In 2008, the app store was launching, and physical software was still sold at Targets, Walmarts and other large retailers. A 30% margin was roughly what retailers would make off of physical software sales. By setting the App Store to be the same, Apple was signaling to retailers that they were not trying to undercut their margin, and keep a healthy relationship with them.
The carriers were taking about 70% in tariffs and fees even without you bribing them to get better positioning. That’s why all the mobile app people rushed to Apple in the early days. They could actually turn a profit on the App Store.
If probably be retired now if I wasn’t already so burnt out on how SMS tariffs worked at the time. Utterly opaque and on a delay. They basically wrote you a check for however much they felt like each month.
Essentially the reseller arm of carriers at that time was just a money funnel from VCs to the telcos. They were eating their own young and I was full up on the bullshit.
No one was buying boxed software in 2008. The second we had broadband, call it 2002-ish, everyone was downloading everything. For many of us that began in the 90s before we had broadband. Overnight downloads over 56K phone modems was already overtaking boxed purchases. More people downloaded Netscape in 1995 than bought it boxed.
Not disagreeing with your general point, but Netscape is probably a bad example here. People who wanted Netscape would have been much more likely to know how to download and wanted to download it. Compared to, say, video editing software, which would have much less correlation with web users back in 1995 when not everyone was a web user.
It was 2008; "big box" software was largely seen as obsolete to the vast majority of developers. Marketing was done online, and the benefit of investing in retail had stopped outweighing the consequences. Online updates quickly became the norm, and service features supplanted point-of-sale business model (much like Apple's double-dip into microtransaction profits).
Apple chose 30% because they knew they weren't a retailer. You can hunt for a cheaper Diablo II copy online or at Wal-Mart, but not on iPhone.
> It was 2008; "big box" software was largely seen as obsolete to the vast majority of developers.
Well, I'm just reporting it as I understood their decision in the moment. I was working on The Sims at that time, and I assure you, retailers still mattered to us bigly.
And what you quoted is my opinion as a consumer. Blizzard got it working in 1996, Valve figured it out in 2003 - the industry was moving on.
EA was an outlier, and by the time they capitulated and started Origin it was so bad that people regret signing up for the service. GoG didn't have this issue, Valve didn't have that issue, EA did.
Steak is the meat that people pay the most attention to in this regard! People will pay hundreds of dollars for a few ounces of steak solely based on how the cow was raised and fed.
For steak, I disagree with the article about stigma of eating bugs. Feeding cows bugs will save money, no doubt, and that might help cost on the low end of the beef market. Steak is a different thing though. A "bug-raised, bug-finished" steak would have to be incredible to overcome the stigma.
Comparing high end, connoisseur based food like wagyu to the plastic wrapped supermarket meat most folks buy day to day isn't a good comparison. Both things exist; there isn't only one way people think (or don't think) about their food in this way.
Similarly with whisky - some folks care deeply some of the time about a particular whisky made by a particular distillery in a particular way in a particular place. This is fun and interesting and there is a lot to appreciate there. That doesn't mean there isnt a massive market for "well" whisky or the flavored ones where they mix up all the lower quality whisky they can get their hands on in bulk then add cinnamon or peanut butter syrup to it until people drink it again.
In the same way people generally don't LIKE the conditions of food animals it doesn't prevent their purchase, especially if it reduces cost or increases availability.
There are probably a fair share of people that care. But I said "most" and stand by it. Maybe you are american? Around here we don't ask how the cattle was fed, maybe in high end restaurants and markets, but that is obviously a minority.
But you left because you were feeling like google was going in gutter and wanted to make an ethical choice perhaps on what you felt was right.
Honestly I believe that google might be one of the few winners from the AI industry perhaps because they own the whole stack top to bottom with their TPU's but I would still stray away from their stock because their P/E ratio might be insanely high or something
So like, we might be viewing the peaks of the bubble and you might still hold the stocks and might continue holding it but who knows what happens after the stock depreciates value due to AI Bubble-like properties and then you might regret as why you didn't sell it but if you do and google's stock rises, you might still regret.
I feel as if grass is always greener but not sure about your situation but if you ask me, you made the best out of the situation with the parameters you had and logically as such I wouldn't consider it "unfortunately" but I get what you mean.
