[Havoc]

Sounds like they're copying google with their desire to get rid of cookies / FLOC etc.

Strong privacy stance on privacy for others (and in media)...but very quiet on 1st party inhouse ability to connect the dots.

I have a hard time seeing how this doesn't end in anti-trust tears for both of them

[kergonath]

> I have a hard time seeing how this doesn't end in anti-trust tears for both of them

In Apple’s case, I hope antitrust action comes before they stray too far and whilst their interests are still aligned with mine. I don’t want them to make any money from advertising, because then they have a conflict of interest and their pro-privacy arguments fall flat.

(Google is too far down that path for me to trust them in the future. Anti-privacy is also their core business, whereas Apple primarily makes money from selling devices).

[SaltyBackendGuy]

> whereas Apple primarily makes money from selling devices

I wonder if Apple is predicting that this wont be the case for much longer (lack of real innovation (excluding the M1) and market saturation), so they're being proactive to dominate another vertical. They will likely capitalize on their current image of being privacy kings.

[tsunamifury]

It’s been explicitly stated many times. It’s why Ive left. They are a “services” company now.

[clairity]

this is what you get when you elevate an operator (an operations/finance focused exective) in place of a product visionary. that's no knock on tim, who's done what he's been incentivized to do by the board and shareholders, and a good job at that (and rewarded disproportionately so). but steve wanted to win with a superior product, not just numerically as tim does. that's why steve, many years after his death, still garners more respect publicly than tim (though tim is respected too).

it's the same slow decline that happens over and over in these cases. apple is already focused primarily on services, which you can see in their financials. product has stagnated, while services continues to grow, and with it, more and more capital invested in chasing manufactured prestige awards like oscars and emmys.

[api]

Services usually mean recurring revenue which is valued at a higher multiple. It’s very hard to build a high value multiple product focused company.

[clairity]

it's certainly harder, but steve did it. tim is unable to, hence the shift to services for easier short-term growth, at the expense of long-term brand loyalty.

[stjohnswarts]

I haven't left yet but it's looking bad. They are nearly out of room to grab more market share, and can't continue growing that way, so one of the few ones left to expand is ad revenue or to purchase other companies, and Apple doesn't really seem big on polluting their brand "Apple" with "lesser" companies.

[LionTamer]

Why do you not think there is more room to grab market share in the laptop/desktop market?

[imwillofficial]

It wasn’t been explicitly stated anywhere by anyone who matters

[tsunamifury]

It was a core slide of the Leadership retreat several years back. Its been referenced several times. Hardware arrow goes down services arrow goes up.

[imwillofficial]

No no, I meant the Johnny I’ve leaving part.

You’re right on all the numbers stuff

[FredPret]

Read their financial reporting, they jump through hoops to show service revenue to their owners

[imwillofficial]

I meant johnny Ive leaving, not the financials. Agree on that one for sure.

[chii]

Just because their primary revenue is from hardware, doesn't mean it isn't attractive to also add extra, uncorrelated revenue sources such as ads and data. Whether they have innovation or not is irrelevant to this.

[metadat]

It is relevant because transitioning from premium into an ad platform is a low-brow-caveman-bottom-of-the-bucket move, only the best one to make once you're out of better options.

Truly premium products respect your privacy.

It turns out truly premium goods aren't Google, Tesla, and soon won't be Apple, if Tim&co go down this path.

[chii]

"truly premium" is one of those no-true-scotsman arguments.

The problem is that apple intends to make maximum profit. The premium product can produce that, but if they smell that their customers don't care enough about privacy, they could _also_ sell ads on top of the premium tax. So until people starts dropping iphones because of it, they will proceed.

[kergonath]

If the US government (or any, really) makes that unattractive, then I am all for it, regardless of any innovation aspect. It’s like Samsung double-dipping by making its smart TVs gather data about their users. This should be illegal.

[chii]

oh yes, it should be illegal. Just like people should care about poverty in the world, or should care about the environment and climate change.

[ethbr0]

> I don’t want them to make any money from advertising, because then they have a conflict of interest and their pro-privacy arguments fall flat.

Absolutely. Advertising and professional services (read: consulting) are both inherently user-hostile channels of revenue, and dangerous enough they should be capped for a company's own strategic good.

Some paths are too seductive and dangerous to naively wander.

[soundnote]

> whereas Apple primarily makes money from selling devices

Microsoft primarily makes money selling software, too. Despite that they're really tracking happy. You'd think selling stuff incentivized less malicious conduct, but...

[jefftk]

In getting rid of third party cookies it's Google copying Apple. This is something that Apple brought mainstream with ITP in 2017.

[fezfight]

You could always disable them in Firefox both desktop and mobile. So I guess they're both copying Mozilla in this regard.

