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Posts tagged with "apple"

US Department of Justice and States Sue Apple Under Federal and State Antitrust Laws

The US Department of Justice and 16 states have sued Apple for antitrust violations in an 88-page complaint filed in New Jersey federal court. At the time of publication, the DOJ’s press release, which has been shared with some media outlets, has not been published on the DOJ website, although I expect it will be before long. In response, Apple says:

At Apple, we innovate every day to make technology people love—designing products that work seamlessly together, protect people’s privacy and security, and create a magical experience for our users. This lawsuit threatens who we are and the principles that set Apple products apart in fiercely competitive markets. If successful, it would hinder our ability to create the kind of technology people expect from Apple—where hardware, software, and services intersect. It would also set a dangerous precedent, empowering government to take a heavy hand in designing people’s technology. We believe this lawsuit is wrong on the facts and the law, and we will vigorously defend against it.

We’ll have a more detailed breakdown of the plaintiffs’ allegations against Apple soon, but the allegations are broad, claiming that:

  • Apple has monopolized or attempted to monopolize the smartphone market under the federal Sherman Act;
  • Apple has monopolized or attempted to monopolize the performance smartphone market under the federal Sherman Act and Wisconsin and New Jersey antitrust laws

(emphasis added).

The DOJ and states argue that Apple’s alleged anticompetitive behavior extends beyond its effect on users and developers to touch a wide swath of the economy:

Critically, Apple’s anticompetitive conduct not only limits competition in the smartphone market, but also reverberates through the industries that are affected by these restrictions, including financial services, fitness, gaming, social media, news media, entertainment, and more. Unless Apple’s anticompetitive and exclusionary conduct is stopped, it will likely extend and entrench its iPhone monopoly to other markets and parts of the economy. For example, Apple is rapidly expanding its influence and growing its power in the automotive, content creation and entertainment, and financial services industries–and often by doing so in exclusionary ways that further reinforce and deepen the competitive moat around the iPhone.

The DOJ and states seek a number of different remedies, including:

a. preventing Apple from using its control of app distribution to undermine cross-platform technologies such as super apps and cloud streaming apps, among others;

b. preventing Apple from using private APIs to undermine cross- platform technologies like messaging, smartwatches, and digital wallets, among others; and

c. preventing Apple from using the terms and conditions of its contracts with developers, accessory makers, consumers, or others to obtain, maintain, extend, or entrench a monopoly.

There’s a lot to digest in the complaint, which you can read for yourself here. I highly recommend reading at least the introduction to get a better sense of what Apple is being accused of. Keep in mind that this is just one side of the story, but Apple will tell its side in more detail soon enough. And, of course, I will be back soon with a more detailed look at what this lawsuit is all about and what’s at stake.

Apple Has Built a New Home for ‘Manuals, Specs, and Downloads’→

Apple has consolidated documentation for its products, including manuals, technical specifications, and downloads on a new webpage that was first discovered by the Japanese-language website Mac Otakara and reported on this morning by MacRumors.

Most of what you’ll find on Apple’s new page was previously published elsewhere, but the new structure of the page is an improvement. It’s simple to drill down by product category to find information on the device for which you need information or use the prominent search field below the product icons. As you may spot from the screenshot above, I’ve not only bookmarked the site, I’ve also addd it to my Safari Favorites bar.

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Six Colors’ ‘Apple in 2023’ Report Card

For the past nine years, Six Colors’ Jason Snell has put together an ‘Apple report card’ – a survey to assess the current state of Apple “as seen through the eyes of writers, editors, developers, podcasters, and other people who spend an awful lot of time thinking about Apple”.

The 2023 edition of the Six Colors Apple Report Card has just been published, and you can find an excellent summary of all the submitted comments along with charts featuring average scores for different categories here.

I’m happy that Jason invited me again to share some thoughts and comments on what Apple did in 2023. As you’ll see from my comments, I was very disappointed with the iPad – there was literally no new hardware last year and only minor changes in software – and more intrigued by what’s happening in macOS land. This, I think, will be a recurring theme on MacStories in 2024: as I move my workflow to the Vision Pro with the Mac as an accessory to it, I expect I’ll be using macOS a lot more as a result. In 2023, I was also very impressed with iPhone hardware, somewhat annoyed with the lack of changes to the AirPods line, and surprised by the updates in tvOS 17.

