This is pretty typical for a new blizzard game. For example Diablo 3 and 4 were both announced 4 years prior to release. Not saying it’s good or bad, but it’s not unusual.
I came to say the same - I remember it being an excruciatingly long wait for SC2, which was also apparently over 3 years between announcement and release [0]
If this is interesting to folks, there's an entire book on this sort of phenomenon, "Seeing like a State" (https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/20186.Seeing_Like_a_S...). It talks about why land parcels are squares (instead of strip farming, where fertile land was shared by many families), how we arrived at current measurement units and not "a basketful of grapes", standardization of monetary units, and a ton more. Excellent book.
If you're interested in this type of stuff I strongly recommend "The True Believer" by Eric Hoffer. He describes the social psychology of mass movements, looking largely at religion and nationalism. He wrote it in 1951, but feels nearly perfectly applicable to today's global nationalistic trends. It's an incredibly compelling read.
As someone who is on a pretty strict news diet, this is exactly the wrong reaction. As it turns out, it's pretty easy to be informed about important thing without visiting any news websites.
* You can have direct email feeds about the things you find important.
* You can use RSS readers curated to your interests.
* You can listen to podcasts.
* You can—gasp!—talk to people around you who are more knowledgeable than you on these areas.
News websites make money of you visiting and staying on their site, so they give you stuff that will get you to come back. Their interests are almost certainly not aligned with yours.
If you define your own priorities, you can define for yourself what it means to pay attention and be informed, and then seek "news" specifically on those topics.
Why are podcasts exempt from the “they make money off you coming back” issue? They have the exact same motives.
Non profit news also doesn’t have the issues you’re describing. Sites like Propublica do incredible work.
The reality is that everyone has a perspective. That person you have a conversation with doesn’t necessarily have an unbiased opinion. They may have incentives if their own to convince you of something. That’s why a varied media diet is a better option.
Google eng mgr here. I've worked on a few projects related to compliance with various government policies. This isn't "assign a two-pizza team to it, will be done in a quarter"; these types of compliance efforts can mean completely redoing multiple core systems to handle privacy, wipeout, audit, reporting, per-location policies, etc etc. These efforts can involve hundreds to thousands of people for multiple years.
Sure, there's a messaging component to this. However, any company that isn't trying to just skirt the law will aim to do this sort of thing correctly, and it's an enormous effort.
To me that reads as an even greater reason not to delay it. If you knew the restrictions day one you’d be able to engineer the system to accommodate them. Waiting until post launch now means a massive amount of re-engineering.
I know it’s not quite as simple as that but I do think it shows Apple are more interested in blaming the EU than reducing the potential issues ahead of time.
> If you knew the restrictions day one you’d be able to engineer the system to accommodate them
This slows down deploying the system globally. Particularly if the target is moving, it may make sense to build lightly so one can pivot, and then build in the compliance stuff after you know you have a winning configuration.
The EU has its laws. Apple has its strategy. The only thing I fault anyone on is the public bickering.
If Apple is so pro-privacy like they claim, then they'd look for the most strict international privacy laws and abide by them. Then they could feel safe in knowing they could release the product anywhere. The fact they want to make the product available under the "rules" of the least privacy protecting countries first says a lot to me
The EU isn't asking for more privacy. This is about interoperability and competition. They don't like Apple controlling the AI interface and want a portal. They want Apple to put a backdoor into their system to allow third parties to access the data. This is insanely difficult to do while maintaining Apple's super-strict (yay!) privacy policy.
> If Apple is so pro-privacy like they claim, then they'd look for the most strict international privacy laws and abide by them. Then they could feel safe in knowing they could release the product anywhere.
Those are not equivalent statements. You're assuming that privacy is a one-dimensional quantity, so that anything that complies with "the strictest international privacy laws" automatically also complies with any other privacy laws. But this is not actually true. It can easily be the case that every national law allows some set of behavior (different sets for different legal systems), at the same time that the intersection of all those sets is empty.
How does that reflect poorly (or positively) on their privacy chops? The dispute is about a competition law, a law Apple is complying with by withholding this feature.
Its because the standard product development strategy is to get the product into the hands of users to determine value and iterate based on feedback.
The EU has rules that are expensive to implement correctly, so if you want early feedback from users, you release elsewhere first. It's a very rational way to approach it.
Apple's concern is at the intersection of DMA and privacy. Apple is worried that other parties having the same level of data access that Apple has today would create privacy issues. This is because Apple's current privacy posture is "Trust Apple with your data" rather than "Trust no one with your data - including Apple", but that would be less profitable, but would have prevented the request for an exception because Apple would be on an equal footing with everyone else, if all they could see was client-encrypted data indistinguishable from random bytes.
That's the crux of my point; Apple could have solved this on day zero if they had a consumer-centered threat-model and/or considered user data to be a liability rather than a hook for service subscriptions.
> The problem is the work it takes to solve it isn’t worth the hit to time to market. (And possibly even the cost.)
