> The Core Technology Fee, a per-install fee for developers that achieve extraordinary scale, will be replaced by the Core Technology Commission, a simple 5 percent commission on digital transactions in apps distributed outside the App Store. The new terms also eliminate the initial acquisition fee and store services fee.
[...]
> In order to keep EU users as safe as possible, Apple will continue to require every alternatively distributed app to go through Notarization — a baseline review focused on basic functionality and protection from serious threats.
All in all, still extremely anti-consumer. If I can download and run arbitrary code on my Mac--even if I have to jump through scary warnings--why should I not be able to do so on my phone? Why would one computing platform be different from the other?
One thing that ticks me off about this conversation is they are always framed as anti-consumer, instead of anti-developer. It's Tim Sweeney, Mark Zuckerberg, and the ad networks who have the biggest gripe with these policies, not consumers. Consumers are the ones who bear the brunt of the cost when it comes to developers who desperately need to exercise their right to capture every and any piece of data the OS provides.
>If I can download and run arbitrary code on my Mac--even if I have to jump through scary warnings--why should I not be able to do so on my phone?
We saw how developers used that "freedom" - now all almost all software runs in a remote server and is delivered through a sandbox (and even then developers try as hard as possible to poison that as well).
Anti-developer is anti-consumer because it creates a barrier to entry as a supplier in a market where consumers create the demand, but I suppose the main thesis behind calling it anti-consumer is that competition among suppliers is generally considered good for consumers for keeping prices and product/service quality in check.
>who desperately need to exercise their right to capture every and any piece of data the OS provides.
thankfully the EU has extensive privacy regulations prohibiting developers from doing just that, so we can enjoy open platforms instead of being at the mercy of a private corporations protection racket as if it's the 19th century
>open platforms instead of being at the mercy of a private corporations protection racket as if it's the 19th century
But your gripe is not about open platforms. Your gripe is that Apple iOS is not an open platform. Those are two different things, there are open platforms out there.
My complaint is that iOS as a closed platform is a feature, and Apple has been a good steward for that platform that has made it a stable computing platform for the general public. Corporations (cosplaying as "poor indie developers"), are simply frustrated that Apple isn't allowing them to abuse their users for extra dollars.
These same "developers" who pretend to care so deeply about open platforms don't even distribute their software on Linux. The concern trolling about open platforms is a farce. Picking on epic games again - you can't play Fortnite on Linux. It's "open platforms for me, but not for thee"
Forget the advertising angle, lets look at payments. Apple forces you to use their payment processor and they charge a larger fee. What does the consumer get? They get a single control panel for all their subscriptions that they can cancel at any time. "Developers" hate this - not because they want to charge you less, but so that they can make you jump through 50 hoops in order to cancel.
If I have to choose between two evil corporations, Apple and the greater tech industry that shit on the web, I'm picking Apple. If I care about open platforms, I'll move to an open platform, not lobby the government for Apple to open theirs.
>, but so that they can make you jump through 50 hoops in order to cancel.
again, doesn't apply in the EU. Consumer Rights Directive passed a few years ago stipulates that any subscription must be as easy to cancel as it is to sign up, and created a 'two click rule'.
Practical example of this is Amazon, here in the EU it takes exactly two clicks, in a lot of other jurisdictions you have to jump through half a dozen pages.
You might have to choose between two evil corporations, my point was I don't. Here we can open Apple up so they don't get to extract platform rent and I'm still not at the mercy of Tim Sweeney. Being governed by robber barons instead of your own government is an ideological choice, if you enjoy living like that fine but we don't.
A closed platform can only ever be a feature if you're so disempowered that private companies are running circles around you, otherwise it's just anti-consumer and anti-developer behavior.
We can? Last time I checked everyone and their mother is collecting all kinds of data for nefarious purposes. EU has a snowball's chance in hell keeping up, and when they eventually get around to issuing a fine it's so small and irrelevant compared to money made that it's business as usual.
Are those regulations adequately enforced? Lots of smaller developers out of jurisdication, and lots of bigger ones treat it as a cost of doing business: the data is worth more than the fines.
