Linked List: March 21, 2024

Thursday, 21 March 2024

The Verge: ‘CarPlay Is Anticompetitive, Too, US Lawsuit Alleges’ ★

Andrew J. Hawkins, reporting for The Verge:

“By applying the same playbook of restrictions to CarPlay, Apple further locks-in the power of the iPhone by preventing the development of other disintermediating technologies that interoperate with the phone but reside off device,” the lawsuit says.

The inclusion of CarPlay, as well as digital key functions through Apple’s Wallet feature, came as a surprise to some analysts, who say that the DOJ may be misunderstanding the utility and functions of the phone-mirroring system.

This is especially true for the next-generation version, which prosecutors described insidiously as taking “over all of the screens, sensors, and gauges in a car, forcing users to experience driving as an iPhone-centric experience if they want to use any of the features provided by CarPlay.”

That’s misleading, said Sam Abuelsamid, principal analyst at Guidehouse Insights and an expert on vehicle software. “Even with the next-gen system, OEMs [original equipment manufacturers] don’t actually have to let Apple take over all the screens,” he said in an email. “They can limit the interface to whichever screens they want.”

“Misleading” is too kind. It’s just flat-out wrong. The biggest problem with CarPlay 2 is its relative dearth of adoption to date — previewed only by Porsche and Aston Martin, neither of which is even vaguely a mainstream brand.

Apple Style Guide, March 2024 Edition ★

Another terrific resource from Apple’s documentation team, also available as a PDF. Apple has long made its style guide publicly available, but I suspect many people aren’t aware of it. The previous edition was from 2022.

Worth noting though that this is Apple’s style bible, and while most of it is inarguably good advice, some of it is simply arbitrary. For example, Apple famously styles some of its product names without title-casing them: Mac mini, iPod nano, macOS, visionOS, watchOS, etc. That’s purely style though, not spelling, and my style — like most publications — is to capitalize proper names.

A new entry, some of the idiosyncrasies of which many of you have likely already noticed in Apple’s marketing and documentation:

Apple Vision Pro — Always use the full name. In general references, don’t use the with Apple Vision Pro. It’s OK to use another article or a possessive adjective: Adjust the fit of your Apple Vision Pro.

You put on and take off Apple Vision Pro. When you have it on, you’re wearing it.

Put on Apple Vision Pro and adjust the fit.
Don’t run while you’re wearing Apple Vision Pro.

In text, don’t write the name Apple Vision Pro by combining the  symbol with Vision Pro.

Correct: Get started with Apple Vision Pro.
Incorrect: Get started with Vision Pro.

Don’t refer to Apple Vision Pro as a headset. In most cases, use the product name; in content where the name is repeated frequently, you can use device.

Outside Cupertino, no one eschews the in front of Apple product names when doing so sounds natural, and everyone calls the Vision Pro a “headset”, because, well, it is a headset.

(I keep thinking that if it had come out in the 1990s, it might have been named AppleVision Pro, closed-up and camel-cased, and also keep thinking that it kind of looks cool that way. Similarly: AppleWatch.)

Jason Snell on US v. Apple ★

Jason Snell, writing at Six Colors, with a first take I found myself nodding my head in agreement with throughout:

For me, the most unexpected part of the document was the DoJ’s explanation that Apple’s success as a company largely stems from… the DoJ itself. It points out that Apple’s resurgence early in this century was due to the release of the iPod, which only became a hit when it arrived on Windows. The DoJ argues that the iPod’s presence on Windows was only due to Microsoft being under a consent decree from the DoJ for monopolistic behavior.

I don’t know enough about the specifics of the Microsoft consent decree to weigh in on the idea that an unconstrained Microsoft would have made it impossible for Apple to make the iPod compatible with Windows. It’s a pretty big hypothetical, and I’m skeptical, but I’m impressed that the DoJ would try to place its current case within the larger DoJ Connected Universe.

You don’t need to be a lawyer to see that this is a nonsensical claim. Microsoft played all sorts of hardball with Windows’s licensing to PC makers back in the 1990s, but nothing they did would have ever stopped Apple from making iTunes for Windows and allowing iTunes for Windows to manage an iPod connected over USB. That’s one thing Windows (and DOS before it) always was: open to third-party software, and open to connected peripherals. iTunes, to my recollection, was always software that users downloaded and installed themselves. iTunes was not pre-installed on PCs and thus subject to Microsoft’s licensing shenanigans (e.g. the way Microsoft used licensing discounts to discourage PC makers from shipping computers with Netscape pre-installed). At a technical level I don’t even see how Microsoft could have hindered iTunes or the iPod even if they had wanted to.

[Update: I forgot about the 2004 HP-iPod deal, which included pre-installing iTunes on HP PCs, but the larger point stands.]

What strikes me most about this document is that people… like using the iPhone? This suit (joined by 16 other attorneys general, mostly of blue states) has a political element to it, in the sense of trying to send a message that your government is looking out for your rights and protecting you from big, bad tech companies.