[jefftk]

For decades you've been able to manually disable third party cookies. The place where Apple innovated was in defaults.

[fezfight]

Probably gotta give it to RMS then. He's kinda the OG in this area. And if you must use the innovation parlance, then he is the innovator for pretty much all user freedoms on computers.

[fomine3]

I argue IE6 (P3P Policy) was an early great try.

[parasubvert]

The anti-trust is a bit of an odd one. A few possibilities - do Google and Apple wind up controlling the online ad market? Or - does the ad market shrink because Apple exploits it less? (Killing an industry isn’t anti-competitive per se)

Another angle is that captive audiences will be steered to other Google or Apple products. But debatably this only becomes anti-trust worthy when Google and Apple will start to buy more businesses in non-core areas eg. To compete with Amazon as the everything store.

Microsoft is definitely doing this with gaming, buying up many huge game properties.

[treis]

>Killing an industry isn’t anti-competitive per se

Using your dominance in one market (computers/phones) to muscle into another (ads) is about as anti-competitive as you can get.

[parasubvert]

It’s not, though. Consumers don’t buy ads. Apple wouldn’t have a monopoly, or be harming consumers.

Otherwise Facebook using its social media site to take over ads from Google would be anti competitive. Or Google taking over with AdSense by using its search engine. Or TV/cable stations taking over from newspapers or radio.

None of this is anti-competitive. They’re different markets that change as the underlying communication medium changes.

And it’s not like ads are somehow killed by Apple. It’s the surveillance based customized ads that have been made less common as customers can deny their use (or approve them!). Ads existed for a century without that level of surveillance.

[tinus_hn]

Also if those ads are exclusively limited to the original market? People can easily choose to shop outside of that market and be exposed to exactly 0 of those ‘anti-competitive’ ads, only to the competing ads.

[clairity]

apple is in a better position to defend against our (laughably weak) anti-trust enforcement, because the platform is closed, so they'd argue that the ad network is an intertwined part of that one market (mobile computing). google, being an advertising (and surveillance) company first and foremost, has a weaker position wrt the any of their flanking businesses, especially mobile computing, since it's hard to argue that mobile computing is an essential component of the ads business.

i'd vote for anyone who promises (and has a realistic plan) to fund the anti-trust division with 100× their current funding (the IRS too) to crack down on all these distortions in our markets. i have little hope of seeing such a political candidate however.

[parasubvert]

There is precedent with broadcast affiliates and satellite/cable TV companies who have significant control over Radio or TV ads on some channels.

I also don’t see how giving consumers choice on ad surveillance could be seen as anti-competitive. Where is the consumer harm? Where’s the monopoly?

Heck, even ad networks dying weren’t considered anti competitive when AdSense took the industry over when Google exploited its search engine, or when Facebook took on AdSense by parlaying their social media power. Again, you have to prove harm or attempt to create monopoly.

[clairity]

i'm not sure what you mean by "choice on ad surveillance", but my point was about anti-trust, not simply anti-competitiveness or monopoly. anti-trust is using market power in one segment to distort another one unfairly.

the precedent you point out is what helps apple claim they're not a trust, because the two components, ads and content, go together in one business model. with google, being paid to place ads is the business model, and competing in the various channels for those ads are potential anti-trust encroachments because they're different markets.

as is usual in these cases, the harm is an inflated market price above the non-distortionary baseline.

[parasubvert]

My point was that all Apple has done is let end users disable third party tracking cookies on apps. They gave users choice on whether they wish to be surveilled. That’s it.

The only potential market this capability hurts is the market for ads based on surveillance on Apple devices. Would these be seen as an illegal/unfair practice? I find it highly unlikely to be seen as such by any western government.

[bee_rider]

Even if Apple is found to be anti-competitive, it could still be decided that their behavior is in consumer interest, right? For example if their ad service is actually privacy respecting somehow.

[MomoXenosaga]

At least Android can't stop you from installing ad blockers.

[consumer451]

I am able to use Firefox Focus to block ads in Safari on iOS. I’ve not had an Android for a while. What additional ad blocking features would I have on Android these days?

[asdfkuhefukhwef]

> I am able to use Firefox Focus to block ads in Safari on iOS

You think you are able to, but you just got lucky so far.

Focus code is very buggy and work for only a few sites. It's very hard to contribute fixes, so I expect it to stagnate even more. And since the sites we, the tech elite, read are similar to the ones the few maintainers do, those will be well served while all the rest of the internet will not see any improvement. IMO it will probably rot away like reader-mode.

Also, it is trivial for publishers to evade it :( just not a effort anyone even bothers with because of the low traffic.

