POSIX has multiple Turing complete utilities that can be used in tandem. Its not a very fair competition. Many of the primitives involved are simply not primitives of higher level languages. Write a python script to remove blank lines from standard input. In awk it takes 5 non-whitespace characters (including 'awk'). Use awk to remove blank lines from your python code when you need to paste it into a terminal. Many python developers have a terrible time from the command line because they do not use the shell to help themselves out.
Does this help big tech or hurt big tech? One way to create a monopoly is to regulate competition out of existence. Lawsuits against big tech are becoming the latest form of semantic satiation.
TFA mentions that «Large tech firms would be designated as internet "gatekeepers" — making them subject to stricter regulations.»
So the regulation is not horizontal. And it is positive that the EU seem to have learnt a few things from the application of GDPR.
Say what you want about Apple but they are by far the most privacy focused big company. Their income is from selling physical devices. Typical megacorps in 2020 are leveraging economies of scale to sell their users' attention. Apple has a unique value add in that when their users benefit they benefit.
Apple revenue for the last year was $275 billion. So you've listed 3.5%, 7%, and probably-rounds-to-0% of their revenue, which doesn't seem like it actually counters the original point.
As you correctly point out, those are revenue figures, not profit. $10 billion from Google out of $60 billion in profit is significant. Apple saying they 'care' about privacy while making +15% of its profits from Google alone is hypocritical.
At the end of the day it's just an option that users can easily choose to opt out of.
As much as I would like them to default to and support DuckDuckGo instead (hell, it would be a match made in heaven if Apple were to buy DDG and make it their privacy centrepiece), a lot of people would be confused if they got DDG instead of Google, so I don't really think it's fair to make it out as some "chink in the armour". It's a business win-win in my eyes and doesn't affect me at all.
I'm not sure this is the correct question. Every company has cost centers and profit centers.
Historically, for example, Playstations were sold at a loss and the games were sold at a profit and a licensing fee to offset that loss.
In the more modern world, Steam and Apple and Epic Games all charge a percentage-based commission for the games and in-app purchases their games have (at least some of them charge the latter). The cost of keeping the game in their catalog is very low compared to the price they charge. The markup is very high; but, it does offset development costs throughout the company. Those development costs may or may not help drive traffic or even use the services that the money-making services boulster, but the money-making services do help pay for it.
Apple makes about 60 billion a year in the profit. The 10 billion they get from Google constitutes 16% of their annual profit. That’s significant!
Apple trades at a 37x P/E ratio. An additional $20B profit could be worth about an additional $760 billion in market cap. You can’t dismiss 10 billion in pure profit because their market cap. Those numbers are directly related and far closer in meaning than you give credit.
> The 10 billion they get from Google constitutes 16% of their annual profit.
You're playing funny buggers with figures there. According to your standard the sales of physical devices constitutes over 350% of their annual profit.
Yes, gross revenue is larger than net income. Particularly when manufacturing is involved.
The $10B Google money is basically pure profit. It costs Apple nothing. Maybe a few million in lawyer time to negotiate the fee each year.
Hardware sales generates enormous revenue and also very large profit. I believe more than half of Apple’s profit is still hardware sales. But they’re working very hard to increase their services income.
> The $10B Google money is basically pure profit. It costs Apple nothing.
If they didn't spend all that money on producing the phones they'd have nothing to sell to Google. You can't meaningfully divorce the two, all profit centres of a business rely on the cost centres.
You are claiming the Google money is 'pure profit' while making phones is not.
They are saying that you can't account for the Google money as pure profit, even though the costs aren't as obvious. In particular, their argument says, you have to make and sell the phones before Google will give you money to make their search engine the default.
So the Google money is not pure profit, in the same way the phone sales are not pure profit (even though the underlying costs are not as obvious).
Apple’s profit is increasingly derived from non-hardware sales. That profit is dependent on them having sold hardware. If they sell no hardware they will generate no services revenue or profit.
Scroll way back to the root of this conversation. Someone said that $20B is not nothing but is a small fraction of their revenue. I think this is a poor characterization because you need to consider the source of both gross and net revenue.
Yes, services revenue is dependent on hardware sales. And yes the margin on services is significantly higher than the margin on hardware. Apple has been working very very very hard to increase services revenue because it is so profitable. Yes that profit is dependent on their ability to continue to sell hardware. Apple’s ability to grow their annual profit is highly dependent on their ability to both maintain hardware sales and increase services revenue. There is a LOT of room to grow services revenue. There is much less room to grow hardware revenue.