Thank you. There is a huge difference between "developers being able to do anything they want to the user's system" and "users being able to do anything they want with their own system." I'm strongly against the former and strongly for the latter.
App developers have shown time and time again that they will abuse every single resource on the user's system they can get their claws into. If they can get it, they will use APIs meant for accessibility and disabled users to remote-control your system. If they can get it, they will use location/GPS when their app has nothing to do with location. If they can get it, they will spam you with notifications and alerts. The USER needs to have control over these and the ability to stop abusive developers from running roughshod over their computers.
> We saw how developers used that "freedom" - now all almost all software runs in a remote server and is delivered through a sandbox (and even then developers try as hard as possible to poison that as well).
Evil developers forcing poor users to download their applications.
Guess we all to suffer with braindead supercomputers in our pockets, because granny gran installed hax to get free gems for a gacha (that she downloaded from Apple approved App Store).
>Guess we all to suffer with braindead supercomputers in our pockets
Complete non-sequitur. You don't have to suffer, you can just buy a different platform. Android has had alternate stores for decades.
This is concern trolling. If you cared about having an open platform, you could just not buy apple. But that's not what you care about - you want to be able to push your shitty software onto other people's supercomputers without Apple getting in the way.
> You don't have to suffer, you can just buy a different platform. Android has had alternate stores for decades.
Because the only difference between Apple and Android crap is only software, of course? I won't fit into the message limit if I start listing issues that I have with Android garbage.
> If you cared about having an open platform, you could just not buy apple. But that's not what you care about
Where did I say anything about open platform? Are you hallucinating LLM or something? I just want to install whatever I write for myself without going through the hoops of weekly resigning and big brother approving what I do on a device that I OWN.
> you want to be able to push your shitty software onto other people's supercomputers without Apple getting in the way.
> We saw how developers used that "freedom" - now all almost all software runs in a remote server and is delivered through a sandbox (and even then developers try as hard as possible to poison that as well).
What are you talking about exactly?
On linux I can run any software I want, and how is that bad?
Your approach is fine, if that is something important to use then use linux. What I dislike is taking a platform where the sandbox is a feature, and crying you aren't allowed to shit in the sandbox.
> If I can download and run arbitrary code on my Mac--even if I have to jump through scary warnings--why should I not be able to do so on my phone?
I just bought a new m5 macbook air. The day that I can't treat my MacOS laptop as basically a glorified NeXT workstation and install/run code of my own choice (albeit after going through a few scary warnings in the default user protecting system preferences, like allow to run unsigned code, etc), is the day I stop buying apple hardware and just use linux laptops again.
I see news about apple thinking about "merging" MacOS and iOS and making a touch screen macbook and it really makes me think they are going to try to do this in the near future.
> "is the day I stop buying apple hardware and just use linux laptops again."
I bought a Linux laptop 1 or 2 years ago (after many years of using Macbooks), and was very surprised how well Linux works nowadays.
As a matter of fact, in many areas Linux is even better than macOS. There's so many annoying bugs in macOS that interrupt your workflow on a daily basis.
So, my Linux laptop is a lot more stable too.
Would definitely recommend giving Linux a try
(Unless maybe if you have very little "tech" knowledge. I would not recommend it to everyone and their grandmother just yet, since they probably aren't aware of the consequences and howto migrate things.)
It's not that I haven't given it a try, my primary desktop machine is debian stable and xfce4 with the libraries installed to also run a bunch of gnome and kde-native applications, but that right now I prefer macos for laptop use... Primarily due to suspend/resume working properly, the touchpad, and certain user interface things in MacOS that make working with a single smaller screen easier for extensive multitasking (expose hot corners of screen to quickly see all windows, switch windows, etc).
I haven't had any suspend/resume issues for years on laptops with Linux. I've used multiple ThinkPads and Dell XPS machines. Currently rocking an ancient MacBook air from 2014 running Ubuntu which also doesn't have any issues.
I use Asahi Linux as my M2 work laptop on a daily basis. Other than the lack of USB external display support, which I don't use, and sleep eating up about 1% of battery per hour it works incredibly well. I have an 13th gen Intel laptop that I got last year and Asahi just runs circles around it on Linux with just about everything.
