Comment by jwr
1 day ago
I have no doubt that Gruber will find reasons why the EU is bad and regulation is bad. At this point it's rather amusing how Daring Fireball (and many other American media) rants against regulation, and in another post complains about how companies exploit users.
Regulation is unfortunately necessary: the market isn't as magical as we would like it to be and competition is not a magic wand that makes everything good for users. Companies either become dominant, or universally screw over their users. Users either have no choice, do not understand the choices, or simply don't care.
I am glad the EU tries to do something. They aren't always right, but they should be trying. As a reminder, one of the biggest success stories of EU regulation: cheap cellular roaming within the EU. It used to be horribly expensive (like it is in the US), but the EU (specifically, Margrethe Vestager) regulated this and miracle of miracles, we can now move across the EU and not worry about horrendous cell phone bills.
Gruber’s take on the USB-C stuff has been hilarious.
All through that fiasco, where Apple was going through all sorts of twists and turns to avoid switching to USB-C, which was objectively better even if you’re an Apple partisan (given that I could carry a single charging cable for my Mac and Samsung phone, but not for my Mac and iPhone), he was going on and on about how the EU was killing creativity by forcing Apple to do something they didn’t want to.
And then Apple relented, their USB-C iPhone saw some of the fastest growth over a previous model despite having minimal other upgrades, indicating significant pent up demand for a USB-C phone.
And I’m guessing at this point even Gruber can’t imagine living life with a Lightning charger, so now the tune is that Apple was planning on switching to USB-C and they were playing a game to make it like like they were forced to switch by the EU so as not to alienate their current Lightning charger fans.
It’s a patently ridiculous idea but it’s necessary given how badly wrong he was on this issue because of how badly he continues to misunderstand how the EU works (which isn’t anything like how the US govt works).
Anecdotally, I’ve found Lightning to be a nice fit when plugged in (it’s got a nice “click”) and USB-C a bit flimsy and loose in comparison. YMMV.
Apple could've made Lightning open and maybe Lightning would've been the new USB-C, if it is the superior product. But no, they chose not to.
> All through that fiasco, where Apple was going through all sorts of twists and turns to avoid switching to USB-C
Is there any evidence that "Apple was going through all sorts of twists and turns to avoid switching to USB-C"?
Apple worked to create the USB-C standard, was among the first to widely deploy it.
Apple fighting against a precedent where the EU would force them to switch everything to USB-C is strictly different from Apple going through all sorts of twists and turns to avoid switching to USB-C.
>Apple worked to create the USB-C standard, was among the first to widely deploy it.
And that is exactly Gruber's take. Apple created USB-C standard and gave it to the USB committee for free.
And it is not even half true. But it spread across the internet as if it was verified.
The other one being Apple AirPod sold at cost, and suggest Apple invented big.SMALL CPU core.
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They also capped credit card fees at 0.3% in 2015. It also included a prohibition on discrimination against any merchant based on eg size or category of goods sold. And as far as I can see neither Mastercard nor Visa had problems staying in business.
Yes! I forgot about this. The EU Interchange Fee Regulation (IFR) effectively eliminated the high fixed minimum fees that previously made small-value card transactions unprofitable for merchants.
The net effect of this is that in Poland, for example, you can carry your phone and no wallet, because you can pay literally for everything using your phone. And I do mean everything, I've recently been to a club in Warsaw and the cloakroom had a terminal mounted on the wall, people just tapped their phones.
So you cannot compare it apples to oranges. There is much more regulation in EU.
In EU there is also more consumer protection by default, so charge backs can be rejected by merchants but a consumer can easily take a merchant to court. So capping card fees is also more reasonable.
Also, when a merchant goes bankrupt and customers perform charge-backs it would involve the entire payment chain. First merchant reserves, then acquiring bank, then MasterCard/Visa, then issuing bank (customer), and lastly the customer. With lower card fees, this has impact on the merchant reserves and their risk profile. Furthermore, acquirers can add additional fees on top if needed.
You can also get lower card fees in US if you have a low risk business model.
> You can also get lower card fees in US if you have a low risk business model.
It is only the maximum fee that is capped (along with various provisions for eg transparency). You can also get lower fees in EU, just twenty minutes ago I saw an ad for just such a zero-fee card.
His business is too tied to being in Apple's good graces anyway to take him that seriously these days. In the past he's been given access well above a lot of bigger outlets and way above what a blog that size should have especially when most of his social media output is now on mastodon to an audience the fraction of his X size.