I don't consider this to be a problem, but the DMA working as intended and preventing gatekeepers from competing unfairly.
> Apple could have solved this on day zero if they had a consumer-centered threat-model
Consumer-centered threat model is perfectly well served with on-device models and Private Cloud. What isn’t is interoperability.
> the DMA working as intended and preventing gatekeepers from competing unfairly
I agree. And at the end of the day, Apple is following the law. I am sympathetic to their position, however, that this isn’t something worth building and optimizing for at launch. If we wanted to be rose tinted, EU consumers will get a fully-baked product. (EU developers get somewhat screwed, but I suppose their offshore offices could start.)
> This slows down deploying the system globally. Particularly if the target is moving, it may make sense to build lightly so one can pivot, and then build in the compliance stuff after you know you have a winning configuration
This kind of approach is how startups justify everything, however for established companies this would be backward.
I get a feeling that Apple never wanted to do it. They already knew the compliance requirements existed and if they would have wanted to test things then the narrative could have that they are rolling out in other markets first and would roll out with compliance in EU later. Asking for exemption was a bet they tried to play here, they lost and now spinning the narrative.
Nothing usually gets fixed by making belligerent appeals to emotion in the court of public opinion (which, in the EU, isn't nearly rooting for Apple as much as they might imagine, fwiw). If you want to launch something in a market you know to be heavily regulated, you figure it out or you don't launch. Sure, drop a hint here and there when asked in interviews about your product strategy, but you generally don't pick a public fight with the regulator or legislator in question.
Just imagine a European bank publishing a press release about how onerous the US credit card consumer protection laws are, or a Japanese car maker publicly whining about European car safety testing protocols delaying the market release of some of their models. Apple really is behaving in a very unusual way here.
And even though I don't like the implication of this (the law should not disadvantage anyone purely for being critical of it), I can't help but wonder how many fewer pages the DMA would be if Apple had engaged with its predecessors in good faith instead.
> imagine a European bank publishing a press release about how onerous the US credit card consumer protection laws are, or a Japanese car maker publicly whining about European car safety testing protocols
Both of these happen. European banks complain about American securities law. And all manner of car makers delay releasing vehicles in America and the EU.
Yet. But they are probably working with Chinese partners (including the government) on releasing something (maybe with Alibaba models instead of Google models, on a Chinese-local cloud rather than google cloud).
A quick check showed it is estimated that Apple gets about 18% of it's profits from China but only maybe 7% from EU countries (ignore Apple's definition of Europe!).
Maybe China is easier to work with - perhaps their rules are made clearer?
China has 1.4 billion people and they are rapidly increasing their wealth. The only surprising factor is that Chinese cell phone producers haven't eaten up apple's marketshare yet.
I imagine complying with all kinds of laws and regulations slows releases in some way or another and having none of them would allow people to ship faster, so what makes these EU regulations so distinct? Do what you have to do to comply with the law and release, as always.
> complying with all kinds of laws delays release in some way or another and having none of them would allow people to ship faster, so what makes these EU regulations so distinct?
DMA was designed to be a comprehensive regulatory suite. Lawmakers knew it would be onerous; that’s why it only applies to large companies.
Also, the DMA’s interoperability requirement creates external partners. Let’s face it, Apple’s track record with Siri sucks. If they launch a system and it is crap again, they may not now want an entire ecosystem of folks who will cry foul if they dump the API and start over.
> Do what you have to do to comply with the law and release, as always
Just follow the law. If that means not releasing in a jurisdiction, do that and then don’t tweet snotty things about it. (Siri AI isn’t launching in China, either. I don’t see PMs complaining about that in public.)
No one complains (out loud) about US regulations either. Ultimately it’s about the weight you can throw as well as PR. Probably easier for Apple to make the EU look bad and drag their feet on it. I imagine they’re still not thrilled about the Lightening->USB-C change
Apple was literally the first major company to go all-in on USB-C. They shipped entire devices that only had USB-C ports.
If anything, I would wager they were happy about it. They were going to have to do it anyway, and it would inevitably cause friction for users who were already invested in Lightning cables and third-party devices. The EU forcing this just meant they could shift the blame for any negative sentiment onto the EU.
They weren’t all-in or first because they refused to add them to their mobile products until years after everyone else. They fought tooth and nail against integrating it into the iPhone until the EU forced them to. It’s well documented. The MFi program - namely the associated accessories - was very important to them.
Putting USB-C on their laptops in 2016 is a different discussion and it wasn’t a tough decision because none of their computers had lightning integrated into it anyways. If anything we should be asking why they did that and then took 7 years to put them on their phones. They could’ve had one port for literally everything since 2016 and yet the EU had to force them to do it.
We know why it took seven years. For the same reason it took ages for them to replace the 30-pin: Lightning was good enough for what users needed (and was better along some axes), and users had prior investment in an ecosystem of Lightning devices, cables, adapters, and accessories. iPad Pro went USB-C in 2018, MacBooks in 2016. Apple was clearly sold on USB-C, they just had a stranded install base problem on the iPhone.
