Recently bought an apple watch for my mom and got it set up with her iphone. Almost instantly she notices that she cant accept WhatsApp calls on her watch, and after looking into it I found out that it was another one of those apple things where they assume youre obviously using facetime so that functionality isnt available for any other app. For context, in europe Whatsapp is the dominating messaging app and alot of people use it for calling as well as messaging. The apple watch is, as far as I can tell, a simple Bluetooth wearable with a speaker and a microphone, so the only reason its like this is that apple has a concept of how the device is "supposed" to be used and only lets you use it that way. After that experience I fully support all the regulations the EU is putting on apple to open up.
Most probably. WhatsApp is also still using the old way of accessing photos where you have to define which photos WA has access to every time you want to share newly taken photos. I’m pretty sure they do that deliberately so you get annoyed and give them blanket access to all your photos. (Which they then probably secretly analyse in the background.)
Then you will see here thousands of comments explaining how that is bad for small businesses, and apple is forcing them out of the market… is a balance…
Seems like you’d just need to set WhatsApp as the default calling app on iOS and make sure to install WhatsApp on the watch too. The ability to set another app as the default for calls has been around since early this year. Doesn’t this work?
I was genuinely sure it’s not a problem, as I personally know quite a few people who do that. But I think they use either FaceTime or regular cellular. That’s sure weird a simple call does work in iPhone 4S (imagine a price for it in 2026), but doesn’t on modern Apple Watch Ultra, which is quite expensive.
Unfortunately, it doesn't work like that. Third-party app calls don't go to the Watch. It's so annoying, I have to tell people to call me using regular phone calls or FaceTime instead of using Signal or WhatsApp because I always miss the latter ones.
WhatsApp did not have a dedicated Watch app until 1 or 2 months ago – it was not even possible to respond to WhatsApp messages on the Watch, only seeing the mirrored notifications was possible.
You can blame Apple for other things if that is the intention, but this particular one was a decision made by Meta and by Meta only.
Write to your regulator and make a complaint that Meta is keeping the WhatsApp stage gate.
I live in the EU and now traveling my family outside the EU. Today I’ve tried updating AltStore but it won’t let me. Even VPNing to my home won’t do it.
So until there will be more incentive to make it globally, the UX is intentionally crippled not only by making the minimal viable but also by region locking.
Imagine pairing headphones working great in EU and then you’re traveling somewhere and it’s broken.
This is the future of the internet. More and more countries have their local laws and international companies need to comply with local laws. This has been the case forever for companies selling products and (physical) services and some digital services restricting music and movie rights in certain countries, but it will expand to more and more services and apps in the future.
"Local laws" is quite the loaded term when your parent commenter's anecdote is about EU which currently encompasses 27 countries.
And when "comply with local laws" means "unbrick bluetooth pairing for third-party devices" then a company in good faith could just, you know, not brick the functionality in the first place. There's no law against products that "just work".
I think the EU believes they have more of an effect on the rest of the world than they actually do. Complying with every law in every jurisdiction that has access to a product sounds like a nightmare that will only stifle innovation.
Hopefully third-party devices will actually implement what is necessary to take advantage of it. Being limited to the EU market, it’s not clear if it will happen much.
I think you're looking at it from the wrong angle.
Most of the EU corpus of law is based on culturally acceptable actions from their members.
The EU regulations don't strangle, the EU culture is just different.
Innovation for the sake of innovation and the pursuit of money isn't deeply entrenched in European culture.
So yes, innovation based on "go fast and don't care if you break stuff" comes mainly from outside of EU.
Well I'm not blaming the EU itself. It'd be the the same or worse in today's EU countries if they weren't in the EU. Yes it's a cultural thing too, but they made regulations based on it.
I mean, they're not entirely wrong, but it's actually the lack of a capital markets union that causes the issues here.
So in fact, this is a case where the answer is more EU (specifically, a better set of cross-country capital markets). Depressingly, the obvious place to build this is no longer in the EU.
They're wrong in everything but a meaningless "well technically" sense. People spouting "EU regulations strangle business" nonsense are never talking about the lack of capital markets union. Let alone in a thread about "iOS 26.3 brings AirPods-like pairing to third-party devices in EU under DMA".
> So in fact, this is a case where the answer is more EU (specifically, a better set of cross-country capital markets).
Can you give me a set of non-EU countries with better cross-country capital markets, that are as such now instead the place to build this? Especially for a set size bigger than 3? Serious question, as I've never heard of one and am fairly sure it doesn't exist, though I'd love to be proven wrong.
> Can you give me a set of non-EU countries with better cross-country capital markets, that are as such now instead the place to build this? Especially for a set size bigger than 3? Serious question, as I've never heard of one and am fairly sure it doesn't exist, though I'd love to be proven wrong.
This does not exist, however the EU single market is also pretty unique in terms of how many countries are involved. If you include the EEA and the customs union, it's definitely the largest.
Given that there's an obvious currency union, the capital markets thing is relatively plausible (difficult but not impossible), and I personally think it would be great.
Note that I am biased, as I live in a small EU country and our financial and insurance providers are both expensive and terrible. And obviously the EU tech industry would benefit, which would also help me.
I think the real reason this hasn't happened is hangover from the EZ crisis, as sharing risk for banks across nations was toxic in many countries as a result of the financial and EZ crises. But now seems like a good time to at least start it.
As I said above, the biggest problem here would be where to put it, and the UK's absence from the EU makes the obvious place politically a non-runner (unfortunately).
If it does not exist, it is not a disadvantage compared to anywhere else. In a sense it's an advantage, as despite the barriers, the capital markets of two EU countries (especially if they use the Euro) are still a lot more integrated than if you'd pick two random non-EU countries. The disadvantages of being from a small EU country would apply the exact same way but even worse if you were from a small non-EU country.
Digital regulation is not a serious blocker, as any EU founder can tell you. Per above, neither are cross-country capital markets a disadvantage of the EU compared to the non-EU world. Then what is the disadvantage? Do Japanese startups have it any better? Korean? Kenyan? Serbian? Mexican? Taiwanese? Malaysian? Singaporean? Do those startups benefit from "less regulations" or from cross-country capital markets? Of course they don't, yet I've never seen a single person in my life mention those countries' regulations or lack of cross-country capital markets. Because they don't have an advantage in those areas, showing that the EU indeed doesn't actually cause any disadvantages in them.
> Because they don't have an advantage in those areas, showing that the EU indeed doesn't actually cause any disadvantages in them.
Lots to unpack here.
So the issue is size of capital markets (for startup and IPO purposes). 27 small markets are much, much less liquid than one large one (like China or the US). Therefore, it's easier for European founders to raise US capital, which often leads to them incorporating or floating in the US. Like, Flutter (which is an Irish company) is on the US markets for exactly this reason, as are a bunch of other large Irish companies.
It would be better for the EU if these companies incorporated in the EU, for which one large capital market would work better.
And it's not that EU companies are disadvantaged vs Singaporean companies, it's that they are disadvantaged relative to US companies.
> are still a lot more integrated than if you'd pick two random non-EU countries.
I guess my point is that they're not integrated enough.
Right, I'm not talking about capital markets, just regulations. Overall tech doesn't thrive in the EU. Their attitude probably predates EU founding too. And I'm not just saying that because of this relatively small AirPods situation (where I actually agree with EU).
Tech "not thriving" in the EU - by what standards, what does this mean? - has zero to do with EU regulations, or we'd see tech thrive much more in Japan, Korea, Kenya, Serbia, Mexico, Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore, all those non-EU countries with supposedly less regulations and as such more thriving tech. Before you point to the chip companies that some of those countries have, those already existed 30+ years ago and aren't an example of tech "thriving" due to less regulations, it would be like pointing at ASML and Airbus to prove that in the EU it is thriving.
And yet if you want applications to work on your phone, many times you'll need approval from either Apple or Google. Google can effectively ban manufacturers (like they did with Huawei) from using "Android" by blacklisting them from Play Services. Apple owns the entire ecosystem and prevents third-party from having access to the same feature set.
Something tells me that the thing about Google not allowing custom Andriod operating systems to install apps is not quite true. I don't know about this specific topic yet, but I bet that if I look into it, I'll find out that there's nuance here that isn't been correctly portrayed by your comment.
Look up Play Integrity, it's the remote attestation framework Google uses to ensure apps only run on Google-blessed hardware and software. Apps that use it verify that both hardware and software are unmodified and blessed by Google before apps are allowed to run. Banking apps use it, the fucking McDonald's app uses it, public transit pass apps use it, etc.
If you want to use your phone like normal people do in 2025, and not relegate yourself to being a second-class citizen when it comes to simple things like paying for stuff, riding the subway, etc, your phone is either an iPhone or something that plays nicely with Play Services.
And that's just the remote attestation side. Many apps rely on Play Services themselves, and without access to them, will not work. Google gates access to Play Services through contracts, it is not open source or part of Android.
You need to allow Play the play store and it's services and those will wall you in. Many times discussed here: many banking, gov, health apps around the world are banning anything not blessed by Google or Apple and installing on a non blessed system will not allow you to use them. My bank allows a modern and supported android or ios phone or a Windows laptop with a biometric card reader. Pretty much locked in and all banks are following.
I do! I've been an Android stalwart since I first got a smartphone over a decade ago.
Problem is, every year Android announces some new stupid-ass restriction or anti-feature that significantly degrades the capability of application software on the OS in the name of security. In other words, Google keeps trying to turn my Android into a shittier iPhone. It's gotten so bad that they recently floated the idea of mandatory notarization, and only marginally backed down after shittons of pushback.
Every time the EU passes a law intended to stop obviously monopolistic shit like this from happening, a certain brand of Ayn Randroid Apple fan comes out of the woodwork to decry the EU "forcing Apple to give away its technology for free". Which is absolutely bullshit, on two counts. First off, Apple sold its technology to us when we bought the phone. That's the whole deal with Apple: the OS is a bundle with the hardware. Ergo, them going to app developers and asking for a cut is double billing. Second off, and more importantly, the only reason why you even need the EU DMA is because Apple won't let you ship an app that is capable of doing what their own first-party daemons do.
I'm going to be honest. Every time I read people like you saying "you can just buy an Android if you want that", I get the same vibes as I do when I see, say, old boomers showing up at town hall meetings to oppose the building of the IBX[0]. You're just App NIMBYs, carrying water for a tech industry trying to turn every computer into the tech equivalent of a car-dependent suburb with restrictive zoning laws.
Now if only the EU could pass a law saying Apple needs to ship an Android app that provides all the missing functionality of AirPods on that platform. At the very least, I should be able to update the firmware on them.
[0] Inter-Borough eXpress - A proposed circumferential NYC subway line connecting Brooklyn and Queens.
I was a diehard Android user as the memory of Apple locking down things like the filesystem among other things really sowed some bad blood for me. But these days it really seems like they're kind of converging and Apple's privacy features are quite appealing...
> Every time the EU passes a law intended to stop obviously monopolistic shit like this from happening, a certain brand of Ayn Randroid Apple fan comes out of the woodwork
These companies spend billions in dollars on PR agencies and lobbying. They spend the most on lobbying the EU out of everyone. The likelihood that zero of that goes towards writing such comments in places like HN is minuscule. And then there's the legions of actual Googlers and Applers here and elsewhere who
have drunk the koolaid.
If you're alleging that I replied to an Apple-affiliated troll farm employee, the possibility is there. But Apple is particularly unique in that it has a certain brand of customer that stuck it out during the days where System 7 was being absolutely clowned on by Windows 95 and NT. These hardcore Apple customers treat the company as if they are members of a persecuted minority religion. In other words, Apple doesn't need a troll farm, they have their fans to do it.
(Which, ironically, was also the strategy of Epic's entire Fortnite stunt...)
I am alleging that specifically because it's always the same old dumb anti-EU narrative that they're pushing. If it was something else, then sure. Those hardcore customers you're talking about have existed similarly for other tech brands like Microsoft or Sony - or even more laughably, Intel or Nvidia - they're just less active in these spaces, and even they can't really excuse Windows 11 and its idiocy.
Maybe because they are the only organisation able to act against the massive (foreign, if it is anything tech related for a European) corporate entities nowadays.
Agreed, but with many privacy and freedom laws I would agree. I don't think they take it nearly far enough; If I buy hardware, it is mine, and they should open up the means to put whatever on it I want. No one has the balls for that I guess but I would want them to enforce that.
Let me know when Apple dictates what kind of transactions it's acceptable for me to engage in and which ones aren't - a decision that Apple has absolutely no say in, but the EU and other governing bodies regularly engage in.
That’s a rather silly view to take. We have a phenomenon called “the first mover advantage” for a reason.
Plenty of other markets and businesses operate just fine while operating in an environment that makes protecting individual innovation functionally impossible. Just look at any related to fast fashion (not that I think the fast fashion market is a healthy phenomenon) or any commodities market. Or for that matter, most of the software industry.
The incentive for creating features should be to remain relevant and competitive. It shouldn’t be to build moats and war chests.
I don't understand. Robust markets don't have large margins. Why would a regulator even want markets with enormous margin? That's usually market failure.
Are you trying suggest that Apple’s margins are so small that they need state protection? Or that Apple can’t compete if they’re not able to tightly lock down every aspect of their ecosystem?
Apple giving themselves an advantage in the markets for headphones and watches, because they have a dominant position in the market for phones is a textbook case of monopoly abuse.
They've done extra work to cripple competing devices. It's obnoxious.
That depends on the interpretation of a market, which is why laws like the DMA establish a market based on its size. In the iOS market, apple have a monopoly.
EDIT: Downvotes for what? That’s literally what the DMA is for. If you don’t like it, take it up with your representatives - it’s nothing to do with me.
So if a company creates a widget and sells that widget, thereby creating a market, they are automatically a monopoly? how is anything invented without creating a monopoly?
Also why is it an iOS market and not a mobile phone market? if we compare features of devices then there’s not a lot of difference between modern phones, so segregating them by what OS they run seems odd.
I would agree in general, but in this specific case it’s still an advantage for the iOS platform in general. It just removes a buying incentive for the AirPods.
The general problem is that there must be a line.
Vendors don’t create lock-ins because they are malicious, they create it because it makes them money.
Now, if we limit these lock-ins, it will reduce their ability to make money and yes, it will impact some features - short term.
But looking at it long terms, vendor lock-ins are actually a reason to stop innovating: your customers are locked in anyway.
So, overall, I would say this is good for innovation in general.
I actually have a problem with this. I want AirPods to be undeniably the best experience for me because I am fully locked into the Apple ecosystem, and I know many folks have complaints against that. I find it to be rather pleasurable to use compared to all the other alternatives out there. So if I have to start sacrificing my experience in favor of universal support, that really sucks.
But this isn't sacrificing your experience, you're free to keep using your Apple AirPods with the quality and reliability you'd expect from Apple. This just means other brands can create products with similar features to AirPods, and if they're not as good or reliable, well that's why you're paying Apple for theirs.
It removes incentives to differentiate a platform because the EU will just come in and make every company exactly the same by forcing others to allow other companies access to their R&D budgets. Why bother? It’s easier to just avoid the EU market
The best code is no code. Every line of extra code added, and every extra platform supported is potential for more bugs, which has the potential to affect my user experience.
I'm not seeing an incentive structure for them to change being the only source of good workflows for their users - it's their whole thing "It just works" - regardless of if it's true in practice or not.
which other company spends as much investing in UX? there is not a single other company on the planet with as polished of a user experience as apple, so who would develop a better workflow?
If you want the "it just works" experience, you can still buy the Apple products though, that's not changing. You just also have the option to not do so.
They did their initial AirPod implementation in a pretty insecure manner because it was securely locked to their hardware and they could trust themselves to not be malicious. If they have to build a feature, plus all the security around it, plus documentation, etc… it makes it much harder to bring to market. They may opt to skip it in favor of something else.
the long term innovation outlooks are still better, so you benefit long term as well.
It’s just less obvious / measurable that immediate benefits.
And also, short term, isn’t it that other EarPods are getting better, rather than AirPods getting worse?
Medium term, I don’t think that Apple will stop innovating on AirPods just because of the EU market and this one feature not being exclusive to AirPods anymore. But it’s a possibility, I agree.
Laws that mandate interoperability between devices are a net win for individual consumers and the market as a whole. They simplify people's lives, make society more efficient, prevent opportunities for blatant rent seeking and ultimately foster market productivity.
A government mandating standards in electricity transmission or gasoline composition may disincentivize the development of features that make some people's devices incompatible with charging at certain locations or cars that can only use gas from certain gas stations but that is the opposite of a bad thing.
We live in a much better world because people in the past decided that all telephones should be able to make calls to each other and that people don't really have to think about messing up putting fuel in their car because the size of the nozzles at pumps are standardized.
There are absolutely more opportunities for governments to make small but objectively measurable improvements in society with well placed regulations on interoperability.
Isn't Apple currently disincentivized to make features because they don't even allow competing smartwatches to access a basic feature set on iPhone?