That's one of the reasons I left. It also became intolerable to work there because it had gotten so massive. When I started there was an engineering staff of about 18,000 and when I left it was well over 100,000 and climbing constantly. It was a weird place to work.
But with remote work it also became possible to get paid decently around here without working there. Prior I was bound to local area employers of which Google was the only really good one.
I never loved Google, I came there through acquisition and it was that job with its bags of money and free food and kinda interesting open internal culture, or nothing because they exterminated my prior employer and and made me move cities.
After 2016 or so the place just started to go downhill faster and faster though. People who worked there in the decade prior to me had a much better place to work.
Interesting, so if I understand you properly, you would prefer working remote nowadays with google but that option didn't exist when you left google.
I am super curious as I don't get to chat with people who have worked at google as so much so pardon me but I got so many questions for you haha
> It was a weird place to work
What was the weirdness according to you, can you elaborate more about it?
> I never loved Google, I came there through acquisition and it was that job with its bags of money and free food and kinda interesting open internal culture, or nothing because they exterminated my prior employer and and made me move cities.
For context, can you please talk more about it :p
> After 2016 or so the place just started to go downhill faster and faster though
What were the reasons that made them go downhill in your opinion and in what ways?
Naturally I feel like as organizations move and have too many people, maybe things can become intolerable to work but I have heard it be described as it depends where and in which project you are and also how hard it can be to leave a bad team or join a team with like minded people which perhaps can be hard if the institution gets micro-managed at every level due to just its sheer size of employees perhaps?
> you would prefer working remote nowadays with google but that option didn't exist when you left google.
Not at all. I actually prefer in-office. And left when Google was mostly remote. But remote opened up possibilities to work places other than Google for me. None of them have paid as well as Google, but have given more agency and creativity. Though they've had their own frustrations.
> What was the weirdness according to you, can you elaborate more about it?
I had a 10-15 year career before going there. Much of what is accepted as "orthodoxy" at Google rubbed me the wrong way. It is in large part a product of having an infinite money tree. It's not an agile place. Deadlines don't matter. Everything is paid for by ads.
And as time goes on it became less of an engineering driven place and more of a product manager driven place with classical big-company turf wars and shipping the org chart all over the place.
I'd love to get paid Google money again, and get the free food and the creature comforts, etc. But that Google doesn't exist anymore. And they wouldn't take my back anyways :-)
My sisters iPad just bricked itself during an update, and nothing I've tried has been able to revive it. And it's an unrepairable disposable piece of tech, so it's going into a landfill.
Please elaborate. China is building an absurd amount of new power plants, and most of that has been coal, with last year hitting a new high of coal deployment[1]. Why would they do that if it's expensive and unreliable? The letter you linked is advocating for a new gas plant.
And no, I am not advocating for building more coal plants.
They are building more plants but starting to burn less coal. Both can be true at the same time. They are expected to hit peak coal as early as this year. So, far coal generation is slightly down relative to last year.
What's happening is part just bureaucratic inertia. They raised funding and are building the plants even though strictly they aren't needed anymore. And part of it is them replacing older plants with newer more efficient ones. They close plants regularly as well. Instead of operating plants 24x7, they keep a few around for when wind/solar fall short. It seems even the Chinese have a hard time predicting how fast the energy transition is going. They've hit their own targets years ahead of time repeatedly in the recent past.
Apparently China coal imports could drop by about 18-19% this year. That seems to be part of a bigger five year plan. They might be hitting the targets for that early as well.
I think you're relating coal as a percentage of all energy rather than relative to itself year on year.
The data here shows that coal consumption is simply increasing in China. Therefore, I believe it is inaccurate to say "they are building more plants but starting to burn less coal." It is more accurate to say "they are building more plants and burning more coal, but they are not increasing their coal use at the same rate they increase their use of other energy sources."
Our World In Data gets that information from https://globalcarbonbudget.org/. I believe that the next update will include 2024 data, and should be available next month.
My reason for challenging the phrasing is just to be precise. This is a complex topic, and the distinction between a falling percentage of energy mix versus a rising absolute amount of consumption is a key detail that's often missed.
I had read the coal plants are also political safety nets for the local governments. Some populace is worried the switch to renewables will go wrong and they will freeze over winter, so the coal plants are built as a perceived backup option.
As another comment pointed out, China isn’t afraid to let infrastructure sit idle. That if these coal plants sit unused or demolished in the end - it would be better than the political risk mentioned above.