Real firefox for android allows you to install uBlockOrigin. The only actively maintained adblocker that is being gasslighted everywhere. And that you was never allowed to install on IOS devices thanks to Apple the company.

[Terretta]

1Blocker and AdGuard Pro for iOS are both quite good.

1Blocker in particular has a great UI for homebrew element targeting, while AdGuard Pro supports arbitrary lists and relatively rich blocklist filter rules.

Both are very actively maintained. The innovation from AdGuard is surprisingly rapid, they are not just resting on feature sets from long ago.

[consumer451]

The workaround on iOS for this seems to be something like Mullvad's VPN with blocking turned on. Are their lists up to snuff?

https://github.com/mullvad/dns-blocklists

[mumblemumble]

I would guess that the argument is that, on Android, you always have the option of rooting your phone or installing an alternative OS. So Google is a bit more limited than Apple is in how hard they can clamp down.

Personally, I don't know that that's true. It may be easier for Apple to do it because the ecosystem is more vertically integrated. But that's a coordination problem, not a technical one. I don't think there's a single major player in the Android ecosystem who wouldn't be willing to go along with a plan to lock things down just as far as laws will allow.

[consumer451]

I should have specified a non-rooted phone. Years ago I used to root androids, install cyanogenmod or similar, and sell them locally. People would pay a premium for that. But I am no longer in the camp where I want a rooted phone as my daily driver.

I am also weary of giving "random" third parties access to my browsing. I think that my least bad option on iOS is Mullvad, with all blocking turned on. But the bad part there is no browser integration to whitelist sites.

I wonder if it would be possible for Mullvad to present their system as an ad-blocker to Safari, if you are running Mullvad VPN.

[doublepg23]

Always? I was under the impression it’s taking a lot longer for phones to get rooted.

[kornhole]

If you are not using a custom Android OS such as Graphene, Calyx, Lineage that don't have Google Play Services,.. you can still remove Google Play Services and other bloat used for ad tracking by using the universal android debloater found on Github. Then you can use browser Mull with ublock origin found on f-droid.org.

[fomine3]

Using Edge + adblock addon is like Firefox Focus.

[vorpalhex]

ublock origin on firefox

[illiac786]

You can install ad blockers for safari in iOS. For system-wide, I recommend using an adblocking Public DNS server, like AdGuard.

[BbzzbB]

They sure could rip the whole extension store from default Chrome to make sure you don't get one without going the extra step (which like 90%[0] don't) of getting Firefox.

0: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/mobile/world...

[stjohnswarts]

I mean they could by locking down the platform more like Apple does...

[pretext-1]

iOS natively supports content blockers and Safari extensions.

[pinewurst]

“Content blockers” are merely a relatively short list of patterns that Safari itself will exclude. It’s nothing like uBlock Origin in power and flexibility and lets far too much through.

[roflc0ptic]

Super misleading. You can block websites manually, but you can’t add an adblocker to Chrome - so if you want an ad free experience, then you’re forced to use safari, a historically subpar browser - but worse, it’s vendor lock in.

If this article is true, this is some terrifically anti competitive behavior

[ben-schaaf]

Chrome on iOS uses the same browser engine as safari; it's vendor lock in regardless of what you do.

[doublepg23]

I believe that’s Chrome’s decision - like on Android.

I’m using Firefox Focus with its native Content Blocker.

[omgrusrs]

All browsers on iOS are merely rebranded safari. No such thing as a subpar browser IMO, just subpar websites that require browser features no one should need.

[samatman]

I'll take the one with about a 1/4 the energy usage and proper tail calls in Javascript.

Think those are related? I think they are. Who knows. I just respect tail call elimination.

[cma]

Can you play a YouTube video in the background with no ads with that, like Firefox mobile?

[yieldcrv]

an in house ad network that only targets iphone users and Mac users by default? yeah I would choose that, no question

[tinus_hn]

You don’t need to invade privacy to show ads in a search result, based on that search. That’s how DuckDuckGo survives.

We’ve all heard the anti trust whining about the App Store for over a decade now. It’s not happening. Nintendo gets to decide what you put on a Nintendo Switch, Apple gets to decide what you put on an iPhone. That’s not monopoly abuse, if you don’t like it buy different console or an Android phone.

Phones have become an important generic computing platform, which is why in different jurisdictions there’s political action to force Apple to loosen control. That wouldn’t be happening if it was so obviously illegal monopoly abuse because then it wouldn’t be necessary. Yet it apparently is.

[arrosenberg]

Its not “obviously” monopoly abuse by virtue of the fact that the antitrust laws have not been updated to account for modern markets and technologies. Beyond that, its not hard to distinguish between Nintendo, a company that makes consoles and video games (and has several larger competitors); and Apple, a vertically integrated empire who controls a big chunk of the global communication and entertainment markets and does not have significant competition (just cartel-style competitors).

