By John Moltz
November 17, 2023 2:00 PM PT
This Week in Apple: Bad looks
Imagine, if you will, an avalanche of tens of billions of beans being spilled. Such is what happened in Google’s antitrust trial. There’s big news in little bubbles this week and social networking continues to be a huge mistake.
Cringe all the lawyers
After years of speculation, we finally know that Apple makes a lot of money.
Well, from Google specifically.
“Apple Gets 36% of Google Revenue in Search Deal, Expert Says”
See, now it makes sense why Apple doesn’t feel bad about taking 10 to 30 percent from developers. “Google gives us 36 percent of a metric crapton of money. You’re arguing about 30 percent of that little bit you make?”
It makes sense through a certain ridiculously wealthy lens.
In a delightful detail about this revelation, Bloomberg says Google’s economics expert, John Murphy, accidentally let this tidbit slip, causing Google attorney John Schmidtlein to “visibly cringe”. Both Google and Apple had been trying to keep this number a secret but now the multi-billion dollar cat is out of the bag.
Once again let me humbly suggest that we have an antitrust trial running all the time, because the discovery and now accidental revelations, even the way they are unveiled, are just delicious.
50 shades of green
In an unexpected move, Apple announced this week that it will support RCS messaging sometime late next year.
“Later next year, we will be adding support for RCS Universal Profile, the standard as currently published by the GSM Association. We believe the RCS Universal Profile will offer a better interoperability experience when compared to SMS or MMS. This will work alongside iMessage, which will continue to be the best and most secure messaging experience for Apple users,” said an Apple spokesperson.
“We’re gonna do it, we just want everyone to know our way is better.” OK, Apple.
Apple further said it will work with the standards group in order to get end-to-end encryption in the standard.
After this announcement, there was wild speculation about what color bubble RCS messages would have. Certainly not blue. But green or a new color? Or even an entirely new color of the spectrum like the color flink or something, to further draw attention to the fact that the messages are not inherent to the Apple ecosystem? As it turns out, they’ll just be green. Sad, really. I wanted to see flink, even though it has reportedly driven several Apple researchers mad.
Social nutworks
You’ve heard of Taskrabbit, where you outsource chores. You’ve heard of Uber, where you outsource driving. Now Meta is hoping to invent a means of outsourcing responsibility, and it’s hoping that the government will help.
“Meta says vetting teens’ ages should fall on app stores, parents”
“Look, can’t our platforms just be unfettered cesspools — wretched hives of scum and villainy, if you will — and someone else can act as an unpaid bouncer standing at the door? Why should we have to do all the work? Or any work at all? We would prefer to do negative work, which is what we are proposing. Thank you for your consideration.”
Meanwhile, things continue to go swimmingly over at the web site that Musk ruined (look, if he doesn’t want to call it Twitter anymore, that’s what I’m calling it).
“IBM pulls X ads as Elon Musk endorses white pride”
Oh. Ohhh. That is… that is not good.
The fact that IBM had pulled ads and Apple was continuing to buy them had not gone unnoticed among Apple fans and something of a letter writing campaign to Tim Cook had taken off on Mastodon. When the company that sold technology to the Nazis during World War II is pulling money from Musk’s vanity dumpster fire and you are not, that is something of a bad look. Fortunately, Apple seems to have heard the message.
“Apple to pause advertising on X after Musk backs antisemitic post”
Here’s hoping this is one of those designs where the pause button is also the stop button.
[John Moltz is a Six Colors contributor. You can find him on Mastodon at Mastodon.social/@moltz and he sells items with references you might get on Cotton Bureau.]