I’ve prepared the full text of my answers to the Six Colors report card, which you can find below.

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It’s Time for Apple to Get Weird→

Speaking of weird things: I’m on the record with saying that I’d love to see Apple get weird with some of their products, so obviously this story by Jason Snell at Macworld resonated with me:

While I admire the great care Apple takes before it brings a product to market, I do sometimes think that the company is missing out on some potentially great products because they’re not willing to get weird and risk failure. Consider the original MacBook Air, which was deeply weird but led to a second-generation model that became the template for Apple’s laptop design for the next decade!

The technology already exists today for Apple to create some wild stuff, the likes of which we’ve never seen from them. The Vision Pro has broken the seal. Let’s get weird, Apple.

As a longtime proponent of Weird in my computing life (I mean), I love that Apple released the Vision Pro in its current form: it’s a weird product with tons of rough edges and I want to make it my main computer. But, like Jason suggests, there are so many other product categories where I’d like to see Apple try and make something weird and wonderful. I have some experience with Android foldables, including some recent ones, and while I like the form factor a lot, I can’t help but think how glorious an Apple device that unfolded to become a larger tablet could be.

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Six Colors’ ‘Apple in 2022’ Report Card

For the past eight years, Six Colors’ Jason Snell has put together an ‘Apple report card’ – a survey that aims to assess the current state of Apple “as seen through the eyes of writers, editors, developers, podcasters, and other people who spend an awful lot of time thinking about Apple”.

The 2022 version of the Six Colors Apple Report Card was published yesterday, and you can find an excellent summary of all the submitted comments along with charts featuring average scores for different categories here.

Once again, I’m happy Jason invited me to share some thoughts and comments on what Apple did in 2022. MacStories readers know that last year didn’t exactly go as planned. While iOS 16 delivered a meaningful update to the Lock Screen for people who care about customization and the iPhone 14 Pro came with substantial improvements to the display and camera tech, the iPad story was disappointing and confusing. This is reflected in my answers to Jason’s survey, and it’ll be a recurring topic on MacStories in 2023. At the same time, I was also impressed by Apple’s performance on services, concerned by the evolution of the Shortcuts app, and cautious about the company’s newfound approach to HomeKit.

I’ve prepared the full text of my answers to the Six Colors report card, which you can find below. I recommend reading the whole thing on Six Colors to get the broader context of all the participants in the survey.

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Apple Celebrates Black History Month with a New Black Unity Collection and More

Source: Apple.

Source: Apple.

To celebrate Black History Month, Apple has released a new Black Unity Collection. The collection includes an iPhone wallpaper, an Apple Watch face, and a Sports Loop band.

According to Apple, the special-edition Apple Watch Black Unity Sport Loop “features the word “Unity” woven abstractly into the band using red, green, and black yarns that pay homage to the Pan-African flag, while a unique layering of yarns lends a sense of three-dimensionality to the letters.” Both the iPhone wallpaper and watch face combine geometric shapes in green, black, red, and yellow. On the watch face, the numbers on the face change as the minutes pass, using parts of other numbers.

Apple is also marking Black History Month across many of its services, including the App Store, Apple Music, the TV app, Fitness+, News, Podcasts, Books, and Maps. Among the offerings will be Apple Maps Guides by the Smithsonian, curated TV and film collections by Dr. Jelani Cobb, apps and games, special playlists on Apple Music, and podcast spotlights.

Apple also announced that it:

is supporting Art Gallery of New South Wales (Sydney), Ghetto Film School (New York, Los Angeles, London), Music Forward (Los Angeles), Shout Mouse Press (Washington, D.C.), and The National Museum of African American Music (Nashville, Tennessee). Apple’s support for these organizations is a continuation of REJI grants over the past two years that helped organizations committed to providing economic, educational, and creative opportunities in communities of color.

The Apple Watch Black Unity Sport Loop is available to order online today and will be in stores on January 24th for $49. The Unity 2023 watch face and iPhone will be available next week, presumably alongside OS updates.

Tim Cook Delivers Keynote Speech to Privacy Group

Today at the International Association of Privacy Professionals’ Global Privacy Summit, Apple CEO Tim Cook delivered a keynote speech on privacy. The IAPP’s mission is to act as a resource for privacy professionals to help them in their efforts to manage information privacy risks and protect data for their organizations.