You're basically saying Apple would be disincentivized to innovate on the Apple Watch because Apple would need to release the underlying APIs that make those work with the phone to competing solutions. But the status quo is that competing solutions that are already better than the Apple Watch straight up aren't allowed on the platform, and the Apple Watch generally costs more than its competitors.
You are unintentionally saying that if Apple had to allow third parties to use their private APIs, that the Apple Watch would have to cost less and/or innovate more in order to convince us all to buy it instead of buying a watch from Samsung or Google.
What you are describing is a more competitive and open market where consumers benefit from lower prices and more of an incentive to innovate and justify high prices.
I would also dispute the notion that merely releasing these APIs would somehow give away all your secret sauce. Competitors still have to build the experience on top of that.
Three months ago a commenter here on HN claimed to me that this will be bad for Apple users:
> There is simply no good way to make the API public while maintaining the performance and quality expectations that Apple consumers have. If the third party device doesn’t work people will blame Apple even though it’s not their fault.
And, competition probably can’t build for it anyway:
> It’s impossible to build Apple Silicon level of quality in power to watt performance or realtime audio apps over public APIs.
And:
> […] Apple has to sabotage their own devices performance and security to let other people use it. The EU has no business in this.
Well, I look forward to next year when we’ll have the receipts and see!
Apple can't perform well with audio on Apple Silicon, either. In 2025 macos is the only OS with audio cracking appearing with CPU load. Even Linux is better
Yeah, this is a regression since macOS Tahoe.
Amazing that it still exists after several patch releases, is audio working not a basic test case for Apple?
I’ve found it to be worst when using Xcode / simulator and having headphones on for music.
sudo killall coreaudiod seems to fix it for a while.
It's ludicrous. I remember when Apple took pride in the audio never stopping. Once a very long time ago my entire Mac froze, even the Force Touch trackpad was unresponsive, but the music kept playing. Now, press Volume Up and the audio stutters. Or AirPods randomly get choppy and then stop playing until you reconnect them. The heck?
I don't think it's CPU-based, but I've always had an issue with my AirPods Max on my iPhone with audio cracking (my AirPods Pro work fine, and the Max works fine with my Mac)
You mean it will benefit Apple’s customers, who prefer headphones not made by Apple? If only the incentive for Apple to improve their interface was that its paying customers will have a better interface.
I really don't understand people who defend Apple on this. The only reason I can imagine is that they're shareholders who don't use any Apple products, or shareholders who use exclusively Apple products and can't understand what sort of poor scrub might want an accessory not made by them.
Strange opinion. Anyone that holds the SP500 (which is probably 99% of HN users between 9am and 5pm PT) are Apple shareholders, and what’s good for Apple is entirely aligned with what’s good for them.
Taking a further step back, this same group of HN users probably understands the straightforward idea that what’s good for Bay Area tech companies is beneficial to them in a much broader sense, since they’re generally employed by them or by a very small group of other companies closely related to them.
You can accuse them of being greedy, selfish, or whatever, but certainly not that they’re unaware of where their interests lie.
Your whole post is an ignorant, ugly and hate filled rant of little value, but I will pick out this one trope:
> Not the EU and its blob of unelected bureaucratic despots and unelected Commission of dictators
EU haters have two complaints, that it is unelected and that it takes away sovereignty, yet it consists of the members of national governments that not only elect the various officers of the EU (including the Commission) but also vote on all major decisions of the EU, as well as the directly elected EU parliament. So in fact the EU preserves both sovereignty and the votes of EU citizens, both member governments and citizen representatives must approve all EU actions.
It's a little complicated sure, apparently too complicated for some to understand.
Your comment is absolutely spot on, no notes. Wish your attitude was more popular and prevalent around here. My guess is that before 2017 or so it used to be.
Apparently even Apple doesn't share your opinion. They haven't threatened to leave Europe, Japan or the United States in retaliation for App Store regulations.
> I don’t see it as a matter of defending Apple, it’s really a matter of technical understanding and competence.
So do I. And my >20 years in the business gives me the experience and knowledge to see through Apple’s FUD.
> […] but also wanting to benefit from all the work and focus that went into creating it, is understandable to me.
It is my device. I paid for it. If Apple thinks they deserve more money for what they did they are free to ask me, the customer, for more money.
> […] unelected bureaucratic despots
Aha, the dog whistle of the AfD brand of conspiratorial bullshit ”unelected” nonsense! Career bureaucracy is supposed to be certified and educated, not elected, because that is the only way they can properly implement the laws of the electorate. Bureaucracy still answers to elected officials, but they are supposed to act without political interference and provide specialist knowledge. For the same reason you do not vote on every captain and colonel in the military hierarchy, or every tax collector/auditor in your IRS equivalent, you do not vote on every bureaucrat in the Commission tasked to execute and implement law.
You had me convinced that you were a self-absorbed narcissist at “it is my device” without any self-awareness about the fact that it is your device that you purchased as it is, under those conditions; not some fantastical conditions you imagined you should have.
But you really just emphasized it with the AfD nonsense, as if everyone in the world cares about your little provincial political obsessions. “Eeek, the eradicated Italian ideology of 80+ years ago that I have been conditioned with basic Pavlovian techniques to hate to control my mind is coming for me”. Ever hear of the book 1984 and the purpose of Emmanuel Goldstein? You seem to have totally missed that they used that very same technique on you, they just templated a different event on your little mind.
Are the commission popularly elected? No they are not, child. But do explain your narcissistic rationalization for how being not elected by the relevant populace makes calling them unelected nonsense. You can’t.
Why are you so fixated on running interference for what amounts to being a cult? Do you personally benefit financially from it or something? Nothing else makes any rational, sane sense. At least if you financially benefit from your own subjugation to unelected tyrannical despots in the commission and the council, at least you can say you are corrupted, greedy, and unprincipled… if you have the confidence and character to admit it.
But you lack the most fundamental understanding of how the EU and government, let alone different systems work or are suppressed to work, so I am not sure that your statements allow for any other conclusion than that you are deluding yourself either intentionally or in some belief that you can fool or gaslight me and others.
Besides, let’s have you put on your own thinking cap for a second. Take off the mind control cap for a minute and put your thinking cap on. Ready? Do you think it is smart for the same commission that originates imaginary “legislation” that the parliament votes on like any other dictatorial system’s apparatchiks do, should also be the body overseeing the implementation of that law? It breaks the most fundamental and major human advancement in governance produced by separating powers through the Constitution. You said people should be educated. Forget government education for a second, you seem to lack the ability to think at all. Do you not understand the danger of the legislative also being the executive? It’s basically just a novel form of aristocracy you are defending, a regression, total conflict of interest in abusing power … which they aren’t even elected to.
What has been done to your mind and all of Europe is commonly called a bait and switch, also known as coercive control in basic abuse patterns of toxic relationships.
You’re quite literally just a textbook abused person rationalizing and excusing the behaviors and actions of your abusers, like someone in any other toxic relationship or a cult.
Please reconsider the harm you are doing to the world and yourself too. I get the EU told you there was candy in the windowless panel van, but you have no idea what mistake you are making and are going to make others suffer for.
> Frankly, I wish Apple had the non-binary balls to simply just cut off all iPhones in Europe rather than bend to EU despot dictates
Perhaps you should come back when you’re less emotional. Suggesting incredibly poor value for shareholder decision while also being hateful (non-binary balls, indeed) is showing the whole ass. Never go whole ass.
You're getting downvoted but it's absolutely true that people simply don't want to (or are incapable) of considering second and third order effects that arise from applying interventions on systems that they do not understand.
HN should really just do away with the down/negative voting or at the least only use it for order sorting, not “points”. The point-punishment only enables abusive and toxic people and behaviors.
I for one believe every human has equal worth and right to speak whatever they want. It may not be relevant, important, smart, or even benevolent; but I still think they should be allowed to say it and even more importantly those who choose to, should be afforded the ability to see/read/hear it. Everything else is just authoritarian, even if it’s just some narcissist who believes HE/SHE is the authority over someone else.
> The point-punishment only enables abusive and toxic people and behaviors.
Actually that's what it's fighting, people like you.
> I for one believe every human...
People can say what they like, that doesn't mean anyone has to listen to it. Freedom of speech also means the ability to silence speech you don't like.
You don't have the right to spread hate and division on a company's website any more than pedophiles have a right to talk to people's children about sex. In both cases the ability to silence speech is fundamental.
HN chooses what kind of discussion it wants to have because doing otherwise would block the sort of speech it wants to host.
I know this will be hard for you to understand, but if you think about it for a while it makes perfect sense.
It's akin to physical autonomy meaning you can't trespass.
> A completely meaningless and self-defeating argument.
Your example is literally true: in Texas you have the right to kill someone entering your home without permission.
So far from being "meaningless and self-defeating", it's reality.
Just like you can't walk on my property without my permission, you can't speak on my property without my permission, including my website. I decide who speaks and who doesn't there.
Government intervention like forbidding led-based paints or asbestos in homes? Or government intervention like doing something about the ozone depletion? Government intervention like forbidding roaming fees? Intervention like requiring 3-point seat belts? Like progressive taxation? Like forbidding discrimination based on skin colour? Like air travel safety? Like a max ceiling on credit card fees?
Abortion abolition in states that are causing women to die because doctors are afraid to perform them even when it puts the woman’s life in danger not to perform them.
It even put the life of a Republican lawmaker in dander in Florida. Of course she blamed democrats.
- Drastic overregulation of nuclear energy in the US, resulting in fossil-fuel pollution measurable in gigatons over the past several decades accompanied by literally countless illnesses and premature deaths.
- Premature mandates for airbags in cars that resulted in hundreds of needless child deaths because the technology wasn't yet safe enough for universal deployment. A scenario that's playing out right now with misfeatures like automated emergency braking.
- The Jones Act (Merchant Marine Act of 1920), whose effects are too convoluted to go into here.
- Misguided, market-distorting housing policies, ranging across the spectrum from rent control to Proposition 13.
- Many if not most aspects of the War on Drugs, including but not limited to mandatory minimum sentencing and de-facto hardwiring of racial bias into the justice system.
Okay, using that definition, Walmart, Target, Dollar Tree, my local regional grocery store, Trader Joe's and Ralph's are monopolies as well. They own their shelves and store space, and are the sole arbiters responsible for deciding what is sold within them.
Okay, so it has to be something you purchase - we're slowly getting closer to the true opinion here.
Sony is a monopoly as well then? They decide what gets sold in the Playstation store. Same with Nintendo.
Ford and Tesla are monopolies, they solely decide what is software is sold or used in their car's infotainment center stores, despite the fact that I have purchased the car!
AWS is a monopoly, despite the fact that I purchase an EC2 instance from them for one year they will not let me run certain kinds of software on it (Parler, some crypto, etc.)
Hilarious opinion. Of course they’re not, Tesla and Ford don’t have a dominant market share anywhere and have a tremendous amount of competitors. I think it would help you to take a look at what the word monopoly means.
You're not understanding my point. I'm not saying Apple has a monopoly on phones, I'm saying they have a monopoly on iPhone apps. It's the App Store that's a monopoly, and the EU agrees with me, hence the DMA.
non-apple headphones work just fine with Apple products. In fact, Apple's bluetooth stack seem to work best among all the portable devices I come across (no random droppings, connects on first try etc.)
My iPhone has plenty of trouble connecting to various devices at times. God forbid it has to manage connecting to my car and my headphones at once. It works OK most of the time, but at least once a week it proves to be a problem.
They have nifty apple-only features, like you can hold them close to the iPhone and they'll pop up and pair with a neat UI.
It's mostly gimicky, but it does give the user the impression that the apple Air pods are higher quality because they have all these things thought out. In actuality, Apple just made it so they're the only ones who can do that.
I was unconvinced till I switched my devices, one by one, to Apple products a few years ago. They really do just work, especially with specification abiding devices.
I will say, I have an Apple device minority ecosystem, and it seems to be that the Apple devices are the bad citizens there.
For example, I have Sony and Bose headphones with bluetooth multi point. The way this is supposed to work for example is that I can connect them to my PC and my smartphone and have my PC playing videos or whatever, and my phone can override that when something "priority" like a phone call comes in.
Except if the iPad is one of the connected devices, then it will claim priority once a minute or so, _even if it's playing no audio_, thereby interrupting other audio streams pointlessly. This makes all the other devices look like they can't play audio and the iPad can, and I'm sure the iPad plays nice with airpods, but it seems weird to me that every non-Apple combination of devices I hve also plays nice with each other.
- Reliable internet sharing, especially when connection is spotty, and when your connection switches between operators or countries
- Making alarms randomly silent. I missed a flight once because of this. There is no excuse for this.
- Randomly not working AirPlay
- GPS is terrible compared to any of my previous Androids. Even my first Android in 2010 was better than this.
- Finding an operator can take a loooong time after crossing border
- Random restrictions in App Store, like no torrent clients
- Generally terrible keyboard for my native language (Hungarian). Prediction and basic accent fixing doesn’t work at all. The exception is when I don’t need to change a word with diacritics… when the keyboard’s dictionary clearly contains them
- Apple Maps is still a joke. Many times it doesn’t load the underlying map layer at all. I switch to Google Maps search for what I want, finding it, reading some info, looking some images, then switching back to Apple Maps, and it still doesn’t load. Also, navigation and speed limit information are unreliable to say the least.
- Heavily underdocumented MacOS virtualization API, and half the features can’t be used in a real environment, but these restrictions are completely undocumented
- Wanting to have a running DNS server is a challenge on MacOS
- Unusable GPU when no monitor is connected
- You basically need to turn off all security features in MacOS to allow some basic automation, like with FaceTime
- Generally terrible compatibility with anything non Apple. Do you want to show your photos on your friend’s random TV without hassle? Good luck.
- Many built in features (eg SSH, VNC) are heavily restricted, and good luck if you want to replace them cleanly. Most information on internet is “just use the built in solution”. Also they are many times completely insecure.
There are hacks for these, but “they just work” is not true at all. On the level of how “they just work”, top level Android and Windows devices are also on that level for more than a decade in case of Android, and at least 20 years for Windows (if not more). Maybe Apple TV is my only device which just works without hitting some quirks. Especially compared to my other TV and TV adjacent devices. But even here its FaceTime solution, let’s say “interesting”.
Currently, on the AirPods side and not iOS side like the article covers, Apple breaks Bluetooth feature parity with other devices by not sticking to the Bluetooth spec with AirPods themselves.
For example, you need to root and patch your Bluetooth stack on your phone if you want to use all of your AirPods features on Android, and not because Android is doing something wrong, it's because the Android Bluetooth stack actually sticks to the spec and AirPods don't.
And even when you do that, you can't do native AAC streaming like you can with iOS/macOS. Even if you're listening to AAC encoded audio, it'll be transcoded again as 256kbps AAC over Bluetooth.
Even no name earbuds on Amazon manage to not break Bluetooth and can offer cross platform high quality audio over Bluetooth.
On the other hand, there’s been a bug open to make a simple harmless change to fix this in Android for 9 months, with no response from Google other than asking for reproduction steps as far as I can tell.
Buganizer is not where you submit code to be reviewed and accepted into Android. And by the author's own admission that change is a hack and not a proper fix. Anyone is free to make a proper fix and upstream it if they wanted to.
No one has presented a remotely correct fix anywhere on that issue, or elsewhere to my knowledge.
You're welcome to write an actually correct patch for android if you want, one that isn't just commenting out code and probably breaking some spec-compliant bluetooth devices.
Make sure to test your patch against all the bluetooth devices in existence to make sure it doesn't regress.
Do that, make a PR, wait the average third-party-android-PR review time (approximately 5 years), and then if your PR isn't accepted at that point we can maybe say Google is intentionally ignoring this issue.
Nobody actually productively commenting in the thread thinks it's a conspiracy theory and everyone acknowledges that the Apple hardware is off-spec. It would be nice to see Android add this workaround.
You have linked me to what sounds like an AI generated comment. AI comments cannot be trusted. AI will make up believable sounding gunk and cannot be trusted.
"The bug", aka not implementing spec violating behavior, also exists in BlueZ, the Linux Bluetooth stack. Is the BlueZ team taking kickbacks to make sure earbuds don't work on Linux, too? They were Google Summer of Code partners, too, so this potentially goes pretty deep.
They do this on purpose if you didn't get it. Google will never "fix" this issue because they follow the spec. They shouldn't have to add an exception for AirPods.
> Google will never "fix" this issue because they follow the spec. They shouldn't have to add an exception for AirPods.
This seems to go against how OS development (and perhaps consumer software in general, just think about browsers!) works in reality, it's just piles of exceptions on top of exceptions for weird hardware.
> For example, you need to root and patch your Bluetooth stack on your phone if you want to use all of your AirPods features on Android, and not because Android is doing something wrong, it's because the Android Bluetooth stack actually sticks to the spec and AirPods don't.
It’s a mix of bad Bluetooth implementations still on the Android side, and Apple extensions to cram audio features into the BLE envelope.
> And even when you do that, you can't do native AAC streaming like you can with iOS/macOS. Even if you're listening to AAC encoded audio, it'll be transcoded again as 256kbps AAC over Bluetooth.
