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Comment Re:Same old, same old .... (Score 3, Insightful) 27

Someone wants to make an easy profit off the coat-tails of Apple's success

Why can't complementary products exist? You wouldn't consider a train timetable app parasitic. In fact, my local train network encourages such apps so that they don't have to do it themselves. Businesses can build co-operating products.

In fact, when the Pebble first came out its notification handling was better on iOS than Android because Apple specifically made it easy. Pebble, Fitbit, and Garmin paved the way for smart-watches. Once the hard work was done, then Apple produced their own. And what a coincidence, everything gets locked down for third-party watches.

Nobody is complaining that they don't make things easy. They're complaining that they make it impossible because they compete with Apple.

Comment Re: interesting (Score 2) 158

Where I live is light orange on that map, but we still had a mild summer. Of course, what people mean when they talk about hot weather and what that map shows are two different things. A summer can be "mild" and "above average" if the highs are a bit lower or longer duration and the lows are much higher or shorter duration.

Comment Re: You mad bro? (Score 1) 109

If one or more companies has the ability to lower the price of a good or service, that's good for consumers.

If one or more companies has the ability to raise the price of a good or service, that's bad for consumers.

The complaint here is that Valve, Apple, and Google have used their position to increase the cost to consumers while reducing the profitability of game makers.

Comment Re:Apple's cut being 48 billion (Score 0) 43

Apple was spending $30 million per month on infrastructure in March 2019. (That's for everything, not just their app store.)

Let's assume that those costs have remained flat from 2008 to now. (That's going to be too low for later figures, but much too high for earlier figures. So it's more likely our estimate will be too high.) Over that time, Apple would have spent $5.4 billion on infrastructure.

That $5.4 billion doesn't account for all their costs, however. Backblaze, who provide cloud storage only, claim that infrastructure costs make up 40% of their total costs. Apple is larger, and thus it seems reasonable to assume they spend more. But at the same time, some costs don't go up with scale. In any case, it's the only figure I have, so let's use it. That would make their total costs since 2008 to be $13.5 billion.

As calculated elsewhere, depending on the breakdown of 15% and 30% cut taken, Apple's income just from app store fees is somewhere between $56.4 billion and $137.1 billion. If this was their only income relevant to the costs (which it isn't), and assuming our calculated costs are correct (unlikely), that means they're making a profit of between 76-90%. That's an exceptionally large net margin. Compare that to industry averages, where the highest net margins are regional banks at 30%, and the various technology industries are all between 14-21%. Those are averages, of course. Individual companies will be higher or lower than those numbers.

Of course, there's a lot of (unavoidable) fudging in these numbers. But it's unlikely that Apple will release the actual numbers. It's in their interests to keep everybody guessing.

Comment Re:I feel locked in. Makes me happy. (Score 1) 98

This is like if someone publicly asked for a green iPhone, and you complain that you don't want Apple to make green iPhones because you don't like green and don't want to be forced to have a green phone.

The only way this could take away your choice is if Apple does a terrible job of implementing it.

The only way things could be as bad as you say is if we lived in the world of your imagination.

Comment Re: Oh god (Score 1) 54

Not quite: it is about the timing of drawing the graphics buffers as they're still being written.

The analysis compared the real first level, the MAME first level, and a photo of a recording of a latter level of one of the record runs. Since the photo looked more like the MAME first level, and they never considered the idea that timings could vary with time, they concluded that the run must have been done via MAME.

That's not to say that the evidence for the other side is any better...

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