What happens when that collides with a product that has extremely high customer satisfaction ratings? Those of us in the know are well aware of all the ways that Apple plays hardball, and understand that the company is so powerful that really the only way it will be convinced to change its ways is under threat of government intervention. But will American iPhone users feel like the government is on their side, in taking on an American tech giant that makes a product they actually enjoy using?

I wonder very much about this too. The biggest US antitrust case in my lifetime was the breakup of Ma Bell, a.k.a. AT&T Classic. The “phone company” was universally reviled at the time, if only for the exorbitant long-distance phone call rates they charged. Ma Bell was both unpopular and inarguably a monopoly — the Bell system was the only way to place telephone calls.

I think the public, by and large, was ambivalent about Microsoft’s monopoly abuse in the 1990s. But Apple is popular, the iPhone in particular. And many of the complaints lodged by the DOJ regarding the iPhone are for the very things that make it popular.

Merrick Garland’s Remarks on the Lawsuit Against Apple’s Supposed Monopoly ★

Attorney General Merrick Garland:

When an iPhone user puts a credit or debit card into Apple Wallet, Apple inserts itself in a process that could otherwise occur directly between the user and card issuer. This introduces an additional potential point of failure for the privacy and security of Apple users.

Apple Pay through Wallet obfuscates your actual credit card numbers, which retailers infamously use to track customers. It’s far more private than using your credit card itself. I highly doubt any banks or credit card issuers would do this themselves if given access to NFC tap-to-pay.

[Update: Whoops, I was wrong about that. Matt Birchler, who works in the payments industry, has a great explainer about how this works, and it turns out major banks and credit cards do generate per-merchant “DPAN” numbers for tap-to-pay transactions. I stand by my argument that Apple Wallet is at least as, if not more secure than, any digital payment app provided by a card issuer.]

And that is just one way in which Apple is willing to make the iPhone less secure and less private in order to maintain its monopoly power. The Supreme Court defines monopoly power as “the power to control prices or exclude competition.”

As set out in our complaint, Apple has that power in the smartphone market.

Defining the iPhone as a monopoly when it has somewhere around 55 percent market share in the U.S. is obviously the first thing the DOJ needs to prove. Microsoft had roughly 95 percent market share of the PC operating system market when the DOJ sued them in the late 1990s. The DOJ tries to get around the uncomfortable fact of Apple’s mere 55 percent share by defining a market for “performance smartphones”. I don’t really see how Apple has any power over the price of phones made by other companies.

Now, having monopoly power does not itself violate the antitrust laws. But it does when a firm acquires or maintains monopoly power — not because it has a superior product or superior business acumen — but by engaging in exclusionary conduct. As set out in our complaint, Apple has maintained its power not because of its superiority, but because of its unlawful exclusionary behavior.

Completely backwards. Superiority is exactly what made the iPhone what it is — superior hardware, superior software, superior integration. Even a superior retail experience. Not only is the DOJ’s take on the iPhone’s success a complete misunderstanding of the actual market dynamics for phones, it’s flabbergastingly insulting.

U.S. Department of Justice Sues Apple, Accusing It of Illegally Abusing an iPhone Monopoly ★

David McCabe and Tripp Mickle, reporting for The New York Times:

The lawsuit filed Thursday focuses on a group of practices that the government said Apple had used to shore up its dominance.

The company “undermines” the ability of iPhone users to message with owners of other types of smartphones, like those running the Android operating system, the government said. That divide — epitomized by the green bubbles that show an Android owner’s messages — sent a signal that other smartphones were lower quality than the iPhone, according to the lawsuit.

But of course SMS is a vastly lower-quality platform than iMessage. Without having read the actual lawsuit yet, I’m curious what they think Apple should do differently on this front. Is Apple obligated to ship an iMessage client for other platforms? For free?

Apple has similarly made it difficult for the iPhone to work with smartwatches other than its own Apple Watch, the government argued. Once an iPhone user owns an Apple Watch it becomes far more costly for them to ditch the phone.

Apple peripherals and Apple software exclusive to Apple devices is, in a nut, what Apple does and what has made their products popular. This summary reeks of technical naivety. The DOJ is alleging that, for example, Apple Watch and iPhone work better together than third-party watches with iPhones not because of specific integration, but because Apple is locking third parties out. Same with Tile trackers vs. AirTags. The only alternative would be to allow third parties to install system software extensions on iOS, like on a Mac or PC.

Watching the DOJ press conference (transcripts of the prepared statements, including Attorney General Merrick Garland’s, are here), there’s a strong undercurrent to the DOJ’s argument that iPhone users are, en masse, trying to switch to Android but finding it too difficult and expensive. That’s not based on reality. Every customer satisfaction survey I’ve seen, from 2007 onward, has shown iPhone owners to be overwhelmingly happy. It’s not just the most successful consumer electronics product in history — perhaps product, period — but it’s arguably the most liked.