All though I would say EU regulation has far more misses than hits, this and forcing Apple to USB-C were great but millions of man hours a year are burned navigating cookie banners on every website and chat control being forced through soon.
So we have two wins on iOS device convenience, not a great trade off for the other overreach.
> were great but millions of man hours a year are burned navigating cookie banners on every website
Cookie banner are not, in fact, an obligation under GDPR. All you need to do to be GDPR compliant is “not collect and sell data to partners” and call it a day. Cookie banners are a loophole that the EC conceded to an ad industry that is addicted to tracking everyone all the time.
> All you need to do to be GDPR compliant is “not collect and sell data to partners”
Are you asserting that I can log IP addresses in my Apache logs? Seems like no one can give me a straight answer there.
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You realize he just famously got in Apple’s “bad graces” this year with his “Something is rotten in Cupertino” post and for the first time in a decade they didn’t make an Apple executive available to be on his post WWDC live show?
Let’s not forget also that the EU first wanted to standardize on micro USB.
There is this idea that regulations are unnatural and no regulations are natural. But the environment where in Apple can operate and make profit is completely artificial. We could go really deep into the origins of nation states, but there is also a practical example like IP law. Is it natural that no one is allowed to copy a iPhone one-to-one? Imagine our ancestors weren’t allowed to copy bow and arrows.
Yeah, all too often discussion devolves into a religious war between free markets and regulation. Like they're somehow opposing forces. Markets are super cool and useful tools. Some regulation is good, some is bad, which exactly is which depends on your values and what you want to optimize for. Framing markets like they automatically do good, or ideas like "we need more regulation" or "we need fewer regulations" are all thought-terminating.
So far the DMA seems like a partial-win for technology users. I wish it enshrined the right to run software on your own computer in less ambiguous language, because as-is there are carve-outs that may let Apple get away with their core technology fee and mandatory app signing.
also usbc in iphones! finally we can just carry one cable
I'm very glad we eventually got standardized chargers. It's too bad the standard happened to be the madness that USB-C is though.
Oh exactly, it's great to have a single cable / charger for many different items in the household. The biggest downside I see with USB-C in this case is that the cables and chargers get quite expensive if you want to be able to just grab one and charge stuff, without having to worry about wattage etc.
All in all a big improvement, with some future improvements left to make. Fingers crossed for a more sane USB-D in twenty years.
Who is this Gruber? Searching ddg just brings up this post.
Unless you mean ol' Hans Gruber. He is quite the villain.
Searching "gruber apple" brings him up as the first nine results on ddg.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gruber
Yesterday, I was trying to get a voice memo out of my Apple watch - on which the recording was made. I switched from Apple last year. My cousin had an iPhone. Apple would not let me transfer the voice memo out of their eco-system. It's not on my iCloud and the watch can no longer be paired with any other iOS device (even temorarily with authentication to transfer a file)...unless the iPhone is registered to me. This is malicious compliance in the name of security.
And mind you, I own 3 Apple devices - 2 Macs and 1 iPad and the watch can't connect to any of those. I must be forced to buy a $1000 device just because I made the mistake of recording something on their watch. We need more regulation because of things like this and I would absolutely hate to live in a society where this is the norm.
If you are not using iCloud, you could try activating it (you get 5 gigs for free IIRC) and switching off everything besides the Voice Memos app. Then you should see the recording on your Mac, and should be able to export it from there. Definitely a shitty workaround, but you might be able to make it work?
It's a totally reasonable position that both regulation and companies exploiting users are wrong. And it's also entirely a moral assertion that markets should resolve to outcomes judged by members of some political apparatus. Likewise, the idea that a third party should interfere with economic relations between two consenting parties is also a moral judgement, not an absolute fact.
Most arguments in favour of regulation cherry pick what they feel are success stories and ignore everything else. Interfering with highly complex and dynamical self-regulating systems has a cost. There are many examples of regulation leading to negative outcomes, and it's also telling that large corporations push for regulation because it's one of the most effective obstacles for competition in a market.
Markets depend on regulations.
Free market absolutists don’t know what they are talking about.
The actual originators of market capitalism, most famously Adam Smith, but also proponents like Milton Friedman, had no such confusion.
In reality, today’s free market absolutists don’t get their ideas from economists (even free market economists). Instead, they get their ideas from terrible mid 20th century novelists (I’ll let you figure out who I’m talking about), who didn’t know much about how anything worked, never mind economics.