How would this be Apple’s fault if the OS audio stack can’t do direct AAC streaming? Or are you saying the headphones themselves decode, re-encode and then re-decode the AAC?
> How would this be Apple’s fault if the OS audio stack can’t do direct AAC streaming? Or are you saying the headphones themselves decode, re-encode and then re-decode the AAC?
There are multiple Bluetooth standards for lossless audio that work across platforms. Instead of implementing those features, Apple uses a proprietary protocol to half-ass it only for the case of AAC. Even in that case, it requires a proprietary Bluetooth stack to work. Without that proprietary stack, the Airpods default to low quality transcoding of audio streams at 256kbps, and don't offer true high quality or lossless audio playback. So even in the one case where Airpods offer some semblance of lossless playback, it's non-standard and applicable to AAC only.
Cross platform high quality and lossless audio, multipoint pairing, etc solved problems and features that even $20 white label earbuds on Amazon are able to implement.
Yes, this is called Bluetooth multipoint and has been common on non-Apple devices (for example Bose) for a few years now. Requires no logins and is vendor-agnostic.
I can stop music on my phone and immediately listen to music from my laptop. I have non-apple headphones, a non-apple laptop and an iPhone. There is no apple magic dust that makes this happen.
It doesn’t need “the cloud” (switching works offline) but it does need to verify that the device it’s switching to belongs to you, which it does using a keypair associated with your account.
Even no name earbuds on Amazon manage to not break Bluetooth and can offer cross platform high quality audio over Bluetooth
That's because they're all based on a small set of BT SoCs from companies who are not exclusively dependent on the Apple ecosystem and need to interoperate with everything BT-compliant.
Apple removed the headphone jack to sell AirPods. This was always one of the dirty little details: You could buy non-Apple BT headphones, but they weren't able to work the same way.
I've had no trouble using corded headphones with my iphones (either via an adapter or e.g. the $20 usb-c earpods). In fact, it seems like people using corded headphones is a news cycle[1] every 6 months.
I bought that adapter, because I wanted to keep using my good old, high quality, corded earphones. It technically works, but it's not a nice experience. The adapter looks and feels out of place. It's the only white part in the setup (can't buy it in black), the cable is thin as a hair and feels like it might break soon, and I now have the additional plug and socket on that cable, which makes it awkward to put the phone in my pocket.
The adapter is annoying enough that very few people bother, and Apple knew it. It's also a bit flaky. Sometimes my phone doesn't detect it at first, or an inline mic doesn't work.
Got a MacBook for work recently, paired it to my AirPods I had for months, and it was funny noticing you could enable FindMy for them from the settings but they wouldn't show up in my devices on the map. Indeed, for this you need to pair with an iPhone or iPad. However it did enable the beacon on the airpods as the next day AirGuard notified a device was following me. And since, I can't disable it, the switch in the settings doesn't disable the beacon AirGuard still detects them. Even within their ecosystem they'll punish you for not being fully "part of the familly".
Let’s call them bureaucrats, but let’s not forget that their baseline is to be public servants, while that of product managers is to increase profits :-) . I think the system is working as intended though, because increasing profits can be a great driver for innovation and service to the consumer, until it’s not and the “immune system” (the bureaucracy) must be called on to fight the uncontrolled pathological growth…
> ALL OF THE LEGALLY SANCTIONED GOVERNMENT MONOPOLIES HERE.
This is the kinda claim that really needs citations, and ideally some commentary on how the examples demonstrate the point you’re trying to make. Otherwise it’s impossible to reply to, and just comes across a little shrill and conspiratorial. Which I don’t think is your goal.
So this tap to pair won’t work in the US? The side loading stuff I can understand to restrict to the EU, but this just seems like a nice feature for everyone
Not only isn’t this or any other of the DMA features accessible in the USA, but Norway which is a member of the EEC and which therefore both have to and is in the process of ratifying the DMA. Don’t get this either.
That Apple is so petty that it blocks on legal technicalities like that, when everyone knows it is just a matter of time. Really sours me on the whole company.
They even restrict "letting you choose the default maps app" to jurisdictions that legally require it (EU and Japan), there is literally no justification for that other than "we want to increase KPIs for our shitty Apple Maps app by making people accidentally open it", it's an extremely basic toggle that pretty much any user of Google Maps would prefer.
The problem is you can’t regulate interoperability where it doesn’t exist.
What does it mean to open the “default map app”? Maps apps typically act a native rendering for a web site, and have their own web-parameter based API for locations, navigation, and points of interest, as well as customizing informational layers.
So if I set say Bing maps to be the default map app, does that mean:
2. Bing Maps reverse engineers as much as possible of the various other mapping products and tries to support them with roughly equivalent features or error messages?
What the default maps app setting Apple created does is create an entirely new URI scheme of geo-navigation and an entitlement for apps which wish to support it to be the default map app. This appears to be roughly limited to a subset of parameters common between Apple and Google Maps.
So this setting in the EU and Japan.. mostly does nothing currently. Every developer needs to change their native apps and web pages to call out to this new custom scheme that only works on Apple platforms. Each of these mapping apps needs to support this scheme. That hasn’t happened yet.
The EU (and in this case Japan) gets early access and the potential exposure of multiple breaking revisions.
It is also certainly possible that a good number of web/app developers decide they don’t _want_ to support multiple mapping apps, since they’ve only verified one or two of them actually provide proper navigation/visualization/POI, and that the whole concept is flawed.
If it were, they wouldn’t be asking. And you haven’t answered it either. Your parent comment is asking why the grandparent commenter thinks it makes sense to restrict third-party stores to the EU instead of having them everywhere.
If you're defending Apple in this situation, I am sorry, but you're an absolute idiot. Android has had this feature for any compatible earbuds for quite some time now, behind a Google-branded technology.
Personally, I discovered it in Android when I recently bought Xiaomi buds for $15 (in Brazil, where this kind of stuff is much more expensive), took them out of the case, and my phone instantly asked whether I wanted to connect. One click, done. Afterward, every time I took those earbuds out, they were _instantly_ connected, and I had access to their individual battery levels in the system UI. These didn't have geolocation, but that's because I literally bought the cheapest earbuds I could find that would be delivered in 24 hours.
Has anyone had bad experiences with the Google Fast Pair (proprietary) technology? (Like Apple defenders here say would happen if you “open up” the proprietary protocol for everyone to implement).
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).
> 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.
And many post before that. But was too late, by that time the words were spread on internet like wildfire. Especially in Apple focused publishing sites.
I cant find the exact one, but he at the time was suggesting AirPods was sold at cost. Along with plenty of American so called "analyst".
He might have his network within Apple on software. But anything that has to do with Hardware or things like MFi Licensing scheme he is completely wrong.
I was specifically trying to address the claims made by the previous commenter I was replying to. I don't think Gruber's takes are generally worth paying attention to, and I don't think Gruber making similar-but-false claims should in any way discredit what I wrote.
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.
Of course you can. And you don't need any consent from the user for doing so.
The only thing you need to do is to have some document where you list all the personal information you process and store, for how long and what you do with the said data.
What you cannot do is store data that you don't have a legitimate interest in storing. And this is why you have to document what you do with the data, because if you're not doing anything with it (“I want to store 10 years worth of IP address logs just in case”) then you aren't allowed to (on the opposite “I want to store IP addresses for a month for DDoS protection purpose ” is allowed).
That’s not how the law is structured. You CAN do that no problem but it’s then WHAT you do WITH that which is where the law comes into play. If it’s just for security purposes then there’s no problem I believe.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
“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
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.
What you said is a bigger fantasy than the complete history of fundamentalist Marxism. There are precisely zero examples of a Laissez-faire economy succeeding in the real world. It is a wholecloth fiction.
If you'd like to reconsider your stance from a realpolitik perspective, it might clarify the parent's response.
Can you be specific about what I said being a complete fantasy? I feel like you're trying to extrapolate some view of economics onto me when I was making the point that there are reasonable arguments that can be made against government intervention. Or is that it, you don't even think a reasonable argument can be made? If so I would call that ideological, not reasonable.
Markets depend on regulations. You can make any case you want, but you must acknowledge this root fact if you are discussing real-world capitalist policy. Otherwise you are advocating to change a system that does not exist in real life, or reflect any modern economy anywhere on the planet.
Your claim that the parent ignored everything you said is bad-faith and objectively wrong. They are critiquing your attack on regulation and pointing out that reality works in the opposite way. Case in point, you have no bombshell argument against regulating Apple in this instance. You cited no real-world examples and gestured at generic and irrelevant anti-regulation boogeymen. Then you used ad-hominem to attack them instead of refuting the point they made.
The notion that I'm the one arguing in bad faith is laughable. Nobody has actually addressed any of the points I brought up, instead defaulting to assertions that regulations are necessary and thus I'm "objectively wrong". This is not how you foster good discussions - you need to be willing to listen and address the opposing viewpoints that are brought up. If I wanted to do the same thing you are doing, I would simply assert that "Markets don't require regulations" and I've made an argument of equal strength, but of course a meaningless one.
If you're actually interested in having a discussion it would be worthwhile to explain your reasoning behind why you think markets depend on regulation. I can think of a few good arguments for that position, because I'm capable of considering multiple perspectives and I'm actually interested in having a debate. You seem more interested in shutting down opposing viewpoints and bullying the other participants into submission.
Right, but regulations are necessary. And ideological opposition to regulation, as a concept, in inherently wrong and always will be.
Some regulations are good, some are bad. In order to have a free market, you MUST have some regulations. It's not optional.
The reason is simple and intuitive - if you don't regulate the free market, it will just make itself un-free, which is what we're seeing with Apple. You need to actively push back against that.
The reason is all free market players, no exceptions, have the utmost fundamental incentive to make the market non-free. Everyone, all the time, is devising new and innovative ways to make the market they control non-free. Because this is how you maximize revenue.
It isn't though. The argument is that regulations are necessary to rein in big companies like Apple. But if regulations created the monster in the first place, it's not a good argument in favour of regulations.
A proper laissez-faire capitalist economy would not have any legally-enforced monopolies at all. That means no IP laws whatsoever!
I would push back a bit on the ideological comment, just to say that ideological acceptance of regulation is also probably wrong. This is different from a philosophical opposition/acceptance of political authority, although it often appears the same.
I think it's fairly obvious that the base prerequisites for market economies are property rights and some form of legal system to handle disputes. I don't consider that to be "regulation", especially not government regulation, but if that is what you mean by the term then of course I would concede that markets require it. However since even the most fervent proponents of laissez-faire economies accept the necessary role of property rights and a legal system, I would consider those to be separate from what we commonly refer to as regulation.
Ok to respond to your main point: It seems reasonable to me that in a competitive market there is an incentive to win, and companies can win by preventing others from being able to compete. This is commonly done via regulation, for example the big companies are lobbying for regulation on AI to help cement their position at the top. The thing is, just because companies are incentivized to win doesn't mean that it's possible to sustain a monopoly position for a significant amount of time. Unlike other competitive activities there isn't a time clock with winners declared at the end. Economists have shown that absent of external cofounders, a position where a company can charge monopoly prices is unsustainable.
There is of course a stronger position to be made for regulating so called natural monopolies, but even then there isn't much evidence that they really exist. Some of the most cited examples, like telecom providers, end up not being true - look at Eastern Europe and what happened when they deregulated that industry for example.
> for example the big companies are lobbying for regulation on AI to help cement their position at the top
And pray tell, how did that work out? It didn't. The worst of it came from OpenAI snatching up long-term federal contracts, but it's not illegal or anticompetitive to waste taxpayer money on debt-encumbered AI outfits. You're citing an example that works against your broader point.
> doesn't mean that it's possible to sustain a monopoly position for a significant amount of time.
> Unlike other competitive activities there isn't a time clock with winners declared at the end.
Neither the SEC nor the FTC has ever argued either of these points to my knowledge. Maybe this is true for other economies, but not America.
> Economists have shown that absent of external cofounders
We don't live in a world absent of confounding factors. Simple cartel logic is enough to loophole around this little theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartel
---
I personally don't take offense at people who prefer anarchist economics. But you have to understand that your opinion about regulation is not shared by even the most hardcore conservative politicians. US courts have proven that it is possible to hold an indefinite monopoly and incur billable damages onto the market, hurting consumers and competitors alike.
Mmm, if you read about cartel prices you'll see that it's inherently unstable since there is incentive for any one member of the cartel to cheat, driving down prices. That isn't a loophole around the theories around monopoly pricing. What tends to confound are government laws and regulations, like IP law for example.
Re. OpenAI et al, they actually work with the US government to help shape the regulatory landscape, and interestingly enough since Google jumped out ahead they are now pushing for a lighter model. I imagine Google is pushing for heavier regulation since that tends to be their M.O.
Also I don't have anarchist economics - anarchists don't believe in property rights or markets, and they certainly don't understand economics. And I certainly don't put any stock in what right leaning American politicians or their courts think or say.
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.)
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.
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.
Third-party accessories like smart watches will be able to receive notifications from the iPhone
This seems incorrect, or at least misleading. I have always (since I switched to iPhone in 2020) been receive notifications on my Garmin Fenix watch. In fact, the only problem I have with notifications is that I have no ability to blacklist apps from notifying on my watch, and its all or nothing. This is a huge downgrade from Android, and I wish whomever is responsible could fix that.. That's probably my biggest annoyance with my iphone.
Waiting to read the news that this unblocks all functionalities in the re-pebble so I could finally purchase one that fully works with iPhones. Way to go EU!
Something like 5% of the time when I pair my airpods to my apple wathc to go for a run, only one of them pairs. So, if I've actually started running, I then have to circle back to get the headphones case, unpair them, stick them back in the case and hope it then works after i close the lid for a minute.
Are we learning the wrong lessons? Integrated always works better than modular components. Here, Apple is being asked to enable their versions of software for third party devices, which do not have the same hardware assumptions as Apple did. (Apple will not release the exact hardware spec for airpods anyway). This means the newer version will be designed modularly, with some tradeoffs to enable the "same" kind of access to third party. Then there is a caveat that it there is even a bit of experience change from 1st party to third party access, it will be complained about and investigated. so, the way fwd is designing with third party in mind, and that almost always leads to bloat and substandard experience for end user.
Probably better would have been just simpler access, even if not the integrated experience like. But that would lead to complains from third party manufacturers.
The lesson being learned is that Apple could’ve avoided all this trouble if they had used or produced standards for the connection between their components. The whole concept of a gatekeeper was created in response to Apple-likes being difficult and simply hostile to interop opportunities even though they’re defacto the phone company and there is no way around them.
So if the solution is not optimal, that circles back to Apple who are responsible for coming up with a solution that works. Then choosing to prioritise platform lock-in is a business strategy, leaving regulation the only recourse.
A company making an integrated experience would inevitably provide a better experience/performance than a company asked to build for 100s of devices with different spec. That Apple did not want to open it up is a separate discussion.
My contention is this: expecting a third party provider to be able to provide the same experience as the first party is an impractical goal. Even pushing companies towards that means a lot of second order effects where everyone ends up like Intel or Windows for that matter. We already have android on that level.
You can have a reasonable requirement where Apple should not be able to block other companies from providing similar services based on an iphone. But clearly the directive here is that Apple's competing products should not be better based on better integration, which can only go in one direction. Apple degrades its own products to comply. Yes, competition wins, but consumers lose. In this case specifically - consumers who would want to choose Apple, better experiences would not be able to simply because Apple cannot ensure the level of software/hardware alignment as it works today if the same software is written with modular hardware in mind.
> You can have a reasonable requirement where Apple should not be able to block other companies from providing similar services based on an iphone.
This is what the requirement is. The EU isn’t demanding that Apple provide the same experience for 3rd Party and 1st Party products. It only requires that Apple allow 3rd Parties access to the same capabilities as 1st Party products, so 3rd Parties could build 1st Party quality experiences.
Nobody is asking Apple to degrade their own products. They’re just demanding that Apple don’t artificially degrade other people’s products.
> That Apple did not want to open it up is a separate discussion.
This is the only point of discussion here. Because all the EU requires is that Apple open up their internal protocols so others can implement them.
We’re talking about a UI interface here. How exactly would you ask Apple to “license its technology” there? Apple needs tell people how to trigger that interface, and Apple needs to support 3rd parties trigging that interface.
Apple could “license its technology”, but what use would that be. Having other phone manufacturers implement the same UI doesn’t change the market distorting effects of the iPhone.
Device manufacturers could pay Apple to register their devices to be recognized by the iPhone that they know how to use the advanced features it is capable of, for example.
Also, device manufacturers can create apps for their devices and trigger those apps when a device is close by.
I am against the idea of having a company spend resources on designing and implementing features for its devices and then being forced to give them away for free.
> Device manufacturers could pay Apple to register their devices to be recognized by the iPhone that they know how to use the advanced features it is capable of, for example.
Maybe if Apple actually offered that at a reasonable price, and to be clear they have never offered this at any price, the EU wouldn’t have felt compelled to act. AirPods have been around for a decade now, the DSA has been in the works for five years. So it’s not like Apple hasn’t had time to act. They chose to do nothing, so now the EU is removing their right to choose.
> Also, device manufacturers can create apps for their devices and trigger those apps when a device is close by.
