What if it’s not about marketing & more about new functionality? In another comment this was compared to Twitter changing to X … what if this is ChatGPT becoming a chat app for peers & with gpt? Or a social network? People share their GPT chats so maybe they want to be the chat platform… sound too bold? They did search.
I’m more surprised that it’s taken this long for a big bad tech company (or companies) to exclude software or hardware releases to the EU. No matter how much of a hit to their (very large) bottom line, Apple or any company should be welcome to skip the EU if they se fit to go that route. I'm not sure Apple’s really out of line to do this either [1] … aybe they’ll never completely pull out of the EU, but if they do maybe that’s also the goal of the EU: to get EU based companies a chance? All it takes now is for Apple to see pulling out as a win-win.
> No matter how much of a hit to their (very large) bottom line, Apple or any company should be welcome to skip the EU if they se fit to go that route
It is a massive hit, though. Not just in Financials over missing millions of users, but in many other indirect ways regarding taxes, overseas relations, resources, and competition. You don't want to just give all that to some competitor who will take the time to bend over backwards for the EU.
SKUs is also a huge manufacturing cost as well. If you've worked in GPU programming you know the sheer hit in performance that branching can cause (without a lot of smart planning). It's the exact same with factories, but on a scale of months instead of seconds.
China, India and Russia were already protective of their space and EU was the only large open market where the American tech giants were able to operate freely. Then EU went protective too but not by banning but making set of rules. An American company disregarding the European rules wouldn't be received nicely, Europe is keeping its market open just says follow the rules that we put in place so we don't have to ban foreign tech like China and the USA did.
I don't see Europeans siding with the American companies on this, if it becomes a conflict it may easily end the same way it ends in China and the USA: Banning foreign owned companies operating in certain industries due to national security reasons.
Have you heard about the rise of far-right in the EU? These right wingers are not the same as the American ones, they don't intent to make America Great again but to make Europe great again. They don't obsess with abortion and stuff but with foreign influence and the only reason some of these are sympathetic to Russia is because they see it as "enemy of their enemy, America". Even in UK there's non-negligible anti-Americanism and the lefties(among which anti-Americanism is more widespread) are about to take power.
If Trump wins the elections and the USA insulates itself as he promises, you can reasonably expect to see the market of Apple and all other tech companies dropping to US-only.
The EU smartphone market will be filled with Korean/Chinese brands who will be willing to cooperate, likely even partnering with local capital to come up with European brands in this.
But who knows, a lot can change with the wars and political realignment going on. It's also possible for Europe to completely give up in exchange of protection but that seems less likely as the US is pushing in the other direction.
Did Fast Company have a similar version of this for Google I/O, OpenAI’s conference, Microsoft’s Copilot+ unveiling, Alexa’s last big presentation?
Apple — all alone — is a threat to human creativity? Really? They’ve caught up to & exceeded the competition (or signed deals with some of them) and are now on the verge of clobbering creativity as we know it …
… as I read each paragraph, an icon for for 3 social media sites follows me while I scroll. There might be a few entities to blame, but something seems off when a situation is implied to be dire and related to social networks ... and by the way please share this.
Regarding links in the article, it’s definitely lacking (as mentioned links like this: https://blog.chromium.org/2024/05/manifest-v2-phase-out-begi...) but also why don’t articles like this offer a consistent set of alternate browsers like Firefox, Safari & all the Chromium derivatives (Brave, DuckDuckGo & Arc) that include ad blockers? I get that there’s a difference between those & the free choice to pick your ad blocker; but eventually everyone grows tired of the cat n mouse game. Why not help promote switching?
Almost all of these, for example, have desktop variants:
I'd go and download the MV2 version of the extension today. Vivaldi lets you load extensions directly from .crx files (unlike Chrome, which refuses to run extensions that were not published on the Chrome store), and MV2 extensions will probably keep working in Chromium for at least a year since Google has said they will allow some special enterprise extensions to keep using MV2 for a while.
What is easier than Apple’s App Store to install & drag to Trash to uninstall. And, non-App Store downloadable dmg installers (and app update utilities available to 3rd parties — albeit not Apple’s updater). macOS is pretty easy.
So I think a lot of people say that they’d rather print photos at a drugstore (or some other online service), which totally makes sense. But if you completely ditch printers at home, which kind of makes sense; where do you feel safe printing contracts & medical docs? Kinkos & the library don’t feel like good alternatives … Is there some place that is good / safe to do this??
Also, what if HP is actually intentionally getting all of use to hate printing on paper altogether? Maybe this is the biggest corporate tree-hugger event in the history of mankind. Nah, no way … it’s definitely money grab.
I've degoogled quite well, the only real google services I continue to voluntarily use are YouTube and Maps. Although I don't use YouTube itself, I mostly interact with it through third party apps (i.e SmartTube or Invidious) and with Maps... well... nothing comes close. I wish there was a decent competitor to Google Maps but there isn't. I tried using Apple Maps but it lacks all of the crowdsourced information that Google has access to.
Even with Google Maps, I find the UX of Apple Maps to be superior.
The worst part is how when you’re on a trip and move to another app and back, Google Maps will wait 5-10 secs before showing you the trip you’re literally on. Instead it prioritises the unwanted “what’s on” box.
I’ll use Google Maps for reviews, and Apple Maps for everything else.
The math around cost of ownership is just vague for EVs. (Tires instead of oil changes mentioned in the article is worse than vague though, at least with respect to cost.) But even if there was good data — and there might be — long term ownership costs won’t be known for quite a while, for example what does a 300,000 lifespan cost? Which leads to another question: Isn’t EV a vague way to describe cars? What might be better is economy EVs vs luxury. Luxury car owners might expect to use up tread quickly, but cheap EV cars might come with different expectations even if those are wrong.