For desktop and server, sure. MacBook is superior for everything that matters in a laptop. The touchpad alone is a dream. compare that to constant pain for the thousands of hours I will use the device over it's lifetime.
Apple makes nice hardware, but it's definitely not superior for everything, and the gap between other manufacturers isn't really there anymore on the upper end.
So sure - the Macbook is better than a cheap ~$500 laptop. But between my work issued Macbook and my nice Dell XPS? Not much difference. In either price or hardware...
Honestly, even between the macbook and my framework - not enough of a difference to really be that upset about (my biggest complaint is mostly just battery life).
---
Personally, I would argue that OS is a much bigger pain point to deal with, and you should probably factor that higher in the decision than the hardware. Just expect to spend roughly the same on the machine (Apple is still ~20% more)
And none of these are meaningfully different on high end laptops from other providers.
Apple had a window with M1 devices where I'd probably agree they were just better. Apple also has a history of making devices that are very expensive, and have a corresponding higher quality (ex - in the 2000s when most laptop manufacturers were racing to the bottom, and things like the Eee pc were considered hot - lots of garbage quality windows machines).
But many manufacturers today have entries in the "High quality, high price" category, and they're very similar.
The size is almost identical to an M5 laptop, the battery life is almost identical to an M5 laptop, the touchpad is almost identical to an M5 laptop (personally, I actually like the touchpad on the xps slightly more because the cutout on the front of macbooks is sharp, and I find it annoying and painful for long use, but I also have very large hands and I'm left handed).
And also - the price is functionally the same as the new M5 laptops.
All of those land in the +/- 10% range of each other. With just slight differences (ex - I can get a touchscreen on the XPS if I want, but it makes the battery life 15hrs instead of 18hrs on the macbook. The XPS is also fractionally lighter (3lbs vs 3.4lbs). The macbook is ~10% faster on single core benchmarks then the intel series 3, but identical to slightly worse on multicore. etc...)
Basically - unless you're actually using different machines here... stop it, you're talking out your ass (cough - fanboy - cough).
Even the framework... yes - it's clearly not as "good" as the $3600 macbook I have. I don't expect it to be given I paid ~$1500 for it. But it also excels in other areas that make it worth considering - I have 3 young kids, and I've had the screen pulled flat several times, the touchpad got a cup of milk dumped in it, and my oldest shoved a screwdriver into a usb-c port. Turns out new screen hinges were ~$19, the touchpad was ~$21, and the replacement port was $9. All done at home myself with simple tools.
Compared to several trips to a store and weeks without a laptop... that's a type of ergonomics that I prefer right now.
Eh, it depends on how you use it. I have a heavily used Linux laptop that's almost a decade old and I still love it.
I've had various work and personal MacBooks over the years and don't really miss them. It sounds like their quality has gotten somewhat better in recent cycles but the era of keyboards so fragile they break if you sneeze on them, and gimmicks like turning part of the keyboard into a touch screen were terrible. I would absolutely take a Linux machine from that era that costs half as much over any of those devices.
One caveat is that there are Apple-specific features like some of the trackpad gestures that I've never been a heavy user of. Partly because they aren't that interesting to me, and partly because I don't like having my workflows and muscle memory tied to a specific platform I don't control. Someone heavily into those features might have a harder time switching away.
How is that touchpad better than any other? My wife has Macbook Air, I don't see any difference between touchpad on my linux Dell 5680 compared to the Macbook.
It sounds similar to people that praise "haptic feedback" on phones, and describe feedback on some devices as extraordinary. (vibration device, seriously?)
Macbook has nice hardware, if I can ignore the strange keyboard layout, although I would prefer bigger keyboard and smaller touchpad.
Macbook software is something that is so bad compared to linux that I won't even comment.
Glad to see I am not the only one. Many years ago I had a laptop with a pointing stick, aka "the clit", and that was surprisingly easy to use. But touchpads? No matter how fancy and expensive you make them, they will always be a bad interface.