[1] shows that they their coal plants have not been sitting idle i 2025 and are producing close to what they did in 2024. [2] shows that coal based electricity produced is still increasing, but their overall CO2 emissions / kWh is lowering [3]
China gets most of its thermal coal locally, it imports specialty coking coal from Australia (to make metal), as well as some thermal coal. It also gets thermal coal from indonesia. It mines 10X what it imports, but really needs to import coking coal to keep making metals (it could probably survive on its own thermal coal reserves).
> China is building an absurd amount of new power plants, and most of that has been coal
Are you sure about that 'most' part? Hasn't China been building something like a coal plant's worth of solar power generation every eight hours for the past year or so?
My knowledge is a few years out of date, but at the time china’s power generation was mostly coal, despite the heavy investment in solar. New power generation at the time was not replacing old but just keeping up with rising demand, so china was building new coal plants as well. I don’t think most _new_ generation was coal even 5 years ago, but most existing _generation_ was coal , and I expect that is still true
As of 2023, China ~50% coal and the almost all of the rest is renewable (they use very little oil/gas since it all has to be imported). Since then, chinese solar capacity added has been absolutely ridiculous. In 2024, they added 125 GW, and in 2025 they have so far added >250 GW of solar. If my math is right, this means that China is as of this year, adding ~5% of 2023 electricity consumption per year, which would mean that within 5 years of similar production (which seems overly pesimistic given how much solar has increased every year up till now) they will be down to ~25% coal
Are they actually decommissioning power plants? Or just adding new capacity? Last I heard it was purely additive, ie they are using the extra capacity, not replacing existing capacity
You don't want to be a few years out of date when making statements about China's electrical grid. Things are changing so rapidly that even being a year or two out of date is talking about the distant past. Most recent data is available from a good search LLM.
> China is building an absurd amount of new [coal] plants
Fossil fuel advocates in the West love repeating this "fact" and omit another, rather more inconvenient fact. 80+% of all new electricity generation in China is solar or other renewable. China builds coal plants but they don't really use them much.
These coal plants either replace older ones shutting down or are mostly left idle. Why? My guess: to keep the jobs and skills around, to juice GDP, and as a backup.
China has lots of coal (to mine from the ground), and most of their solar/wind is out west, and most of their huge hydro is south, but is not enough anyways. They are able to reduce the amount of coal they depend on for their rising energy needs, but not eliminate them. It isn't just to keep the jobs/skills around, actually that would be easily transferred, they just can't pragmatically stop using coal yet.
Right they're gonna continue using as much coal they were already using. Because they have coal. People like the commenter I responded to repeat the talking point about "more coal plants". Because that automatically makes others think China is burning more and more and more coal and we're the only suckers who try to "go green". When in reality China's manufacturing prowess is responsible for solar power becoming so cheap in the first place and they're the biggest users of it by far.
They're going to operate a coal-backed renewable grid, while we (were up until recently) trying to build a natgas-backed renewable grid. They just have coal instead of natural gas, and they're actually building the renewables.
Natural gas isn't an option for them, but they can use coal. The biggest problems with renewables is that they exist too far away from where electricity is being used, and moving much more industry out west isn't very viable because it doesn't have enough water.
They are addressing that with HVDC transmission lines. They currently have around 48 000 km of such lines and are 2-3000 km more per year. They cross much of the country, including a 3300 kM line that runs between the Northwest and the middle of the East that operates at +/- 1100 kV and carries 12 GW.
It will take the, a few decades to build what they need, and they still need to add capacity until them for the east coast. Also, there is loss from moving power all the way from gansu to say hebei. Nuclear combined with renewables should make coal obsolete in a few decades, but they have to make do until then.
I think TVA's elaboration, which I linked to, is not only far more authoritative and trustworthy than me, a random internet poster, but here goes:
1) Our coal plants are old and trip off all the time, putting the grid at high risk. 2) The cost to upgrade a coal plant or build a new one is far higher than the gas alternative, so no financially competent entity is going to go with coal unless they are forced to by political manipulation/strong arming/bad incentives that hurt ratepayers.
Prices in China have literally nothing to do with the US, for either construction or gas or coal, so I'm not sure why you're linking to that in favor of our actual utilities' opinions here in the US. Is China's experience with coal really the reason you think that coal is either reliable or cheap?
