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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 14th, 2023

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  • Thank you for the respectful responses, even though I started off with a little bit of attitude in the conversation. It has been a pleasant surprise today.

    I agree that that’s what they’re trying to do, but I think that what we are experiencing is exactly what was obviously going to happen with the measures they put into place. So I place the blame on the EU, because they put laws in place that have made everything worse for everyone in predictable ways.

    I also blame all the sites that make it hard for me to just visit them, but less so, since every individual site creator that uses cookies needs to do that, even if they are benign, and they have to deal with other regional laws such as California’s weak as all hell version intending to do the same thing.

    The USB-C argument is a great example of how most of these things have happened.

    Apple is basically responsible for USB being the industry-wide standard to begin with. It was developed by Intel, and not widely used before Apple put it as its only option on the iMac, effectively forcing the tech into the industry.

    It also provided a large portion of the engineers who developed the USB-C specification for the standards board. They effectively invented the standard alongside Intel. It was also the first to announce a laptop using the standard.

    It seems like they were building the the Lightning cable at the same time in-house, possibly to hedge bets, and it was objectively better by far than what the original USB-C spec was doing at proposal time. And since USB-C wasn’t adopted as a standard by the standards board yet, they chose the better product path.

    By the time USB-C was formally adopted, 4 years after Apple launched its first Lightning cable-based phone, there was already tons of e-waste to contend with and it didn’t have obvious benefits for the customer to make the switch, so why would they go choose that expensive, wasteful, option, that harms their users?

    The same is true about the blue vs green circles. If you read the history of RCS it’s like a circus show act.

    It is not some open standard alternative to iMessages, like people seem to love to claim. You cannot host your own RCS server.

    It doesn’t support the features iMessages does, such as E2E encryption. That is a proprietary add-on from Google’s chat app, not part of the “standard.”

    Google had to buy Jibe mobile and push hard to get this “standard” to be something serious, and it now profits off it by being basically the only one who runs the proprietary infrastructure. That purchase was 4 years after iMessages was launched.

    Major telecom companies tried to band together to create their own RCS infrastructure and official app, and they bumbled the whole thing in 2019. As a result they’re all centralizing on Google’s Jibe platform.

    All that for a product that isn’t as good as what Apple put out in 2011.

    I know I have biases towards the products I enjoy more, but it gets frustrating to not be allowed to enjoy them and also be on platforms like this where it’s constantly twisted, revised history, in favor of much more evil companies because Apple Bad seems to be the mantra here.


  • Yes, I understood it was a quote from the investigation and was pointing out that it is phrased in a way to make it sound like the investigation was saying “guilty even though you don’t meet the criteria.”

    And, like all EU regulations, I am happy they think they’re helping but angry at the fallout of all of their actions.

    My boyfriend has a different phone model than I do, and we now have to carry multiple cables to do anything. My car has carplay over usb, so we have two cables in there, etc.

    And when I update his phone we will be producing a ton of e-waste.

    No I don’t want you to track me with cookies, but I also don’t want to go through three layers of pop ups to tell you that. Everything is shittier that the EU touches-tech-wise, and they’re fisting everything hard lately.


  • Not at all…

    But why bother bringing up a way in which Apple DOES NOT meet requirements in your PR?

    That’s what I was pointing out, ffs. Not some grand argument you are putting on me.

    For the record, unlike almost all the android folks who post constant hate and negativity on the apple enthusiast community, I like my Apple products and am annoyed that the EU is working to make them shittier for me so that they can applaud.

    There’s like 4 or 5 versions of this article posted to this community at once. People couldn’t wait to rub it in the faces of the few of us who are here to be enthusiastic about Apple products.

    It would be nice to have one community where I could enjoy the things I like without a flood of nonsense.


  • while its end user numbers were close to the threshold

    Why have a threshold if you literally ignore it?

    its importance for certain use cases, such as gaming apps.

    Sure, Jan. The iPad definitely has that gaming apps market gatekept!

    At this point it’s obvious these aren’t consumer protection mechanisms as much as they’re anti-tech measures meant to try to put the breaks on a highly competitive market that the EU is not a part of in hopes that home-grown alternatives can catch up.

    But since the EU is so tech-hostile, why would anyone want to startup tech there?


  • While Helldivers 2 and Baldur’s Gate 3 might look like sudden jackpot successes

    This article is funny. It’s like the feel-good inverse of a rage-bait article. It’s stating what we all want to be true and cherry-picking two games that only sort of provide evidence towards it, and only if you squint really hard.

    Both games are sequels backed by huge publishers with tons of cash.

    BG3 is a Dungeons and Dragons franchise title; a franchise which recently received a massively successful film, a huge boost in popularity during a pandemic, and a boost in cultural relevance in Strange Things.

    Helldivers 2 fits the claim a bit better, but it is still a sequel to a well received, well selling title. The extraction shooter genre is also exceedingly popular right now, and the fact that it has Games as a Service bullshit built in says that publishers weren’t as hands-off as the article implies.

    So the more realistic take-away from this is that good games with huge budgets for development AND marketing in reasonably popular genres can make a ton of money.

    Which isn’t saying much. And it certainly doesn’t look like a sudden jackpot.




  • My snarky point was comparing the “nobody goes there it’s too crowded” joke to this.

    My actual point is that literally every Apple product has people who don’t buy them complaining about how expensive they are.

    Elsewhere in this post’s comments someone claimed that iPhones are raising in price and staying there (which is only true if you ignore inflation basically).

    The XDR display and its stand had gamers everywhere furious, because their monitors were much cheaper and came with a stand included in the price!

    If Apple were giving out free ice cream people would complain about how much it costs to add sprinkles.