This would require support from Apple, which notably, it doesn’t provide.
> I am against the idea of having a company spend resources on designing and implementing features for its devices and then being forced to give them away for free.
We’re talking about Apple here, one of the richest companies on the planet. I think it can survive. The DSA only applies to companies that achieve gatekeeper status, which basically means they’re an effective monopoly in a market that many people are forced to participate in (in this case smartphones). It’s a heck of bar to cross, and something that only been achieved by unbelievably profitable companies.
I am going to comment on the last part of your post: No one is forcing people to buy or use Apple products. You can buy a Pixel, a Samsung or one of the other lesser known Android brands and be on your merry way. And you can buy earbuds for those devices too; Samsung offers their own brand for example.
Apple makes a choice here, they don’t degrade anything they just choose to be difficult and to have to be forced to do the right thing by “whomever has enough money to sue us”.
If you’re a user of Apple devices, I don’t know why you’re defending them because noting this corporation does is meant for you once they double dip on you buying their hardware and then signing up for their services.
> A company making an integrated experience would inevitably provide a better experience/performance than a company asked to build for 100s of devices with different spec. That Apple did not want to open it up is a separate discussion.
I disagree, this is not a given. Usually the opposite is true.
Meaning, properly designed APIs and protocols for public use are more robust than one-off private protocols. Because there are expectations.
Apple could be malicious and make the API stupid, but if they were genuine then they wouldn't. They would make a good API, which is much more likely, I think, when the API is public versus some secret private API.
> Meaning, properly designed APIs and protocols for public use are more robust than one-off private protocols. Because there are expectations.
This is the polar opposite of my experience. Whether it's Bluetooth, PDF's, or a web audio JavaScript spec, actual products are plagued with inconsistencies and incompatibilities, as they implement the spec in different ways or brand A has bugs that brands B, C and D need to write special code for to get interoperability working. And brand C has other bugs brands A, B and D now need to also handle.
Whereas private protocols are much more likely to just work because there's only one implementation. There are no differing interpretations.
> A company making an integrated experience would inevitably provide a better experience/performance than a company asked to build for 100s of devices with different spec
This isn't given. For example the company that makes smart light switches doesn't provide a code entry pad and the company that makes the alarm doesn't provide a light switch. If they were interoperable I'd have a better system. Futhermore they'd both sell more widgets, as I'm holding off on further units in case I find a better third option and end up disposing of my current ones.
You're missing the point. Apple isn't in trouble beacuse of user's choice between iPhone and Android. They're in trouble because of 20-50 headphone makers who Apple prevents from truely competing Apple for 2 billion iPhone users.
It's the same with all of these issues Apple (and Google) are running into. It's not about the user's choice to buy iPhone or Android. It's about 100s of thousands of businesses ability to reach those billions of users without a gatekeeper.
I am saying that if you force Apple to move away from integrated devices to something which has to be generic (modular like Intel) which does not know which hardware it will pair up with and hence needs baseline performance, it turns into android to a large extent. Other businesses may have legit incentives to reach those customers, but unless Apple makes drastic changes to current setup, the software would not support other manufacturers to the same extent. So they will go to EU and then Apple will write a more generic code - to ensure all manufactures are similarly supported, and it takes them away from integrated system they currently have. Competition wins, but customers dont.
There is no “produced standard” to allow three Bluetooth devices - each headphone and the case - to register as one Bluetooth device or to automatically register a Bluetooth device to all devices using the same cloud account.
Big disagree that integrated always works better than modular writ large, but in any case maybe they could just hire this guy to do it? https://github.com/kavishdevar/librepods
Its mostly true when the integrating company cares for the user experience. Which apple clearly does.
The example you shared is the opposite. I am imagining a kernel today written in a manner that airpods would be able to use it to extract the max out of it. Now, it has to support 10 other third party pods, so at the minimum, kernel would be more generalized.
I guess if apple changes the way it works completely it would be different, with the kernel and such but like
Aren’t peripherals inherently modular kind of definitionally?
You should check that GitHub, it makes AirPod functionality mostly agnostic. The warts could (in some world) be mere bug reports for the manufacturer firmware team.
Personally, I think the Bluetooth standards suck a big one even recognizing how good it’s gotten and I _almost_ resent apple for not pushing this out as anither standard.
Modular in the sense you have to support multiple hardwares (of different kinds) instead of just one. Eventually you arrive at a place where software is good enough, and hardware + kernels cannot do the exact heavy lifting that is happening today in conjunction. Not the intel level but directionally similar kind of tradeoffs.
Steve Jobs loved the iMac's terrible hockey puck mouse. Jony Ive is probably to blame for the terrible (yet very thin) butterfly keyboard making it into Apple laptops. However, these missteps do not prove that Apple doesn't care about user experience.
The components are modular under the hood, they have to be. Apple just doesn't let you take advantage of it.
iOS has a daemon that reads your notifications and ships them to Apple Watch. They have a daemon that scans for AirPods and gives you UI to pair them. But you as an app developer cannot do any of those things. There was no public API for notification stream access, scanning for specific Bluetooth devices, floating UI widgets, or even just persistent daemons. All of those capabilities more or less exist on Android, which is why multiple smartwatch ecosystems have been built on top of it while iOS only supports the first-party option.
Back in the 2000s, when Apple was just getting into mobile devices, the app development landscape was far less bleak. iTunes on Windows could happily index your entire music and video collection and sync it to an iPod and there was nothing Microsoft could do to stop them. Everything is just finding the appropriate file and connecting to the appropriate USB device to transfer it. And that's more or less how things still work today, except now on smartphones all of that is put into isolated containers and walled off behind private APIs.
modular does not mean in terms of how the library is architected, but in terms of how many vendors/customers it needs to support. Airpods' hardware is built and then kernels are written in a way to compliment each other and get the most out of the system. With another set of headphones with a different chip, there is a very good chance that code written today would not be optimal because other builders could manufacture different things based on the same spec. You cannot bring everything to software, nor can you have hardware doing everything. Tradeoffs would be needed.
The issue comes in second order effects. If third party headphones are given access and then the experience is not as good, they complain that Apple hasnt open up the spec enough, and it just results in Apple being forced to be modular in their approach.
Third-party headphones already have access. Bluetooth audio is a standard that is well-supported both by iOS and headphones of any kind[0]. The problem is that the process for pairing a device on iOS (or, for that matter, Android) is a pain in the ass for knowledgeable users and completely untenable for everyone else.
Apple recognized that this was a problem, and made their phone detect if you were trying to pair new headphones and pop up a notification for it. But only for Apple's headphones. Which is stupid.
[0] In fact, this is why I use AirPods Pro on an Android phone.
I disagree with the premise. For me, "works better" means that I can swap out one of the devices in my fleet with a different brand and still have a functioning setup.
But even ignoring that, I think your claim can be true while forcing Apple to be compatible is still the right thing to do, because optimizing for personal convenience and user experience only is not the best outcome if it comes at the expense of market failure due to vendor lock-in.
Depending on how you look at it, there may be two distinct parts to this:
a) API to not just read notifications but also perform the notification quick actions (if any), e.g snooze for a calendar event, mark complete for a reminder, and of course reply for a text (SMS or otherwise). This seems entirely reasonable and ludicrous that it doesn't exist.
b) API to access SMS / Messages. That one appears to be heavily guarded because security / E2E (for iMessage).
I mention b) because a lot of times people invoke the problem a being b) (and possibly a problem in its own right, forcing one to use Messages for SMS) but really for watches a) is sufficient and probably much more relevant.
There's also a.1) API access
to media (images) in notifications.
In any case, DMA could definitely help crack both.
I mean I’d settle for the status quo and Garmin itself not deleting big parts of my watch faces.
The last update from Garmin did this to my Epix. Funnily enough the complications can still be activated if you touch the screen, they’re just invisible.
I really wonder what the technical detail is that makes it so much harder for this feature to work when your phone is outside the EU, does anyone know?
The same technical detail that makes it so the "Default Navigation App" toggle to change the default from 'Apple Maps' to 'Google Maps' only shows up if you live in the EU but not in the US.
Does proximity pairing also mean seamless switching between iDevices? As it stands non Apple earphones need to disconnect from the currently paired device to only then connect with another. My Beats Studio pro on the other hand can control primary device and on secondary device I can prompt it to connect and it will switch.
This is wrong - Apple did implement multipoint pairing. I’ve had Bose headphones and cheapo Amazon headphones and both switched perfectly between various Apple devices.
No, they did not implement mulitpoint Bluetooth as per the spec in AirPods, they are doing proprietary handoffs between their own devices, multipoint pairing is not implemented for Airpods outside of macOS and iOS.
Yeah this would be weird if it's only for EU based companies. I think apple strategy is overall 'divide and conquer' making all different stuff working different in EU, Japan, UK, US. To this already many variables also if the user has account in EU and also if is living in EU or for how long. Their whole compliance is not robust and reliable making this in fact dead on arrival. Any maker relying on this will have more complains from customers. Customers will think that all non-apple solution are buggy and reliable and will stick with apple stuff.
> I think apple strategy is overall 'divide and conquer'
I think Tim Cook’s strategy is rather “hoard and extract as much money as legally possible, no matter what it does to the experience”. Selling tech products is no different to him than selling car parts of frozen meat. What matters to him is the pile of money at the end.
I don't know much about this, but does "proximity pairing" use some open standard API that's part of the bluetooth spec? Are there any examples of other devices using something like this?
Part of the appeal of Airpods is how seamless they are to pair and share between devices. The UX of bluetooth headphones pairing and device switching before Airpods came along seemed atrocious.
Is this a case of Apple arbitrarily locking out third parties, or is a case of Apple doing the work to get something to work nicely and now being forced to give competition access?
I don't know how proximity pairing works in Apple land. My wife uses Apple devices.
But between my Android phone and my contractor issued Windows laptop, the $20 headphone I use just works. It connects to both of them because of multi-pairing.
If one of the devices is playing, say, a Youtube video, the other doesn't take over the sound even if I start playing music there. And if I pause the Youtube video in one device, the other is free to play sounds.
It's seamless and intuitive.
I should try also pairing to my Linux workstation. If that works too I would be impressed.
Considering how aggressive they’ve been about internet legislation lately, mandating age checks and asking companies to give them keys to encrypted data, I think I’d rather them not rejoin just yet, we don’t need another country trying to force Chat Control and making it worse.
Likely not. FTA: “The changes to proximity pairing and notifications are only available for device makers and iPhone and iPad users in the European Union.”
Wow, it's almost as if regulations were necessary to curtail the worst excesses of capitalism and steer it towards user interest instead of maximal exploitation...
Recently bought an apple watch for my mom and got it set up with her iphone. Almost instantly she notices that she cant accept WhatsApp calls on her watch, and after looking into it I found out that it was another one of those apple things where they assume youre obviously using facetime so that functionality isnt available for any other app. For context, in europe Whatsapp is the dominating messaging app and alot of people use it for calling as well as messaging. The apple watch is, as far as I can tell, a simple Bluetooth wearable with a speaker and a microphone, so the only reason its like this is that apple has a concept of how the device is "supposed" to be used and only lets you use it that way. After that experience I fully support all the regulations the EU is putting on apple to open up.
You can accept calls on the watch from Telegram.
So this sounds like a “whatsapp didn’t want to do it” more than a “Apple disallowed it”
Most probably. WhatsApp is also still using the old way of accessing photos where you have to define which photos WA has access to every time you want to share newly taken photos. I’m pretty sure they do that deliberately so you get annoyed and give them blanket access to all your photos. (Which they then probably secretly analyse in the background.)
I wish apple would deprecate the old way and force apps to adopt the new photo picker.
Then you will see here thousands of comments explaining how that is bad for small businesses, and apple is forcing them out of the market… is a balance…
Perhaps it should be by user base?
"You have 100M MAU, you need to be keeping up with the standards"
Seems like you’d just need to set WhatsApp as the default calling app on iOS and make sure to install WhatsApp on the watch too. The ability to set another app as the default for calls has been around since early this year. Doesn’t this work?
Huh, with CallKit’s existence I would have assumed any app using CallKit would work on Watch…
I was genuinely sure it’s not a problem, as I personally know quite a few people who do that. But I think they use either FaceTime or regular cellular. That’s sure weird a simple call does work in iPhone 4S (imagine a price for it in 2026), but doesn’t on modern Apple Watch Ultra, which is quite expensive.
Unfortunately, it doesn't work like that. Third-party app calls don't go to the Watch. It's so annoying, I have to tell people to call me using regular phone calls or FaceTime instead of using Signal or WhatsApp because I always miss the latter ones.
Seems like this has changed?
WhatsApp did not have a dedicated Watch app until 1 or 2 months ago – it was not even possible to respond to WhatsApp messages on the Watch, only seeing the mirrored notifications was possible.
You can blame Apple for other things if that is the intention, but this particular one was a decision made by Meta and by Meta only.
Write to your regulator and make a complaint that Meta is keeping the WhatsApp stage gate.
It’s fascinating the kind of cool features we can have when products are made to be useful, with their target user in mind. Go EU!
I live in the EU and now traveling my family outside the EU. Today I’ve tried updating AltStore but it won’t let me. Even VPNing to my home won’t do it.
So until there will be more incentive to make it globally, the UX is intentionally crippled not only by making the minimal viable but also by region locking.
Imagine pairing headphones working great in EU and then you’re traveling somewhere and it’s broken.
This is the future of the internet. More and more countries have their local laws and international companies need to comply with local laws. This has been the case forever for companies selling products and (physical) services and some digital services restricting music and movie rights in certain countries, but it will expand to more and more services and apps in the future.
"Local laws" is quite the loaded term when your parent commenter's anecdote is about EU which currently encompasses 27 countries.
And when "comply with local laws" means "unbrick bluetooth pairing for third-party devices" then a company in good faith could just, you know, not brick the functionality in the first place. There's no law against products that "just work".
Good. It was hubris to think that the internet would forever be segregated as an American asset.
I think the EU believes they have more of an effect on the rest of the world than they actually do. Complying with every law in every jurisdiction that has access to a product sounds like a nightmare that will only stifle innovation.
Between this and the USB-C iPhone, I think you're very wrong.
Hopefully third-party devices will actually implement what is necessary to take advantage of it. Being limited to the EU market, it’s not clear if it will happen much.
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Last time I checked the European Union was a political construct and not a phone manufacturer.
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Still don't get your point.
How can the failures to innovate from privates companies be the responsibility of a political union of different governments?
EU regulations strangle corporate innovation there
I think you're looking at it from the wrong angle.
Most of the EU corpus of law is based on culturally acceptable actions from their members. The EU regulations don't strangle, the EU culture is just different.
Innovation for the sake of innovation and the pursuit of money isn't deeply entrenched in European culture.
So yes, innovation based on "go fast and don't care if you break stuff" comes mainly from outside of EU.
Well I'm not blaming the EU itself. It'd be the the same or worse in today's EU countries if they weren't in the EU. Yes it's a cultural thing too, but they made regulations based on it.
And another one parroting this without talking to EU founders.
I mean, they're not entirely wrong, but it's actually the lack of a capital markets union that causes the issues here.
So in fact, this is a case where the answer is more EU (specifically, a better set of cross-country capital markets). Depressingly, the obvious place to build this is no longer in the EU.
They're wrong in everything but a meaningless "well technically" sense. People spouting "EU regulations strangle business" nonsense are never talking about the lack of capital markets union. Let alone in a thread about "iOS 26.3 brings AirPods-like pairing to third-party devices in EU under DMA".
> So in fact, this is a case where the answer is more EU (specifically, a better set of cross-country capital markets).
Can you give me a set of non-EU countries with better cross-country capital markets, that are as such now instead the place to build this? Especially for a set size bigger than 3? Serious question, as I've never heard of one and am fairly sure it doesn't exist, though I'd love to be proven wrong.
> Can you give me a set of non-EU countries with better cross-country capital markets, that are as such now instead the place to build this? Especially for a set size bigger than 3? Serious question, as I've never heard of one and am fairly sure it doesn't exist, though I'd love to be proven wrong.
This does not exist, however the EU single market is also pretty unique in terms of how many countries are involved. If you include the EEA and the customs union, it's definitely the largest.
Given that there's an obvious currency union, the capital markets thing is relatively plausible (difficult but not impossible), and I personally think it would be great.
Note that I am biased, as I live in a small EU country and our financial and insurance providers are both expensive and terrible. And obviously the EU tech industry would benefit, which would also help me.
I think the real reason this hasn't happened is hangover from the EZ crisis, as sharing risk for banks across nations was toxic in many countries as a result of the financial and EZ crises. But now seems like a good time to at least start it.
As I said above, the biggest problem here would be where to put it, and the UK's absence from the EU makes the obvious place politically a non-runner (unfortunately).
If it does not exist, it is not a disadvantage compared to anywhere else. In a sense it's an advantage, as despite the barriers, the capital markets of two EU countries (especially if they use the Euro) are still a lot more integrated than if you'd pick two random non-EU countries. The disadvantages of being from a small EU country would apply the exact same way but even worse if you were from a small non-EU country.