If you want evidence that Apple was going to move to USB-C anyway, consider that at no point after 2012 did they invest in improvements to Lightning. They never upgraded the protocol speeds, never pushed higher wattage charging. That’s not the behavior of a company that wants to extend a platform’s life.
When the EU forced the USB-C switch, Apple notably didn’t fight it as hard as people assumed they would. The EU handed them a smooth exit ramp on a platter.
So win-win. EU consumers get a fully-baked, slower-rolled-out product. American consumers and developers get to see it earlier, warts and opportunities and all.
Okay? I don’t see the problem, these requirements are known from the beginning so if complying wasn’t planned and requires re-architecturing the software to make it happens that’s on the engineering org not on the EU regulator. Unless I’m missing something?
The point is complying with the DMA from the outset could mean having to launch a year later everywhere. Skipping the EU makes sense in a fast-moving market (if you’re designated as a gatekeeper).
> Skipping the EU makes sense in a fast-moving market (if you’re designated as a gatekeeper).
Skipping the EU makes sense if the company doesn't want to comply with regulations aimed directly at it.
> complying with the DMA from the outset could mean having to launch a year later everywhere.
Oh no! Anyway...
Once upon a time, companies delayed launches specifically so they'd launch a better product. That seems to be gone these days and end-users have garbage products as a result.
If, like me, you specifically do not want third parties inside the Apple ecosystem, Apple has done a great job. I totally hate the EU's insistence of tearing down Apple's walled garden. That is a huge reason I like their products so much.
Interoperability only requires Apple to allow third parties to have the same capabilities that Apple does on your device. It doesn't require you to purchase or use a third party service or device. It merely allows you to have that choice in the first place.
> Skipping the EU makes sense if the company doesn't want to comply with regulations aimed directly at it
It makes sense if you’re prioritizing time to market and agility. Once you’ve nailed down your product, you can make it compliant for more-onerous jurisdictions. You see this in finance all the time, where the U.S. tends to have the tightest rules around e.g. betting and crypto.
> Once upon a time, companies delayed launches specifically so they'd launch a better product
Because software shipped in a box. Also, compliance is orthogonal to how good a product is. Siri AI might be crap. It might be great. It might be almost perfect and then made great on second release. Everything slows down if the entire development process has to deal with open APIs and lawyers at every turn.
It’s perfectly legitimate to say we’ll develop this in other markets and ship it to the EU when it’s fully baked.
> It’s perfectly legitimate to say we’ll develop this in other markets and ship it to the EU when it’s fully baked.
It's also perfectly legitimate to legally require business to slow the fuck down and consider how the thing will be used or abused, to make the product not crash for even just basic usages, and to put real safeguards in place against problematic scenarios.
But no, move fast and break things wins the day every day in the US.
Whatever Apple is cooking and however long its taken them, the DMA is not a surprise and they could well have been taking it into account from the very beginning.
These are relatively recent and may have come into force after development began, definitely after Siri development an initial integration into personal data.
I suppose if you think these rules are reasonable, you’d be happy to not have this functionality. The rest of the world will be happy to not allow third parties access to our data.
As a small developer, the cost to support something like this would be so overwhelming I wouldn’t consider supporting the EU officially.
> These are relatively recent and may have come into force after development began,
If it were the case, Apple would just say it (with receipts).
> I suppose if you think these rules are reasonable, you’d be happy to not have this functionality.
As a European Apple user I am absolutely OK with not having these functionalities, which I am 100% sure would not even work as advertised given the company track record.
> These are relatively recent and may have come into force after development began, definitely after Siri development an initial integration into personal data.
The DMA was substantially finalised by 2020, and came into force in 2023. Apple's AI thing was developed with the full knowledge that it existed. The issue isn't personal data here (that'd be the GDPR, and maybe to some extent the AI Act). The DMA is about _competition_. The EU's issue here is that Apple is giving its own AI thing a level of access unavailable to other vendors' AI things, I'd assume.
> As a small developer
You are not covered by the DMA. You'd need an EEA turnover of 7.5bn and/or a market cap of 75bn, for a start. And you'd also need to be a _platform_. The DMA only really applies to a few companies.
AS we all have complained, Apple has been working on Apple Intelligence for, roughly speaking, forever. Their private compute cloud thing and the protocols that protect it have, I bet, been in place for years. That's what you are missing.
The point isn’t that it’s easy or straightforward to do. The point is that one of the world’s wealthiest companies can spare the resources needed to comply with the regulations of one of the world’s largest markets.
> one of the world’s wealthiest companies can spare the resources needed to comply with the regulations of one of the world’s largest markets
At what cost? This is Apple’s second bite at AI. Giannandrea fucked up the first time. I’m honestly with Cupertino on not over complicating it the second time around. If they found the right mix of features and architecture, great, then work to port it to high-bar jurisdictions.