Haptic feedback touchpad is vastly superior to the button style. Less force required makes it easier to move your finger while the "button" is pressed. Most higher end laptops use it as the standard touchpad these days. MacOS is also well optimized for touchpads to the point that the traditional mouse experience is somewhat degraded. The smoothness and interactivity of the animations in response to touchpad gestures give a powerful placebo effect for how good the hardware is.
Multiple other competitive laptops have haptic trackpads with the list growing every year.
Lenovo and Framework have great ones, so does Microsoft and other brands I can’t think of right now.
I also find it that “macOS is well-optimized for touchpads” actually means “macOS is hostile to traditional mice and keyboards so that Apple can sell you external mice that cost 3x the price of alternatives even though you’re using your laptop at a stationary desk with external monitor 80% of the time”.
Plug in a traditional mouse to macOS and you’ll see how horrible the OS is with it for no reason. I needed third party mouse software just to play Minecraft without a horrendous scroll wheel experience for the item bar. There’s no built-in OS setting to have separate scroll directions for trackpad versus external mouse even though such a setup is highly logical. You need third party software for that. Meanwhile, on Linux that configuration option is built-in to Gnome and KDE.
Most trackpad gestures in macOS don’t need to be trackpad gestures at all and seem to be aimed at selling expensive peripherals and making Apple’s trackpad advantage larger than it would be if their system used a different OS. There’s no advantage to three finger swiping versus a traditional keyboard shortcut (to be fair, macOS also offers the keyboard shortcuts).
With the exception of flying on an airplane, grabbing a $30 mouse out of your backpack and plopping it on the table is perfectly acceptable and portable solution and often better than any trackpad imaginable for deep productive work.
Anyway, that last bit is a tangent and a rant of mine, but either way, the list of reasons to prefer a Mac is shrinking every day, if you ask me.
For example, MacBook Pros aren’t at the top of the battery life charts anymore, that honor goes to the Framework 13 Pro with the Panther Lake chips.
Unfortunately, not to my knowledge. I wouldn’t be surprised if they get a retail partner soon, though. Surely they must realize that Micro Center would be an ideal partner for their demographic.
I own the original chassis 13, AMD 7640U. My previous laptop was a MacBook Pro M2 14”.
There are some clear downgrades: battery life, screen, speakers. Processing power, yeah, though it’s not like I ever maxed out the one I had.
I love having ample storage though. 2TB/32GB in a MacBook Pro was wildly out of my price range. Back in the good old days of early 2025 buying those components yourself was something like a $200-300 cost while the Mac was closer to a thousand bucks. The keyboard is superior to a MacBook Pro in my eyes. I also started to really, really despise the notch and the way the menu bar software fights it.
My Framework 13 Pro arrives tomorrow. It appears like it should address every complaint I have on my original 13”. It’s just too bad about the RAM situation otherwise LPCAMM2 would be a benefit rather than something of a detractor like it is today. I’m one of the lucky people who snagged an old stock 32GB module for $250 during the announcement keynote. You’re almost better off with soldered memory in the current situation, but hopefully that’s temporary.
It’s a dream with Linux compatibility, as you’d expect. I enjoy the fact that I can play real games on Steam compared to the macOS situation where gaming was always a pain. There are also a lot of things I like about CachyOS and KDE a lot better than macOS. In a lot of ways it’s freeing, but some commercial software is obviously missing.
Apple is the worst about this. "It works on my computer" but it won't on your computer, because Apple will quarantine my code when it gets copied to your computer, so it can't run on your computer because it's "damaged". Unless I pay Apple $100/yr. Microsoft is worse these days, but that's no excuse.
The "merging" is the "convergence" meme. Tech journos like it because they can say "the coming unification" and it has a kind of mythic taste and they're casual thinkers. If (when?) Apple goes down that path, their entire value prop will be dead and gone. The Linux Desktop will come as everything else simply decays.
yes, though the level of headache is relatively minimal. I meant I'd stop using it if things became completely impossible to run unsigned code (or the hassle went from a couple of extra seconds of work to some convoluted process) . Additionally something like this takes less than a minute to do once.
