[Bad_Initialism]

Tim Cook has been absolutely fantastic for Apple shareholders and absolutely awful for anyone else, particularly the customers.

The walled garden has to end. There is no excuse for making people pay a premium price for an iPad Pro that can't run a third party web browser or do software development in any meaningful way.

Outside of a very narrow use case, the iPad product range is useless, despite the endless rantings of the brainwashed fanboys. Source: used to be one. Left the ecosystem when they started treating the RFCs like toilet paper.

[codexb]

At one point, there was a case for preventing scammy and fraudulent apps. For a long time, the ios App store had a much higher quality than android.

But now? There are tons of scammy and fraudulent apps on the app store. If you try to search for any popular app, you'll be presented with a dozen apps that look similar with similar names and logos.

[bigyabai]

Apple's "manual review" process stopped meaning anything to me when they verified a trojan horse version of LastPass: https://blog.lastpass.com/posts/warning-fraudulent-app-imper...

I don't even know how this is possible. FOSS repos have more security than that...

[whstl]

Yep. And this has been the case for over a decade.

They might do some sampling, but they're definitely not checking everything.

The first app I published in 2012 had a backend, but the Apple team never logged in with the provided credentials, or even tried anything.

[bogwog]

Like when you search for anything "AI" and get bombarded with a wall of minimalist goatse

[buellerbueller]

Also: gambling apps. Legal, sure, but also incredibly scammy.

[SXX]

And there are literally app farms pushing hundreds consealed illegal gambling / casino / betting apps to app store daily. Apple approves every single one.

They are then getting removed in days / weeks, but it just proves their review process is a joke.

[lowbloodsugar]

>There is no excuse for making people pay

I know! I was just out shopping for a towel and these armed gunmen grabbed me and pulled me into this store and held a gun to my kids head until I bought them a new iPad Pro M5. I am traumatized.

Oh, no, wait, I remember, my kid wanted an iPad Pro for their art and for school. They liked their wacom, but the iPad was more portable, and with the keyboard, it was perfect for taking notes.

[bsimpson]

Steve wasn't exactly famous for playing nicely with other tech either.

He signed his name to the "fuck Flash" memo, promised to publish interoperable specs for iMessage/FaceTime and never did, presided over the original App Store launch, etc.

A lot of the balls Tim is rolling were first pushed by Steve.

[lenerdenator]

> The walled garden has to end. There is no excuse for making people pay a premium price for an iPad Pro that can't run a third party web browser or do software development in any meaningful way.

Why?

There's an alternative: Android. I'm perfectly free to use that instead. I don't.

If I want to "do software development in any meaningful way", I'm not using a tablet. I'm using something with MacOS or GNU/Linux on it.

People willingly pay what Apple's charging for the iPad in the face of competition from a different OS and different classes of device, so I'm not really seeing the problem, especially when I can hand my technologically-handicapped 65-year-old mother an iPad and not have to worry as much about her installing something that will wreck every device on my parents' network or compromise her bank accounts or something.

Besides, the whole "locked-down device" wasn't Tim's idea, it was Steve's. There are plenty of reasons to gripe about Tim Cook, but "the iPad is too locked down" isn't one of them.

[Ensorceled]

> There's an alternative: Android. I'm perfectly free to use that instead. I don't.

I think this is my entire problem with most of these conversations. When they say "The walled garden has to end." ... they mean "YOUR walled garden has to end.".

I also like the Walled Garden. Do I think Apple should be able to charge more than Stripe? No.

I wish they would stop conflating the gate keeping price to enter the walled garden being too high with the wall garden and the gate being a moral wrong.

[lenerdenator]

Apparently, the market can bear Apple charging more than Stripe. Hell, Stripe's business model is just moneychanging at its core; at least Apple can make an argument that they do more than that.

[bogdan]

> I can hand my technologically-handicapped 65-year-old mother an iPad and not have to worry

We don't have to lock an entire ecosystem of devices because your mom's technologically-handicapped

[O-stevns]

As we dive further and further into them being dependent on said devices to be part of modern society... Yes we do.

It's the niche that wants open and flexible devices and the ability to customize everything.

Let's not ruin iOS by trying to make it Android.

I say that both as an iOS developer and Android user.

[lenerdenator]

Find another ecosystem of devices. There are plenty. And it's not just my family, there's at least one person in most families who is like that.

[innagadadavida]

Hard disagree. Tim should focus on fixing their software. It has become extremely buggy and it needs to be fixed. No one buying an iPad cares about running some custom browser and supporting it is pointless and is what makes the software emote complex and worse. He should take better care of his paying customers rather than engaging with opinionated activists.

[Barbing]

You hopeful for this? Per Gurman:

>For iOS 27 and next year’s other major operating system updates — including macOS 27 — the company is focused on improving the software’s quality and underlying performance.

-via Bloomberg -18d

Edit: almost can’t be true if they’re going to try to push Siri hard :-/

[lII1lIlI11ll]

Did you consider... not buying an Ipad Pro?

[throwaway-11-1]

I'm a consumer too and I despise having 20 different logins for each vendor to extract data from and the resulting increased exposure to identity theft. I'm grateful for Steam's dominance in the gaming space, my Playstation Sony account was hacked and was a nightmare cleaning up. It is not my job to care about developer margins, all the apps I care about are able to stay in business regardless of Apple's fees and if they cannot then they should charge more. I also dread the idea of having to spend time cleaning spammy "Patriot.Eagle App Store" from my elderly parent's devices if the walled garden is fully removed in the future, I know that shit is coming.

[samdoesnothing]

What gives you the right to tell someone who purchases Apple devices because of the walled garden that they should no longer have that option because YOU don't like it. What an incredibly entitled and selfish position. Have you even stopped to consider for even a second why Apple devices are so popular, especially with normal people who don't spend their time fantasizing about how they want to control other people's purchases with other sweaty nerds on the internet? Have you ever considered that other people may have different preferences and desires from yours? Jfc.

[ninth_ant]

> Outside of a very narrow use case, the iPad product range is useless, despite the endless rantings of the brainwashed fanboys

The use case is rich iPhone users who want an easy experience to watch videos, read, or consume social media on a larger screen than their phones. It’s especially popular for the children or elderly parents of these rich people. You can argue this use case is narrow, but it’s decently profitable.

Just because this use case doesn’t apply to your experience doesn’t mean anyone who disagrees is a brainwashed fanboy.

I will agree that the iPad Pro range seems overly niche to me — but also it could be I just don’t understand the use case. If someone else finds it productive and pleasant to use, what difference does this make to me or you?

[eddieroger]

Tim Cook, or any CEO, is accountable to the shareholders, so job well done it seems. It's still the user's choice if they want to live in the walled garden or not, and lots of people do, so why would they change it?

[maxhille]

I heart that at least in the US losing access to Facetime would be a serious loss in social status. So then this would be a real hurdle WRT user choice.