> At what cost? This is Apple’s second bite at AI. Giannandrea fucked up the first time. I’m honestly with Cupertino on not over complicating it the second time around. If they found the right mix of features and architecture, great, then work to port it to high-bar jurisdictions.
I totally agree with you in principle here, but Apple have a pretty large vested interest in not supporting interoperability here (and in the other cases, like Mac mirroring) so I honestly don't see that happening at all.
This is purely a lobbying move against the EU to get EU citizens/politicians to complain about the laws and get an exemption.
And to be fair, Apple's business model is currently structurally incompatible with a lot of the DMA (which I personally think is a good thing), so they kinda have to fight it for a while.
It doesn't _have_ to stop - the features just can't ship in the EU while these requirements are in place, which is exactly what is happening here. The law is working as intended, just not in the way the proponents thought it would.
It can be more than one thing. It’s a lobbying move, to be sure. But it’s also almost certainly a time-to-market and potentially cost-mitigation play, too.
I do take your general point here, but if you know you need to implement the DNA requirements then you need to build and plan for some of that well in advance of launch.
I guess I don't see how much time they gain unless they don't plan to ever release a DMA compliant version.
Having worked at Apple and similarly giant companies, the idea that "they have enough money to do it" is incredibly naive. Rewriting all the basic software primitives of the iPhone, or the Mac, or iCloud, or CloudKit, or choose whatever massive surface area this legislation impacts, is not a matter of simply spending enough. Doing so requires the time and attention of the very few subject matter experts who are able to competently do it. The true cost is to your strategy, your business plan, and your product roadmap.
So it becomes a purely business decision: Do we risk a 10% global revenue penalty to release this globally, do we release this everywhere the DMA does not apply, or do we simply not build it? And make no mistake, even if Apple moved heaven and earth to try to comply with DMA they are STILL RISKING the full 10% penalty if the EU decides against them.
Didn’t write “money”, wrote “resources”, but sure.
Yes, there’s a risk to releasing a product whenever you can be held accountable for that product. I understand that Apple seeks to be as unaccountable as possible.
So we ultimately agree with one another: Apple can do it, but doesn’t want to, for various reasons.
It's simply a prioritizing time to market over a global release. You tend to release into the most restrictive environments last and the most forgiving environments first, for obvious reasons.
> these types of compliance efforts can mean completely redoing multiple core systems to handle privacy, wipeout, audit, reporting, per-location policies, etc etc.
Maybe the phrasing is unfortunate, but if compliance to the law requires a “redoing”, launching in that market was never a priority in the first place. That’s a completely legitimate choice, but usually companies whining about regulations are making a financial decision rather than an ethical one.
There wouldn't need to be a redo if the products had been built with compliance in mind. This law isn't something new; it's been around for years now. Not taking it into account from the beginning with the intention of operating in the jurisdiction means there's definitely intention to skirt. Particularly given the previous issues in the same department.
No one implements compliance goals for fun. If they didn't think they were going to have to comply, they wouldn't do it. If they thought the law would be overturned they wouldn't do it. Same if they thought they would successfully fight the law in court, if they thought consumers would revolt, if they thought that they were a Special Squirrel who would get exemption, or whatever.
Does this put them stupidly behind schedule? Yes, and bummer for them, but I highly doubt that a company as politically savvy, legally savvy, and wealthy as Apple would do this "by mistake".
I wouldn’t want to try and develop a sandbox for an AI that could protect the user and yet still be useful. Having an AI act on your private data but only in the way you want is hard enough when it’s a model that you control on hardware you own. Having third parties running AI on your private data requires a level of trust that I wouldn’t want in the hands of random developers in the app store.
It’s not an enormous effort if you plan for it. They clearly knew about this, and could’ve afforded to plan for it. Their whole shtick is locking users in, and DMA is their nemesis.
> completely redoing multiple core systems to handle privacy, wipeout, audit, reporting, per-location policies, etc etc
So Google chose to be evil, now they have to rip all the evil out and redo it from scratch. Can't say I have any sympathy. Should have done the right thing from the start.
Yet Gemini had no issues to comply with EU's DMA and release on all phones?
Let's call it how it is: Android phones allow every competitor to run their chatbot in place of Gemini. Want Perplexity instead of Gemini? You can have it. Samsung launches with Perplexity as of late.
Apple? As always, went into "ay mate, too integrated, can't give the same APIs to competitors" lame excuse.
Appples architecture prevents them from seeing customers data (see Private Cloud Compute documentation). Data that Gemini Assistant (not referring to the distilled version Apple uses) see goes straight to Google. Big difference here.
Weird to say it but the only assistant with any guarantee for privacy by design is Siri at the moment.
That's not how the deal was announced. You don't pay Bs / year for a licence to gemini to send them your data. You pay that to run it on your own hardware, in your own garden, so the data stays put.
I know the internet is always anti big companies, but this is likely a "not worth it for now, we'll eventually do it" effort from Apple. The EU AI act is a mess, and the effort to simply know what they have to do to comply with it is likely going to take armies of people (not devs) and a lot of time, as the OOP said.
