Comment by recursive
5 days ago
> show signs of rent seeking
They've been hard rent-seeking since iTunes and iPod. They aggressively eliminated and made inconvenient other ways for getting music onto iPods. Hardware was great, but hard dependence on iTunes killed it for me.
Requiring dedicated software available for free is not rent seeking, there is no rent, and it was not exactly rare in the more lifestyle pmp space.
What if that software is trying to sell you stuff? And what if it's discouraging or preventing by technical means alternatives from that?
What do people do with ipods if not play music? And where do they get that music if not paying Apple? Apple's official recommendation at the time if you wanted to ingest arbitrary audio like your own recordings was to burn a CD and then rip it with iTunes. That cost about a dollar an hour to get access to your own audio rather than just... making a reasonable process.
It is the definition of rent. The cost is that I have to run your software on my device. I could create value for myself by running software of my choice, instead Apple destroys that value to create a percentage of it for themselves.
Apple pretends to value user privacy and artist rights as these values often conveniently align with taking away user and partner control. The mask has slipped multiple times but their control over users never will until they are legally required to treat their users like humans.
> It is the definition of rent.
In no sense of “rent”, or “definition”.
> The cost is that I have to run your software on my device. I could create value for myself by running software of my choice
This is an outright Orwellian redefinition of the term.
> Apple pretends to value user privacy and artist rights as these values often conveniently align with taking away user and partner control. The mask has slipped multiple times but their control over users never will until they are legally required to treat their users like humans.
Ah, so you have an axe to grind against Apple and could not care less about the stone, got it.
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