What is the point of responding to someone if you're going to completely ignore everything they say? Serious question, I'm curious what compels you to do this. Especially in such an arrogant and condescending way.
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“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." -- John Rogers
Even the most maligned lids attached to bottles looks stupid for 5 minutes but have the nice side effect of not having to hold the lid while you drink, which makes things easier most of the time you're holding something else
Nah I can't get behind that one. I love Europe and I want to live there, but I would 100% take the North American free bottle caps any day.
I don't think it's as black and white as you suggest.
He just wrote about Japan's implementation of a similar set of laws rather favourably - the theme is that Japan's implementation looks very much like a genuine attempt at protecting users and benefitting end users and developers.
While I don't agree with what a lot of what Gruber has to say. A point I do agree with is that the DMA is being sold (by Margrethe Vestager, Thierry Breton and Ursula von der Leyer) as a set of consumer protections, when it's plainly not that, and in some clear ways does the opposite.
There's also persistent transparency questions like why the EU has excessive meetings with Spotify, or why there is not a "music" gatekeeper in the DMA, or the requirement to easily move music libraries between music services - things that would actually help consumers and prevent genuine lock in.
(Note this isn't to excuse the behaviour of big tech.)
I just read the post about Japan.
The only example he gave where the MSCA is better than the DMA is:
> E.g. apps distributed outside the App Store in Japan still require age ratings. There’s no such requirement in the EU.
Most of his description of what Japan does better is simply “mutual respect”. Which reinforces the idea that this isn’t about the actual practical differences but about ego. Apple hates how the EU forces them to make change.
And Apple has done this before. After the EU forced them to make a change, which emboldened other nations to push similar changes, Apple points to those other nations’s obviously more streamlined law making process (given that the EU has already gone through the hard work of drafting the law, working with a non-cooperative Apple, and then actually seeing it implemented and the practical issues that arise), to justify their hostility to the EU’s trend setting efforts, without which those other nations would almost certainly have not proceeded.
I bet if Japan’s MSCA had come before the DMA, Apple’s tone towards both those governments would have been reversed.
He has been anti EU / UK or EUR for quite some time even during Jony Ive era. Regardless of regulations.
>I just read the post about Japan.
Great, now let's stack what you've written in both of your comments directly against what Gruber has written, and not what an imaginary strawman wrote.
You wrote:
1. I have no doubt that Gruber will find reasons why the EU is bad and regulation is bad.
2. The EU has already gone through the hard work of drafting the law, working with a non-cooperative Apple, and then actually seeing it implemented and the practical issues that arise.
3. Most of his description of what Japan does better is simply “mutual respect”.
Addressing point 1 (again):
I wrote words to the effect of (they're just above): Gruber's writing is not as black and white as you assert and then I made reference to the Japan regulation article as an example where Gruber again makes nuanced arguments towards regulated changes.
That article does not make a blanket statement that regulation is bad, and Gruber points to a long-standing idea that he has which neither the EU nor Japan have regulated, which he believes should be. He's also stated (repeatedly) that he's in favour of link-outs and other commonly requested changes to the app store terms, and believe's Apple are too slow to change on these.
So does Gruber believe all regulation is bad as you have asserted: no. His views are demonstrably in favour of well-minded regulation.
Addressing point 2: The belief that the EU bears the brunt of regulation teething, and that's why it goes well in other regions.
Maybe you skipped the part where Gruber points to a 2021 regulation requirement from Japan, which Apple in fact did not provide resistance to, but worked with the regulatory authority to achieve their goal - then Schiller himself (the overseer of the App store at the time) came out and spoke in public with supportive language. That is an example Gruber provided, however there are plenty more examples of the app store changing policies long before the EU took notice. The EU gets all the attention here because they seem to be uniquely incapable of foreseeing unintended consequences.
So is the EU's leading the source of friction. No and they're not even first in many respects.
Addressing point 3: Gruber makes only immaterial "mutual respect" comparisons between DMA/MSCA.
I'm guessing you skimmed this bit too - Gruber talks at length to MSCA and DMA's approach to regulation, stating that MSCA's changes prioritise privacy and security in contrast to the DMA, and practical aspects such as user safety (that's a wee bit more than "mutual respect"). Secondly that users are not presented with onerous choice screens (see end note 1) which is making reference to the EU's requirement that browser selection screens must be repeatedly shown when the user's default browser is Safari (but not if it's any other browser), Japan doesn't take this approach to a browser selection screen.
So is it true that Gruber makes immaterial comparisons between the two: again no.