Comment by josephg
13 hours ago
Look, you might be right. But you might be wrong. We don't know for sure.
One of my first jobs was in infosec, and there was a sign above one of the senior consultant's door quoting Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity". That quote is right.
There's so much going on at any medium-to-large organisation, from engineering to politics and personalities. All that multiplied across hundreds of thousands of people in thousands of teams. Its possible you're right. Apple might have provided an iOS-only SDK for wifi aware because of regulatory pressure. Its also possible they want to provide it on all platforms, but just started with an ios only version because of who works on it, or which business unit they're part of, or politics, or because they think its more useful on ios than on macos. We just don't know.
Whenever I've worked in large organisations, I'm always amazed how much nonsense goes on internally that is impossible to predict from the outside. Like, someone emails us about something important. It makes the rounds internally, but the person never gets emailed back. Why? Maybe because nobody inside the company thought it was their job to get back to them. Or Steve should really have replied, but he was away on paternity leave or something and forgot about it when he got back to work. Or sally is just bad at writing emails. Or there's some policy that PR needs to read all emails to the public, and nobody could be bothered. And so on. From the outside you just can't know.
I don't know if you're right or wrong. Apple isn't all good or all bad. And the probability isn't 100% and its not 0%. Take off the tin foil hat and have some uncertainty.
Your reply makes sense in a vacuum, but in reality we have the context of having seen Apple comply with regulation maliciously before, so we do know for sure that there's no macOS in the sdk because they weren't forced to by regulation.
> we do know for sure that there's no macOS in the sdk because they weren't forced to by regulation.
Unless you have insider knowledge, we don't know anything for sure here. Apple isn't a person. Apple doesn't have a single, consistent opinion when it comes to openness and EU regulation. (And even a person can change their mind.) All we know is that some teams at apple responded in the past to some EU regulation with malicious compliance. That doesn't tell us for sure what apple will do here.
Apple is 165 000 people. That's a lot of people. A lot more people than comment regularly on HN, and look at us! We don't agree about anything. I'm sure plenty of apple's employees hate EU regulation. And plenty more would love to opensource everything apple does.
That sort of inconsistency is exactly what we see across apple's product line. The Swift programming language is opensource. But SwiftUI is closed source. Webkit and FoundationDB are opensource. But almost everything on iOS is closed source. Apple sometimes promotes open standards - like pushing Firewire, USB and more recently USB-C - which they helped to design. But they also push plenty of proprietary standards that they keep under lock and key. Like the old 20-pin ipod connector, that companies had to pay money to apple to be allowed to use in 3rd party products. Or Airdrop. Or iMessage. AFS (apple filesystem) is closed source. But its also incredibly well documented. My guess is the engineers responsible want to support 3rd party implementations of AFS but for some reason they're prohibited from open-sourcing their own implementation.
We don't know anything for sure here. For my money, there's even odds in a year or two this API quietly becomes available on macos, watchos and tvos as well. If you "know for sure" that won't happen, lets make a bet at 100-1 odds. If you're sure, its free money for you.
I largely agree with you but want to highlight a few points.
> Apple doesn't have a single, consistent opinion when it comes to openness and EU regulation.
But it does have a greedy leader who can and does override everyone else.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/24/apple-exec-phil-schiller-t...
> Apple is 165 000 people. That's a lot of people. A lot more people than comment regularly on HN
How do you know the HN numbers? I’m not doubting you, I’m curious about the data.
> and look at us! We don't agree about anything.
At the same time, anyone can join HN. There’s no “culture fit” or anything like that. It is possible to have a larger difference of ideas in a smaller pool of people.
> AFS (apple filesystem)
APFS, not AFS.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_File_System
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