend and they did
a sequel to one of my favorite SNL sketches (which is completely
dorky in a design nerd sort of way) ever: Papyrus. Behold,
Papyrus 2.

See also: Elle Cordova’s “Fonts Hanging Out” trilogy.

 ★ 

Jason Kottke:

Ryan Gosling was on Saturday Night Live this weekend and they did
a sequel to one of my favorite SNL sketches (which is completely
dorky in a design nerd sort of way) ever: Papyrus. Behold,
Papyrus 2.

See also: Elle Cordova’s “Fonts Hanging Out” trilogy.

Read More 

Regarding the jacktastic argument that Marques Brownlee shouldn’t call the worst product he’s ever reviewed the worst product he’s ever reviewed, I’m reminded of the lede from Alan Deutschman’s 2004 profile of Walt Mossberg for Wired:

Walt Mossberg is walking through a convention hall at the Consumer
Electronics Show in Las Vegas when a man starts screaming at him.
The screamer, Hugh Panero, blames Mossberg for his company’s
recent problems: falling stock price, a sudden plunge in consumer
interest. Mossberg is annoyed but hardly intimidated. As the
author of the weekly “Personal Technology” column in The Wall
Street Journal, he’s used to dealing with disgruntled execs. He
lets Panero shout. A crowd is gathering. Finally, Mossberg yells
back, “I don’t give a fuck about your stock price!”

Keep reading. The story doesn’t end there.

What Mossberg always got right was that he relentlessly focused on his readers. Not what a product was supposed to be. Not what future versions might be. And not the fucking stock price of the company that made it. What he cared (and cares, in retirement) about was the actual experience of using the actual product, as it actually was, by actual users. He was rewarded with his readers’ trust.

That same mentality is what made Siskel and Ebert superstar film critics: they loved movies and they judged them for what they were, from the perspective of fellow moviegoers. They weren’t Hollywood insiders, and in the same way Mossberg didn’t give a fuck about XM Radio’s stock price, they didn’t give a fuck about how their reviews might affect opening weekend box office numbers. They cherished the trust of their TV viewers and newspaper readers, and rewarded them by providing nothing less than their fully honest expert appraisals of the movies they reviewed.

Art criticism has a long history, though. Consumer technology criticism does not. Mossberg blazed the trail.

 ★ 

Regarding the jacktastic argument that Marques Brownlee shouldn’t call the worst product he’s ever reviewed the worst product he’s ever reviewed, I’m reminded of the lede from Alan Deutschman’s 2004 profile of Walt Mossberg for Wired:

Walt Mossberg is walking through a convention hall at the Consumer
Electronics Show in Las Vegas when a man starts screaming at him.
The screamer, Hugh Panero, blames Mossberg for his company’s
recent problems: falling stock price, a sudden plunge in consumer
interest. Mossberg is annoyed but hardly intimidated. As the
author of the weekly “Personal Technology” column in The Wall
Street Journal, he’s used to dealing with disgruntled execs. He
lets Panero shout. A crowd is gathering. Finally, Mossberg yells
back, “I don’t give a fuck about your stock price!”

Keep reading. The story doesn’t end there.

What Mossberg always got right was that he relentlessly focused on his readers. Not what a product was supposed to be. Not what future versions might be. And not the fucking stock price of the company that made it. What he cared (and cares, in retirement) about was the actual experience of using the actual product, as it actually was, by actual users. He was rewarded with his readers’ trust.

That same mentality is what made Siskel and Ebert superstar film critics: they loved movies and they judged them for what they were, from the perspective of fellow moviegoers. They weren’t Hollywood insiders, and in the same way Mossberg didn’t give a fuck about XM Radio’s stock price, they didn’t give a fuck about how their reviews might affect opening weekend box office numbers. They cherished the trust of their TV viewers and newspaper readers, and rewarded them by providing nothing less than their fully honest expert appraisals of the movies they reviewed.

Art criticism has a long history, though. Consumer technology criticism does not. Mossberg blazed the trail.

Read More 

Daniel Vassallo, who has over 172,000 followers on Twitter/X, regarding Marques Brownlee’s scathing but utterly fair (if not bend-over-backwards fair) “The Worst Product I’ve Ever Reviewed… For Now” review of the Humane AI Pin:

I find it distasteful, almost unethical, to say this when you have
18 million subscribers.

Hard to explain why, but with great reach comes great
responsibility. Potentially killing someone else’s nascent project
reeks of carelessness.

First, do no harm.

Marques Brownlee:

We disagree on what my job is.

There’s cool, and then there’s cool.

 ★ 

Daniel Vassallo, who has over 172,000 followers on Twitter/X, regarding Marques Brownlee’s scathing but utterly fair (if not bend-over-backwards fair) “The Worst Product I’ve Ever Reviewed… For Now” review of the Humane AI Pin:

I find it distasteful, almost unethical, to say this when you have
18 million subscribers.

