Markets are like thermodynamics: the real world doesn’t actually conform to the linear approximations, but in some circumstances gets close enough for the models to be useful. Adam Smith’s model with a large number of both sellers and buyers, none having power to dictate prices, works in some cases. The early days of mobile telephones (esp. in the European GSM market with ready substitutability) was close enough that with care the market model could be applied.
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Some problems haven’t yet been solved, but the end is in sight.
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They really aren’t. Thermodynamics exists whether we do or don’t. Markets are the product of very specific cultural interactions between humans at particular times and places and utterly dependent on the social, governmental, regulatory, geographical, historical etc. environment they occur in.
To assume a frictionless vacuum in this case is to make your answer to the question an a priori.
It’s why they have two Nobel prizes for money astrologers, each with the opposite answer to the same question.
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The same designers who are over-employed but under-utilised and to avoid twiddling their thumbs and being laid off decide they need to justify their existence and continued employment by improving (where “improve” = “fix” = break) things that were not broken, did not need fixing and are now worse due to their “improvements”.
Those people! (May a pox be upon them to the end of time.)
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It’s become clear that Apple’s interests lie not “encouraging innovation” but rather actively suppressing the utility of non-Apple devices, and the ability of their users and non Apple-device-havers to communicate. It’s an egregious violation of their reason for existing as a communications provider.
In Adam Smith’s day every country had their own definition of the inch (some wildly varying, by like 10-15% in a couple cases). Widespread industrialization would have been impossible then, the degree of evolution of economic and industrial systems that allowed the modern world to exist are inconceivable without network effects that depend on effectively global standardization - (one major example being the Haber process among other things, which critically depended on precise large machined bores and other techniques that could support the vacuum and pressures needed to fix nitrogen - it took most of the twentieth century for the benefits of more easily available nutrition to reach many parts of the world). As others pointed out above, standards and enforcement of technological interoperability don’t have to come from the state, but when a situation warrants (like preventing excessive plastic waste in the environment or lowering incidence of destructive fires caused by badly mating interconnects, (certs are mandated for wall power electrical hookups and installations)), government intervention is one tool for society when market inefficiencies become an excessive burden on society.
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I don’t think this is as cut and dry as it seems. They just added the ability to allow interop with FaceTime.
Obviously there are very good arguments to be made as to why doing so would be in Apple’s financial interest. I just think its disingenuous to immediately assume Tim Cook is sitting on an iron throne in a dark tower with his hands together, trying to dream up new ways to keep iOS and Android users from ever talking.
Thermodynamics is a simplified model of the statistical behavior of large numbers of particles which exchange energy and momentum. The thermodynamic model assumes that the number is large enough that the collection can be treated as a continuum. This is false but as the famous saying goes, “All models are false, but some are useful.”
Adam Smith’s market model makes similar assumptions about groups of buyers and sellers (lots of both, products that can be substituted for each other, no coercion, etc.) Like the behavior of gas molecules, the models are flawed but still useful as long as care is taken in light of the assumptions. This is a lot easier with atoms than with humans, as Wolfgang Pauli reminded us:
Als Physiker kann man davon ausgehen, dass ein Elketron wie das andere ist, während Sozialwissenschaftler auf diesen Luxus verzichten müssen.
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From the Apple employee quoted in the linked article :
“The #1 most difficult [reason] to leave the Apple universe app is iMessage … iMessage amounts to serious lock-in,” was how one unnamed former Apple employee put it in an email in 2016, prompting Schiller to respond that, “moving iMessage to Android will hurt us more than help us, this email illustrates why.”
“iMessage on Android would simply serve to remove [an] obstacle to iPhone families giving their kids Android phones,” was Federighi’s concern according to the Epic filing.
They broke SMS and MMS - those weren’t perfect, but they worked consistently across carriers and devices. That should be the priority in any communications protocol - closed proprietary systems inherently drive towards monopolies in interacting tech.
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?!?
I didn’t come to get into an argument, but I’m really lost on what you’re claiming here. SMS and MMS still work just fine on iOS if you communicate with non-iOS devices. Even so much as to fall over gracefully if the iMessage protocol is unavailable.
Also, I was not claiming Apple doesn’t try to create lock-in. Of course they do; they’re a for-profit company. I was only trying to say that purposeful obfuscation of interop for its own sake (as your original comment appeared to me to suggest) doesn’t appear to be a primary modus operandi of theirs.
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right. i was talking about the engineers who actually have to implement those designs.
slightly ot example: while it was an engineer who the put mouse charging port on the bottom of the mouse, it wasn’t an engineer who convinced apple to do so.
better to put that effort – and the effort of making dongles – into something useful.
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Excuse my rambling about this …
Your note about widespread industrialisation (and by very direct inference given what you were referring to - widespread cross-border industrialisation) being reliant on common standards made me think a little off-topic about things like this being a good example of how the Brexiteers’ mantra about freedom from EU regulation opening up opportunities for ‘Global Britain’ is just patent nonsense. And also about why EU (and to date, UK) standards on things like meat production and differing US standards on the same are constraints to more widespread cross-border trade that follows from industrialisation.
I guess standardising the inch was more moral-value-free than standardising how to treat the animals we breed for food and how to treat the meat they produce. (I use this merely as a convenient example - there are many more, such as GM crop production and certain types of chemical/pesticide use).
It suits some people (and some countries) for some standards to be aligned sometimes and at other times it suits them to be very much not aligned. In either case, market inefficiencies that arise as a result are still the result of state intervention (albeit at the behest of very vested interests with influence to wield).
My belief is that we should always question not only the motives of those who oppose standardisation (Apple) but also examine the motives and interests of those proposing a particular standard to be sure they are as neutral as possible.
(And I’m surprised that the evergreen XKCD for this has not yet appeared in this thread.)
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Are we sure it won’t mean another opportunity for Apple to sell yet more dongles?
And it has a lot of unstated assumptions. Adam Smith, apart from nicking his pin factory from Diderot who also hadn’t been to one and nicked it in his turn, didn’t investigate those assumptions.
ETA
In short: he’s wrong. If you accept his assumptions he’s right. That’s true of pretty much all money astrologers.
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RE: Adam Smith
Exactly: thermodynamics. All models are wrong, but some are useful.
I don’t have any USB C devices yet. I think my wife has one.
Most of my devices take micro USB and a couple use mini. The rest take 2.1mm barrel connectors, mini HDMI (seriously!), or PoE.
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Hooray! (Grey is 61p, but if you buy it in white it’s £10.)
That’s so stupid. My MBP uses USB-C, so what’s the problem, Tim Apple?
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As a non apple user: what is up with the blue bubble thing? Is it just that texts from Android users come up with a different colour?
I’m asking because I have heard (non technical) apple users speak with disgust about people that show up with blue bubbles on their phones and they weren’t being facetious. Surely there is more behind it than tribalism?
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I’m stealing this
I know the Swedish central bank has a memorial Nobel prize in economics but what is the second Nobel prize you are referring to?
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Apple will find a way. And I thank Brussels every time I click accept all Cookies, they just can’t stop making the world a better place.
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