[gorkish]

Sure they could; but I find it kind of hard to criticize their strategy of getting a hundred million people to commiserate with them before they try. Even better that Apple has decided to act like a big ugly baby about it; they must be over the moon.

I've owned and used Apple products continuously for over 30 years, and I'm not ashamed to say that I am rooting HARD for Epic on this. Apple doesn't give a shit about innovation when they are making money hand over fist. They are spending all their time nurturing their cash cow. It's time to butcher that motherfucker.

[FractalParadigm]

> Apple doesn't give a shit about innovation when they are making money hand over fist

It's crazy but I didn't even notice this paradigm shift until they announced their credit card. Apple used to be the company to push boundaries and revolutionize computing in some way every few years. The last real "innovation" I feel Apple has come up with was the Retina display, pushing OEMs everywhere towards higher pixel counts and better overall user experiences. Before that we got everything from the iPhone and iPod and even iTunes, to USB and WiFi brought to the mainstream, to crazy, beautiful designs that worked well, like the iMac G4.

Just for instance working off local memory, The iMac hasn't seen a form factor update since what, 2012 when they slimmed down the curve? Which even then was a minor facelift of the 2007 design at best, which itself was an aluminum facelift. Before then we had new iMac designs every few years, between the G3 in '98, the G4 in '02, and the G5 settling on the current form factor in '04.

[viraptor]

> to USB and WiFi brought to the mainstream

Not sure what you mean here. USB was used everywhere and around the time iPhone launched, microusb was used by a large portion of new phones. Apple is pretty much the only actively USB-avoiding company left. They still use a proprietary connection for their devices.

They certainly sped up the wifi on mobile trend, but I would argue with bringing it to the mainstream.

[FractalParadigm]

It was meant as a separate statement to the iPod/iPhone one, separate innovations that (I would argue) Apple majorly popularized or brought to the mainstream. The iMac G3 and PowerBook/iBook G3 brought USB and WiFi (Airport) to the masses, respectively. The iMac G3 famously came with FireWire and USB as it's only peripheral connections, while the iBook was the first consumer laptop period that included WiFi standard, and IIRC Apple released one of the first consumer WiFi routers as well.

[viraptor]

iBook included wifi, but they killed pcmcia more than provided wifi itself. Everyone who needed networking had a pcmcia card then, whether ethernet or wifi. (Or both) So I'd give them half a point for the first wifi in practice.

[prewett]

Apple is still pretty innovative, but it hasn't been as visible as a new product for a while. They already shrunk computers down to the size of a watch, it's not obvious what more they can do, and the technology is probably not ready for wearables, etc.

Some innovations I can think of are force touch, fingerprint sensor (arguably), Face ID, T2 chip / hardware security, Touch Bar, the heart sensor on Watch, and (possibly) wireless charging. Now, some of those, like the Touch Bar are widely reviled here, but whether or not you find it useful, it is an innovation.

Design-wise there's been incremental innovations, some of which haven't succeed (scissors keyboard). The Jet Black iPhone was a design innovation, or at least a manufacturing innovation, since they had to preprocess the metal surface so that the black dye would soak in beyond the outer layer.

[dmitriid]

> Even better that Apple has decided to act like a big ugly baby about it

You mean, Apple, like any grown-up company would do in their place, has rightfully shown Epic the door? Google kicked Fortnite from Play Store for the same reason. And had they tried this against consoles (where devs also pay 30%), they'd be kicked out of the respective console forever.

What's a "non-cry-baby" reaction in your opinion?

[viraptor]

Blocking the new release and blocking the version which allowed out of ecosystem payments. That's it. It's not like Apple gains anything from further actions.

[dmitriid]

Further actions, unless I'm mistaken, are the direct application of TOS. Epic kept on pushing updates to Fortnite that violated TOS. Your dev account will be disabled if you keep violating TOS.

Epic hoped for preferential treatment just because they are big, and they've enjoyed preferential treatment on consoles. hey've run into Apple applying their TOS equally to everybody and are now somehow pissed.