Tim Hardwick:
Apple Fellow Phil Schiller testified in court on Monday that he initially opposed the 27% commission Apple now charges on purchases made outside the App Store, citing compliance risks and potential developer backlash (via AP News).
Schiller, who oversees the App Store, said he had concerns that the fee would create an “antagonistic relationship” between Apple and developers, and worried about Apple becoming “some kind of collection agency” that might need to audit developers who didn’t pay.
[…]
The current hearings are scheduled to continue until Wednesday, and are focused on determining whether Apple has violated the original court order. Judge Gonzalez Rogers has expressed frustration with Apple witnesses’ hazy recollections about how they developed rules for the alternative payment system.
According to court documents, Apple extensively analyzed how the “less seamless experience” of external purchases would affect transaction completion rates, which helped the company work out when developers would likely return to using Apple’s in-app purchase system.
Paul Thurrott:
Long-time Apple executive Phil Schiller admitted in court that the 27 percent fee Apple imposed likely violated a court order in Epic v. Apple. In effect, he simply confirmed what everyone already knows about Apple’s bad faith compliance with antitrust rulings around the globe: It is doing as little as possible to meet the letter of the law to forestall actual compliance for as long as possible.
[…]
Schiller said he opposed the fee initially, and that multiple Apple executives, including CEO Tim Cook, were involved in the process of determining the fee structure for web-based fees. He also admitted that the fee structure it came up with was “antagonistic,” though he did sign off on it.
The Judge was already unimpressed by Apple’s behavior before this week. “All this does is maintain the non-competitive environment that exists,” she told Schiller last year. Since then, the only thing that’s changed is that Apple hasn’t complied with the court order for a longer period of time. What’s left is for Judge Gonzalez-Rogers to hold Apple in contempt of the court and order it to make more meaningful changes that address her original ruling. From four years ago.
Schiller has been a particularly bad witness for Apple, as he’s claimed to forget almost anything related to Epic Games each time he’s testified. But Epic’s lawyers are using evidence to “refresh” his memory during this week’s hearings.
Tim Sweeney:
And it wasn’t explicitly said, but the testimony had the vibe that Phil didn’t want to do any of this - not even charging the commission - but was overruled by the “revenue committee” (CEO Tim Cook and then-CFO Luca Maestri).
He wasn’t sure it would even be legal, and this lines up with the previous reporting that Schiller wanted to cap the App Store profits at $1 billion per year, in the interest of ecosystem health. Obviously, the buck stops at Tim Cook.
Tim Sweeney:
Exhibit 225 shows that Apple CEO Tim Cook PERSONALLY directed the App Store team to add misleading security warnings to undermine developers and users transacting directly. This is one of the critical points in the Contempt of Court proceeding.
Perhaps he will testify, too, and tell the court that Apple has to deal with the same fees and warnings as developers.
Tim Sweeney:
Now we’re in court reading Apple’s internal emails on making the third-party payment scare screens as scary and intimidating as possible. “It raises questions and hesitancy, ha ha!”, one writes of the latest scare screen.
Now this witness, a UX designer, is on the stand being examined by a friendly Apple lawyer, redefining the English word “scare” as some sort of benign benevolent gesture. 🙄
Previously:
Antitrust App Store Apple Business Epic Games In-App Purchase iOS iOS 18 Lawsuit Legal Phil Schiller Tim Cook
John Siracusa (Mastodon):
There are plenty of Mac apps that will save disk space by finding duplicate files and then deleting the duplicates. Using APFS clones, my app could reclaim disk space without removing any files! As a digital pack rat, this appealed to me immensely.
By the end of that week, I’d written a barebones Mac app to do the same thing my Perl script was doing. In the months that followed, I polished and tested the app, and christened it Hyperspace. I’m happy to announce that Hyperspace is now available in the Mac App Store.
Hyperspace is a free download, and it’s free to scan to see how much space you might save. To actually reclaim any of that space, you will have to pay for the app.
It costs $19.99/year, $9.99/month, or $49.99 lifetime. As he says, it’s “dangerous,” but I trust Siracusa to be careful and get it right. However, this and other duplicate finder apps are not for me. I know from first principles where most of my duplicates are, and how they result from the way I build my apps and Web sites. You have to pay to see which duplicates Hyperspace found, but the overall total was in the expected range. I don’t really care about saving a quarter of a percent of the space on my SSD. I assume my situation is not typical or this wouldn’t be such a popular app category.