I look forward to seeing where the goal post gets moved next.
> I think this is a poor characterization because you need to consider the source of both gross and net revenue.
I agree with this wholeheartedly.
From earlier upthread (forrestthewoods-0):
> Apple makes about 60 billion a year in the profit. The 10 billion they get from Google constitutes 16% of their annual profit. That’s significant!
This is the contentious part.
Some of the $10B from Google needs to be allocated against the cost centres that enable the sale, in order to account for it correctly. To put it another way, the marginal cost of this revenue is insignificant but the capital costs are significant.
It is worthwhile to consider marginal and capital costs separately, but it's not reasonable to ignore those upfront costs when making an argument - it comes across as "playing funny buggers with figures" (wyattpeak-1).
So I generally agree with your points, but also agree with people who say you need to factor in the non-marginal costs required to generate the Google revenue.
As a meta point, your comments on goal post moving (while potentially correct - I'm not making a comment on correctness here) don't add to your argument, your argument makes sense without them (and in my opinion would come across better if you left them out).
Not hard to be the most privacy focused big company when the competition Google , Facebook or Amazon...
I don't understand why we should always have good guys and bad guys and we can't accept that none of those company respect us.
Nothing will change if we relay Apple's propaganda about privacy. People will think that the solution is already there and it's Apple. And it's not. Apple has catastrophic Privacy, just a bit less catastrophic than Google but that's it.
They don't even encrypt your cloud, how's that remotely close to "privacy focused company"
“Catastrophic privacy” is quite a huge claim - do you have any actual examples? My perspective is that iphone privacy protections have actually gotten better and more sophisticated over time, and I’m much more comfortable having older non-techie relatives on iOS for that reason. When it comes to providing them tech support ios has always been less finicky than android.
But when you follow history of how IDFA was introduced (a replacement for more privacy-invasive identifiers which were available), IDFA makes sense. At least it's completely fair and honest - it is an identifier for advertisers, that user's have control over.
Identifier for Advertisers was opt-out, and will soon be opt-in [1], so that seems like an example of Apple's privacy protections getting better over time.
Yes, but "better" is a qualitative term not a quantitative. That this thing even exists in the first place and was either mandatory or opt-out is still concerning to me.
This change moved Apple a little closer to the "good guys" column, but not really into it.
If by "good guys" you mean champions of privacy, I don't think Apple will ever be that. They're a giant business and that means they're primarily motivated by profit.
It's up to the people to be the champions of privacy and help Apple realize that our interests (privacy) are aligned with their interests (profit).
(And I say this as someone who's rather anti-Apple for other reasons. Life is complicated and full of compromises.)
Agreed, we should be careful not to champion them as the saviours of consumer privacy just because they have lately been marketing themselves as an improvement over Google and Microsoft.
What are they doing that other vendors aren't? From what I can tell their privacy-forward marketing began with the rollout of the Secure Enclave in the 5S, but Android vendors were already using hardware key stores and full disk encryption at that time.
I will admit that this action to change the advertising ID to default-off is a promising one though.
News agencies get things wrong. 'Sources' are often times extremely unreliable, or don't always present the whole picture. Not that I'm absolving Apple here, just that I've been indirectly on the receiving end of 'sources' and Reuters being technically right, but very, very wrong.
One important implication of not using full encryption is that it protects users from themselves. If a user forgets their password, Apple can still unlock their data. From a security perspective, this obviously isn't ideal. But, from the perspective of the average user who has lost all of their data, this is great.
I should be given the choice to turn it on though. I understand Apple not wanting to deal with the annoying customer who forgets their password, loses everything, and blames Apple. I’ve seen enough forgotten password people while waiting at the Genius Bar to sympathize with Apple. But just because some of their customers can’t handle the responsibility doesn’t mean none of their customers should have the option. I encrypt my hard drive despite Apple’s warnings about FireVault. I understand the risk, have weighed the pros and cons, and have taken steps to mitigate the risk.
It is very typical of Apple, unfortunately, to leave out power features in order to focus on excelling at the basics. I switched to an iPhone from a rooted Android a few years ago, and while I do miss that level of control, I don't have to worry about the overhead that that type of Android device commands.
This. As an example, my mother (who is over 90) got locked out of her icloud account a couple years ago, from getting unexpected password prompts on her ipad and not understanding which password was required, she entered the wrong one too many times. We had recorded our answers to the “security questions” when setting up the account, but they were not accepted either. In the end, we managed to restore access via a rather cumbersome process. No complaints about that, of course; the important part is that she did get her access back in the end.