[tinus_hn]

Apple controls slightly less than 20% of the global smartphone market and has been bypassed by Samsung in market share. It’s just ridiculous to claim they do not have significant competition, they have less than 20% while that other over 80% is all Android.

Even in their biggest market, the US, they barely pass 50% and the rest is all one very successful competitor. Pretty significant competition.

[arrosenberg]

The global smartphone market is irrelevant, since the majority of global non-Apple purchases are cheap, one-time hardware purchases with low margin and no long tail revenue. Apple absolutely dominates the market in revenue (~65%) generated on those devices (which is recurring and high margin). They control the only roads that matter, and they only have 1 real competitor in Android. That's not a competitive market by any metric I am aware of.

Additionally, they have and continue to enforce regulatory authority on their platforms, which is the role of government, not a private company. It's anticompetitive for a massive private enterprise like Apple (or Google) to arbitrarily use its' distribution platform to control the economic fortunes of the companies built on that platform.

[tinus_hn]

They have a real competitor, yet it’s not a competitive market.

Remember how Microsoft had 95% market share and how they were actively and overtly abusing that position to embrace, extend and extinguish any threats? Everyone was crying antitrust and it never went anywhere. The worst they got was the EU forcing them to put up Windows without Windows Media Player, which then got bought by nobody, and the browser choice pop-up they got rid of after a few years.

If you think anything worse is going to happen to Apple with their 20% market share, or even if you somehow inflate the number to 65%, think again. It’s not going to happen under antitrust law. If anything is going to happen it’s going to be new laws.

[arrosenberg]

> They have a real competitor, yet it’s not a competitive market.

Yes, that's completely consistent with the Brandeis view of antitrust. Cartels are not a competitive market.

> Everyone was crying antitrust and it never went anywhere.

Not facts. It resulted in a successful prosecution by the Clinton DOJ, and Microsoft was ordered to breakup in 2000. The company appealed (dragging past the election) and it was settled by the Bush DOJ, which obviously resulted in weaker policies since the Bush lawyers subscribed to the Borkist view of antitrust.

> If you think anything worse is going to happen to Apple with their 20% market share, or even if you somehow inflate the number to 65%, think again. It’s not going to happen under antitrust law. If anything is going to happen it’s going to be new laws.

Guess we will see. Seems to already be happening based on the defensive moves these companies are making in response to more aggressive regulators, but I agree new laws would help move things along. I didn't "somehow" inflate it. I looked at the recurring revenue streams from the app store instead of device sales, because app store revenue is a massive stream of profit, and devices are low-margin commodities.

[jefftk]

> You don’t need to invade privacy to show ads in a search result, based on that search. That’s how DuckDuckGo survives.

DDG does track how you interact with their search results and search ads, same as Google.

[tinus_hn]

DDG does not set a cookie that identifies you and as such has absolutely no way to have your ads or anything else be influenced by what you searched for earlier or what results you clicked on, outside of the single page you get when you search.

Check it for yourself using your favorite browsers developer console, there are no cookies, unless you set preferences and if so, the cookie is a very short string that indicates your preferences and is obvious not usable as a user id.

What they do is log what is searched for and what results and ads are clicked and that is not tied to you. Because they don’t have a concept of ‘you’, only of that one search.

And that is definitely not ‘same as Google’, Google automatically sets a user identifying cookie once you open the homepage, tries all kinds of tricks to tie this user id to your Google account and tracks anything you do to that account and remembers it forever. That’s why you only need to search for a car once to get ads for cars for weeks. Even if you clear your cookies. That’s Google tracking you. DuckDuckGo does not do that.

And it is really unfair to just accuse them of being ‘same as Google’. They are not same as Google, obviously they are not perfect but they do make the sacrifices while still making it work without tracking everything you do.

[jefftk]

Good point on the cookies!

> That’s why you only need to search for a car once to get ads for cars for weeks.

I don't think that's right? If you search for things about cars and then click through to a page about cars you'll get tagged with all sorts of advertising cookies, same as if you did that with any other search engine. But I'm pretty sure just searching for something on Google won't affect either (a) what ads you see on future Google searches or (b) what ads you see on non-Google pages around the web.

(Disclosure: I used to work on ads at Google, though not search ads.)

[SV_BubbleTime]

> That’s how DuckDuckGo survives.

Interesting example. I found that their service is definitely going downhill.

I’ve been using them almost since they came on the scene. in the past two months I have had to double check search results against Google, where as I expected the results are far superior.

In the previous years I’ve almost never had to double check a result.

So, I don’t know about the future of Apple at all, but I hope the quality stays higher than your example.