Hard to explain why, but with great reach comes great
responsibility. Potentially killing someone else’s nascent project
reeks of carelessness.

First, do no harm.

Marques Brownlee:

We disagree on what my job is.

There’s cool, and then there’s cool.

Read More 

John Davidson, writing for the Financial Review on Phil Schiller’s testimony in Australia, where Apple is once again facing off against Epic Games (archive link in case FR’s web server goes down):

The casual approach to its meetings, instituted by Apple
co-founder Steve Jobs when he returned to the company in 1997
after having been fired in 1985, explained why Epic’s lawyers
could find precious few contemporaneous records of Apple’s
decision-making processes since the App Store was first launched
in 2007, Mr Schiller suggested.

“When Mr Jobs came back in 1997, in one of the earliest meetings
someone was taking notes, writing down what [Mr Jobs] was saying
about what we’re doing. He stopped and said ‘Why are you writing
this down? You should be smart enough to remember this. If you’re
not smart enough to remember this you shouldn’t be in this
meeting’. We all stopped taking notes and learnt to just listen
and be part of the conversation and remember what we were supposed
to do. And that became how we worked.” Mr Schiller testified.

“It was very action-oriented. It was built to be like a small
start-up where we all are working together on the same things, and
we all know what our plans are and what we’re doing.”

And:

Nor is there much talk in meetings of how profitable the Apple App
Store is, despite the fact it would be the 63rd biggest company on
the Fortune 500 if it were hived off as a separate entity.

“Are you telling His Honour that you have no idea whether … the
App Store has been profitable?” asked an incredulous Neil Young,
KC, leading the cross-examination on behalf of Epic Games.

“I believe it is [profitable],” replied Mr Schiller, who has
been in charge of the App Store since the beginning. “I’m simply
saying ‘profit’ as a specific financial metric is not a report I
get and spend time on. It’s not how we measure our performance as
a team,” he said.

Sounds like Epic is getting its hat handed to it once again.

 ★ 

John Davidson, writing for the Financial Review on Phil Schiller’s testimony in Australia, where Apple is once again facing off against Epic Games (archive link in case FR’s web server goes down):

The casual approach to its meetings, instituted by Apple
co-founder Steve Jobs when he returned to the company in 1997
after having been fired in 1985, explained why Epic’s lawyers
could find precious few contemporaneous records of Apple’s
decision-making processes since the App Store was first launched
in 2007, Mr Schiller suggested.

“When Mr Jobs came back in 1997, in one of the earliest meetings
someone was taking notes, writing down what [Mr Jobs] was saying
about what we’re doing. He stopped and said ‘Why are you writing
this down? You should be smart enough to remember this. If you’re
not smart enough to remember this you shouldn’t be in this
meeting’. We all stopped taking notes and learnt to just listen
and be part of the conversation and remember what we were supposed
to do. And that became how we worked.” Mr Schiller testified.

“It was very action-oriented. It was built to be like a small
start-up where we all are working together on the same things, and
we all know what our plans are and what we’re doing.”

And:

Nor is there much talk in meetings of how profitable the Apple App
Store is, despite the fact it would be the 63rd biggest company on
the Fortune 500 if it were hived off as a separate entity.

“Are you telling His Honour that you have no idea whether … the
App Store has been profitable?” asked an incredulous Neil Young,
KC, leading the cross-examination on behalf of Epic Games.

“I believe it is [profitable],” replied Mr Schiller, who has
been in charge of the App Store since the beginning. “I’m simply
saying ‘profit’ as a specific financial metric is not a report I
get and spend time on. It’s not how we measure our performance as
a team,” he said.

Sounds like Epic is getting its hat handed to it once again.

Read More 

Matt Stoller, linking to the aforelinked FT report on Apple “losing” the top spot in IDC’s phone market share figures:

The early signs that Apple is having a Boeing-like slow collapse.

That’s quite the take. It is true that iPhone sales have been relatively flat for two years — here are the quarterly revenue and year-over-year revenue change charts from Six Colors for the October–December 2023 quarter. But they’re not in decline. Apple’s problem — or perhaps better said, Apple investors’ problem — is that iPhone sales have peaked because they’ve saturated the globe. Everyone who wants one and can afford one has one.

But whatever is going on with iPhone sales, a comparison to Boeing is just dumb. Boeing’s problem isn’t cheap Chinese competition. It’s that when Boeing was Boeing — a truly great American company — it was an engineering-driven company. It was — past tense — in broad strokes similar to Apple in that regard. Then Boeing “merged” with McDonnell Douglas, the McDonnell Douglas CEO became Boeing’s CEO, other executives with zero aviation experience came over from companies like General Electric, and “a passion for great planes was replaced with a passion for affordability.” The 737 Max isn’t just unpopular — it’s an engineering disaster. The iPhone 15 lineup is, by consensus, the best lineup of phones in the industry — the fastest chips, great reliability, and industry-leading customer satisfaction. Even if iPhone sales were in decline — which only IDC is claiming to be true — it’s not for reasons that bear any resemblance to Boeing at all.