Nick Heer:
On my MacBook Pro, used for far less strenuous tasks, the potential savings are around 57 MB.
John Voorhees:
I took Hyperspace for a spin to see what it could find on my Mac Studio, which stores about 2.5 TB of data. The scan was impressively fast at around 30 seconds, identifying 4.04 GB of data that it could free up. That’s not a lot in the grand scheme of things, but it was also nice to know that I don’t generate a lot of duplicate files with my workflows.
Apple File System (APFS) Hyperspace Mac Mac App macOS 15 Sequoia Storage
Tripp Mickle and Eli Tan (Hacker News, MacRumors):
While using Apple’s automatic dictation feature to send messages on Tuesday, some iPhone users reported seeing a peculiar bug: the word “racist” temporarily appearing as “Trump,” before quickly correcting itself.
The message blip, which was replicated several times by The New York Times, provoked controversy after appearing in a viral TikTok post, raising questions about Apple’s artificial intelligence capabilities.
An Apple spokeswoman blamed the issue on phonetic overlap between the two words, and said the company was working on a fix.
[…]
“This smells like a serious prank,” Mr. Burkey said. “The only question is: Did someone slip this into the data or slip into the code?”
Juli Clover:
Speaking the word racist with dictation doesn’t always show “Trump” first, though it did show up more often than other words in our testing. We also saw “Rhett” and “Rouch” appear before the iPhone corrects to racist.
Chance Miller:
The New York Times story cleverly omits the fact that other words like “rampage” trigger this glitch, not just “racist.” This leads some credence to Apple’s explanation that this is due to “phonetic overlap.”
Except that there is a lot of overlap with “rampage.” There are a variety of possible explanations, from a prank to some sort of semantic adjacency in a training dataset, but I think the idea that it’s because the phonemes are similar is laughable. I wonder why Apple PR felt the need to give this specific explanation instead of just saying that it was a bug.
Previously:
Artificial Intelligence Bug Dictation iOS iOS 18
Andrew Liszewski (Hacker News, Reddit):
Starting on February 26th, 2025, Amazon is removing a feature from its website allowing you to download purchased books to a computer and then copy them manually to a Kindle over USB. It’s a feature that a lot of Kindle users are probably not aware of, given books can be more easily sent to devices over Wi-Fi, but it’s especially useful for backing up purchases or converting them to other formats compatible with non-Kindle e-readers.
[…]
It doesn’t happen frequently, but as Good e-Reader points out, Amazon has occasionally removed books from its online store and remotely deleted them from Kindles or edited titles and re-uploaded new copies to its e-readers.
[…]
The feature is also the easiest way to convert books purchased from Amazon to other formats like EPUB that can be used on alternative devices such as a Kobo. Books downloaded through Amazon’s website are delivered in the older AZW3 format which allows DRM to be easily removed using various software tools.
Jason Snell:
This feature was designed for users who had connectivity on their computer, but not on their Kindle. But it’s also been the easiest pathway to get ebook files out of Amazon’s copy protection scheme so that they can be converted to play back on other devices.
[…]
While I remain optimistic about the ability of scrappy underdogs to circumvent the copy protection regimes of big tech companies, the fact is that Amazon’s newer file format has been incredibly difficult to crack—hence the value of the USB downloading hole that Amazon’s about to close.
[…]
I used the Amazon Kindle eBook Bulk Downloader by friend of the site Sam Davis.
David Sparks (Mac Power Users):
There is something about this that stinks to me. I pay for the books. I feel like I should be able to download them. I’ve bought hundreds of books from Amazon over the years and this push toward cloud-based model data control feels like crossing a line. Maybe this is a thing with me and I should have realized that I was only purchasing a “license” to read the books instead of “ownership” of the books all along.
Nathan (Hacker News):
Amazon recently changed the wording on their website when it comes to buying Kindle ebooks.
As the screenshot above shows, they now have a disclaimer under the buy now button that says, “By placing your order, you’re purchasing a license to the content and you agree to the Kindle Store Terms of Use”.
[…]
I read somewhere about a new law that was passed in California where companies have to “conspicuously” disclose that customers are buying a license when it comes to digital media like ebooks, so that’s likely the reason why Amazon made the change.
Previously:
Backup DRM E-books Kindle Sideloading Sunset USB