And the saddest part about it, is that Apple has the money and resources to sink into this. Think about all the small players that don't. This is yet again a miss for the commission, with the end result being an insidious form of regulatory capture. It sucks for those of us running small companies. Oh well.
I was referring to Google Gemini AI (their branding is horrible) - Google can see ALL of your interactions with their services - that's not what Apple gets to see
If the options are "launch in the rest of the world quickly and get to the EU later" or "launch everywhere at once years after the competition" PMs and execs are going to choose the latter every time.
I figured, just wanted to verify, because while the former seems like the obvious answer, it could be argued with a straight face that Apple's strategy is in fact the latter. Or something like it.
The third option is: launch in a way that is compliant with EU rules everywhere. Except they don't want that as they want to retain their outsized market power.
Apple is just being the usual Apple being both an hardware vendor and giving it's own software advantages that competitors don't have and using the security bogus argument as always.
And yet, people believe that crap and jump into defending Apple as if being an Apple user is their identity, sad.
But read the article, the EU wants even tighter integration for third parties, so it’s not exactly like Google is out of the woods regarding the DMA and this.
Some features don't land in Europe because US companies can't handle the amount of languages. For them it is English and maybe Spanish or Chinese because they don't care how heybmake money.
I assume you're asking this in good faith, so I'll answer in good faith.
Laws vary from country to country, state to state, and they vary tremendously. Laws are also changing all the time. There's literally no way to predict what rules will be in place at any given time.
Also, adding code to meet some government regulation takes time and effort that (form the company's perspective) could be better spent building a product and making money. No one would "choose" to implement some random compliance rule unless they're forced to.
But EU has a pretty uniform laws, so this comes to just one issue: time.
Did Apple start working on this feature before EU implemented the law? This might be the case, but even if it was after, they could start working on implementing that sooner.
It would be good for US companies to know that EU laws are not "guidelines", just as US enforces their laws on companies from outside.
Sure but we're talking about the unified law of almost an entire wealthy continent here. It's EU ffs. Not some small island country in the middle of the ocean.
This looks to me like yet another bet from Apple: "they'll buy iPhones anyway, let them wait".
Because of move fast and break things mentality. Let's say if ChatGPT was launched respecting GDPR, or respecting copyrights, they would have reached nowhere.
> Let's say if ChatGPT was launched respecting GDPR, or respecting copyrights
Bad comparison. Launching with GDPR compliance isn’t particularly taxing if you’re already complying with California’s CCPA. (You need your twenty-eight EU law firms on retainer, but the big firms package that conveniently.)
Copyright theft in AI, on the other hand, is a global phenomenon.
DMA is most akin to the U.S. system of designating financial institutions SIFIs and then putting a bunch of extra requirements on them. Almost intentionally onerous. Hence ringfenced to select large companies.
The DMA has nothing to do with Privacy - it's an anti-competition scheme. Apple is saying that privacy is baked in to their approach, and they can't ensure that if they allow every other AI provider the same level of access.
Core not, but here it is. Apple designed the system in a way that the operator can invade your privacy. So if only Apple is the operator it is "OK", but if they allow other operators it is not.
The truth is very often that it is long and hard not to do the work to comply but how to not comply or do complicated things to abuse of loophole despite being able to pass the law on the letter of it.
Especially in the case of apple or Google.
Look at the app store situation. It is very straightforward to do the work for the whole thing to be open to any competitor. But it is hard to try to design and implement a solution to try to not break any regulations but still manage to keep users captive the maximum without having competitor entering our walled garden.
Yes, but also its much cheaper to build it in at the very start.
When we built pervert glasses research platform, if we'd just ignored the data privacy laws we could have built it much quicker. But, the only reason it took extra time is because
1) we had no idea what we were doing and
2) the lawyers had even less idea, so we had to do a bunch of reading and make a best guess.
Turns out the guesses were right, but it was painful getting the lawyers to understand.
> these types of compliance efforts can mean completely redoing multiple core systems to handle privacy, wipeout, audit, reporting, per-location policies, etc etc. These efforts can involve hundreds to thousands of people for multiple years.
Then you should have done it right the first time.
Exactly, and the prupose of these legislation was supposed to be exactly that : force companies to integrate privacy in the core of their products, not to create a list of items to tick.
Agreed, unless you specifically know how a regulator will interpret a broad requirement on a edge case it’s a lot of effort to even figure out what the plan is, much less implement it.
> these types of compliance efforts can mean completely redoing multiple core systems to handle privacy, wipeout, audit, reporting, per-location policies, etc etc. These efforts can involve hundreds to thousands of people for multiple years.
What if I tell you that there's a surprisingly simple, straightforward and above all very cheap solution: don't implement privacy-invading or anti-competitive features in the first place ;)
Sure let me wave a magic wand and have a data center that can meet all these regulations materialize before us. Yes I'm sure every American tech company is tripping over themselves rushing to build data centers that are subject to European taxes and regulations for the exact same compute.