> yes, though the level of headache is relatively minimal
Minimal if you're technical, completely incomprehensible if you're not. I mean I know when the OS says "this application is damaged and should be deleted" that it's lying and there is a terminal command for it, I can never remember it off the top of my head.
At least the right click open thing was something a normie could remember, but a non-technical person doesn't understand navigating a file structure and running a terminal command on a file with flags.
SOC2 and other compliance frameworks will take charge of making those flags compulsory, with the threat of being uninsured and willfully personally responsible in case of breach.
At least computers of all other normal workers would be locked down; Those of developers could have development tools but certainly shouldn't be able to connect to production servers or have customer invoicing data in them. Maybe buy two computers for developers with legal tasks? Win-win for Apple.
The water is fine! All you have to do is a little song and dance now and then, and you hardly even feel the heat. If it was boiling I'd be out of here in a jiffy.
First, Gatekeeper was introduced, but you could globally set in system preferences if unsigned software is enabled. Then this setting option was removed. What will come next? I do not know but I started to migrate off the ecosystem. Just in case.
(At least on macOS one can still disable routined. Unlnike on iOS.)
There was a time I was worried about them doing this (during the touchbar Macbook era) but I think the Mac is once again viewed by Apple as extremely important. I think it's more likely we see a split of the iPad line in the next few years - Pros run macOS, whereas the base iPad, iPad Mini, and iPad Air continue to run iOS which is being modified for larger screens of foldables anyway. iPadOS goes away
> is the day I stop buying apple hardware and just use linux laptops again.
Kinda tempted to do that already just because of Liquid Glass.
I mean, if I'm going to be stuck with a *nix OS whose UI is badly thought out and inconsistent between apps, might as well take the cheaper option, right?
yeah, but if only suspend/resume worked near flawlessly... I've had MacOS crash on suspend or resume before, but I'd say it happens less than 1/10th of 1% of the time I sleep or resume my laptop.
There is no actual "news" about that, because it is, and always has been, bullshit.
People talk about it every time Apple releases a new major OS update with UI changes that make macOS and iOS look similar, or a new laptop form factor, because it gets clicks. It's basically the new "Apple is Doomed!" (Which, in case you weren't paying attention to the tech press pre-2010, was the perennial narrative around them—and yes, it did take years after the runaway success of the iPhone for the stories to stop.)
> All in all, still extremely anti-consumer. If I can download and run arbitrary code on my Mac--even if I have to jump through scary warnings--why should I not be able to do so on my phone?
Don’t worry. They’re working really hard to fix the bug. It’s not intended that you can install without paying a fee.
There is a big difference between fighting to keep their walled garden in IOS alive and nuking the entire developer ecosystem that they have built on macos.
Strictly speaking, you can. Enable developer mode, connect your phone to your Mac (you need a Mac), and you can build and install whatever code you want.
Asterisks being that your phone will uninstall it after a while I think, and you need to create a free account for Xcode.
The up to 3 apps per device stay but cannot be opened after 7 days until refreshed.
And "whatever code you want" here excludes JIT compilation, or as I understand it memory that is both writable and executable, as your app would require a special 'entitlement' from Apple.
Seriously? I have a custom Android app that I use. It's mostly vibe coded now, which I'm a bit embarrassed about, but demonstrates that the bar for custom software is very low at the moment and getting lower.
I considered getting an iPhone to replace my S-series Samsung, the only reason I stayed with Samsung is for the S-Pen. Had I gone with iPhone I would not be able to write and run my own software? That's absolutely ridiculous.
Apple's internal justification for this is that the iPhone and iPad are consumer devices designed for maximum comfort and safety, whereas the Mac is a device designed for developers and professionals. From their perspective there's legitimate demand for both, and they serve both market needs.
BTW you can't download and run arbitrary code on your Mac unless you break out a terminal and do developer-y things, because notarization has been a requirement on macOS for years. There is no clicking through scary warnings. macOS will simply tell you that an unnotarized app is broken and refuse to open it via any GUI path that exists. You'll have to strip the quarantine xattrs at the UNIX level to bypass it.
