I just saw this via Casey's Twitter. Here's a point I see few people make:

Apple sells their phones to their customers. Then they say their customers are not allowed to install any program they want on the phone they paid for. So Apple are behaving like the thing they sold still belongs to them. How does that make any kind of sense? If someone sells you a physical object, that object no longer belongs to them. Right? This is how commerce has worked for thousands of years.

I suggest that Apple be sued to return their customers money, since Apple believes it still owns their phones. Class action lawsuit when? :)

It's not only vs Apple. It's also vs Google.
And it's not about how "owns" the phone. It's about competition and monopoly.

Anyways - nobody forced you to buy Apple phone. When you were buying iPhone, you knew well ahead of time in what kind walled-garden you are buying in. Apple's control of ecosystem is nothing new. There's zero reason to do any return. Vote with your wallet.

mmozeiko
It's not only vs Apple. It's also vs Google.
And it's not about how "owns" the phone. It's about competition and monopoly.

Anyways - nobody forced you to buy Apple phone. When you were buying iPhone, you knew well ahead of time in what kind walled-garden you are buying in. Apple's control of ecosystem is nothing new. There's zero reason to do any return. Vote with your wallet.

mmozeiko
It's not only vs Apple. It's also vs Google.
And it's not about how "owns" the phone. It's about competition and monopoly.

Anyways - nobody forced you to buy Apple phone. When you were buying iPhone, you knew well ahead of time in what kind walled-garden you are buying in. Apple's control of ecosystem is nothing new. There's zero reason to do any return. Vote with your wallet.

Here is a shiny new $2000 shovel! (But you can only dig in gardens Tim Apple approves of.)

- Apple iShovel


"Anyways - nobody forced you to buy Apple phone."

No one forced you is not a legal argument, if the contract is exploitative.

Selling something to someone and keeping it is exploitation. If Apple controls an object, not the person they took money from, then the object is Apple's.

When I was out for my walk I was thinking about Apple's monopoly, and Elon Musk came to mind.

Imagine Elon says, here's my awesome electric car. Its the best car on the market and it really is. When you buy Elon's car, the fine print says, you can only drive on roads Musk approves of, and if you try to drive where Elon does not approve, the car will drive itself back onto approved roads. Of course Elon has business interests in the areas where he lets you drive his car...

There is no way that Elon would get away with that, even if 50 million Tesla fans agreed to his contract. Yet this is what Apple is getting away with, because baby boomer judges don't understand tech. If you explain it to them in simple terms, so even a 5 year old child can understand it, maybe they will understand.


"Vote with your wallet"

When in doubt, sue, sue, sue!

I cannot, unfortunately, "vote with my wallet" to bust the joint monopoly that Google and Apple have over smartphones. "Vote with your wallet" is not, has never been, and will never be, a strategy capable of effecting meaningful change in the world.

The kind of platform lockdown you're talking about is a result of a simple economic fact: it is generally more profitable to rent than to sell. As long as we live under a capitalist economic system, that will be the direction firms take. No amount of "voting with your wallet", or smugly telling others to do the same, will change the fundamental market forces at work.

Aphetres
Imagine Elon says, here's my awesome electric car. Its the best car on the market and it really is. When you buy Elon's car, the fine print says, you can only drive on roads Musk approves of, and if you try to drive where Elon does not approve, the car will drive itself back onto approved roads. Of course Elon has business interests in the areas where he lets you drive his car...

That's a silly comparison, because Apple does not dictate where you can keep your phone, or in which buildings you are allowed to use, etc... All it does is control where from you are installing software (thus the Epic lawsuit). Tesla does exactly same thing - can you install your own apps in Tesla dashboard? No. Tesla controls it. The difference is that there is no marketplace in Tesla software, so this argument is kind of invalid.

Your arguments sound really more about closed hardware vs open hardware, and not at all what Epic is suing Apple for.
I'm perfectly fine with closed hardware solutions. Why they should be illegal? If it's a problem then there will be either a competitor that does not do that or people will not purchase the product and/or developers won't target the platform - aka "vote with your wallet".
Banning closed hardware will not magically make equivalent open hardware to appear.

mmozeiko
If it's a problem then there will be either a competitor that does not do that or people will not purchase the product and/or developers won't target the platform

Free market absolutists would certainly like for this to be true. To be honest, I also wish it were true, because if so, it would mean there's no need to do anything about the current state of the industry, as it will all just sort itself out soon enough. Unfortunately, there is no evidence to suggest that this is the case.

mmozeiko

Aphetres
Imagine Elon says, here's my awesome electric car. Its the best car on the market and it really is. When you buy Elon's car, the fine print says, you can only drive on roads Musk approves of, and if you try to drive where Elon does not approve, the car will drive itself back onto approved roads. Of course Elon has business interests in the areas where he lets you drive his car...

That's a silly comparison, because Apple does not dictate where you can keep your phone, or in which buildings you are allowed to use, etc... All it does is control where from you are installing software (thus the Epic lawsuit). Tesla does exactly same thing - can you install your own apps in Tesla dashboard? No. Tesla controls it. The difference is that there is no marketplace in Tesla software, so this argument is kind of invalid.

Your arguments sound really more about closed hardware vs open hardware, and not at all what Epic is suing Apple for.
I'm perfectly fine with closed hardware solutions. Why they should be illegal? If it's a problem then there will be either a competitor that does not do that or people will not purchase the product and/or developers won't target the platform - aka "vote with your wallet".
Banning closed hardware will not magically make equivalent open hardware to appear.

Its not silly if you understand that cyberspace is a place, just as real as the physical world. You can meet people there, you can earn money there, you can learn there, you can do almost anything, just like you can in the real world, so it is real.

I'm not talking about closed or open hardware. Its about bypassing the App Store.

So you say you support free markets as in freedom, yet you want to sell me something, and then tell me what I can can and can't do with it. So you support freedom when it comes to markets, but control freaking when it comes to hardware/software. That is inconsistent.

If understand it right, if Epic wins the case and can install their games without using the App Store, then other devs will be able to do the same, which means Apple won't be able to control what software their users install.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/1...p-store-removal-injunctive-relief

If that is right, I think it is a good thing. Above you called what Apple is doing a Walled Garden, but I'd call it a Compound. I think people locked in compounds should be allowed to access other things if they choose, so they don't become weird and cultish.