This DOJ vs Apple thing is an annoying distraction to my social media timelines and surely soon to expand to fill all my podcast listening time.
It is my novice opinion that while Apple is frequently poorly behaved, to put it mildly, most of this stuff doesn’t rise to the level of monopoly abuse. The problems are purely Apple’s making and are almost all caused by simple greed. Isn’t it always?
It is convenient for them that things like privacy provide cover for some behaviors. That doesn’t make things like privacy unimportant and certainly not worth compromising too much in these areas.
Another interesting thing is seeing all the Apple pundits choosing very clear sides on this. I think any rational thinking Apple observer can point out dozens of places where Apple could do better by consumers or developers but stubbornly sticks to their ways. Blindly defending Apple is a bad look. They are not without many faults here. At the same time, bashing Apple blindly with “I told you so…” is equally poor form.
I believe this is yet another one of those situations where nuance is needed. Yes, Apple often behaves badly. At the same time It’s possible that these things don’t rise to the level of monopoly abuse. If we, as a supposed democracy, want to curtail some of these behaviors we need better laws. I don’t think the current laws address this adequately. Nor do I believe the people in power are knowledgable enough to deal with these sorts of technical things in the ways that are required.
Along with “AI”** I fear this sort of “distraction” will just slow improvements to the development tools we use every day. It already takes Apple years to improve on some frameworks. I would prefer they improve MapKit for SwiftUI and 100 other things rather than waste time dealing with this nonsense.
** I realize some level of this so called “AI” is needed. I don’t want it to absorb all the oxygen in the room. Much like I know they spent years on the Vision Pro but right now I don’t care. I have work to do on the other platforms likely to be shortchanged by focus in these other areas for the foreseeable future.