My understanding is that china has a lot of coal, but has to import natural gas and petroleum products. I believe this changes the cost calculus in favor of coal specifically in china. That said, Chinese coal power plants are also much newer than US plants, which might mean they require less maintenance.
In terms of absolute usage the coal use in China is declining since the start of 2025. Deployment of renewables and storage are enough to supply both the grid expansion and displace existing coal demand.
China is build coal plants, solar, wind, nuclear, natural gas. They do less natural gas because they don't really have much of that, they do more coal because they can mine that locally, solar/wind are really only abundant out west while most people live in the east, and nuclear is a new thing that they are still getting into (and has lots of expenses that they haven't made cheap yet).
China is building less coal plants than they would need to if they just focused on coal, so they are improving over time.
You have to look at the locations of their renewables, China can only move so much industry out west due to a lack of water. They haven't been able to bring as much as that electricity back east with UWH transmissions lines as they hoped.
Can you give me some links supporting this? All the references I can find show that China is building transmission lines at about the rate they originally planned to.
They just haven’t built out wha they needed yet, they have capacity and are adding, but there is still a surplus of renewables from the west. At least Lanzhou has went from one of china’s dirtiest to one of their cleanest cities.
They also have a huge amount of line construction in the pipeline and have a tendency to do well at building things when it’s a priority. I feel like in just a few years we’ve seen anti-renewable/anti-China talking points shift from “China won’t build renewables” to “China can’t build renewables, it’s not economically feasible” to “ok, China is building renewables inexpensively and at massive scale but for some reason they won’t connect them to the grid” to “oh they are actually connecting renewables to the grid and emissions are dropping.” That midpoint of “they build but don’t connect” doesn’t feel like a hill I’d want to die on, and instead feels a lot like cope.
The future remedy will take a while to build, in the near term they still have to be flexible. I don’t think is doubting china’s ability or will to build things at this point.
If they build gas plants then they'd be so much more entangled in conflicts in the middle East (and Russia) . I'm not sure that that would be fantastic for anyone, the Chinese included
I wouldn't be surprised is the anti coal movement has been pushed by the petrostates
Coal sucks but it does ensure energy independence (as does solar and wind)
And Apple is now saying "That's fine, we'll instead adhere to the law by having our product do less. Don't buy it if you don't like the reduced featureset."
Someone at Apple did math on this and it's not worth their time to make this feature interoperable just for the EU market. That's because of this law. They wouldn't have even considered it without the law.
Which is fine as well if that's really the case (which I don't think it is, Europe apparently makes up ~1/3 of Apple's total Airpods revenue).
If they refrain from distorting the market in their favor (and instead "retreat and rally up the userbase") the DMA seems to work surprisingly well so far...
The procedures with the EU are quite interesting here, Apple was exchanging extensively for more than a year on how to reach compliance, then the decision [0] was made.
There are also separate procedures for the specification of compliance and investigating (non)compliance.
This gives Apple little room to argue on violation of the DMA later-on, because they were actively involved in defining the criteria beforehand.
So it's possible that they currently just need to find a mode to achieve launch-parity for EU on such features, and they're not there yet.
There are a few clear precedents where Apple held a feature back in the EU, then shipped later and/or exposed a path others could plug into:
Apple Intelligence: Announced as “not at launch” in the EU in 2024, then rolled out to EU users with iOS 18.4 in spring 2025 (most features). One carve-out remains: Live Translation with AirPods
NFC access for third-party wallets (HCE): After an EU antitrust case, Apple committed to open iPhone NFC (“tap-to-pay”) via Host Card Emulation, let users set a default non-Apple wallet, support Field Detect/Double-click flows, etc., so a genuine “build a platform others can plug into.” The Commission made these commitments legally binding for 10 years.
With iOS 17.4 Apple created EU-only entitlements for non-WebKit engines (e.g., full Chromium/Gecko), so browser makers can ship their own engines on iPhone/iPad in the EU.
Home-screen web apps (PWAs) reversal: Apple initially said PWAs would go away in the EU for 17.4, then reversed and kept them—implemented on WebKit with the usual security model.
Alternative app distribution (marketplaces + web distribution): In response to the DMA, Apple shipped EU-only APIs/entitlements for third-party app marketplaces and later web distribution (direct from developer sites) with notarization, installation, backup/restore hooks, etc.
