Patreon should have just immediately pulled their app from Apple's store. They're a website. There's no obvious benefit to doing things in an app versus a website.

That said, nothing inherently prevents Apple from maliciously making it harder for Patreon's website to work on iOS. Apple controls the only web browser engine that is allowed to run on the platform.

Actually, it is. Cars don't generally allow third-party apps at all. They're an embedded system. Therefore, those are entirely moot.

Gaming systems are largely limited to games, and to a limited extent, media consumption (e.g. Netflix), which makes them a much more specialized system than an iPhone.

And gaming systems don't need to be a single tool that serves all of a user's needs in the way that a cell phone does. Cell phones are something you carry with you all day, and generally require a monthly cell service contract. So there are significant ongoing costs and hassles associated with having more than one. But most people play games primarily at home, which means it is relatively painless (apart from the initial purchase cost) to have multiple consoles; if a game isn't available on one, they can play it on another. Thus, game console app sales compete across platforms in a way that cellular phone app sales largely do not.

So while not entirely moot, gaming platforms are still a very different animal from a consumer perspective.

Apple is the only high-volume general-purpose computing platform I can think of that does not freely allow side-loading and third-party app stores. So in many critical ways, Apple stands alone on this one. And that's doubly true if you limit it to mobile platforms.

That said, I do agree that game platforms should not be allowed to be locked down, either. It is just far less important from an antitrust perspective because of fundamental differences in how the devices are used.

U.S. courts could not give two s**ts about worldwide market share. Apple has more than 58% of U.S. market share for cellular phones.

Apple's servers aren't involved at all for in-app purchase payments through third party payment processors. And no sane person would consider such sandboxing to be reasonable for a server that just provides downloads of app binaries, because the server is not doing anything more than loading bytes from disk and sending them out over HTTPS. So that would get smacked down by the courts in a quarter of a second.

Competent lawyers do not play games like that, because they know that doing so is the surest way to incur treble damages for willful violation of court orders.

They, in fact, have 58% of the U.S. cellular phone market, which is more than enough control over the market to regulate them under antitrust law.

This. When Steve first introduced the App Store, he said they weren't trying to make a profit off of it. That was quickly proven to be a lie, because the economies of scale brought the costs way down, but the fees never decreased.

And the fact of the matter is that the decision to make apps go through the app review process is a decision made by Apple primarily for their benefit, not for the user's benefit. No other general-purpose platform (as opposed to game-only platforms like primitive cell phones and game consoles and iPod) ever did anything like that prior to Apple doing it, and it was never a security disaster.

Because the user has no choice about whether to buy apps from Apple or from a third-party, it isn't reasonable for Apple to charge fees on the review process. Doing so is effectively rent seeking, interposing themselves in commerce while adding zero value to that commerce compared with other alternatives. Doing so distorts the free market for in-app payment processors by basically making that market not exist. And so on.

And Apple already charges a fee for the review process. Every developer has to pay a $99 a year to distribute apps through the store. That's paying for app reviews and a couple of DTS incidents. If that isn't adequate to cover the costs, then Apple needs to make that reflect the actual cost of app review.

And IMO, Apple should be forced to open up the platform to third-party app stores globally, allowing companies to choose whether to pay that fee or distribute their app through a third-party store instead. Building a platform should not give you carte blanche authority to say what apps run on that platform, because Apple does not own the hardware once a consumer buys it. It looks like a sale, so it is a sale. And at that point, the law recognizes customers' rights to do pretty much whatever they want to with the hardware, up to and including wiping it and running Android if they can figure out how.

There's no clear security justification for not requiring Apple to provide a switch on iOS similar to the one on macOS that lets you install apps signed by Apple and distributed outside the store, nor for providing a switch that lets you install and run unsigned apps with the same security mechanism that macOS provided prior to code signing. It worked well enough to keep users safe for decades, and the code is already there. All they have to do is turn it on, provide a little bit of UI integration, and maybe unify the keychain implementation if they haven't already done so by now.

Users who want the current model would just not go into Settings and change the setting. Apple can have three or four dire warnings about how doing this reduces the security of the phone before allowing users to do so, ensuring that only users who understand what they are doing throw the switch.

And there's no clear justification at all for Apple demanding that third-party app stores pay money for sales of apps that Apple doesn't actually review. That is *pure* rent seeking. Apple isn't providing *any* value in those transactions, but is still charging money ("core technology fee"). No way should that be allowed. Users already pay for the operating system as part of the cost of buying the device. Those fees are pure double dipping, and that's really not okay to charge two parties for the same purchase.