Digital regulation is not a serious blocker, as any EU founder can tell you. Per above, neither are cross-country capital markets a disadvantage of the EU compared to the non-EU world. Then what is the disadvantage? Do Japanese startups have it any better? Korean? Kenyan? Serbian? Mexican? Taiwanese? Malaysian? Singaporean? Do those startups benefit from "less regulations" or from cross-country capital markets? Of course they don't, yet I've never seen a single person in my life mention those countries' regulations or lack of cross-country capital markets. Because they don't have an advantage in those areas, showing that the EU indeed doesn't actually cause any disadvantages in them.
> Because they don't have an advantage in those areas, showing that the EU indeed doesn't actually cause any disadvantages in them.
Lots to unpack here.
So the issue is size of capital markets (for startup and IPO purposes). 27 small markets are much, much less liquid than one large one (like China or the US). Therefore, it's easier for European founders to raise US capital, which often leads to them incorporating or floating in the US. Like, Flutter (which is an Irish company) is on the US markets for exactly this reason, as are a bunch of other large Irish companies.
It would be better for the EU if these companies incorporated in the EU, for which one large capital market would work better.
And it's not that EU companies are disadvantaged vs Singaporean companies, it's that they are disadvantaged relative to US companies.
> are still a lot more integrated than if you'd pick two random non-EU countries.
I guess my point is that they're not integrated enough.
Right, I'm not talking about capital markets, just regulations. Overall tech doesn't thrive in the EU. Their attitude probably predates EU founding too. And I'm not just saying that because of this relatively small AirPods situation (where I actually agree with EU).
Tech "not thriving" in the EU - by what standards, what does this mean? - has zero to do with EU regulations, or we'd see tech thrive much more in Japan, Korea, Kenya, Serbia, Mexico, Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore, all those non-EU countries with supposedly less regulations and as such more thriving tech. Before you point to the chip companies that some of those countries have, those already existed 30+ years ago and aren't an example of tech "thriving" due to less regulations, it would be like pointing at ASML and Airbus to prove that in the EU it is thriving.
Tech is thriving in some of those east Asian countries. For the size of the EU population or GDP, take your pick, their tech sector isn't so hot.
Of course I didn't say that being unregulated automatically makes the tech sector thrive. Kenya has plenty of other problems to solve first.
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Not sure why self proclaimed "hackers" seem to be in love with walled gardens and corporate control :)
That's the thing, you don't have to be! You are welcome to use another phone more to your liking.
There are 2 phone operating systems and both make things user hostile. So no, there is not a real choice to use another phone.
And it's not only about users. Headphone manufactures too. Their headphones need to support both iOS and Android phones.
You obviously know that it's not just the phone, it's the apps we can use on them. There are only two companies and they both control the market.
There are far more than two companies selling phones.
And yet if you want applications to work on your phone, many times you'll need approval from either Apple or Google. Google can effectively ban manufacturers (like they did with Huawei) from using "Android" by blacklisting them from Play Services. Apple owns the entire ecosystem and prevents third-party from having access to the same feature set.
Something tells me that the thing about Google not allowing custom Andriod operating systems to install apps is not quite true. I don't know about this specific topic yet, but I bet that if I look into it, I'll find out that there's nuance here that isn't been correctly portrayed by your comment.
Look up Play Integrity, it's the remote attestation framework Google uses to ensure apps only run on Google-blessed hardware and software. Apps that use it verify that both hardware and software are unmodified and blessed by Google before apps are allowed to run. Banking apps use it, the fucking McDonald's app uses it, public transit pass apps use it, etc.
If you want to use your phone like normal people do in 2025, and not relegate yourself to being a second-class citizen when it comes to simple things like paying for stuff, riding the subway, etc, your phone is either an iPhone or something that plays nicely with Play Services.
And that's just the remote attestation side. Many apps rely on Play Services themselves, and without access to them, will not work. Google gates access to Play Services through contracts, it is not open source or part of Android.
You need to allow Play the play store and it's services and those will wall you in. Many times discussed here: many banking, gov, health apps around the world are banning anything not blessed by Google or Apple and installing on a non blessed system will not allow you to use them. My bank allows a modern and supported android or ios phone or a Windows laptop with a biometric card reader. Pretty much locked in and all banks are following.
I do! I've been an Android stalwart since I first got a smartphone over a decade ago.
Problem is, every year Android announces some new stupid-ass restriction or anti-feature that significantly degrades the capability of application software on the OS in the name of security. In other words, Google keeps trying to turn my Android into a shittier iPhone. It's gotten so bad that they recently floated the idea of mandatory notarization, and only marginally backed down after shittons of pushback.
Every time the EU passes a law intended to stop obviously monopolistic shit like this from happening, a certain brand of Ayn Randroid Apple fan comes out of the woodwork to decry the EU "forcing Apple to give away its technology for free". Which is absolutely bullshit, on two counts. First off, Apple sold its technology to us when we bought the phone. That's the whole deal with Apple: the OS is a bundle with the hardware. Ergo, them going to app developers and asking for a cut is double billing. Second off, and more importantly, the only reason why you even need the EU DMA is because Apple won't let you ship an app that is capable of doing what their own first-party daemons do.
I'm going to be honest. Every time I read people like you saying "you can just buy an Android if you want that", I get the same vibes as I do when I see, say, old boomers showing up at town hall meetings to oppose the building of the IBX[0]. You're just App NIMBYs, carrying water for a tech industry trying to turn every computer into the tech equivalent of a car-dependent suburb with restrictive zoning laws.
Now if only the EU could pass a law saying Apple needs to ship an Android app that provides all the missing functionality of AirPods on that platform. At the very least, I should be able to update the firmware on them.
[0] Inter-Borough eXpress - A proposed circumferential NYC subway line connecting Brooklyn and Queens.
I was a diehard Android user as the memory of Apple locking down things like the filesystem among other things really sowed some bad blood for me. But these days it really seems like they're kind of converging and Apple's privacy features are quite appealing...
> Every time the EU passes a law intended to stop obviously monopolistic shit like this from happening, a certain brand of Ayn Randroid Apple fan comes out of the woodwork
These companies spend billions in dollars on PR agencies and lobbying. They spend the most on lobbying the EU out of everyone. The likelihood that zero of that goes towards writing such comments in places like HN is minuscule. And then there's the legions of actual Googlers and Applers here and elsewhere who have drunk the koolaid.
If you're alleging that I replied to an Apple-affiliated troll farm employee, the possibility is there. But Apple is particularly unique in that it has a certain brand of customer that stuck it out during the days where System 7 was being absolutely clowned on by Windows 95 and NT. These hardcore Apple customers treat the company as if they are members of a persecuted minority religion. In other words, Apple doesn't need a troll farm, they have their fans to do it.
(Which, ironically, was also the strategy of Epic's entire Fortnite stunt...)
I am alleging that specifically because it's always the same old dumb anti-EU narrative that they're pushing. If it was something else, then sure. Those hardcore customers you're talking about have existed similarly for other tech brands like Microsoft or Sony - or even more laughably, Intel or Nvidia - they're just less active in these spaces, and even they can't really excuse Windows 11 and its idiocy.
Maybe because they are the only organisation able to act against the massive (foreign, if it is anything tech related for a European) corporate entities nowadays.
Okay, so someone acting against something big and foreign is good? Why?
If they are not playing with local laws, then yes.
What if the local laws are bad? I think it would be good to disobey Turkey's law that requires removal of posts criticizing the current leadership.
Agreed, but with many privacy and freedom laws I would agree. I don't think they take it nearly far enough; If I buy hardware, it is mine, and they should open up the means to put whatever on it I want. No one has the balls for that I guess but I would want them to enforce that.
So it’s okay to not follow local laws sometimes?
Because they're often acting as a bulwark against powerful MNCs.
Let me know when Apple dictates what kind of transactions it's acceptable for me to engage in and which ones aren't - a decision that Apple has absolutely no say in, but the EU and other governing bodies regularly engage in.
Hey, don't take it personally. Apple is a known innovator in the field of government bribery: https://www.theverge.com/news/737757/apple-president-donald-...
Not sure what this has to do with my comment but okay!
Or it disincentivizes creating those features, if you must give it to your competitors.
That’s a rather silly view to take. We have a phenomenon called “the first mover advantage” for a reason.
Plenty of other markets and businesses operate just fine while operating in an environment that makes protecting individual innovation functionally impossible. Just look at any related to fast fashion (not that I think the fast fashion market is a healthy phenomenon) or any commodities market. Or for that matter, most of the software industry.
The incentive for creating features should be to remain relevant and competitive. It shouldn’t be to build moats and war chests.
"plenty of other markets" have way smaller margins and are not nearly as robust an industry as software.
I don't understand. Robust markets don't have large margins. Why would a regulator even want markets with enormous margin? That's usually market failure.
Pharmaceuticals have very large margins.
Are you trying suggest that Apple’s margins are so small that they need state protection? Or that Apple can’t compete if they’re not able to tightly lock down every aspect of their ecosystem?
Apple giving themselves an advantage in the markets for headphones and watches, because they have a dominant position in the market for phones is a textbook case of monopoly abuse.
They've done extra work to cripple competing devices. It's obnoxious.
Apple market share is 10% in the EU. Hardly a monopoly.
Where do you get 10% from? Its close to 40%, and the company with the biggest market share in Europe.
https://gs.statcounter.com/vendor-market-share/mobile/europe
That depends on the interpretation of a market, which is why laws like the DMA establish a market based on its size. In the iOS market, apple have a monopoly.
EDIT: Downvotes for what? That’s literally what the DMA is for. If you don’t like it, take it up with your representatives - it’s nothing to do with me.
> In the iOS market, apple have a monopoly.
So if a company creates a widget and sells that widget, thereby creating a market, they are automatically a monopoly? how is anything invented without creating a monopoly?
Also why is it an iOS market and not a mobile phone market? if we compare features of devices then there’s not a lot of difference between modern phones, so segregating them by what OS they run seems odd.
https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/index_en
Abusing one’s market position doesn’t require a monopoly, being a major player is enough.
I would agree in general, but in this specific case it’s still an advantage for the iOS platform in general. It just removes a buying incentive for the AirPods.
The general problem is that there must be a line.
Vendors don’t create lock-ins because they are malicious, they create it because it makes them money.
Now, if we limit these lock-ins, it will reduce their ability to make money and yes, it will impact some features - short term.
But looking at it long terms, vendor lock-ins are actually a reason to stop innovating: your customers are locked in anyway.
So, overall, I would say this is good for innovation in general.
I actually have a problem with this. I want AirPods to be undeniably the best experience for me because I am fully locked into the Apple ecosystem, and I know many folks have complaints against that. I find it to be rather pleasurable to use compared to all the other alternatives out there. So if I have to start sacrificing my experience in favor of universal support, that really sucks.
But this isn't sacrificing your experience, you're free to keep using your Apple AirPods with the quality and reliability you'd expect from Apple. This just means other brands can create products with similar features to AirPods, and if they're not as good or reliable, well that's why you're paying Apple for theirs.
It removes incentives to differentiate a platform because the EU will just come in and make every company exactly the same by forcing others to allow other companies access to their R&D budgets. Why bother? It’s easier to just avoid the EU market
The best code is no code. Every line of extra code added, and every extra platform supported is potential for more bugs, which has the potential to affect my user experience.
I see their point.
If Apple knew they would need to expand this feature past their gear, possible they’d never have implemented.
We may never know what stays unimplemented due to this.
(This is a neutral take - note I do not have a personal opinion formed in this “debate”.)
> If Apple knew they would need to expand this feature past their gear, possible they’d never have implemented.
And this is EXACTLY why they need to open up more core access to their devices. So someone else can innovate.
Why they need to be forced to, you mean?
I'm not seeing an incentive structure for them to change being the only source of good workflows for their users - it's their whole thing "It just works" - regardless of if it's true in practice or not.
which other company spends as much investing in UX? there is not a single other company on the planet with as polished of a user experience as apple, so who would develop a better workflow?
If you want the "it just works" experience, you can still buy the Apple products though, that's not changing. You just also have the option to not do so.
Indeed. They have shown (and keep showing via blatant malicious compliance) that they can’t be trusted to play fairly.
Is there anything that makes you believe they'll sacrifice quality to have universal support?
They did their initial AirPod implementation in a pretty insecure manner because it was securely locked to their hardware and they could trust themselves to not be malicious. If they have to build a feature, plus all the security around it, plus documentation, etc… it makes it much harder to bring to market. They may opt to skip it in favor of something else.
Spite? It's standard practice for corporations to take the ball home when they are forced to play fair.
They won’t, but Apple previously lied similarly against PWAs.
the long term innovation outlooks are still better, so you benefit long term as well.
It’s just less obvious / measurable that immediate benefits.
And also, short term, isn’t it that other EarPods are getting better, rather than AirPods getting worse?
Medium term, I don’t think that Apple will stop innovating on AirPods just because of the EU market and this one feature not being exclusive to AirPods anymore. But it’s a possibility, I agree.
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Laws that mandate interoperability between devices are a net win for individual consumers and the market as a whole. They simplify people's lives, make society more efficient, prevent opportunities for blatant rent seeking and ultimately foster market productivity.
A government mandating standards in electricity transmission or gasoline composition may disincentivize the development of features that make some people's devices incompatible with charging at certain locations or cars that can only use gas from certain gas stations but that is the opposite of a bad thing.
We live in a much better world because people in the past decided that all telephones should be able to make calls to each other and that people don't really have to think about messing up putting fuel in their car because the size of the nozzles at pumps are standardized.
There are absolutely more opportunities for governments to make small but objectively measurable improvements in society with well placed regulations on interoperability.
Isn't Apple currently disincentivized to make features because they don't even allow competing smartwatches to access a basic feature set on iPhone?
You're basically saying Apple would be disincentivized to innovate on the Apple Watch because Apple would need to release the underlying APIs that make those work with the phone to competing solutions. But the status quo is that competing solutions that are already better than the Apple Watch straight up aren't allowed on the platform, and the Apple Watch generally costs more than its competitors.
You are unintentionally saying that if Apple had to allow third parties to use their private APIs, that the Apple Watch would have to cost less and/or innovate more in order to convince us all to buy it instead of buying a watch from Samsung or Google.
What you are describing is a more competitive and open market where consumers benefit from lower prices and more of an incentive to innovate and justify high prices.
I would also dispute the notion that merely releasing these APIs would somehow give away all your secret sauce. Competitors still have to build the experience on top of that.
I thought the first thing they teach you about capitalism is that competition is good, and monopolies are anti-competitive...
competition is for losers
I disagree with this, but it shouldn't get downvoted. That's not how it works here.
Bro, market is there to benefit consumer first, not to make money for shareholders.
That is what the "free market" was supposed to do, if you believe capitalist lore. Shareholders getting a cut was the side hustle.
Three months ago a commenter here on HN claimed to me that this will be bad for Apple users:
> There is simply no good way to make the API public while maintaining the performance and quality expectations that Apple consumers have. If the third party device doesn’t work people will blame Apple even though it’s not their fault.
And, competition probably can’t build for it anyway:
> It’s impossible to build Apple Silicon level of quality in power to watt performance or realtime audio apps over public APIs.
And:
> […] Apple has to sabotage their own devices performance and security to let other people use it. The EU has no business in this.
Well, I look forward to next year when we’ll have the receipts and see!
Apple can't perform well with audio on Apple Silicon, either. In 2025 macos is the only OS with audio cracking appearing with CPU load. Even Linux is better
Yeah, this is a regression since macOS Tahoe. Amazing that it still exists after several patch releases, is audio working not a basic test case for Apple?
I’ve found it to be worst when using Xcode / simulator and having headphones on for music.
sudo killall coreaudiod seems to fix it for a while.
It's ludicrous. I remember when Apple took pride in the audio never stopping. Once a very long time ago my entire Mac froze, even the Force Touch trackpad was unresponsive, but the music kept playing. Now, press Volume Up and the audio stutters. Or AirPods randomly get choppy and then stop playing until you reconnect them. The heck?
> sudo killall coreaudiod seems to fix it for a while
For me this fixes it for about 30 minutes then I have to do it again… and again… and again…
I wonder why some folks need to do it more than others
I've had it since the first macOS that shipped with my M1 Pro MacBook!
I don't think it's CPU-based, but I've always had an issue with my AirPods Max on my iPhone with audio cracking (my AirPods Pro work fine, and the Max works fine with my Mac)
I only have it when iphone simulator is running and using the same audio output.
Personally not experienced this. However, continuity camera seems to have gotten more unstable over the past months for me.
That drives me nuts. It happens more in my AirPod pros and gen 4 AirPods.
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You mean it will benefit Apple’s customers, who prefer headphones not made by Apple? If only the incentive for Apple to improve their interface was that its paying customers will have a better interface.
I really don't understand people who defend Apple on this. The only reason I can imagine is that they're shareholders who don't use any Apple products, or shareholders who use exclusively Apple products and can't understand what sort of poor scrub might want an accessory not made by them.
It's the second one, but without being shareholders.