Tap to Pay on iPhone (SoftPOS): Apple’s merchant “no extra hardware” payments feature expanded across EU countries and is designed for platforms like Adyen/Stripe/Mollie to integrate via SDKs
The fact is adapting a service to provide and support a generic API for the long term that others can hook into is extra work, compared to a private API tailored to their own hardware and that they can change whenever they like. It may be they could provide this as an open service in future.
On the other hand, what is to prevent another ear bud manufacturer writing an iPhone app their ear buds connects to that provides translation? Is this really a hardware feature in the phone? If it’s just software at the phone end, as long as other manufacturers have the feature access to implement this themselves, surely that’s their problem? Why should apple offer translation software as a service to other companies for free? I can see the argument for hardware but not software that others could implement themselves on iPhones.
The only one clearly DMA related with EU specific unlocks are:
* app store
* browser engines
The DMA could have been just an app store regulation. It seems to have had its intended effect there. Very very unproven outside of it. At best you've shown no harm other than delay in some areas.
I'm assuming NFC lawsuits are separate from the DMA but could be mistaken. But in any event NFC payments already existed and aren't a new feature apple decided to release under the DMA.
This is a play of Apple here, trying to spin the narrative in its favor.
The upside for the user is to have a larger variety of devices to choose from, each with similar interoperability with his Apple device.
The upside for the market is that all vendors are technically able to compete on the same terms. Apple is not allowed to operate a market, invite others to compete but also participate as a player with preferential treatment.
This is already decided for the existing features of Airpods, Apple Watch, etc. Apple is trying to rally its userbase against the EU by withholding new features now, in hopes that they can secure their skewed playing-field
The upside is that the market for headphones is more competitive because apple cannot use its control over the iphone to muscle competitors in the headphone market.
The goal is to make consumers better off, not just to have a competitive market. There's a lot of ways to make markets more competitive that don't result in better value for consumers, and I'd argue that this is one of them.
In the short term, specifically because of Apple's malicious compliance. In the long term, a more competitive market results in better off consumers.
But no, the goal is not to make consumers better off, but citizens and nations better off. And their interests do not stop at $PRODUCT. Namely, they probably don't want a slow slide into serfdom to foreign corporations that abused their market power.
I don't know how you reached that conclusion, sorry.
It's fine if Apple decided to refrain from its anti-competitive behavior in the headphone market because it's not economically viable to have this feature as a generic OS feature.
I find your views alien and strange (and vaguely upsetting, because they negatively impact the entire world)
There are huge hosts of software and hardware that work better because of an ecosystem of interoperable components. That’s not anticompetitive, it’s the benefit of good design with compounding returns.
As the manufacturing process and software becomes less complicated, there is a natural trend towards budget competitors (see: SaaS in 2025) that can replicate functionality they know has a market.
The idea that making it unappealing to make an integrated product is good for consumers — or anticompetitive — seems so wrong that it’s farcical. There are definitely cases where verticalization can harm consumers, but this opens the space for good competition. Perplexity wouldn’t exist if Google actually cared about search customers. Internet Explorer didn’t have to be regulated out of existence — by virtue of sucking, there is opportunity.
Apple is free to do as many interoperable components or integrated products as they please. The DMA doesn't define ANY such restriction.
What they CAN'T do is maintain an environment where their products cannot be met with fair competition by other players, by intentionally giving advantages in the ecosystem only to their own brands.
Apple might not dominate the market for fitness trackers above 150USD today if they wouldn't have prevented others to achieve the same interoperability with their iOS ecosystem.
Apples featureset for wellness tracking was not competitive, neither in function nor in price. Fitbit and Garmin were better in doing that task, but they were not able to display message notifications, apps, etc. because the required interfaces in iOS were only available to Apple's Watch.
Maybe Apple would have beaten them in 2nd Gen, maybe competitors would have followed with equally tight iOS-interoperability in 2nd Gen.
Maybe Apple Watch would nonetheless be the leading Smartwatch in the market today. Or maybe it would be e.g. the Moto360 (google it) just due to Apple's "virtue of sucking" and insistence of doing rectangular watches.
We don't know, because none of the other players are able to compete on fair terms with Apple in this segment until today. And today Apple has such a leap-start that it's questionable whether this can still be rectified.