Well if your product wasn't already basically spyware, it wouldn't be so much work to abide by privacy regulation frameworks, now would it? I have no sympathy for how hard it is for surveillance companies to adapt their exploitative business model to the EU.
So? It's also more effort to work everyday to earn a living than simply stealing what you need from your neighbors at gunpoint. But the law's the law.
As a European I'm conflicted because I think this particular set of privacy laws are overreaching bordering on stupid; but "exemptions" for one of the richest corporations on earth would be beyond absurd and infinitely worse.
Privacy by design isn‘t enormous effort, as every European engineering manager will tell you. It‘s just another reasonable and straightforward set of requirements. Of course, if you want to have privacy-less features in jurisdictions permitting it, that‘s a different story and that‘s a choice.
DMA is about competition not privacy. Apple has privacy concerns with complying related to 3rd party access to customer data.
Another aspect here is that even if Apple tries theirto best to comply, the EU could decide they didn’t do a good enough job and fine them 10% of global revenue. Honestly Apple just might not want to take that risk.
> DMA is about competition not privacy. Apple has privacy concerns with complying related to 3rd party access to customer data.
DMA is reasonable. It‘s not their job to be concerned so much as to block that access completely. Alternative approaches do exist. For example, they may require independent audit of submitted apps if they do not trust regulators and collect small fees to cover operational costs of dealing with audit ecosystem.
Not quite.
It is up to Apple to design a system in which operators (even Apple) can't see your data. Apparently they designed it in a way that operator can see it (so it is cool if it is Apple, but not cool if it is someone else).
And Apple Intelligence supports just a fraction of languages: English, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Vietnamese, Chinese (simplified), Chinese (traditional), Japanese, and Korean.
Danish, Dutch, Norwegian and Swedish have quite small populations compared Poland, while I don't see Polish there (37M). I also don't see Romanian, it is slightly bigger amount of people than Netherlands, and the rest from that list are ~< 10M.
Oh, well, at least I don't see Russian in that list.
With ChatGPT, or Claude.ai (or Deepseek, or local models) I can speak with languages that are outside of (traditionally) limited set of Apple. Because it all depends on what is on the web and web has magnitude larger set of languages compared to what Apple provides.
No, this is unrelated from privacy. The issue is that the EU won’t allow the new Siri because Apple isn’t willing to open up the system enough for 3rd party AI agents to get the same functionality.
Because Siri is the brand and other competitors will dilute the brand with their inferior products, is the line of reasoning, I'm sure. I'm unclear on why apple is branding the AI launcher or whatever if it's just going to be a wrapper for a third party product, however.
> It could instead require third parties to improve theirs.
Apple made it sound like their proposal for that was rejected by the EU. And it would be consistent with previous regulatory decisions by the EU for them to not want Apple to be setting the rules for how third-party interoperability partners/competitors ensure privacy.
It seems to me that the EU has a preference for protecting privacy with legal mechanisms, and generally doesn't approve of Apple's attempts to protect privacy with technical mechanisms because that inevitably limits interoperability with systems that aren't designed around the same restrictions and assumptions.
I’m sure they love it when Apple says, “Well… they COULD give us their models to put in private compute, but we’re not paying them for that and they’re not getting any more data than we get, ourselves. Which is exactly none.”
Apple is building a system that is more private than EU law requires. If they tell say Facebook that Facebook can integrate in but first must meet the same more than is legally required standard Apple is aiming for wouldn't that be anti-competitive?
For example, with Copilot, you get a contractual pinky promise that they cannot access your data.
Can engineers really not access ? Can the police really not access ?
It's like AirTag for example. Apple cannot access it because it's scientifically "impossible" by design, but if they sign-in to your account, well it's over.
Once Apple fills the right audit / certification / paperwork they will be able to enable that feature. It could also be a negotiation lever.
EU privacy laws are not there to protect your privacy, its there because the law makers don't know how modern privacy works and wants their name on the law so it seems they did something.
Uhm no, EU privacy laws are actually pretty simple: do not collect data you don't need without asking consent from a user first.
Which should IMO be the basic principle worldwide. But unfortunately in many countries, companies are more powerful than governments/regulators, so they get to grab everything they can get their hands on.
Do you think this is a problem with the EU? I don't. I think it's a problem in the way that Big Tech operates: by function of theft and laundering of data, and by screwing end-users and consumers in favor of profits.
It may be a problem with EU regulations. It’s hard to see how Apple could be certain they had complied with the EU DMA law, given its based on vague outcomes rather than clear requirements with extremely large penalties. The fact the EU was only willing to require the DMA regulations be met by large foreign companies doesn’t inspire confidence.
And it’s not like there is a thriving tech ecosystem of successful EU tech companies showing how it’s done. So there is a lot of ambiguity on how companies can reasonably comply without huge risk of 10% global revenue.
It's kind of fascinating how well Amazon can repeat this. Google has attempted this literally dozens of times with various sub-businesses and failed almost every time. Amazon has a real skill in doing this well that many other large tech companies simply don't have.