It's odd though, they have these contradictory actions. For the iPhone, they are pushing for privacy, but on MacOS, we are now dealing with things like excessive telemetry to the point of phoning a authorization server for running local binaries. Not to mention the new firewall issues, where Apple utilities are able to bypass local firewall rules.
Surely you know this ‘telemetry’ statement isn’t really true. They use badly designed open protocol to do certificate revocation. It’s not like they designed this as a way to collect user data.
Perhaps they don't intend to use the data as telemetry, but regardless, intentionally or not, they are receiving information about what you are running, even if it were just a hash of the binary. So you're right, it would be a trivially small information leak, but I'd like to think a company focused on privacy wouldn't resort to such an aggressive protocol.
I haven't followed this very closely, has anyone determined exactly what is being sent?
That's a very good point. Their primary revenue stream is from hardware or sources that aren't based on collecting user data.
I also think this is why Apple and Microsoft have bright futures but companies like Amazon, Google, and Facebook will only see more legal hurdles from here on out.
Apple gets on the order of $12 billion a year from Google to make Google Search the default search engine in iOS. All that money comes from ads. They care about privacy until it hits their pocketbook.
Yes, that same hypocrisy applies to Mozilla. And it's been a total and unfortunate way to run a nonprofit - getting money from a direct competitor that wants to pay you as little as possible. The lower the browser market share, the worse their negotiating position got.
I wish they had come up with an alternate revenue stream.
If I’m looking at HomeKit for example, this is not true.
Also people would want google anyway. After all it’s still the most useful search engine for almost everyone. Apple is primarily still a device maker for people who want stuff to justwerk and people who have no interest in tech.
I treat Apple being privacy-focused the same way I treat a politician that has a platform that I like: alignment of interests at the present moment. It doesn't mean that we want the same thing for the same reasons.
IMO Pine64 is more privacy respecting than Apple. I don't have to send them an email address to install software and I don't have to send them my drivers license to be allowed to compile it.
They had me send my license the last time I tried, I guess now you can do it for free for your own devices although you still need a mac and an online developer account.
Apple had its own advertising platform called iAd that was abandonded a few years ago. Cynical me thinks that them disabling the IDFA could be a ploy for them to corner the adtech market for themselves.
Wow. I only knew the term from fantasy role plays and fantasy overall. Would not have guessed it to have a real world connotation.
By your comment I learned from the Wrestler, but more importantly the Ku Klux Klan reference and meaning. Thanks for laying out a bread crumb to follow for new insights.
Building features on top of other features is often zero cost. Code becomes a many layered cake consumed by the end user. In the web development stack the simplest of features like text on a screen is the achievement of decades of technological progress. Text may be localized, shaped with HarfBuzz, run through libicu's BIDI algorithm, encoded with a nontrivial encoding, wrapped in markup language, nested inside of multiple layers of network headers and corresponding metadata, sent over the wire as a series of 0s and 1s, and then painstakingly unpacked in reverse order.
This is clearly complicated and clearly works. Many different actors operating quasi-independently. You can imagine the difficulty when one actor in a time crunch tries to design a similarly complicated cake stitched together with parts homemade, parts open sourced and parts paid for.
Just one of those things that no one really questions the existence of. It, like the semicolon, always has been and will be.
Good work digging through these historic esoteric languages. Wikipedia states McCarthy of Lisp fame invented it so many of the evangelists here likely know the conclusion here.
Looking at newer languages, I also get the impression it’s on the way out. Rust has them, but python, scala, go and swift try to avoid them (https://python-reference.readthedocs.io/en/latest/docs/opera...: “Avoid having multiple statements on a single line. Though the language definition allows one to use a semi-colon to delineate statements, doing so without reason makes one’s code harder to read”, https://golang.org/doc/effective_go.html#semicolons: “Like C, Go's formal grammar uses semicolons to terminate statements, but unlike in C, those semicolons do not appear in the source. Instead the lexer uses a simple rule to insert semicolons automatically as it scans, so the input text is mostly free of them.”, https://docs.swift.org/swift-book/LanguageGuide/TheBasics.ht...: “Unlike many other languages, Swift doesn’t require you to write a semicolon (;) after each statement in your code, although you can do so if you wish. However, semicolons are required if you want to write multiple separate statements on a single line”)