Strange opinion. Anyone that holds the SP500 (which is probably 99% of HN users between 9am and 5pm PT) are Apple shareholders, and what’s good for Apple is entirely aligned with what’s good for them.
Taking a further step back, this same group of HN users probably understands the straightforward idea that what’s good for Bay Area tech companies is beneficial to them in a much broader sense, since they’re generally employed by them or by a very small group of other companies closely related to them.
You can accuse them of being greedy, selfish, or whatever, but certainly not that they’re unaware of where their interests lie.
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Your whole post is an ignorant, ugly and hate filled rant of little value, but I will pick out this one trope:
> Not the EU and its blob of unelected bureaucratic despots and unelected Commission of dictators
EU haters have two complaints, that it is unelected and that it takes away sovereignty, yet it consists of the members of national governments that not only elect the various officers of the EU (including the Commission) but also vote on all major decisions of the EU, as well as the directly elected EU parliament. So in fact the EU preserves both sovereignty and the votes of EU citizens, both member governments and citizen representatives must approve all EU actions.
It's a little complicated sure, apparently too complicated for some to understand.
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Your comment is absolutely spot on, no notes. Wish your attitude was more popular and prevalent around here. My guess is that before 2017 or so it used to be.
Apparently even Apple doesn't share your opinion. They haven't threatened to leave Europe, Japan or the United States in retaliation for App Store regulations.
That's fine, I have no issue with Apple not sharing my opinion. It's a perfectly understandable and respectable business decision.
Posting right wing flavored hate filled rants is actually a more recent thing here and becoming more prevalent. It's slowly poisioning this site.
> I don’t see it as a matter of defending Apple, it’s really a matter of technical understanding and competence.
So do I. And my >20 years in the business gives me the experience and knowledge to see through Apple’s FUD.
> […] but also wanting to benefit from all the work and focus that went into creating it, is understandable to me.
It is my device. I paid for it. If Apple thinks they deserve more money for what they did they are free to ask me, the customer, for more money.
> […] unelected bureaucratic despots
Aha, the dog whistle of the AfD brand of conspiratorial bullshit ”unelected” nonsense! Career bureaucracy is supposed to be certified and educated, not elected, because that is the only way they can properly implement the laws of the electorate. Bureaucracy still answers to elected officials, but they are supposed to act without political interference and provide specialist knowledge. For the same reason you do not vote on every captain and colonel in the military hierarchy, or every tax collector/auditor in your IRS equivalent, you do not vote on every bureaucrat in the Commission tasked to execute and implement law.
You had me convinced that you were a self-absorbed narcissist at “it is my device” without any self-awareness about the fact that it is your device that you purchased as it is, under those conditions; not some fantastical conditions you imagined you should have.
But you really just emphasized it with the AfD nonsense, as if everyone in the world cares about your little provincial political obsessions. “Eeek, the eradicated Italian ideology of 80+ years ago that I have been conditioned with basic Pavlovian techniques to hate to control my mind is coming for me”. Ever hear of the book 1984 and the purpose of Emmanuel Goldstein? You seem to have totally missed that they used that very same technique on you, they just templated a different event on your little mind.
Are the commission popularly elected? No they are not, child. But do explain your narcissistic rationalization for how being not elected by the relevant populace makes calling them unelected nonsense. You can’t.
Why are you so fixated on running interference for what amounts to being a cult? Do you personally benefit financially from it or something? Nothing else makes any rational, sane sense. At least if you financially benefit from your own subjugation to unelected tyrannical despots in the commission and the council, at least you can say you are corrupted, greedy, and unprincipled… if you have the confidence and character to admit it.
But you lack the most fundamental understanding of how the EU and government, let alone different systems work or are suppressed to work, so I am not sure that your statements allow for any other conclusion than that you are deluding yourself either intentionally or in some belief that you can fool or gaslight me and others.
Besides, let’s have you put on your own thinking cap for a second. Take off the mind control cap for a minute and put your thinking cap on. Ready? Do you think it is smart for the same commission that originates imaginary “legislation” that the parliament votes on like any other dictatorial system’s apparatchiks do, should also be the body overseeing the implementation of that law? It breaks the most fundamental and major human advancement in governance produced by separating powers through the Constitution. You said people should be educated. Forget government education for a second, you seem to lack the ability to think at all. Do you not understand the danger of the legislative also being the executive? It’s basically just a novel form of aristocracy you are defending, a regression, total conflict of interest in abusing power … which they aren’t even elected to.
What has been done to your mind and all of Europe is commonly called a bait and switch, also known as coercive control in basic abuse patterns of toxic relationships.
You’re quite literally just a textbook abused person rationalizing and excusing the behaviors and actions of your abusers, like someone in any other toxic relationship or a cult.
Please reconsider the harm you are doing to the world and yourself too. I get the EU told you there was candy in the windowless panel van, but you have no idea what mistake you are making and are going to make others suffer for.
> Frankly, I wish Apple had the non-binary balls to simply just cut off all iPhones in Europe rather than bend to EU despot dictates
Perhaps you should come back when you’re less emotional. Suggesting incredibly poor value for shareholder decision while also being hateful (non-binary balls, indeed) is showing the whole ass. Never go whole ass.
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Clearly the response of someone with no emotion whatsoever wrapped up in this.
You're getting downvoted but it's absolutely true that people simply don't want to (or are incapable) of considering second and third order effects that arise from applying interventions on systems that they do not understand.
HN should really just do away with the down/negative voting or at the least only use it for order sorting, not “points”. The point-punishment only enables abusive and toxic people and behaviors.
I for one believe every human has equal worth and right to speak whatever they want. It may not be relevant, important, smart, or even benevolent; but I still think they should be allowed to say it and even more importantly those who choose to, should be afforded the ability to see/read/hear it. Everything else is just authoritarian, even if it’s just some narcissist who believes HE/SHE is the authority over someone else.
> The point-punishment only enables abusive and toxic people and behaviors.
Actually that's what it's fighting, people like you.
> I for one believe every human...
People can say what they like, that doesn't mean anyone has to listen to it. Freedom of speech also means the ability to silence speech you don't like.
You don't have the right to spread hate and division on a company's website any more than pedophiles have a right to talk to people's children about sex. In both cases the ability to silence speech is fundamental.
HN chooses what kind of discussion it wants to have because doing otherwise would block the sort of speech it wants to host.
I know this will be hard for you to understand, but if you think about it for a while it makes perfect sense.
> Freedom of speech also means the ability to silence speech you don't like.
That's akin to saying the right to physical autonomy means the ability to dominate others. A completely meaningless and self-defeating argument.
It's akin to physical autonomy meaning you can't trespass.
> A completely meaningless and self-defeating argument.
Your example is literally true: in Texas you have the right to kill someone entering your home without permission.
So far from being "meaningless and self-defeating", it's reality.
Just like you can't walk on my property without my permission, you can't speak on my property without my permission, including my website. I decide who speaks and who doesn't there.
It's not hard to understand for most people.
The right to kick someone off of your property is not the right to silence someone's speech, that is utterly ridiculous framing.
Who cares about the framing, both are legal facts, yet you're unable to comprehend or accept that.
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> always ends up catastrophically.
Government intervention like forbidding led-based paints or asbestos in homes? Or government intervention like doing something about the ozone depletion? Government intervention like forbidding roaming fees? Intervention like requiring 3-point seat belts? Like progressive taxation? Like forbidding discrimination based on skin colour? Like air travel safety? Like a max ceiling on credit card fees?
Always?
>Like progressive taxation? Like forbidding discrimination based on skin colour?
Ok, sometimes.
Give an example regulation which has objectively been catastrophic and where there has been no clear attempts at amending or improving it.
Abortion abolition in states that are causing women to die because doctors are afraid to perform them even when it puts the woman’s life in danger not to perform them.
It even put the life of a Republican lawmaker in dander in Florida. Of course she blamed democrats.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/22/kat-cammack-...
Some off-the-cuff examples that come to mind:
- Drastic overregulation of nuclear energy in the US, resulting in fossil-fuel pollution measurable in gigatons over the past several decades accompanied by literally countless illnesses and premature deaths.
- Premature mandates for airbags in cars that resulted in hundreds of needless child deaths because the technology wasn't yet safe enough for universal deployment. A scenario that's playing out right now with misfeatures like automated emergency braking.
- The Jones Act (Merchant Marine Act of 1920), whose effects are too convoluted to go into here.
- Misguided, market-distorting housing policies, ranging across the spectrum from rent control to Proposition 13.
- Many if not most aspects of the War on Drugs, including but not limited to mandatory minimum sentencing and de-facto hardwiring of racial bias into the justice system.
I quoted a couple.
Please provide any tangible evidence that progressive taxation and prohibition on discrimination on the basis of race has been catastrophic.
You mean with your other sockpuppet account you did?
Is this a bot account? Why is it green and spouting nonsense? There is nothing quoted in the previous comment
Green users are recently created accounts.
You call it government intervention, we call it good government.
Hopefully this uniquely American push for dysfunctional government stays on their side of the ocean.
Because a monopoly extracting 30% of every purchase you make is a dream scenario?
How is Apple a monopoly?
They own the only app store you can use on an iPhone.
Okay, using that definition, Walmart, Target, Dollar Tree, my local regional grocery store, Trader Joe's and Ralph's are monopolies as well. They own their shelves and store space, and are the sole arbiters responsible for deciding what is sold within them.
If you have purchased your own Walmart and corporate still decides what you sell within it, then yes, that is exactly the same.
Okay, so it has to be something you purchase - we're slowly getting closer to the true opinion here.
Sony is a monopoly as well then? They decide what gets sold in the Playstation store. Same with Nintendo.
Ford and Tesla are monopolies, they solely decide what is software is sold or used in their car's infotainment center stores, despite the fact that I have purchased the car!
AWS is a monopoly, despite the fact that I purchase an EC2 instance from them for one year they will not let me run certain kinds of software on it (Parler, some crypto, etc.)
If you purchase a physical device, yes. You don't buy devices from AWS, you rent. I'm not sure what's hard about this.
I notice how you intentionally didn't respond to the other two points, interesting.
I responded to all the points. What's unclear?
So Ford and Tesla are monopolies?
If you buy a physical device from them and they control what you can install on it, yes.
Hilarious opinion. Of course they’re not, Tesla and Ford don’t have a dominant market share anywhere and have a tremendous amount of competitors. I think it would help you to take a look at what the word monopoly means.
How many vendors can you buy software for your Tesla from? How many vendors can you buy software for your Dell from?
> How many vendors can you buy software for your Tesla from?
Not many. That's fine. Just buy another car. There's plenty of competition in the space.
Not "not many". One. That's what a monopoly is.
You’re welcome to purchase a car from another vendor. This framing is dishonest
You're not understanding my point. I'm not saying Apple has a monopoly on phones, I'm saying they have a monopoly on iPhone apps. It's the App Store that's a monopoly, and the EU agrees with me, hence the DMA.
non-apple headphones work just fine with Apple products. In fact, Apple's bluetooth stack seem to work best among all the portable devices I come across (no random droppings, connects on first try etc.)
My iPhone has plenty of trouble connecting to various devices at times. God forbid it has to manage connecting to my car and my headphones at once. It works OK most of the time, but at least once a week it proves to be a problem.
I was unaware that my headphone experience as impaired in some way.
I exclusively use non Apple headphones and I have no issues. I had AirPods for a while and I don’t remember them being better.
They have nifty apple-only features, like you can hold them close to the iPhone and they'll pop up and pair with a neat UI.
It's mostly gimicky, but it does give the user the impression that the apple Air pods are higher quality because they have all these things thought out. In actuality, Apple just made it so they're the only ones who can do that.
Apple used to brag that “it just works”. That included peripherals it did not control. Nowadays, it can’t even have its own devices work correctly.
Apple has stopped improving long ago, and it’s not regulation that’s at fault.
I was unconvinced till I switched my devices, one by one, to Apple products a few years ago. They really do just work, especially with specification abiding devices.
Everything else feels flakey.
I will say, I have an Apple device minority ecosystem, and it seems to be that the Apple devices are the bad citizens there.
For example, I have Sony and Bose headphones with bluetooth multi point. The way this is supposed to work for example is that I can connect them to my PC and my smartphone and have my PC playing videos or whatever, and my phone can override that when something "priority" like a phone call comes in.
Except if the iPad is one of the connected devices, then it will claim priority once a minute or so, _even if it's playing no audio_, thereby interrupting other audio streams pointlessly. This makes all the other devices look like they can't play audio and the iPad can, and I'm sure the iPad plays nice with airpods, but it seems weird to me that every non-Apple combination of devices I hve also plays nice with each other.
Except of course these things:
- Reliable internet sharing, especially when connection is spotty, and when your connection switches between operators or countries
- Making alarms randomly silent. I missed a flight once because of this. There is no excuse for this.
- Randomly not working AirPlay
- GPS is terrible compared to any of my previous Androids. Even my first Android in 2010 was better than this.
- Finding an operator can take a loooong time after crossing border
- Random restrictions in App Store, like no torrent clients
- Generally terrible keyboard for my native language (Hungarian). Prediction and basic accent fixing doesn’t work at all. The exception is when I don’t need to change a word with diacritics… when the keyboard’s dictionary clearly contains them
- Apple Maps is still a joke. Many times it doesn’t load the underlying map layer at all. I switch to Google Maps search for what I want, finding it, reading some info, looking some images, then switching back to Apple Maps, and it still doesn’t load. Also, navigation and speed limit information are unreliable to say the least.
- Heavily underdocumented MacOS virtualization API, and half the features can’t be used in a real environment, but these restrictions are completely undocumented
- Wanting to have a running DNS server is a challenge on MacOS
- Unusable GPU when no monitor is connected
- You basically need to turn off all security features in MacOS to allow some basic automation, like with FaceTime
- Generally terrible compatibility with anything non Apple. Do you want to show your photos on your friend’s random TV without hassle? Good luck.
- Many built in features (eg SSH, VNC) are heavily restricted, and good luck if you want to replace them cleanly. Most information on internet is “just use the built in solution”. Also they are many times completely insecure.
There are hacks for these, but “they just work” is not true at all. On the level of how “they just work”, top level Android and Windows devices are also on that level for more than a decade in case of Android, and at least 20 years for Windows (if not more). Maybe Apple TV is my only device which just works without hitting some quirks. Especially compared to my other TV and TV adjacent devices. But even here its FaceTime solution, let’s say “interesting”.
Based on the latest iOS / MacOS update they don’t want to improve their interfaces anyway.
Currently, on the AirPods side and not iOS side like the article covers, Apple breaks Bluetooth feature parity with other devices by not sticking to the Bluetooth spec with AirPods themselves.
For example, you need to root and patch your Bluetooth stack on your phone if you want to use all of your AirPods features on Android, and not because Android is doing something wrong, it's because the Android Bluetooth stack actually sticks to the spec and AirPods don't.
And even when you do that, you can't do native AAC streaming like you can with iOS/macOS. Even if you're listening to AAC encoded audio, it'll be transcoded again as 256kbps AAC over Bluetooth.
Even no name earbuds on Amazon manage to not break Bluetooth and can offer cross platform high quality audio over Bluetooth.
On the other hand, there’s been a bug open to make a simple harmless change to fix this in Android for 9 months, with no response from Google other than asking for reproduction steps as far as I can tell.
https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/371713238
Some comments on the bug accuse Google of intentionally not fixing it to make people buy Pixel Buds instead of AirPods.
I wouldn’t say that myself, but then again I also wouldn’t say that Apple intentionally violated the spec just to make AirPods not work on Android.
Buganizer is not where you submit code to be reviewed and accepted into Android. And by the author's own admission that change is a hack and not a proper fix. Anyone is free to make a proper fix and upstream it if they wanted to.
No one has presented a remotely correct fix anywhere on that issue, or elsewhere to my knowledge.
You're welcome to write an actually correct patch for android if you want, one that isn't just commenting out code and probably breaking some spec-compliant bluetooth devices.
Make sure to test your patch against all the bluetooth devices in existence to make sure it doesn't regress.
Do that, make a PR, wait the average third-party-android-PR review time (approximately 5 years), and then if your PR isn't accepted at that point we can maybe say Google is intentionally ignoring this issue.
https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/371713238#comment829 seems fine and only has the potential to break other Apple BT hardware, which is relatively easy to test.
Nobody actually productively commenting in the thread thinks it's a conspiracy theory and everyone acknowledges that the Apple hardware is off-spec. It would be nice to see Android add this workaround.
You have linked me to what sounds like an AI generated comment. AI comments cannot be trusted. AI will make up believable sounding gunk and cannot be trusted.
"The bug", aka not implementing spec violating behavior, also exists in BlueZ, the Linux Bluetooth stack. Is the BlueZ team taking kickbacks to make sure earbuds don't work on Linux, too? They were Google Summer of Code partners, too, so this potentially goes pretty deep.
Does it? The LibrePods readme doesn’t mention any special patching required on Linux but maybe I’m missing something
They do this on purpose if you didn't get it. Google will never "fix" this issue because they follow the spec. They shouldn't have to add an exception for AirPods.
> Google will never "fix" this issue because they follow the spec. They shouldn't have to add an exception for AirPods.