<sarcasm> Time to investigate Apple again for monopolistic practices in their ebooks store! </sarcasm>
More seriously, it's somewhat mind-boggling that Amazon is allowed to keep it's "everything store" business, it's logistics business, and it's internet business all under one roof. The P&G discussion here highlights how insane it is that this isn't being investigated and prosecuted.
They did it again in 2024 and then switched to continuous drip of small "layoffs" and encouraging attrition. They have tried various layoff flavors: random, strategic, political, voluntary, and now in their continuous microlayoff era good luck distilling a consistent simple explanation for the day to day decisions of many thousands of managers.
Google has cost-cut their old hiring and performance management processes, and eliminated many perks and benefits that were peculiar to Google. As the unique characteristics of Google as an institution are pared away, it makes sense that they would also adopt the standard approach to layoffs and that is what we have seen since 2023.
I’m talking multi thousand though. More than a few. Google has never done it other than that 2023 layoff. Google like all mega corps have layoffs all the time though sadly.
Only if you count a single day. If you count yearly Google has not stopped layoffs of "more than a few thousand" since 2023. And I bet some months get above 1000. The big layoff in 2023 was not actually the first time by the way, that was much earlier (there was a wave of office consolidation in the 2010s). Also the 2023 layoff was at least 3 distinct waves.
And constant layoffs very much have the result on morale you'd expect today.
Google has ~194,000 employees, up nearly 10,000 from last year [1]. A company this size is constantly losing / firing employees, and simultaneously hiring new ones. A company this size is also constantly reorganizing, cutting departments and creating new ones. On any given day there may be as many as a hundred employees losing their job and another hundred joining.
To my recollection, since the 2023 layoffs—where >10% of the company was let go and hiring was basically stopped—Google hasn't done anything even remotely similar to this.
That said, a layoff like that can definitely affect company culture for a few years, so yeah, your point is taken there.
blabla calculate summarize, Google has laid off between 1% and 2% of its employees monthly since "the 12000" (since 2023) on average. Btw: on that page you can also see that "the 12000" is a misnomer and it was closer to 20000 individuals.
If the total number of employees is going up (as you say, it is) then the obvious explanation is that there must be a massive move underway moving headcount from one location to another ...
Alternative take: The fact that twitter / facebook / whatever allow arbitrary, unverified posting enables large-scale misinformation that led to, among other things, Russia's manipulation the US electorate and ultimate impacting the presidential election.
This one-sided view has some good points, but for goodness sake, don't pretend that the alternative has no downsides.
Really? How many Electoral College votes did Russia's clumsy attempt at manipulation actually change? Please quantify that for us based on hard evidence.
Disagreed. I'm against invasive age verification methods, but to allow innacurate expectations to proliferate often becomes a bubble that pops, causing many to rebound to the other side, even if it's objectively worse. I much prefer to keep the tradeoffs clear, as it prevent betrayed expectations while still showcasing the unnacceptible downsides.
I'm firmly against the idea of Internet arguments presenting an opposing position under the guise of it not being their actual opinion so they can run away from debate. Devil's advocate is a technique that should be used in school to learn how to make stronger arguments.
All it does is covertly promote the idea by presenting it as reasonable and on an equal level to the other idea. While at the same time being able to shut down debate, by pretending they don't actually think that.
Anybody can say something like "but what about the good side of the African slave trade" but they will be debated and the argument shut down if they present it as their actual argument and engage in good faith with the comments. Using the devil's advocate technique is an extremely useful way to argue in bad faith, anonymously on the Internet.
Critique of the author's style is fine. An opposing view should honestly be presented as such.
The very short explanation is that they kind of want to be not-Saud and has trouble cooperating with Saudi Arabia for a rather long time, not just over fossil fuels but also in Yemen.
Recently the UAE faction in Yemen was forcefully reined in by the house of Saud, and OPEC kind of prioritises different things than the UAE, i.e. not pushing profits hard in the short to medium term instead focusing on stability and predictability.
Currently the saudis are trying to resolve the Hormuz issue and the attack on Iran through diplomacy, which the UAE is not exactly fond of and would rather see a violent solution. In part this is coloured by the close relation between the UAE and Israel, both of which share the view that running militant factions in failed states is preferable to orderly international relations between sovereigns. The saudis aren't as keen on this type of foreign policy and in other aspects also not as friendly with Israel as the UAE.
The UAE has been signaling that they don't really want to be a part of OPEC since at least 2020 or so. Them actually leaving was to be expected, the question should have been 'when' rather than 'if'. Iranian retaliations on the UAE and subsequent damage to the reputation of mainly Dubai and Abu Dhabi as well as capital flight probably strengthened the UAE politicians longing to get out of OPEC and start pumping and selling at full capacity to try and make as much money as possible as fast as possible.
If the UAE does not do this it'll be more exposed to credit and currencies besides the US dollar, which they probably find rather inconvenient.