> Apple's internal justification for this is that the iPhone and iPad are consumer devices designed for maximum comfort and safety, whereas the Mac is a device designed for developers and professionals.
Then why did they recently launch a MacBook that costs less than an iPhone and a marketing campaign targeted at existing iPhone users?
> If you love iPhone, you'll love Mac. Mac is designed to be just as easy to learn as iPhone.
Actually, it is just apple started with app store/closed with the iphone, and got away with it.
for the mac - I don't think they could close the platform.
What I think they could do is make the ipad more appealing, add a keyboard, then kill the mac like they killed the mac pro. (fire your low-value customers)
> Why would one computing platform be different from the other?
Good question - maybe ask Epic (a video game company known for Fortnite) why they sued Apple and Google while ignoring Sony, Nintendo and (the Xbox portion of) Microsoft.
As arstechnica noted:
> "That might help explain why console makers feel the need to guard their 30-percent cut on software and microtransaction sales. But it doesn’t really explain why a company like Epic would be OK with paying that fee to Sony but not to Apple."
The messages on Mac are becoming more ridiculous and cumbersome each upgrade though. Kind of sick of jumping through System Settings hoops every time I upgrade an app
Every time I’m forced to do it[0] I feel good because I’m glad these hoops are unavoidable on all the computers of the people I provide family tech support for.
[0] Which is rare. I’m installing random shit all the time using homebrew and it’s basically never an issue.
Except that it's easier to invalidate an entire signing certificate than to hope your malware definition satisfies all mechanically generated permutations of the malware.
How does that help you when the malware authors can get more signing certificates the same way they got the first one?
Notice that this is easier for malware authors to do than ordinary people because their business is compromising others' machines, so then they can use the signing keys of any victims who have a developer account, or sign up for new ones using stolen cards from any of the victims.
Meanwhile you would then have Apple revoking the victims' signing certificates and screwing their honest users who can now no longer install the non-malicious software they previously released.
The entire premise is a scam to extract an annual fee from a million small developers.
You know what's even easier than getting a signing certificate for malware? Not bothering with signing at all.
And revoking a cert for one "dev" does not mean revoking everything, as for them stealing signing keys from other devs (not typical users, but security literate) how often does that happen, especially in the case of apple with sandboxing etc?
I'm honestly baffled as to how EU regulators can see Apple's behavior as compliance. They're doing everything they did before, perhaps changing only to temporarily turn down the intensity a bit.
If what we were discussing was hacky ways of installing apps on your own device rather than distribution to end users, you can do without the Developer membership cost.
It would just be limited to 3 apps per device that require to be refreshed every 7 days to continue to be able to open them.
Web apps are a non starter for iOS since the only allowed browser on iOS happens to not support crucial standards and may drop your app's persistent data.
Because a Raspberry Pi would be very inconvenient to use as a smartphone, obviously. Doesn't explain why it makes sense to treat one ARM computer as a mildly locked jail (Macs) and another as a hard locked jail (iPhones and other handhelds); I feel like the only explanation here is that the smartphone duopoly has worked hard to condition customers into accepting this.
> I feel like the only explanation here is that the smartphone duopoly has worked hard to condition customers into accepting this.
This is older than the current smartphone duopoly; IIRC, with a few exceptions like the N900 and the Palm Treo, cell phones were always very locked down. It probably came initially from the phone companies being control freaks, and wanting to restrict which devices (even mechanical ones with no electrical or radio interface) could be attached to their phone system.
Yes, phone companies did not want this parties devices attached to their analog network, which basically was a low voltage power grid.
I don't know if we can say that those old phones were locked down: either they could not run any software at all or they run only what they got in their factory settings.
Symbian phones, palmtops from the 90s and the like could run apps and I did write a few of them. Usually Java and an emulator on my computer and an upload to the phone. They were almost general purpose computing devices but it was hard to get a 30% tax on them. All of these policies from Apple derive from the will of making money from services, not only from the hardware. It's understandable because it's a lot of money.
If apps will ever start losing money to Apple (e.g. they are forced to distribute them for free), apps will be dead, the Store will shut down, nothing could be installed anymore (privacy, safety, think of the children) and everything will be done with a web browser.