Call me when Apple is led by executives who lack a passion for great computers.

 ★ 

Matt Stoller, linking to the aforelinked FT report on Apple “losing” the top spot in IDC’s phone market share figures:

The early signs that Apple is having a Boeing-like slow collapse.

That’s quite the take. It is true that iPhone sales have been relatively flat for two years — here are the quarterly revenue and year-over-year revenue change charts from Six Colors for the October–December 2023 quarter. But they’re not in decline. Apple’s problem — or perhaps better said, Apple investors’ problem — is that iPhone sales have peaked because they’ve saturated the globe. Everyone who wants one and can afford one has one.

But whatever is going on with iPhone sales, a comparison to Boeing is just dumb. Boeing’s problem isn’t cheap Chinese competition. It’s that when Boeing was Boeing — a truly great American company — it was an engineering-driven company. It was — past tense — in broad strokes similar to Apple in that regard. Then Boeing “merged” with McDonnell Douglas, the McDonnell Douglas CEO became Boeing’s CEO, other executives with zero aviation experience came over from companies like General Electric, and “a passion for great planes was replaced with a passion for affordability.” The 737 Max isn’t just unpopular — it’s an engineering disaster. The iPhone 15 lineup is, by consensus, the best lineup of phones in the industry — the fastest chips, great reliability, and industry-leading customer satisfaction. Even if iPhone sales were in decline — which only IDC is claiming to be true — it’s not for reasons that bear any resemblance to Boeing at all.

Call me when Apple is led by executives who lack a passion for great computers.

Read More 

Tim Bradshaw and Michael Acton, reporting for the Financial Times, under the eye-opening headline “Apple Loses Smartphone Crown to Samsung as Chinese Rivals Gain Ground” (archive link):

Apple lost its lead in the global smartphone market at the start
of 2024, with iPhone sales falling 10 per cent as lower-cost
Chinese rivals such as Xiaomi experienced rapid growth.

Sounds bad! Then comes the second paragraph of the report:

Samsung regained its position as the world’s largest smartphone
maker by volume in the first quarter, according to market
researcher International Data Corporation, just three months after
Apple claimed the top spot for the first time.

So we’re talking about unit sales volume (a measure Apple has never pursued as a top priority), using numbers from IDC (sketchy at best), and a supposed lead that Apple held for … three months? Which three months happen to be the holiday quarter, when — every single year — all of Apple’s sales go up, and when new iPhone models drop. Warm up your dictionaries, time to refresh your memory of how to spell beleaguered.

The iPhone’s success is so poorly reflected by market share numbers that the Department of Justice invented a fictional category of “performance smartphones” just to make it maybe sorta kinda — if you squint just right — look like they might possibly hold a monopoly under U.S. law.

IDC estimated that global iPhone shipments declined 10
per cent to 50.1mn in the first three months of 2024 compared with
the same period in 2023, giving it a 21 per cent market share.

Let’s see if there’s a 10 percent drop in iPhone revenue year-over-year when Apple reports results for the January–March quarter on May 2. If so, that’ll be quite the feather in IDC’s cap. If not, I’m sure we’ll see a correction from IDC and the FT.

 ★ 

Tim Bradshaw and Michael Acton, reporting for the Financial Times, under the eye-opening headline “Apple Loses Smartphone Crown to Samsung as Chinese Rivals Gain Ground” (archive link):

Apple lost its lead in the global smartphone market at the start
of 2024, with iPhone sales falling 10 per cent as lower-cost
Chinese rivals such as Xiaomi experienced rapid growth.

Sounds bad! Then comes the second paragraph of the report:

Samsung regained its position as the world’s largest smartphone
maker by volume in the first quarter, according to market
researcher International Data Corporation, just three months after
Apple claimed the top spot for the first time.

So we’re talking about unit sales volume (a measure Apple has never pursued as a top priority), using numbers from IDC (sketchy at best), and a supposed lead that Apple held for … three months? Which three months happen to be the holiday quarter, when — every single year — all of Apple’s sales go up, and when new iPhone models drop. Warm up your dictionaries, time to refresh your memory of how to spell beleaguered.

The iPhone’s success is so poorly reflected by market share numbers that the Department of Justice invented a fictional category of “performance smartphones” just to make it maybe sorta kinda — if you squint just right — look like they might possibly hold a monopoly under U.S. law.

IDC estimated that global iPhone shipments declined 10
per cent to 50.1mn in the first three months of 2024 compared with
the same period in 2023, giving it a 21 per cent market share.

Let’s see if there’s a 10 percent drop in iPhone revenue year-over-year when Apple reports results for the January–March quarter on May 2. If so, that’ll be quite the feather in IDC’s cap. If not, I’m sure we’ll see a correction from IDC and the FT.

Read More