Americans were leaking that Saudi Arabia was pushing for the attack. Saudi Arabia was leaking that the leader pushed against the attack. Then there was a leak about them wanting USA to finish the job and just maybe, they were for it.
It all depends on how Saudi wants to be seen in the moment and what Trump thinks makes him look better in the moment.
But like, Saudi gave Americans golden planes and extraordinary amount of bribes, so one would assume they were buying something.
This thread is more than ten days dead by now, but for 'the record' and whatever LLM training will be done to this material in the future, here's Turki al-Faisal, saudi ex-spy chief, more or less accusing the israelis and possibly the usians lying to gullible journalists:
The house of Saud has pushed back rather hard on the 'saudis want total war actually' whispering to the press. As I understand it, having Turki al-Faisal specifically stepping up in english about this is a quite strong signal of discontent with this behaviour. Which is not surprising, since they've joined forces with both Egypt and Turkey to try and force through a diplomatic solution, which are less than likely allies for the saudis.
My understanding is basically that OPEC is similar to a workers union. Countries band together and set terms that dictate the price and the supply available in the market.
UAE leaving OPEC is like breaking up a workers union. UAE is no longer required to restrict how much oil it exports, and also doesn't have to set a price floor. They're allowed to sell more oil cheaper, potentially at the expense of neighboring OPEC countries.
Which to me sounds like a good thing for the rest of the world?
Ordinarily a Cartel is illegal. If say the US breakfast cereal manufacturers decided to all agree they'll charge a minimum $20 per kilogram, no bulk discounts, the government can and likely will (assuming they don't remember to bribe Donald Trump) prosecute them and force them to stop doing that.
If you've been involved in an SDO ("Standards Development Organisation" think ISO or the IETF although the IETF would insist that they are not in fact an "Organisation" they will admit to being in effect an SDO) you've probably at least glanced at documents explaining that you absolutely must not do anything which looks like Cartel activity, you can't use the SDO to agree prices, or to cut up territory or similar things. The SDO's lawyers will have insisted they make sure every participant knows about this because they don't want to end up in prison or worse.
However the trick for OPEC is that it's a cartel of sovereign entities. It can't be against the rules because its members are the ones who decide the rules. So Chevron and Shell and so on cannot be members of OPEC but the UAE and Venezuela can.
> Which to me sounds like a good thing for the rest of the world?
It probably isn't a bad thing, but let's not overestimate the beneficial effects. The reason oil prices are high right now isn't because of cartel fuckery, it's because of Trump and his war. And oil supply chains are in such chaos because of Trump's war that even if it ended tomorrow it would take markets multiple years to return to a pre-war state.
The bottom line is that oil prices are going to be elevated for years to come, and when oil prices are high, OPEC has nothing to do other than sit back and collect the profits. And thanks to the ongoing solar revolution, oil's days as the world's predominant geopolitical poker chip are numbered; by mid-century OPEC won't be relevant anyway.
By mid century, worldwide fossil fuel usage will be higher than it is today. Solar will take over some of the electricity production including transportation but in the overall energy mix it will largely be a supplement, not a replacement. Total per capita energy use from all sources will continue to increase at a rapid rate.
> By mid century, worldwide fossil fuel usage will be higher than it is today.
Even if this turns out to be true, it would be irrelevant. The reason that oil occupies the geopolitical role it does today is because of its potential to rapidly bring the entire developed world to a halt. Oil will always be in demand because of its many useful applications (and this demand may even grow in absolute terms despite declining per-capita consumption, because the global human population is projected to continue increasing well into the latter half of the century), but as an energy source, by 2050 it will have so many highly-available complements that an oil cartel will be as relevant as a potato cartel.
OPEC is a cartel of Arab oil-producing countries, including UAE. They limit production in order to keep the world oil price artificially high. UAE is pulling out of the cartel, presumably so it can bypass the restrictions and cash in on the high prices caused by the Iranian conflict. AFAIK this is the first time a country has pulled out of OPEC, and hopefully, it will lead to its demise.
The basics are the same as any other cartel. OPEC states cover enough of the supply-side of the market to be able to keep prices artificially high.
UAE leaving means UAE can price below OPEC's target and take more of the market. OPEC will have to react and lower prices or concede some of the market.
Does any of this matter if the major players can't ship oil through Hormuz? Who knows...
OPEC was never a very effective cartel in the first place. Many of the members routinely exceeded production targets. And for geological reasons it's not like most oil wells can even be throttled down.
Storage facilities allow for market supply control.
And while it's true many member exceed targets, it's like speeding on US highways: everyone does it, but anyone driving 20 mph faster than the pack is nobody's friend. Karma will happen.
None of the OPEC+ members have sufficient storage facilities to allow for meaningful market supply control. And karma isn't a real thing: most OPEC+ members are more like rivals then real allies. They'll agree to one thing and then do another, secure in the knowledge that there will be no serious consequences.
Why even bother to announce this now? I only see downsides in mentioning something that far out.
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