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by gumby 828 days ago
I am still surprised that when I search for a specific app (as you did for your bank) I still see junk ads before the real app shows up. Apple should be better than that. They seem to have the same bad incentive Google search does.

What is CFD gambling? When I read “CFD” I always think of computational fluid dynamics and so “CFD gambling” sounds pretty cool to me. Obviously I do know I’m just overfitting to a TLA and I’d like to know what it actually means.

4 comments

Probably “contract for difference”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contract_for_difference
> Apple should be better than that.

Everyone should be better than that, but as far as Apple specifically, they're really no better than any other hypermegacorp. Apple's a company, it doesn't give a damn about you, it only gives a damn about enriching its owners.

It really does undermine the legitimacy of their claims that they should be the only source of apps, for safety reasons, of course. That reason alone is why they "should be better"; It would serve to legitimize their dogma.
Yeah, I consider it short sighted.
Apple built up a really strong brand by not doing this kind of thing for a while. They get to charge twice as much money for half as much performance because they made sure their products felt nice and intuitive to use. Now they’re willing to destroy the most valuable brand in the world to make crypto money? It makes absolutely no sense, even accounting for greed.

Also, I’m sure this kind of thing hurts their prospects in antitrust cases (like in the EU)

> Apple … get to charge twice as much money for half as much performance…

Has this ever really been the case?

Maybe I should say half as much hardware. Performance is too subjective. But nobody else can charge $800 for an extra 64g of ram. My point is their thoughtfulness about their ecosystem is what allows them to de-commodify their hardware. There’s a price for RAM, and a price for RAM in an Apple computer.
I don't know the current status, but iOS's design meant apps at least used to be _far_ more efficient than the equivalent Android, and thus Apple could ship lower end hardware to deliver the same or better performance to the end user. The was a measurable fact, thus objective.

The same is still somewhat true for macOS where for the average web browsing user, macOS + Safari needs less memory than you would need on Windows. This is also a fact, but it doesn't help power users.

I regressively searched for the app advertised in the previous search. At around depth twelve, a search for “four” gave both an ad and top result of an app named “Four”.

If you’re curious, Four’s description is “Shop Now, Pay Later.”

contract for difference

in this case: extremely short term highly leveraged bets

This guy's the least risk adverse trader on the Internet! (I know, probably not, but it's funnier this way)