I think the bet here is that AI is like Dropbox — a feature. Operating globally, these models are going to be a regulatory tar pit. The industry hype train is 100% reliant on courts ignoring the law - that didn’t work out well for Napster.

That makes the “category shift” difficult for Apple to execute well and difficult for competitors to gun for them. Microsoft is even worse off there because the PC OEMs relied on dying companies like Intel to deliver engineering for innovative things.

AWS, Azure, and GCP are doing the same stuff in different flavors. Google and Microsoft approach human facing stuff differently because they own collaboration platforms.

Apple and Microsoft are both flailing at the device level. Apple is ahead there as at least I can tell you what they are not doing well. Microsoft’s approach is so incoherent that it struggles to tell you what they are doing, period.

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walterbell 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

> at the device level. Apple is ahead

Apple could turn everything around overnight by quietly re-enabling the jailbreak community for a few years, or restoring the 2022 Hypervisor API entitlement for arbitrary VMs. Hopefully this does not have to wait for leadership changes.

Either of those actions would take the shackles off Apple's underutilized hardware and frustrated developers. The resulting innovations could be sherlocked back into new OS APIs under Apple guardrails, whence they could generate revenue via App Store software. Then retire the jailbreaks and silently thank OutsideJobs for uncredited contributions to Apple upstream.

At present, the only industry participants maximizing usage of Apple hardware are zero-day hoarders. Meanwhile, every passing day allows Qualcomm, Nvidia and Arm-generic/Mediatek to improve their nascent PC hw+OS stacks, whittling away at Apple's shrinking hardware lead.

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ethbr1 3 days ago | parent [-]

Any loosening of Apple hardware restrictions is going to be judged internally on what impact it will have on App Store revenue & related DRM / IP contracts.

I'm not sure Tim Cook is the guy to overrule that based on a vision of the future.

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walterbell 3 days ago | parent [-]

Let's see if the $599 MacBook (iPhone SoC!) can run VMs and software distributed outside App Store, i.e. like existing MacBooks.

If Pixel phones (with inferior hardware) can run Debian Linux VMs with external USB-c display, so can Apple tablets/phones. Apple and Google app stores have similar business incentives and antitrust constraints.

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ericmay 3 days ago | parent [-]

You are spot on, they can indeed run that software.

The problem that you and others with similar interests are running into is that you’re asking Apple to spend perhaps tens of millions of dollars to make a change that, frankly, almost nobody wants or cares about. I don’t want it or care about it whatsoever, nor does my grandma. That’s why this all plays out in court and in countries that want to stick a finger in the eye of American tech companies.

Anti-trust concerns tend to just be multi-billion dollar corporations (Apple, Meta, Epic, Netflix, etc.) arguing over who gets the slice of your wallet. None of these companies lower prices when they win court battles, experiences don’t get better, and as Apple in particular loses more and more control over the App Store they lose the ability, however flawed, to collectively bargain on behalf of regular folks against developers [1].

Can anyone point to a single major technology product/service/app, like Spotify or something where after Apple has ceded control over the App Store the company has lowered prices, or perhaps instituted tougher privacy controls than Apple has demanded on the App Store?

Is there a single example?

[1] Items like forced private Sign in with Apple, or disclosing how data is used, don’t and won’t exist on “the Meta App Store” because as a single person or small group you’d rather have access to Facebook and you’ll give up data for it. But Apple can listen to users and then force Meta to comply with those demands, however flawed the situation may be and however self-serving Apple’s interests may be.

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ethbr1 3 days ago | parent [-]

> Can anyone point to a single major technology product/service/app, like Spotify or something where after Apple has ceded control over the App Store the company has lowered prices, or perhaps instituted tougher privacy controls than Apple has demanded on the App Store?

Epic?

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ericmay 2 days ago | parent [-]

What prices were lowered? Or was there another improvement such as further privacy restrictions against developers?

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ethbr1 2 days ago | parent [-]

The original 2020 discount was literally what sparked the Apple/Google-Epic lawsuits.

https://www.vg247.com/fortnite-v-bucks-discount-epic-direct

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ericmay 2 days ago | parent [-]

That was prior to ceding control - now that companies have the ability to stand up their own app stores and do direct payments (as I understand to be the case now at least), where have prices gone down?

VBucks are still $8 aren't they?

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ethbr1 2 days ago | parent [-]

With 20% Epic rewards, if you use Epic's store. https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/news/better-deals-in-fortn...

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ericmay 2 days ago | parent [-]

So after all the legal mess and crusading and white knighting about the Apple App Store what we got in return is now buy the same product as I did before for the same price in dollars, but I can get 20% of my purchase price back in what is the equivalent of carnival tokens if I use Epic’s proprietary payment system?

Do you wholeheartedly believe that this counts as lowering prices or providing improvements? Are the Vbucks still $8 or no?

	▲	ethbr1 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		You can choose to value company store bucks however you want, but they're worth >$0, which means that yes, Epic lowered prices. (Reasonably, considering they're saving a good chunk of the App Store tax)

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andsoitis 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> Apple and Microsoft are both flailing at the device level. Apple is ahead there as at least I can tell you what they are not doing well. Microsoft’s approach is so incoherent that it struggles to tell you what they are doing, period.

Can you elaborate? I don't see what you're seeing.

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Spooky23 3 days ago | parent [-]

There’s a whole industry around critiquing Apple and their misadventures on iOS with respect to AI. We understand what is happening - there’s even podcasters castigating individual executives!

What is the story with Copilot as an on device feature of Windows? How dos that relate to an “AI PC”? In my business, what is Copilot (on the PC) do? How about Copilot Chat? How do they both relate to Copilot for Office 365?

Answer: I have no fucking idea. It’s a big soup of stuff with the same name that dumps everything in a bowl that the company makes. In a business, you’re going to make product decisions within your enterprise than fundamentally change the products based on your privacy and security needs and what countries you are operating in.

Apple has articulated a vision/framework for what they are delivering on device, with outside 1st party help and with 3rd parties. They’ve laid out how they are accessing your proprietary data. They have also failed to deliver.

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andsoitis 3 days ago | parent [-]

Ah, by "Apple and Microsoft are failing at the device level", you are specifically saying they are failing specifically with respect to AI inference executing on edge devices (rather than in the cloud)?

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Spooky23 3 days ago | parent [-]

Yes, that and edge platform integration with cloud services.

It’s complicated and difficult - I say fail in the “fail fast” sense, not as an insult. Where are the line(s) between Excel as a component of Windows, as a web service and as a node on the office graph?

If I need AI help integrated with the product to write Excel formulas, I think the way to get that from Microsoft is with Copilot for Office 365, which also accesses all of my data on the graph and can potentially leak stuff with web grounding. (Which for companies means you need to fix SharePoint governance and do lots of risk assessment #godbless)

I just go to ChatGPT.

	▲	ethbr1 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		> fix SharePoint governance and do lots of risk assessment Pretty sure that's the product requirement that drove MS Purview (previously: MS data protection?). No business wants to take the time to do data classification. No business is going to do cool new stuff with sensitive data. ... Therefore, flip Microsoft Purview on and when you leak data you now have someone to point the finger at. And can do cool stuff.