You technically don’t need to pay if you just want to run your app on your phone. If you want to distribute your app with Testflight or the App Store you need to pay.
As long as you're willing to re-sign and reinstall it every 7 days, that is. The free certificates Apple hands out have expiry set to a week, and AFAIK you can't configure your own iPhone to trust your own certificate.
> The curated experience on iOS is a feature, not a bug.
Which experience do you mean? The crApp Store full of obvious scams? The abuse of the built-in push notifications and apps to advertise Apple "services" on every device? I mean, how many damn times do I have to say no to Apple Arcade or iCloud+?
These aren't problems I face often. I especially don't get random push notifications about Apple (or any other) services, so I'm not sure what's going on for you.
Microsoft proposed locked-down PCs decades ago and got criticism from sources as mainstream as the New York Times. Everyone more technical than that, with the possible exception of corporate IT types flatly rejected it.
I'm sad there was so much less backlash to restricting user control on phones.
Microsoft sell locked down PCs today. Secure Boot cannot be disabled, nor new keys enrolled, on Windows PCs that ship with an ARM processor (yes they exist). It's as if Apple decided to lock down Macbooks when they switched to M-series. The only thing keeping PCs "free" is that ARM processors suck at the high end if you're not Apple, so it's seen as acceptable market segmentation. It's purely arbitrary though, just like it's purely arbitrary that you can put Linux on a Macbook but not an iPad despite having the same SoC.
They do, and 20 years ago a move like that would have also drawn widespread condemnation.
It's not as big a problem as it is with phones though because the vast majority of PCs on the market are not locked down in this way, and only a handful of PC applications (a few competitive games) use remote attestation to check for an unmodified Microsoft OS.
Well here's EU regulators working with Apple directly to allow it. I honestly think that's worse, the EU government took the time to allow this directly. It's not just a case of the existing laws not being clear in this instance, it's the EU working with Apple to come up with this 'solution'.
5% tax on all digital transactions (still applies to Kindle ebooks too I'm guessing?) and all applications have to go through an Apple review process. That's ridiculous for a government to explicitly agree to.
Governments will agree to that because at the end of the day it gives them a party they can go to. In this instance if they want Apple or Google to remove an app they can. It gives them the ability to use that option whenever they don't like something it's not by accident. Its a win-win for them and Apple/Google. You are never going to get the wild wild west we have on the pc platform ever again.
On mobile we have a duopoly, Apple/Google. While Apple has their platform on lockdown since day one, Google is slowly making its way there. Where does that leave the average users?
The dominance of Microsoft actually depended on openness.
The IBM PC commoditized hardware and software, which facilitated PC clones. When IBM licensed DOS from MS, it allowed MS to license a version to non-IBM computers too. Thus, IBM ended up commoditizing itself and became replaceable, with the MS OS as the new standard.
Apple can lock down iPhones because it's the sole provider of the software and the hardware.
They successfully did it, basically, if you read about Xbox's architecture. It's a really interesting look into how we basically wouldn't own our Windows PCs if they used that tech in their mainstream software and hardware.
> Why would one computing platform be different from the other?
Because malware breaking the sandbox of one of them can mostly only spy on the owner, while malware breaking the sandbox of the other can spy on whoever the owner walks past, GPS trace their movements…
Question for those with more industry knowledge than me: If you assume a broken sandbox, is it possible for an app to record phone calls, then use that recording to create a deepfaked voice that can then be transmitted as a new call? My naïve assumption is "yes obviously", but for all I know the hardware has some way to activate a switched circuit from the phone service to the speaker and microphone that can't have other sound data pass through it.
LOL. That security bogeyman argument is a convenient post-hoc justification. The real reason is much simpler: Because "computers" started out with "Owner can run code of their choice on it" as one of the main definitional qualities agreed upon by the market.
Devices which only ran code that the vendor had specially packaged for the device always had other names, like Games Console, Word Processor, MP3 Player, Graphing Calculator, or just plain "Toy." Nobody confused those with computers and nobody accepted them as computers.