The more Apple clings to control over the platform, the more fines they are going to get, both in the U.S. and the European Union. One company exercising near-monopolistic control over a large chunk of the cellular phone market is inherently problematic, and using that monopoly to control an unrelated market (apps) by deliberately preventing consumers from being able to install alternative app stores that avoid those fees is IMO a flagrant violation of antitrust law. I'm glad the courts have affirmed that.

I'm talking specifically about the meat substitutes that try to taste like meat. There are ways to have a healthy vegan diet, but a lot of the plant-based burgers and fake meat tend to be loaded up with large amounts of sodium salt. So switching to those because you think they are healthier may actually be way worse than not doing so.

This isn't actually true. For screens with low resolution, because of the way scaling works, serifs can degrade legibility, but because of the way human brains and eyes do superresolution with micro-eye movements to compensate for poor visual acuity, serifs should not degrade readability even if your vision is blurry.

More to the point, I have to scale up sans-serif fonts a lot more than serif fonts to work well with my eyesight. So I'm saying this from personal experience.

You actually have it entirely backwards. Serifs require a higher resolution to render, or else thin lines can disappear entirely. That's why some people incorrectly think that sans-serif fonts are more readable on screen; their screens simply aren't good enough to render serifs properly. (Pedantically, this means that sans-serif fonts are more readable on crappy screens.)

But if you have a screen with a high enough resolution to render them properly, fonts with serifs significantly increase reading comprehension and speed of reading for large blocks of normal-sized text. (citation, original book) And while it is possible to reduce the difficulty of reading sans-serif fonts through careful design, IMO, there's no good reason to believe that a version of Calibri with serifs would not still be more readable.

To be fair, some serif fonts sometimes need 600 DPI to prevent lines from disappearing entirely because of poor font scaling software.

But the flip side is that assuming the serifs don't disappear because of scaling deficiencies, they are way more readable at small font sizes, particularly for people whose vision is not perfect. It is dramatically more legible to me than Calibri.

I'd rather pay $9.99 per month for what Netflix used to be before all the companies said, "I can milk these properties for more money if I create my own streaming service and cut out the middleman."

There may or may not be too many streaming services, but there are WAY too many streaming services owned by content distributors. You can't have any sort of meaningful free market among streaming providers if they're all just providing their own content. You still have competition among content providers at that point, but zero competition on the streaming itself.

I wouldn't call plant-based meat alternatives "healthy" unless your idea of healthy is dying of salt poisoning.

Apple was one of the cofounders of ARM (the company) in 1990. It did not create the architecture, though it likely had an impact on ARM6 (ARMv3 architecture) and later. Either way, the ARM architecture probably would not still exist if ARM (the company) hadn't been founded. The ability for multiple companies to design and manufacture chips turned out to be critical for its long-term survival and viability in the cell phone market and others.

ARM (short for Acorn RISC Machine or Advanced RISC Machine) is an acronym, and all letters are capitalized. Arm is something attached to your torso.

I'm not saying Apple Silicon isn't better than the competition — it is — but that's not a fair comparison. Raspberry Pi's performance is largely because they use Broadcom chips, which stay several generations behind the state of the art. For example, the Raspberry Pi 5 (released in 2023) was designed around the Cortex A76 CPU (released in 2018).

Disagree. They put blazingly fast single-core performance and roughly half the speed of a workstation-class laptop in the power envelope of a netbook.

• M5 PassMark CPU Mark: (28561 multi / 6001 single)
• Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX top-end laptop chip (56007 multi / 4745 single)
• i9-14900KS top-end desktop chip (60511 multi / 4828 single)

They're nowhere near the top overall, but their single-core performance (which affects perceived speed more than multi-core performance, typically) is at the top.

You really can make the comparison. Which one is best depends on the workload.

Yeah, that's about right. But Apple also uses those chips in desktop, where the comparison is not nearly as rosy.

Don't get me wrong, I love my M1 MacBook Pro. The battery life is spectacular, and performance is good enough. But I'd be lying if I said there weren't workflows for which Intel would be better. :-)

No, it's how you get mens rea for the felony murder rule. You didn't carry the gun with the intent to kill, only to intimidate, but you still had a guilty mind, and if you then used the gun to kill someone in the heat of the moment, there's your mens rea.

And remember that actual cause does not mean literally pulling the trigger. At least in the U.S., the courts apply a "but for" test. If the event would not have happened without the previous event, then the previous event is considered the actual, not proximate cause. The police would not have shot the other person but for the perpetrator pointing a gun at someone (and possibly shooting at the police).

IMO, that's not meaningfully different than involuntary manslaughter convictions for allowing unsafe working conditions at a construction site or leaving your loaded gun out where a child can take it, both of which have happened.