This seems to go against how OS development (and perhaps consumer software in general, just think about browsers!) works in reality, it's just piles of exceptions on top of exceptions for weird hardware.
Guess the users suffer.
> For example, you need to root and patch your Bluetooth stack on your phone if you want to use all of your AirPods features on Android, and not because Android is doing something wrong, it's because the Android Bluetooth stack actually sticks to the spec and AirPods don't.
It’s a mix of bad Bluetooth implementations still on the Android side, and Apple extensions to cram audio features into the BLE envelope.
> And even when you do that, you can't do native AAC streaming like you can with iOS/macOS. Even if you're listening to AAC encoded audio, it'll be transcoded again as 256kbps AAC over Bluetooth.
How would this be Apple’s fault if the OS audio stack can’t do direct AAC streaming? Or are you saying the headphones themselves decode, re-encode and then re-decode the AAC?
> How would this be Apple’s fault if the OS audio stack can’t do direct AAC streaming? Or are you saying the headphones themselves decode, re-encode and then re-decode the AAC?
There are multiple Bluetooth standards for lossless audio that work across platforms. Instead of implementing those features, Apple uses a proprietary protocol to half-ass it only for the case of AAC. Even in that case, it requires a proprietary Bluetooth stack to work. Without that proprietary stack, the Airpods default to low quality transcoding of audio streams at 256kbps, and don't offer true high quality or lossless audio playback. So even in the one case where Airpods offer some semblance of lossless playback, it's non-standard and applicable to AAC only.
Cross platform high quality and lossless audio, multipoint pairing, etc solved problems and features that even $20 white label earbuds on Amazon are able to implement.
Can headphones that stick to the spec actually play nicely with multiple devices? - switching quickly between phone and laptop like Airpods do?
Yes, this is called Bluetooth multipoint and has been common on non-Apple devices (for example Bose) for a few years now. Requires no logins and is vendor-agnostic.
It's finnicky though. Sometimes, if I get a call on my phone and hang up, my Bose headphones tell my Mac to start playing music.
I can stop music on my phone and immediately listen to music from my laptop. I have non-apple headphones, a non-apple laptop and an iPhone. There is no apple magic dust that makes this happen.
Can you do that with 7 devices? Can you pair your device with your phone and it automatically pairs with all of your devices?
> switching quickly between phone and laptop like Airpods do?
They do that? Mine can't even switch quickly between my corporate and my own iphone.
Are they on the same iCloud account? I believe that's the magic needed.
Of course not, that's the whole point of having a separate corp phone ;)
But why would switching headphone connections need the cloud... ah... nevermind...
It doesn’t need “the cloud” (switching works offline) but it does need to verify that the device it’s switching to belongs to you, which it does using a keypair associated with your account.
Didn't I previously prove this by completing the pairing process anyway?
Even no name earbuds on Amazon manage to not break Bluetooth and can offer cross platform high quality audio over Bluetooth
That's because they're all based on a small set of BT SoCs from companies who are not exclusively dependent on the Apple ecosystem and need to interoperate with everything BT-compliant.
Apple removed the headphone jack to sell AirPods. This was always one of the dirty little details: You could buy non-Apple BT headphones, but they weren't able to work the same way.
I've had no trouble using corded headphones with my iphones (either via an adapter or e.g. the $20 usb-c earpods). In fact, it seems like people using corded headphones is a news cycle[1] every 6 months.
[1]:https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2025/dec/19/bluetooth-wi...
I bought that adapter, because I wanted to keep using my good old, high quality, corded earphones. It technically works, but it's not a nice experience. The adapter looks and feels out of place. It's the only white part in the setup (can't buy it in black), the cable is thin as a hair and feels like it might break soon, and I now have the additional plug and socket on that cable, which makes it awkward to put the phone in my pocket.
The adapter is annoying enough that very few people bother, and Apple knew it. It's also a bit flaky. Sometimes my phone doesn't detect it at first, or an inline mic doesn't work.
Got a MacBook for work recently, paired it to my AirPods I had for months, and it was funny noticing you could enable FindMy for them from the settings but they wouldn't show up in my devices on the map. Indeed, for this you need to pair with an iPhone or iPad. However it did enable the beacon on the airpods as the next day AirGuard notified a device was following me. And since, I can't disable it, the switch in the settings doesn't disable the beacon AirGuard still detects them. Even within their ecosystem they'll punish you for not being fully "part of the familly".
Apple should dump their Product Managers and hire the EU bureaucrats directly then we will finally see improvements and innovations again.
Let’s call them bureaucrats, but let’s not forget that their baseline is to be public servants, while that of product managers is to increase profits :-) . I think the system is working as intended though, because increasing profits can be a great driver for innovation and service to the consumer, until it’s not and the “immune system” (the bureaucracy) must be called on to fight the uncontrolled pathological growth…
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> ALL OF THE LEGALLY SANCTIONED GOVERNMENT MONOPOLIES HERE.
This is the kinda claim that really needs citations, and ideally some commentary on how the examples demonstrate the point you’re trying to make. Otherwise it’s impossible to reply to, and just comes across a little shrill and conspiratorial. Which I don’t think is your goal.
Can't wait for CSAM client scanning and chat control. And blocking of social networks during periods of civil unrest.
It's a tragedy, though no surprise, that this is required
I guess "the regulations will continue until product management improves".
So this tap to pair won’t work in the US? The side loading stuff I can understand to restrict to the EU, but this just seems like a nice feature for everyone
Apple is not really interested in giving you nice features that makes it easier for you to escape their ecosystem and have Apple make less money.
Not only isn’t this or any other of the DMA features accessible in the USA, but Norway which is a member of the EEC and which therefore both have to and is in the process of ratifying the DMA. Don’t get this either.
That Apple is so petty that it blocks on legal technicalities like that, when everyone knows it is just a matter of time. Really sours me on the whole company.
They even restrict "letting you choose the default maps app" to jurisdictions that legally require it (EU and Japan), there is literally no justification for that other than "we want to increase KPIs for our shitty Apple Maps app by making people accidentally open it", it's an extremely basic toggle that pretty much any user of Google Maps would prefer.
The problem is you can’t regulate interoperability where it doesn’t exist.
What does it mean to open the “default map app”? Maps apps typically act a native rendering for a web site, and have their own web-parameter based API for locations, navigation, and points of interest, as well as customizing informational layers.
So if I set say Bing maps to be the default map app, does that mean:
1. The OS hijacks attempts to link to sites such as Google Maps (https://maps.google.com) and Apple Maps (https://maps.apple.com) and send them to Bing Maps instead?
2. Bing Maps reverse engineers as much as possible of the various other mapping products and tries to support them with roughly equivalent features or error messages?
What the default maps app setting Apple created does is create an entirely new URI scheme of geo-navigation and an entitlement for apps which wish to support it to be the default map app. This appears to be roughly limited to a subset of parameters common between Apple and Google Maps.
So this setting in the EU and Japan.. mostly does nothing currently. Every developer needs to change their native apps and web pages to call out to this new custom scheme that only works on Apple platforms. Each of these mapping apps needs to support this scheme. That hasn’t happened yet.
The EU (and in this case Japan) gets early access and the potential exposure of multiple breaking revisions.
It is also certainly possible that a good number of web/app developers decide they don’t _want_ to support multiple mapping apps, since they’ve only verified one or two of them actually provide proper navigation/visualization/POI, and that the whole concept is flawed.
> The side loading stuff I can understand to restrict to the EU
Just curious: why do you understand they restrict it to EU?
It's pretty clear isn't it?
They do so with third-party app stores.
And if they wanted to have airpods-like pairing to third-parties in US, they would already have.
The only reason they might bring this to US is customers will be royally pissed.
> It's pretty clear isn't it?
If it were, they wouldn’t be asking. And you haven’t answered it either. Your parent comment is asking why the grandparent commenter thinks it makes sense to restrict third-party stores to the EU instead of having them everywhere.
If you're defending Apple in this situation, I am sorry, but you're an absolute idiot. Android has had this feature for any compatible earbuds for quite some time now, behind a Google-branded technology.
Personally, I discovered it in Android when I recently bought Xiaomi buds for $15 (in Brazil, where this kind of stuff is much more expensive), took them out of the case, and my phone instantly asked whether I wanted to connect. One click, done. Afterward, every time I took those earbuds out, they were _instantly_ connected, and I had access to their individual battery levels in the system UI. These didn't have geolocation, but that's because I literally bought the cheapest earbuds I could find that would be delivered in 24 hours.
Has anyone had bad experiences with the Google Fast Pair (proprietary) technology? (Like Apple defenders here say would happen if you “open up” the proprietary protocol for everyone to implement).
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.
I haven’t heard anyone make any of those claims in the way you’ve made them.
Conversely, the inference you leave readers with from your description of Apple’s contribution to USB-C and CPU design is just as untrue.
>>your description of Apple’s contribution to USB-C and CPU design is just as untrue.
Not my description. Or you mean Gruber's description of Apple's contribution.
His post on USB-C, CPU Design and AirPod is still Up on his site.
Those who actually worked on USB-C before it was even known also posted on HN.
I haven’t heard Gruber make any of those claims in the way you’ve made them.
Conversely, the inference you leave readers with from your description of Apple’s contribution to USB-C and CPU design is just as untrue.
Of course you could actually try to link to some context on this.
Apple certainly didn't create USB-C, but was one of the biggest contributors.
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2015/03/14/apple-usbc
And many post before that. But was too late, by that time the words were spread on internet like wildfire. Especially in Apple focused publishing sites.
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2017/03/17/cybart-apple-pr...
I cant find the exact one, but he at the time was suggesting AirPods was sold at cost. Along with plenty of American so called "analyst".
He might have his network within Apple on software. But anything that has to do with Hardware or things like MFi Licensing scheme he is completely wrong.
I was specifically trying to address the claims made by the previous commenter I was replying to. I don't think Gruber's takes are generally worth paying attention to, and I don't think Gruber making similar-but-false claims should in any way discredit what I wrote.
according to this Apple is listed as one of the contributors:
https://www.those.ch/designtechnik/wp-content/uploads/2014/0...
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.
Of course you can. And you don't need any consent from the user for doing so.
The only thing you need to do is to have some document where you list all the personal information you process and store, for how long and what you do with the said data.
What you cannot do is store data that you don't have a legitimate interest in storing. And this is why you have to document what you do with the data, because if you're not doing anything with it (“I want to store 10 years worth of IP address logs just in case”) then you aren't allowed to (on the opposite “I want to store IP addresses for a month for DDoS protection purpose ” is allowed).
That’s not how the law is structured. You CAN do that no problem but it’s then WHAT you do WITH that which is where the law comes into play. If it’s just for security purposes then there’s no problem I believe.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
“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
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.
What you said is a bigger fantasy than the complete history of fundamentalist Marxism. There are precisely zero examples of a Laissez-faire economy succeeding in the real world. It is a wholecloth fiction.
If you'd like to reconsider your stance from a realpolitik perspective, it might clarify the parent's response.
Can you be specific about what I said being a complete fantasy? I feel like you're trying to extrapolate some view of economics onto me when I was making the point that there are reasonable arguments that can be made against government intervention. Or is that it, you don't even think a reasonable argument can be made? If so I would call that ideological, not reasonable.
Markets depend on regulations. You can make any case you want, but you must acknowledge this root fact if you are discussing real-world capitalist policy. Otherwise you are advocating to change a system that does not exist in real life, or reflect any modern economy anywhere on the planet.
Your claim that the parent ignored everything you said is bad-faith and objectively wrong. They are critiquing your attack on regulation and pointing out that reality works in the opposite way. Case in point, you have no bombshell argument against regulating Apple in this instance. You cited no real-world examples and gestured at generic and irrelevant anti-regulation boogeymen. Then you used ad-hominem to attack them instead of refuting the point they made.
The notion that I'm the one arguing in bad faith is laughable. Nobody has actually addressed any of the points I brought up, instead defaulting to assertions that regulations are necessary and thus I'm "objectively wrong". This is not how you foster good discussions - you need to be willing to listen and address the opposing viewpoints that are brought up. If I wanted to do the same thing you are doing, I would simply assert that "Markets don't require regulations" and I've made an argument of equal strength, but of course a meaningless one.
If you're actually interested in having a discussion it would be worthwhile to explain your reasoning behind why you think markets depend on regulation. I can think of a few good arguments for that position, because I'm capable of considering multiple perspectives and I'm actually interested in having a debate. You seem more interested in shutting down opposing viewpoints and bullying the other participants into submission.
Right, but regulations are necessary. And ideological opposition to regulation, as a concept, in inherently wrong and always will be.
Some regulations are good, some are bad. In order to have a free market, you MUST have some regulations. It's not optional.
The reason is simple and intuitive - if you don't regulate the free market, it will just make itself un-free, which is what we're seeing with Apple. You need to actively push back against that.
The reason is all free market players, no exceptions, have the utmost fundamental incentive to make the market non-free. Everyone, all the time, is devising new and innovative ways to make the market they control non-free. Because this is how you maximize revenue.
which is what we're seeing with Apple
Apple is the result of a broad class of regulations: IP laws. Would Apple even exist without IP laws? I doubt it.
That's besides the point. If Apple isn't viable as a business without the ability to misinterpret copyright law, then they shouldn't exist at all.
It isn't though. The argument is that regulations are necessary to rein in big companies like Apple. But if regulations created the monster in the first place, it's not a good argument in favour of regulations.
A proper laissez-faire capitalist economy would not have any legally-enforced monopolies at all. That means no IP laws whatsoever!
Thank you for your response :)
I would push back a bit on the ideological comment, just to say that ideological acceptance of regulation is also probably wrong. This is different from a philosophical opposition/acceptance of political authority, although it often appears the same.
I think it's fairly obvious that the base prerequisites for market economies are property rights and some form of legal system to handle disputes. I don't consider that to be "regulation", especially not government regulation, but if that is what you mean by the term then of course I would concede that markets require it. However since even the most fervent proponents of laissez-faire economies accept the necessary role of property rights and a legal system, I would consider those to be separate from what we commonly refer to as regulation.
Ok to respond to your main point: It seems reasonable to me that in a competitive market there is an incentive to win, and companies can win by preventing others from being able to compete. This is commonly done via regulation, for example the big companies are lobbying for regulation on AI to help cement their position at the top. The thing is, just because companies are incentivized to win doesn't mean that it's possible to sustain a monopoly position for a significant amount of time. Unlike other competitive activities there isn't a time clock with winners declared at the end. Economists have shown that absent of external cofounders, a position where a company can charge monopoly prices is unsustainable.
There is of course a stronger position to be made for regulating so called natural monopolies, but even then there isn't much evidence that they really exist. Some of the most cited examples, like telecom providers, end up not being true - look at Eastern Europe and what happened when they deregulated that industry for example.
> for example the big companies are lobbying for regulation on AI to help cement their position at the top
And pray tell, how did that work out? It didn't. The worst of it came from OpenAI snatching up long-term federal contracts, but it's not illegal or anticompetitive to waste taxpayer money on debt-encumbered AI outfits. You're citing an example that works against your broader point.
> doesn't mean that it's possible to sustain a monopoly position for a significant amount of time.
> Unlike other competitive activities there isn't a time clock with winners declared at the end.
Neither the SEC nor the FTC has ever argued either of these points to my knowledge. Maybe this is true for other economies, but not America.
> Economists have shown that absent of external cofounders
We don't live in a world absent of confounding factors. Simple cartel logic is enough to loophole around this little theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartel
I personally don't take offense at people who prefer anarchist economics. But you have to understand that your opinion about regulation is not shared by even the most hardcore conservative politicians. US courts have proven that it is possible to hold an indefinite monopoly and incur billable damages onto the market, hurting consumers and competitors alike.Mmm, if you read about cartel prices you'll see that it's inherently unstable since there is incentive for any one member of the cartel to cheat, driving down prices. That isn't a loophole around the theories around monopoly pricing. What tends to confound are government laws and regulations, like IP law for example.
Re. OpenAI et al, they actually work with the US government to help shape the regulatory landscape, and interestingly enough since Google jumped out ahead they are now pushing for a lighter model. I imagine Google is pushing for heavier regulation since that tends to be their M.O.
Also I don't have anarchist economics - anarchists don't believe in property rights or markets, and they certainly don't understand economics. And I certainly don't put any stock in what right leaning American politicians or their courts think or say.
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
I took the time to search before asking. I appreciate the information but not the castigation.
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.
It's sad that we have to wait for the EU instead of having laws for cross-device and software compatibility.
Third-party accessories like smart watches will be able to receive notifications from the iPhone
This seems incorrect, or at least misleading. I have always (since I switched to iPhone in 2020) been receive notifications on my Garmin Fenix watch. In fact, the only problem I have with notifications is that I have no ability to blacklist apps from notifying on my watch, and its all or nothing. This is a huge downgrade from Android, and I wish whomever is responsible could fix that.. That's probably my biggest annoyance with my iphone.
Waiting to read the news that this unblocks all functionalities in the re-pebble so I could finally purchase one that fully works with iPhones. Way to go EU!
