The Verge has such a hard on for this story. They’ve published like ten articles about it already.
To be fair, it’s the most interesting story the verge has covered in about, well, as long as the verge has existed.
This is a big deal - it’s going to shape the entire tech industry for the foreseeable future. And it’s going to drag on in court and probably also congress for years and years.
Apple is the target of the lawsuit but the DoJ is also telling every other tech company what rules they need to operate under. The last decade of “just do whatever you want” is over.
Because we all do, because someone is finally trying to do something about Apple's decades long walled garden anti-competitive bullshit.
What, are you upset that your favourite trillion dollar mega corp feels picked on?
Europe already did. That's just usa kind of catching up, if it ever success.
I expect them to cover this in as much detail as possible. They are probably the last big tech / business news website standing. I know Gizmodo, Engadget, Tech Crunch etc exist but nobody seems to have resources and connections The Verge does.
Good! It's a massive story.
They were like this about the Epic V Google suit too. their legal reporting team is over-the-top.
Think about all the legit clicks.
Since someone else brought up superapps, do they seem like an initial attempt to get around the manufacturer's app store lock-in?
Super apps allow adding mini apps. Seems like an app store.
The goog/apple app stores are already saturated by malware, I can't imagine some mini app store would do better. Even if the big two did do a better job, how would they go about vetting all the code these super apps might have access to?
I guess I'm too jaded, but it seems like just another malware loader you intentionally install.
Am I being too hard on the concept? Are there any really good ones you've used?
F-Droid is good one
Why rely on them doing the detective work and just not give 1 more second to think through before hitting that install button? This is basic digital hygiene.
I had hoped that as most younger adults now were kids who grew up with computers, the average person would have a pretty good understanding of how they work. I never expected everyone to be a programmer or sysadmin of course, but to have a general sense of things like whether data is stored on their device or remotely, how to find out if an app install is risky, and whether a prompt requesting permissions, a password, etc... is reasonable.
For the most part, I don't think that has happened. The average person doesn't know how to use a computer and isn't going to learn.
All that happened by design. The trend for decades has been to remove the user from the internal workings of the computer. This paved the way for expensive support packages, geek squads, and genius bars.
If we look at cars as an example, the future of computing looks grim. Who’s to say that there won’t be leased laptops with built in features behind paywalls in the next 10 years?
I don't think we need a sinister plan to explain how we got where we are.
Most people are interested in some outcome, and want the easiest process to achieve it, not to learn about the process. They want to play a computer game, not learn about graphics drivers. They want to take a picture and send it to their friends, not learn about communications protocols or camera settings.
It's not just tech. They want to cut their food, not learn to sharpen knives. They want to drive to their destinations, not maintain their cars. Maintenance-free tends to outsell serviceable in most product categories.
Geek Squad didn't come about because people didn't have the ability to access the inner workings of their computers, but because they didn't want to put in the effort to learn. Getting the defaults right so most people don't have to change settings before your product is useful is good design even when your product offers lots of access to the inner workings.
I do, however see the trend of software requiring remote attestation about the OS it's running on as sinister. Google even recently tried to bring that to the web.
I'm afraid peak computer literacy and hygiene is past us now. Younger folks are so used to everything just working, that the vast majority don't care or are willing to find out how things work. (Don't get me wrong, the vast majority of boomers, gen-x and millennials aren't much better, but tend to have more of a healthy suspicion because of their analog youths.)
I work at a major university. Everything became a black box and now if there is no output, students born circa 2002-2006, who are otherwise very bright, don't know how to navigate it.
Is it possible this is because of Apple though? Feels like a whole generation is coming of age that we're told they were too dumb to figure out settings and to just let papa Apple take care of all that nerd shit.
That requires thinking, an activity most people are unwilling to engage in.
That doesn't sound right, but I don't have the wherewithal to defend myself
Here's the full complaint, for those who want to read the whole thing.
Thanks for sharing! This was an amazing read.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
United States v. Apple is a lawsuit written for the general public, an 88-page press release designed to be read aloud on cable news shows.
That’s not against the rules — note that United States v. Google (filed 2023) has a single, terse intro paragraph outside the numbered section — but US v. Apple powers up for two whole pages before getting into allegations.
There are even a beguiling few paragraphs in which the DOJ compares the need to regularly update AAA video game titles to the onerous process of App Store review and then concludes that “Apple’s conduct made cloud streaming apps so unattractive to users that no developer designed one for the iPhone.” At no point does the DOJ allege that Apple is why I can’t play AAA games on my iPhone….
(At the Thursday press conference, Attorney General Merrick Garland made no mention of how Sarah Jeong would like to see the SE return to its 2016 size.)
It’s fun to engage with the legal distillation of nerd rage at the line level, but there’s also an overarching narrative here that the DOJ is trying to push, one with potentially enormous ramifications.
Meanwhile, the opening volley in its battle against one of America’s favorite companies is a killer start, not least in part because of an unusual degree of lawyerly insight into the human psyche.
The original article contains 1,258 words, the summary contains 228 words. Saved 82%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
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