This seems like an entirely academic, theoretical technique with literally zero real world risk, and without any path forward to ever turn it into a practical attack.
kirklennon
joined 1 year ago
As a practical matter all they have to do is not proactively block their iPad apps from being available, which is the default.
Literally zero effort: Their iPad app is available for the Vision Pro and works perfectly fine.
Minor effort: Block the iPad app from being available.
Extra effort: make a specialized visionOS app that takes advantage of additional hardware features.
Why are they just outright stripping this feature instead of just paying the patent fee? (As in literally removing the chips, actually stripping it.)
They're not. Despite some misleading press coverage, Apple never remotely suggested they were removing any hardware. They're just going to start importing them without the "functionality." They're disabling it in the US via software while they go through the legal process. When it's all done, they can activate it for everyone.
As for why they're not paying, Apple's position is that their product does not infringe any patents, and this is not an outlandish position. Apple has already had most of Masimo's patent claims from a dozen total patents invalidated. The ITC ban is a result of a single patent still currently left standing that Apple believes should never have been issued and is working to have invalidated.
I think there's a very good chance Apple succeeds and Masimo is left with no relevant patents. If they go through everything and Masimo is still left with something, at that point Apple can negotiate with them on a reasonable fee, and they'll be doing so from a position of relative strength. Masimo was obviously hoping an ITC ban would cause Apple to blink and pay whatever Masimo wanted. Clearly that didn't happen and Apple would prefer go for total vindication.
I won’t shed any tears for Amazon etc having to give Apple a huge chunk of cash
Amazon doesn't have to give Apple a huge chunk of cash though. Apps don't pay anything to Apple for real-world stuff being sold. Amazon pays nothing for the tens of billions of dollars purchased every year from iPhones. The only thing they pay Apple for is if someone uses the Prime Video app to buy or rent something or subscribe to Prime Video, but who does not already have an Amazon account (with saved card) that they're signed into. We're probably talking a number measured in the thousands of dollars. Uber, for example, pays Apple nothing other than their annual developer account fee (or fees, assuming they have multiple accounts).
this sounds like a way to frustrate small developers who don’t have a whole team to devote to their finances.
Nobody is going to actually use this program so there's no real world extra accounting cost. Previously Apple charged 30% for a combined payment handling and commission. A court determined they had to let developers handle their own payments so Apple complied and said the commission is 27%. It's invariably cheaper to just stick with Apple's 30%.
Everyone always wants more money. Developers would love to pay less; Apple would love to make more. The 30% max fee (in practice less for many developers) has been pretty successful for everyone involved. I think people can quibble over the "right" number, but I don't think it's wrong that there's a sales commission for access to a profitable platform.
If you are a developer, what right does Apple have to seeing your finances for all purchases made in the app that they sold on their store?
It's a commission for sales that came from the app, meaning from Apple's platform, where they have roughly one billion above-average income users with a reputation for buying apps and subscriptions.
It's also worth keeping in mind that there are different ways of monetizing platforms, none of which are necessarily morally better or worse than the other. Microsoft's IDE, Visual Studio, is $45 or $250 per user per month (so $4500 annually for a team of ten). Xcode, Apple's IDE, is free. A business can offer its apps on the App Store, which also serves the files, for a grand total of $99/year.
Amazon doesn't even pay a dividend. Do you think suppliers are just gifting their products to Amazon? Amazon is a pretty low-margin company on the whole.
- This is advertising. It's not the most worst example, but it's still fundamentally an ad.
- Revenue is absolutely the wrong metric to use. If you had $100 of revenue and $99 in costs, you have only $1 left to pay your fines. Amazon did not earn enough to pay its fines in 1 hour and 50 minutes because most of that that money was used to buy and deliver the products, plus various other expenses. The blog post is misstating the numbers by over an order of magnitude for some of the companies. If you're going to do it, do it right at least. The profit numbers are just as easy to come by as revenue.
I’m not sure why the entire phone experience needs to be slowed down by some percent for every phone of a particular model.
It's not. The throttling is dynamic based on current battery state and current power demands. If you're doing stuff that's low-demand, you probably won't be experiencing any throttling at all. If you do something demanding, only then does it slow down, and only to the extent needed. It may be as simple as dimming the screen brightness a bit while taking a video. Or maybe you've edited some video and need to export it. Instead of, for example, the five seconds that it would have taken, it will slow the processor down and take ten seconds. And then when you're back to just scrolling web pages, the throttling may be gone again. The more severely degraded your battery is and the lower its charge level, the more you'll experience throttling, but you'll only experience throttling at the moments when, without it, your phone would have instead just shut itself off. It comes and goes as needed.
No, it will never go away because it's a legitimately good feature that was introduced in order to extend the useful life of older devices with degraded batteries. Old batteries can't always consistently deliver the same power as newer batteries. Before "Batterygate" your phone would just shut itself off in the middle of whatever you were doing. That's the baseline experience. To prevent this, Apple developed a software update to, when and to the extend needed, dynamically throttle power demand in order to stay within the limits of the battery. On a full charge at room temperature, even a degraded battery may still be able to support full unthrottled performance, but if it gets too hot, or if your battery is low, it might not. Even then you may still be able to do stuff without any throttling, but if you do something that requires a spike in power consumption, it might need to be temporarily throttled then, through some combination of slightly slower performance (often not even noticeable) or a slightly dimmed screen. The more degraded your battery gets, the more it will need to throttle.
There are no scenarios where a sudden shutdown is actually preferable to throttling. This was a pro-consumer move that make old iPhones more usefull. It's a shame that Apple was bullied into adding the ability to disable the throttling feature.
My point is that adding the CC notice doesn't make any violations traceable or even less likely. Your comments are just as likely to be scraped with it versus without it. You're not adding any restrictions on the use of the comments; you're just selectively removing some restrictions.
So, instead of providing all our comments for free to LLMs, how about adding a copyright notice to everything we write?
Legally everything you write is already copyrighted, and no notice is required. Creative Commons licenses are a way to reduce the restrictions on what people can do with your content. They don't impose any extra obligations beyond what would exist without any copyright notice at all.
It's a commission for access to a lucrative market that Apple created. Apple gives away the developer tools and charges an extremely modest annual App Store fee, which also covers the review process and hosting. It's been common for platform creators to charge third-party developers in some capacity for many decades. Some do it by charging high costs for the developer tools, others by charging a commission based on sales. I don't think any strategy is necessarily better or worse than the other on a legal or moral basis; they're just business decisions. Previously Apple has combined the commission and payment processing costs into one fee. Apple made a decision on what they wanted to offer developers on that platform and Epic wasn't satisfied with it. They got a court to agree on what is ultimately a minor technical point in how Apple's deal is packaged so Apple is offering an alternative that they don't want to but complies with the law. It's, ultimately, a worse deal for the developer. Developers don't have a right to demand that some arbitrary percentage is the right one, tough. Apple offered a deal: take it or leave it. Developers are perfectly free to leave it.