Something like 5% of the time when I pair my airpods to my apple wathc to go for a run, only one of them pairs. So, if I've actually started running, I then have to circle back to get the headphones case, unpair them, stick them back in the case and hope it then works after i close the lid for a minute.
Anyone have a solution for this?
Well you need to bring your iPhone to take selfies for Strava anyway because otherwise the run doesn't count.
I had that problem with PowerBeats Pro. Sadly, my solution was to get new headphones.
Are we learning the wrong lessons? Integrated always works better than modular components. Here, Apple is being asked to enable their versions of software for third party devices, which do not have the same hardware assumptions as Apple did. (Apple will not release the exact hardware spec for airpods anyway). This means the newer version will be designed modularly, with some tradeoffs to enable the "same" kind of access to third party. Then there is a caveat that it there is even a bit of experience change from 1st party to third party access, it will be complained about and investigated. so, the way fwd is designing with third party in mind, and that almost always leads to bloat and substandard experience for end user.
Probably better would have been just simpler access, even if not the integrated experience like. But that would lead to complains from third party manufacturers.
The lesson being learned is that Apple could’ve avoided all this trouble if they had used or produced standards for the connection between their components. The whole concept of a gatekeeper was created in response to Apple-likes being difficult and simply hostile to interop opportunities even though they’re defacto the phone company and there is no way around them.
So if the solution is not optimal, that circles back to Apple who are responsible for coming up with a solution that works. Then choosing to prioritise platform lock-in is a business strategy, leaving regulation the only recourse.
A company making an integrated experience would inevitably provide a better experience/performance than a company asked to build for 100s of devices with different spec. That Apple did not want to open it up is a separate discussion.
My contention is this: expecting a third party provider to be able to provide the same experience as the first party is an impractical goal. Even pushing companies towards that means a lot of second order effects where everyone ends up like Intel or Windows for that matter. We already have android on that level.
You can have a reasonable requirement where Apple should not be able to block other companies from providing similar services based on an iphone. But clearly the directive here is that Apple's competing products should not be better based on better integration, which can only go in one direction. Apple degrades its own products to comply. Yes, competition wins, but consumers lose. In this case specifically - consumers who would want to choose Apple, better experiences would not be able to simply because Apple cannot ensure the level of software/hardware alignment as it works today if the same software is written with modular hardware in mind.
> You can have a reasonable requirement where Apple should not be able to block other companies from providing similar services based on an iphone.
This is what the requirement is. The EU isn’t demanding that Apple provide the same experience for 3rd Party and 1st Party products. It only requires that Apple allow 3rd Parties access to the same capabilities as 1st Party products, so 3rd Parties could build 1st Party quality experiences.
Nobody is asking Apple to degrade their own products. They’re just demanding that Apple don’t artificially degrade other people’s products.
> That Apple did not want to open it up is a separate discussion.
This is the only point of discussion here. Because all the EU requires is that Apple open up their internal protocols so others can implement them.
> This is the only point of discussion here. Because all the EU requires is that Apple open up their internal protocols so others can implement them.
Apple supports Bluetooth just like Android phones do and does not degrade that.
A fair way of dealing with this is to ask Apple to license its technology to third parties, not be forced to give it away for free.
We’re talking about a UI interface here. How exactly would you ask Apple to “license its technology” there? Apple needs tell people how to trigger that interface, and Apple needs to support 3rd parties trigging that interface.
Apple could “license its technology”, but what use would that be. Having other phone manufacturers implement the same UI doesn’t change the market distorting effects of the iPhone.
Device manufacturers could pay Apple to register their devices to be recognized by the iPhone that they know how to use the advanced features it is capable of, for example.
Also, device manufacturers can create apps for their devices and trigger those apps when a device is close by.
I am against the idea of having a company spend resources on designing and implementing features for its devices and then being forced to give them away for free.
> Device manufacturers could pay Apple to register their devices to be recognized by the iPhone that they know how to use the advanced features it is capable of, for example.
Maybe if Apple actually offered that at a reasonable price, and to be clear they have never offered this at any price, the EU wouldn’t have felt compelled to act. AirPods have been around for a decade now, the DSA has been in the works for five years. So it’s not like Apple hasn’t had time to act. They chose to do nothing, so now the EU is removing their right to choose.
> Also, device manufacturers can create apps for their devices and trigger those apps when a device is close by.
This would require support from Apple, which notably, it doesn’t provide.
> I am against the idea of having a company spend resources on designing and implementing features for its devices and then being forced to give them away for free.
We’re talking about Apple here, one of the richest companies on the planet. I think it can survive. The DSA only applies to companies that achieve gatekeeper status, which basically means they’re an effective monopoly in a market that many people are forced to participate in (in this case smartphones). It’s a heck of bar to cross, and something that only been achieved by unbelievably profitable companies.
I am going to comment on the last part of your post: No one is forcing people to buy or use Apple products. You can buy a Pixel, a Samsung or one of the other lesser known Android brands and be on your merry way. And you can buy earbuds for those devices too; Samsung offers their own brand for example.
> Apple degrades its own products to comply
Apple makes a choice here, they don’t degrade anything they just choose to be difficult and to have to be forced to do the right thing by “whomever has enough money to sue us”.
If you’re a user of Apple devices, I don’t know why you’re defending them because noting this corporation does is meant for you once they double dip on you buying their hardware and then signing up for their services.
> A company making an integrated experience would inevitably provide a better experience/performance than a company asked to build for 100s of devices with different spec. That Apple did not want to open it up is a separate discussion.
I disagree, this is not a given. Usually the opposite is true.
Meaning, properly designed APIs and protocols for public use are more robust than one-off private protocols. Because there are expectations.
Apple could be malicious and make the API stupid, but if they were genuine then they wouldn't. They would make a good API, which is much more likely, I think, when the API is public versus some secret private API.
> Meaning, properly designed APIs and protocols for public use are more robust than one-off private protocols. Because there are expectations.
This is the polar opposite of my experience. Whether it's Bluetooth, PDF's, or a web audio JavaScript spec, actual products are plagued with inconsistencies and incompatibilities, as they implement the spec in different ways or brand A has bugs that brands B, C and D need to write special code for to get interoperability working. And brand C has other bugs brands A, B and D now need to also handle.
Whereas private protocols are much more likely to just work because there's only one implementation. There are no differing interpretations.
> A company making an integrated experience would inevitably provide a better experience/performance than a company asked to build for 100s of devices with different spec
This isn't given. For example the company that makes smart light switches doesn't provide a code entry pad and the company that makes the alarm doesn't provide a light switch. If they were interoperable I'd have a better system. Futhermore they'd both sell more widgets, as I'm holding off on further units in case I find a better third option and end up disposing of my current ones.
> We already have android on that level.
You're missing the point. Apple isn't in trouble beacuse of user's choice between iPhone and Android. They're in trouble because of 20-50 headphone makers who Apple prevents from truely competing Apple for 2 billion iPhone users.
It's the same with all of these issues Apple (and Google) are running into. It's not about the user's choice to buy iPhone or Android. It's about 100s of thousands of businesses ability to reach those billions of users without a gatekeeper.
I am saying that if you force Apple to move away from integrated devices to something which has to be generic (modular like Intel) which does not know which hardware it will pair up with and hence needs baseline performance, it turns into android to a large extent. Other businesses may have legit incentives to reach those customers, but unless Apple makes drastic changes to current setup, the software would not support other manufacturers to the same extent. So they will go to EU and then Apple will write a more generic code - to ensure all manufactures are similarly supported, and it takes them away from integrated system they currently have. Competition wins, but customers dont.
There is no “produced standard” to allow three Bluetooth devices - each headphone and the case - to register as one Bluetooth device or to automatically register a Bluetooth device to all devices using the same cloud account.
Big disagree that integrated always works better than modular writ large, but in any case maybe they could just hire this guy to do it? https://github.com/kavishdevar/librepods
Its mostly true when the integrating company cares for the user experience. Which apple clearly does.
The example you shared is the opposite. I am imagining a kernel today written in a manner that airpods would be able to use it to extract the max out of it. Now, it has to support 10 other third party pods, so at the minimum, kernel would be more generalized.
I guess if apple changes the way it works completely it would be different, with the kernel and such but like
Aren’t peripherals inherently modular kind of definitionally?
You should check that GitHub, it makes AirPod functionality mostly agnostic. The warts could (in some world) be mere bug reports for the manufacturer firmware team.
Personally, I think the Bluetooth standards suck a big one even recognizing how good it’s gotten and I _almost_ resent apple for not pushing this out as anither standard.
Modular in the sense you have to support multiple hardwares (of different kinds) instead of just one. Eventually you arrive at a place where software is good enough, and hardware + kernels cannot do the exact heavy lifting that is happening today in conjunction. Not the intel level but directionally similar kind of tradeoffs.
A company that produces a wireless mouse that charges upside down really does not care about user experience.
Steve Jobs loved the iMac's terrible hockey puck mouse. Jony Ive is probably to blame for the terrible (yet very thin) butterfly keyboard making it into Apple laptops. However, these missteps do not prove that Apple doesn't care about user experience.
> told disgruntled iPhone 4 users that they were holding their phones wrong
That was never proven. Although their PR response was atrocious.
> That was never proven
“All phones have sensitive areas,” Jobs wrote. “Just avoid holding it in this way.”
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2010/06/jobs-on-iphone-4-ant...
https://www.macrumors.com/2010/06/24/steve-jobs-describes-ip...
Jobs wasn't exactly wrong - bridging the antenna with your finger was not a good way to hold the iPhone 4.
What's hilarious is how they "fixed" it in software - by changing the signal bar display curve, and then making the lower bars appear taller.
https://9to5mac.com/2025/10/08/a-15-year-mystery-solved-the-...
The components are modular under the hood, they have to be. Apple just doesn't let you take advantage of it.
iOS has a daemon that reads your notifications and ships them to Apple Watch. They have a daemon that scans for AirPods and gives you UI to pair them. But you as an app developer cannot do any of those things. There was no public API for notification stream access, scanning for specific Bluetooth devices, floating UI widgets, or even just persistent daemons. All of those capabilities more or less exist on Android, which is why multiple smartwatch ecosystems have been built on top of it while iOS only supports the first-party option.
Back in the 2000s, when Apple was just getting into mobile devices, the app development landscape was far less bleak. iTunes on Windows could happily index your entire music and video collection and sync it to an iPod and there was nothing Microsoft could do to stop them. Everything is just finding the appropriate file and connecting to the appropriate USB device to transfer it. And that's more or less how things still work today, except now on smartphones all of that is put into isolated containers and walled off behind private APIs.
modular does not mean in terms of how the library is architected, but in terms of how many vendors/customers it needs to support. Airpods' hardware is built and then kernels are written in a way to compliment each other and get the most out of the system. With another set of headphones with a different chip, there is a very good chance that code written today would not be optimal because other builders could manufacture different things based on the same spec. You cannot bring everything to software, nor can you have hardware doing everything. Tradeoffs would be needed.
The issue comes in second order effects. If third party headphones are given access and then the experience is not as good, they complain that Apple hasnt open up the spec enough, and it just results in Apple being forced to be modular in their approach.
> If third party headphones are given access
Third-party headphones already have access. Bluetooth audio is a standard that is well-supported both by iOS and headphones of any kind[0]. The problem is that the process for pairing a device on iOS (or, for that matter, Android) is a pain in the ass for knowledgeable users and completely untenable for everyone else.
Apple recognized that this was a problem, and made their phone detect if you were trying to pair new headphones and pop up a notification for it. But only for Apple's headphones. Which is stupid.
[0] In fact, this is why I use AirPods Pro on an Android phone.
I disagree with the premise. For me, "works better" means that I can swap out one of the devices in my fleet with a different brand and still have a functioning setup.
But even ignoring that, I think your claim can be true while forcing Apple to be compatible is still the right thing to do, because optimizing for personal convenience and user experience only is not the best outcome if it comes at the expense of market failure due to vendor lock-in.
Rooting for Apple in cases like this is akin to watching Star Wars and rooting for the Empire.
I wonder, could this means we get better support for things like sending messages from Garmin smartwatches?
Previously, this was available on Android but not iOS as Apple didn’t expose the APIs for watches other than their own.
Depending on how you look at it, there may be two distinct parts to this:
a) API to not just read notifications but also perform the notification quick actions (if any), e.g snooze for a calendar event, mark complete for a reminder, and of course reply for a text (SMS or otherwise). This seems entirely reasonable and ludicrous that it doesn't exist.
b) API to access SMS / Messages. That one appears to be heavily guarded because security / E2E (for iMessage).
I mention b) because a lot of times people invoke the problem a being b) (and possibly a problem in its own right, forcing one to use Messages for SMS) but really for watches a) is sufficient and probably much more relevant.
There's also a.1) API access to media (images) in notifications.
In any case, DMA could definitely help crack both.
I would settle for my Garmin not disconnecting every few days at this point
I mean I’d settle for the status quo and Garmin itself not deleting big parts of my watch faces.
The last update from Garmin did this to my Epix. Funnily enough the complications can still be activated if you touch the screen, they’re just invisible.
Where there's a will--or a law--there's a way. Hallelujah!
I really wonder what the technical detail is that makes it so much harder for this feature to work when your phone is outside the EU, does anyone know?
The same technical detail that makes it so the "Default Navigation App" toggle to change the default from 'Apple Maps' to 'Google Maps' only shows up if you live in the EU but not in the US.
You can rest assured that Apple is paying hundreds of engineers to discover any potential solution and then mitigate it.
Does proximity pairing also mean seamless switching between iDevices? As it stands non Apple earphones need to disconnect from the currently paired device to only then connect with another. My Beats Studio pro on the other hand can control primary device and on secondary device I can prompt it to connect and it will switch.
This is already part of the Bluetooth spec that Apple didn't implement: multipoint pairing.
This is wrong - Apple did implement multipoint pairing. I’ve had Bose headphones and cheapo Amazon headphones and both switched perfectly between various Apple devices.
No, they did not implement mulitpoint Bluetooth as per the spec in AirPods, they are doing proprietary handoffs between their own devices, multipoint pairing is not implemented for Airpods outside of macOS and iOS.
We will soon have US/ROW Tech - EU Tech - and Chinese Tech. Some countries will align with one or the other, a few might pick 2 of the 3.
But worldwide tech is dying
I hope EU subdues Apple fully, and one day I can run Linux on my iPad. At least virtualised.
FTA: “The changes to proximity pairing and notifications are only available for device makers […] in the European Union.”
Will that mean we’ll see some last step assembly move into the EU, or does it only require legal presence?
Yeah this would be weird if it's only for EU based companies. I think apple strategy is overall 'divide and conquer' making all different stuff working different in EU, Japan, UK, US. To this already many variables also if the user has account in EU and also if is living in EU or for how long. Their whole compliance is not robust and reliable making this in fact dead on arrival. Any maker relying on this will have more complains from customers. Customers will think that all non-apple solution are buggy and reliable and will stick with apple stuff.
> I think apple strategy is overall 'divide and conquer'
I think Tim Cook’s strategy is rather “hoard and extract as much money as legally possible, no matter what it does to the experience”. Selling tech products is no different to him than selling car parts of frozen meat. What matters to him is the pile of money at the end.
Does anyone know what this adds beyond AccessorySetupKit, which shipped over a year ago?
I don't know much about this, but does "proximity pairing" use some open standard API that's part of the bluetooth spec? Are there any examples of other devices using something like this?
Part of the appeal of Airpods is how seamless they are to pair and share between devices. The UX of bluetooth headphones pairing and device switching before Airpods came along seemed atrocious.
Is this a case of Apple arbitrarily locking out third parties, or is a case of Apple doing the work to get something to work nicely and now being forced to give competition access?
I don't know how proximity pairing works in Apple land. My wife uses Apple devices.
But between my Android phone and my contractor issued Windows laptop, the $20 headphone I use just works. It connects to both of them because of multi-pairing. If one of the devices is playing, say, a Youtube video, the other doesn't take over the sound even if I start playing music there. And if I pause the Youtube video in one device, the other is free to play sounds.
It's seamless and intuitive.
I should try also pairing to my Linux workstation. If that works too I would be impressed.
Would this include the UK I wonder?
It seems the UK will have to undertake their own procedure. Unless they rejoin before that (one can hope).
Just realised I’m not in the EU (from UK). There was me thinking about digging my old Garmin out!
You guys are always welcome to rejoin once you figure your drama out.
We miss you, British Friends <3
Considering how aggressive they’ve been about internet legislation lately, mandating age checks and asking companies to give them keys to encrypted data, I think I’d rather them not rejoin just yet, we don’t need another country trying to force Chat Control and making it worse.
Only let us back if we join schengen.
Honestly, ideally you'd rejoin without any of the weird opt-outs you had.
But I wouldn't let that be the sticking point, y'all are too important to us to get hung up on it.
Likely not. FTA: “The changes to proximity pairing and notifications are only available for device makers and iPhone and iPad users in the European Union.”
Wow, it's almost as if regulations were necessary to curtail the worst excesses of capitalism and steer it towards user interest instead of maximal exploitation...
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