Or you end up with companies (like Wal-mart) that decide that they don’t want to accept Apple Pay and become payment processors themselves, requiring you to install their app to do phone/watch payments. Congrats, you now need a whole boquet of payment apps and we’re back to it being easier to use physical credit cards. For some of these things, the consolidation was the whole point.
Since Walmart keeps popping up in other comments, I'll do devil's advocate using the exact same argument other people used:
If you don't want to buy on Walmart and their custom payment system, then just go to a competitor.
With that said: this is an unrealistic scenario. Walmart doesn't pay the famous 30% to ApplePay, only a regular CC-like fee (probably less). Also, physically they can just accept contact payments where they don't interact with Apple but it still works with the iPhone wallet. Online, they can just use credit cards instead of ApplePay, which iPhones have autofill for, and probably not lose much.
That only works if competitors aren’t doing the same exact thing.
There’s also situations where you don’t have a choice. In many parts of the US the only reasonably accessible store (and sometimes grocery store) is a Walmart.
HN's time-honored scapegoat. "Corporations can't be trusted - that's why I trust Apple to fight them" is a ridiculous pretense to support consolidation. If Apple uses their de-facto position of privilege to demand people use their products as a solution, then they have become the problem. The exact same problem as Wal-mart insisting you download their wallet app.
There is a real solution to this, where we codify our social limits through legislation and open standards to prevent these horrible "leopards ate my face" scenarios that everyone seems to hate so much. Or we could keep trusting Apple, and see how many F1 advertisements that nets us in the long-run.
Legislation would be better, no question. Have you seen US politics, though? Not just lately, but for the past couple of decades. Electing knowledgable politicians who are willing to stay properly abreast of technology and work for the interests of their constituents is nigh impossible.
The ones that get into office are most often out of touch and in someone’s pocket because they grandstand on polarizing topics that information-deficient and single-issue voters flock to. I try to vote for candidates who I think will do good that way, and it makes some impact on the micro scale, but on the national scale it’s like trying to drain the Pacific Ocean with a thimble.
Are you now going to argue that Tim Cook is a really nice guy who practices genuinely principled leadership? I hope not, he's only there to convert your loyalty to something more liquid and fungible.
Nope, it’s clear he does what he thinks is best for the company and its shareholders. Companies aren’t your friend. Even without that, the US political system is broken and the alternatives have their own glaring issues that either lie in the blind spots of or are actively ignored by their proponents.
Conversely, we can _not_ open up our bootloaders in Android because banking apps then refuse to run on an "insecure" OS. Of course we'd have to put aside the fact that our computers can access the same banking features through a web browser.
Exactly. Jailbreaking is WAI for the folks who want the “Android experience” on an iPhone. Much of this drama is merely corporations vying to “get theirs” from the ecosystem, without understanding that the extant nature of the ecosystem is why it is the most valuable platform by user spend (that is to say, they care little for the consumer).
Shouting "monopoly" from the rooftops is not enough to affect real change. If I wish not to pay property taxes, my options include moving to another state, but courts do not recognize a general right to challenge tax liability on the grounds of personal preference or disagreement with taxation. Perhaps it's worth sparing a thought as to why, and who ultimately empowered that stance.
Plus, this is often the “if I can’t have it no one can” line of thought, sometimes from companies engaging in anticompetitive practices themselves (like Epic Games).
I'm all for corporations "trying to get theirs" if it benefits the rest of society.
iPhones are a premium product and they don't have a natural right to 30% of transactions going through it if the participants don't want Apple to know about it.
> It’s the “if I can’t have it no one can” line of thought
That describes what you and _benton are advocating. "If I can't have the phone be the way I want, no one can".
That's exactly backwards. I have no desire to limit the types of phones you can purchase, and you have an enormous amount of choices in phones outside Apple that provide essentially the same functionality, and can be as open as you wish. You wish to limit my ability to access a device that I want. I want a locked down phone, and third parties wish to intervene on a transaction between me and Apple so they can illegitimately get a piece of the pie.
How about people who want a Mac (which is still "open" to the extent that it makes a difference), and therefore would also like an iPhone because of the propitiatory APIs Apple makes available solely to the iPhone?
I don't particularly like my iPhone, in fact I see as a worse device in many ways to my old Android phone, but the interoperability with my Mac makes the trade-off worth it. So ironically, the only reason I want it is because of even _more_ anticompetitive practices.
And yes, the day the Mac is as closed off as the iPhone, there will be zero Apple devices in this house.
> You wish to limit my ability to access a device that I want. I want a locked down phone
As others have repeatedly said, you can still opt to not use any other kind of app from outside the AppStore.
But as I asked on another thread, as a thought experiment: What about we meet in the middle and governments force Apple to only "open" 50% of the phones, for the same price. Would that satisfy you?
> third parties wish to intervene on a transaction between me and Apple so they can illegitimately get a piece of the pie.
It's actually Apple that wants to intervene in transactions where I don't want them to be a part of. I don't want to pay 10 euros and give 3 to them.
Never seen WAI before, all I can come up with is Works As Intended or Web Accessibility Initiative?
Anyways- jail breaking requires being or remaining on certain iOS versions on certain specific hardware models. You can’t “just jailbreak” your apple device that you daily drive/use regularly. If you’re not on an old version on the right hardware already, you’re fucked. And waiting for a new jailbreak exploit is a (anecdotally, for me at least) nondeterministic amount of time on the order of O(years), with a significant probability that it will not be relevant for whatever device you’re waiting on.