> Someone at Apple did math on this and it's not worth their time to make this feature interoperable just for the EU market. That's because of this law
Let's not pretend like Apple isn't doing everything it can to turn its EU users against their government by complying with the DMA in the most obtuse, disruptive, and useless ways possible. They're risking fines and further punishments betting that they can ultimately subvert the democratic process that put in place laws that would require more developer and user freedom. To Apple, the threat of users owning their computers is an existential one.
If the consumers in EU don’t like the legal and predictable effects of the DMA in this case, how is Apple subverting the democratic process? If the act isn’t having the intended effect, then either voters will change their minds or it will need to be reformed. But this sounds like a successful outcome of the law insofar as preventing anticompetitive behavior.
Subverting democracy, to me, would involve things like dark money campaigns and lobbying.
> If the consumers in EU don’t like the legal and predictable effects of the DMA in this case, how is Apple subverting the democratic process
The issue is that Apple isn't following the law. It's breaking it and then miming to its customers that its actions are on account of the law. That misrepresentation is meant to convince citizens of the EU that DMA is a bad law with consequences they don't support so that they pressure their representatives to get it removed.
It's Apple making a big show of directly harming consumers as part of a misinformation campaign to get policy that limits their power repealed. To me that reaches the bar for subverting democracy.
It’s not breaking the law in this case as far as I know.
The law requires Apple to provide equal access to the iPhone hardware and software in marketplaces that it competes in.
That can be done in a manner that is either additive, by providing access to third parties (which is potentially a significant expense and liability) or subtractive, by choosing not to engage in the regulated activities at all, in that jurisdiction.
You're right that they're not breaking the law in this specific instance. I was referring to the many instances they've lost or are disputing in court, mainly around browser engines/JIT, their handling of default app screens, third party app distribution, extra fees, and mandatory app bundle signing.
In this case they're merely being obtuse by refusing to provide an API to other device manufacturers. Unless you genuinely believe that the cost/benefit analysis of adding a new feature to their OS dictates that they basically freeze development unless they're able to recoup costs by tying it to their accessories, then you must conclude that they made the live transcription API Apple-only, and therefore not DMA-compatible, only to make EU citizens feel like their laws were depriving them of new features.
An organization interested in good-faith compliance would expose their internal API surface with some vetting process for access by interested parties. Then as the API becomes stable they would open it up more broadly. If accused of being anti-competitive by restricting access they could easily and correctly argue that they were working with potential competitors on that stable and secure API, and that their actions balanced the interests of market competition and security.
Of course, Apple is not interested in good-faith compliance. It's my belief that they should be made an example of so that they and other companies running the math in the future decide that proactive and good-faith compliance with regulations is more cost-effective than attempting to fight them.
Proponents of EU competition law seem to be the most egregious version of “America isn’t the center of the world.” Why should international companies build products to align with regulation that has put the nail in the coffin of European innovation?
Typical meme comment with zero substance. The DMA is a competition-promoting regulation which will breed innovation as long as it's properly enforced.
Inventing a substandard product and using your market dominance in one area to ensure that nobody can compete with your substandard product is as far detached from innovation as you can possibly be. One size fits all solution with centrally planned development where one person knows best and competition isn't considered a driver of progress, isn't that a very communism-shaped approach to "innovation"?
I'm not even joking here and it's bizarre that I'm having to promote the good parts of free market capitalism to someone who claims to care about innovation.
No, they're not risking fines that way. They are free to not bring such features to the EU-market which prevent a level playing ground for competition.
But they were found to have already skewed the market with several Apple-accessory-exclusive iOS-features in the past (Proximity pairing, Watch-integration, etc.) and for those they have to provide interoperability now.
They worked with the EU for a year now on how exactly they should reach compliance, then the ruling was made, ordering them to make such interoperability features also available to other brands than Apple.
Now it seems that they try to rally their userbase against that ruling, in hopes to create a political climate that gets the ruling revoked again...
It's more complicated then this. Apple is a big company with a lot of money - they're absolutely willing to burn millions in the pursuit of principle.
The reality is that, if Apple conforms non-maliciously, they're proving that the law is reasonable and they can do it while remaining profit. Um, that's a huge problem.