Phones entered this world already in that second category, long before Apple even considered making one. Apple kept an iron grip at first and after careful consideration, decided to only allow third-parties to even enter on terms extremely favorable and profitable to Apple, and always under their direct control.
Closing off the Mac would be very messy and also cause tremendous headaches due to it being the development platform for iOS. They don't want to bother. But the reason iOS is closed is because it's always been closed, and they'll never open it unless forced, because money.
I respect your overall point but I think the picture is more nuanced than that. "Computer" as a term is simply unpopular, in favor of something referencing the intended application, as determined by things like the form factor:
Graphing Calculators are computers in every sense, it's hard to find one you can't at least program in a high level language like Basic or Python, and many accept assembly programs - even Texas Instruments models did, before their signing keys were brute forced.
Games consoles too almost invariably run third party code, although they tend not to be end user programmable - no different than an iPhone in that regard, really.
"Feature phones" - pre-smartphone phones with cameras and internet etc - usually had the ability to run Java Midlets without manufacturer blessing, even though you couldn't touch the OS. You could SSH into servers from those!
I think a big problem is that the distinction between "general purpose computer" and "end user programmable general purpose computer" is functionally meaningless when you can't write programs, which is most people. Instead they understand it in a functional context - what is this device for? How does it compare to how such devices usually work? The general purpose CPU inside is an implementation detail, and just because you think of an iPhone as a computer doesn't mean everyone does. They think of it as a "phone".
> usually had the ability to run Java Midlets without manufacturer
I had to respond first to this - I happened to grow up with Verizon phones. They had the manufacturers ship variants that replaced Java with BREW - some locked-down bastardized atrocity with DRM, which could only be acquired through purchasing in an on-device App Store (Called "Get It Now"). I knew about how everyone else had Java on their dumbphones though. But overall in that era the meme is accurate that if you even accidentally pushed the "Internet" button on your phone, the ensuing insane per-KB data charges would be noticeable. No one I know used any such apps or features.
Anyway, I didn't mean to suggest "end user programmable" was a requirement to be a computer. I meant that the computer owner expects that the computer manufacturer isn't gatekeeping.
Now, a GameCube or PlayStation buyer may have seen the gatekeeping as a positive -- knowing that Nintendo wouldn't bless a cartridge/disc that was pornographic, bomb-making instructions, or what have you, they felt it was a safer device to put in a kid's bedroom than a Windows XP computer.
I posit: To normal people, "A computer" is a subset of devices which, conceptually speaking, wants to be usable for a maximum of purposes. In other words, if you gave someone a variety of tasks (Edit the file on this flash drive, do your taxes, sort 100 photos into 3 folders based on occasion and print the best 3 of each, find an email you sent 3 months ago and quote excerpts from it) and then presented them with a bunch of devices from all the categories I mentioned, basically everyone knows a Mac or Windows PC will do that well, and anything else will lack important tools like the filesystem, drivers for hardware, reasonable multitasking, capable browsers, etc and make those tasks painful at best. And if specialized software is needed, that software will likely not run on those other devices.
Every other modern device, including my Apple Watch to a Chromebook to a PS5, is more than capable of all those tasks computationally, but the manufacturers specifically crippled many abilities and blocked all non-blessed software, and Nintendo or Samsung doesn't want you running TurboTax on the Switch or your Smart Fridge.
Most people consider the iPhone as a "phone", not as a "computer". It's even in the name. So it fits your definition for devices which only run code that the vendor had specially packaged.
People obviously consider it a computer; they install and use third party software on it. The question is whether the vendor should be allowed to monopolize the market for the third party software even when both the user and the third party developer don't want them to.
> Because malware breaking the sandbox of one of them can mostly only spy on the owner, while malware breaking the sandbox of the other can spy on whoever the owner walks past, GPS trace their movements…
[...]
> In order to keep EU users as safe as possible, Apple will continue to require every alternatively distributed app to go through Notarization — a baseline review focused on basic functionality and protection from serious threats.
All in all, still extremely anti-consumer. If I can download and run arbitrary code on my Mac--even if I have to jump through scary warnings--why should I not be able to do so on my phone? Why would one computing platform be different from the other?