Cook’s speech, which was livestreamed on the IAPP’s YouTube channel, began with a recap of Apple’s efforts to protect user privacy, including App Tracking Transparency, alluding to the “A Day in the Life of Your Data” white paper the company published early last year.

Cook told the assembled crowd that Apple supports privacy regulation, including GDPR in the EU and privacy laws in the US. However, Cook also expressed concern about unintended consequences that laws being considered in the US and elsewhere might cause, calling out sideloading proposals in particular. Cook said that although Apple supports competition, alternate app stores and sideloading are not the solution because they would open devices up to apps that sidestep the company’s tracking protections and can expose users introduce malware.

Concluding his remarks, Cook called on tech companies and governments to work together to fashion policies that don’t undermine user privacy. Ending on an optimistic note, Cook told the gathering that although the world is at a pivotal moment for privacy, the end of privacy as we know it is not inevitable.

Six Colors’ ‘Apple in 2021’ Report Card

For the past seven years, Six Colors’ Jason Snell has put together an ‘Apple report card’ – a survey that aims to assess the current state of Apple “as seen through the eyes of writers, editors, developers, podcasters, and other people who spend an awful lot of time thinking about Apple”.

The 2021 installment of the Six Colors report card is now out, and you can find an excellent summary of all the submitted comments along with charts featuring average scores for different categories on Six Colors.

I wasn’t able to participate in last year’s report card, but I’m happy Jason invited me back to share some thoughts and comments on what Apple did in 2021. As it turns out…I had a lot of opinions I wanted to share this year, particularly about the Mac. This may be surprising coming from me – a longtime iPad Pro user – but I’m incredibly fascinated by Apple’s new direction with the Mac platform and how it’s changed thanks to Apple silicon.

I’ll have much more to share about macOS and the M1 Max MacBook Pro I’ve been testing in the near future. In the meantime, I’ve prepared the full text of my answers to the Six Colors report card, which you can find below. Once again, I recommend reading the whole thing on Six Colors to get the broader context of all the participants in the survey.

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Austin Carr and Mark Gurman on Tim Cook’s Apple→

Austin Carr and Mark Gurman, writing for Bloomberg, today published a lengthy investigation of Tim Cook’s tenure at Apple. From his earlier years building out Apple’s supply chain under Steve Jobs, to more recent times navigating the Trump presidency and the building antitrust pressure, the article is well researched and very worth a read. Without explicitly taking a stance, Carr and Gurman highlight both positive and negative aspects of Cook’s level-headed approach to piloting the company. I found some of the descriptions of Cook’s early manufacturing moves particularly interesting:

Cook’s global supply chain greatly improved upon the fabrication approaches that Dell and Compaq had developed. The big PC brands often outsourced both manufacturing and significant design decisions, resulting in computers that were cheap but not distinctive. Cook’s innovation was to force Foxconn and others to adapt to the extravagant aesthetic and quality specifications demanded by Jobs and industrial design head Jony Ive. Apple engineers crafted specialized manufacturing equipment and traveled frequently to China, spending long hours not in conference rooms as their PC counterparts did but on production floors hunting for hardware refinements and bottlenecks on the line.

Contract manufacturers worked with all the big electronics companies, but Cook set Apple apart by spending big to buy up next-generation parts years in advance and striking exclusivity deals on key components to ensure Apple would get them ahead of rivals.

The article also focuses on the stark contrast of manufacturing prowess between the U.S. and China, including Chinese manufacturer Foxconn’s ability to spin up brand new facilities in mere months:

[Foxconn founder Terry] Gou always seemed happy to accommodate, often building entire factories to handle whatever minimalist-chic design specs Apple threw at Foxconn. Jon Rubinstein, a senior vice president for hardware engineering during Jobs’s second tour at Apple, recalls almost having a heart attack in 2005 when he went with Gou to see a new factory in Shenzhen for the iPod Nano—a tiny device 80% smaller than Apple’s original MP3 player—only to find an empty field. Within months, though, a large structure and production line were in place. “In the U.S. you couldn’t even get the permits approved in that time frame,” he says.

Check out the full contents over at Bloomberg.

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