They require the plausible deniability of "oh we can't do this, it's too expensive!" Otherwise, other governments (US) might look to implementing similar laws. So, it's a long con. They're burning lots of money, now, with the hope it allows them to continue their anti-competitive behavior for longer. If they're REALLY lucky, they might even stall out the EU and get the EU to backtrack on their laws. That's the golden scenario.
I very briefly worked at an ISP long after the days of dial-up were over. We had some super old servers on the network. These things hadn't been patched in forever, the OS was unsupported, etc. I think they were old Sun machines and Sun wasn't in business anymore. I asked what they were for and I was told there were still people paying for dial-up and their accounts were on there. They weren't actually using it, but the credit card auto payments were still going through and that was higher than the cost of the electricity. Nobody wanted to mess with it as long as people were still paying.
I worked on a help desk from 2013-2016 for an MSP that served some rural telcos. A couple of the clients still offered dial-up internet, so there were a few hundred people with dial up at that point. They were largely people with very rural homes that they didn't even have DSL. They were largely older people. And they just made a steady profit, the equipment and lines basically just worked and they had a FAR lower rate of calls than the DSL, Cable, Fiber, etc customers.
Reminds me of how AT&T continued generating revenue from renting landline phones many years after it became legal to own and connect your own equipment to their network.
My mom, who used dialup as recently as 2019 (not AOL) used it almost exclusively for email...Gmail's simple interface. She had a very active group of email correspondents, but Gmail on Chrome was her only need.
I've got in-laws that use 12yo Macs; would not surprise me in the least if a lot of older folks were still using whatever box from Best Buy or a relative they got in the late 00s.
I have now seen multiple articles about this and none of them talked about how much use it was actually getting today, which I have found disappointing.
Not sure why none that I have seen have been any better.
Disclosure would likely sooner or later compare actual users to people paying for the service, and while a discrepancy of orders of magnitude more of the latter probably wasn't illegal (unless some enterprising AG decides to make it a crime) it would be very bad press. No point in risking that when they can just stay mum.
Having very older parents, what an important use case!
Long gone are the days of writing a family update, including physical photos, and putting them in the post.
Fortunately, I’m able to guide
my parents in their tech usage. I can’t imagine what it would be like to be their age and have nobody to do the same. The sheer isolation… It’s horrible to contemplate.
They also do a massive amount of credible, in-depth reporting and while they deserve criticism where it is due, I can't believe the eagerness that some display to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
A baby takes nine months to make and a moment to throw out a window. Shall we keep on with analogies?
I disagree it takes "a moment" for a large, multiperson organization to lose all credibility due to occasional editorial lapses.
Or maybe it's because I think trust in reputable organizations is the only thing binding society together from crumbling into an AI social media abyss, that I refuse to declare NYTs credibility dead.
Heck, I still support the WSJ news section even though they're owned by an enabler of the current administration.
Don’t forget that for most than one or two years they pushed “4% kill rate” for covid despite it being multiple orders of magnitude lower. The amount of people that went insane as a result of that blatant misinformation is incredibly high.
They have zero credibility as far as I’m concerned. They are just a front for goverment propaganda.
This article is lacking detail. For example, how is the data sharded, how much time between indexing and serving, and how does it handle node failure, and other distributed systems questions? How does the latency compare? Etc. etc.
Except that, unlike a human, this particular "reader" can then regurgitate millions of copies of that content and all other content it sees, in seconds.
I wish people would stop treating this topic like it's not nuanced. It clearly is not as straightforward as either side would like to think.
Interesting. My hot take is 99% of the time non-founder CEOs end up on the dustbin of history, successful or unsuccessful.
Terry Semel. John Akers. John Sculley, Carly Fiorina. Except among those of us in tech, all are now long forgotten failures. Even Gil Amelio, who made one of the most genius acquisitions ever, was fired and his name lost to the sands of time. My bet is nobody's going to remember Tim Cook or Sundar or Satya in 50 years, maybe even 20.
Possibly the only non-founder CEO who has made a real legacy in the last 100 years is Elon. I would also say TJ Watson Jr. but I very much wonder if that many HN commenters know who he is!
I think the founders tend to have a love for the business and a long-term plan for it. Followup CEOs are more about the stock performance and happy to sell it for parts if it serves their bonus. Sundar and Satya took all of the strengths of those respective companies and burned them to the ground. Made a lot of money doing it, stockholders love them, but they're pale husks of their former businesses.
