#store apples

[comfortspringstation]

How to Store Apples

[horseimagebarn]

horse in what appears to be an apple store alongside a person in a wheelchair who it seems to be accompanying this small horse is likely a service horse an honorable and important profession that this horse takes with calm determination and ease as it stoically stands among various devices and people or perhaps this is just a normal jobless horse who really wants a new iphone and begged its caretaker to get it one until they finally relented and brought it to the apple store

[raepliica]

tristamp post-S1 mashwood sillies and tri98(?) merylwood :]

[evil-robot-cat]

Hey uh...

Not that I often acquire new patrons, but if anyone has been considering it (we got printables!), I strongly encourage you to do it from a computer, NOT from the iOS Patreon app.

Apple's going to take 30% of the money you pledge to the indie artists you want to support on Patreon and just shove it into their fat pockets.

No reason other than greed. And probably to tighten censorship down the line, but we'll get to that bridge later.

For me, money from my patrons helps me pay for groceries/vet/cremation and the occasional treat. Many times these past few years it's literally been the difference between boiling flour in water to eat, or having some vegetables and broth to go with that.

What is that money to Apple? Just a fucking drop of water in an ocean of money they hoard away for points in a no stakes play-pretend game of their own creation. What do any of those ghouls know about love or hunger?

Anyway. You'll be hearing about this from a lot of artists today. Please remember it, because it's going to hurt all of us, big or small.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

An Epic antitrust loss for Google

A jury just found Google guilty on all counts of antitrust violations stemming from its dispute with Epic, maker of Fortnite, which brought a variety of claims related to how Google runs its app marketplace. This is huge:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/11/technology/epic-games-google-antitrust-ruling.html

The mobile app store world is a duopoly run by Google and Apple. Both use a variety of tactics to prevent their customers from installing third party app stores, which funnels all app makers into their own app stores. Those app stores cream an eye-popping 30% off every purchase made in an app.

This is a shocking amount to charge for payment processing. The payments sector is incredibly monopolized and notorious for its price-gouging – and its standard (wildly inflated) rate is 2-5%:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/04/owning-the-libs/#swiper-no-swiping

Now, in theory, Epic doesn't have to sell in Google Play, the official Android app store. Unlike Apple's iOS, Android permit both sideloading (installing an app directly without using an app store) and configuring your device to use a different app store. In practice, Google uses a variety of anticompetitive tricks to prevent these app stores from springing up and to dissuade Android users from sideloading. Proving that Google's actions – like paying Activision $360m as part of "Project Hug" (no, really!) – were intended to prevent new app storesfrom springing up was a big lift for Epic. But they managed it, in large part thanks to Google's own internal communications, wherein executives admitted that this was exactly why Project Hug existed. This is part of a pattern with Big Tech antitrust: many of the charges are theoretically very hard to make stick, but because the companies put their evil plans in writing (think of the fraudulent crypto exchange FTX, whose top execs all conferred in a groupchat called "Wirefraud"), Big Tech keeps losing in court:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/03/big-tech-cant-stop-telling-on-itself/

Now, I do like to dunk on Big Tech for this kind of thing, because it's objectively funny and because the companies make so many unforced errors. But in an important sense, this kind of written record is impossible to avoid. Any large institution can only make and enact policy through administrative systems, and those systems leave behind a paper-trail: memos, meeting minutes, etc. Yes, we all know that quote from The Wire: "Is you taking notes on a fucking criminal conspiracy?" But inevitably, any ambitious conspiracy can only exist if someone is taking notes.

What's more, any large conspiracy involving lots of parties will inevitably produce leaks. Think of this as the corollary to the idea that the moon landing can't be a hoax, because there's no way 400,000 co-conspirators could keep the secret. Big Tech's conspiracies required hundreds or even thousands of collaborators to keep their mouths shut, and eventually someone blabs:

https://www.science.org/content/article/fake-moon-landing-you-d-need-400000-conspirators

This is part of a wave of antitrust cases being brought against the tech giants. As Matt Stoller writes, the guilty-on-all-counts jury verdict will leak into current and future actions. Remember, Google spent much of this year in court fighting the DoJ, who argued that the company bribed Apple not to make a competing search engine, paying tens of billions every year to keep a competitor from emerging. Now that a jury has convinced Google of doing that to prevent alternative app stores from emerging, claims that it used these pay-for-delay tactics in other sectros get a lot more credible:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/boom-google-loses-antitrust-case

On that note: what about Apple? Epic brought a very similar case against Apple and lost. Both Apple and Epic are appealing that case to the Supreme Court, and now that Google has been convicted in a similar case, it might prompt the Supremes to weigh in and resolve the seeming inconsistencies in the interpretation of federal law.

This is a key moment in the long project to wrest antitrust away from the pro-monopoly side, who spent decades "training" judges to produce verdicts that run counter to the plain language of America's antitrust law:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/13/post-bork-era/#manne-down

There's 40 years' worth of bad precedent to overturn. The good news is that we've got the law on our side. Literally, the wording of the laws and the records of the Congressional debate leading to their passage, all militate towards the (incredibly obvious) conclusion that the purpose of anti-monopoly law is to fight monopoly, not defend it:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/14/aiming-at-dollars/#not-men

It's amazing to realize that we got into this monopoly quagmire because judges just literally refused to enforce the law. That's what makes one part of the jury verdict against Google so exciting: the jury found that Google's insistence that Play Store sellers use its payment processor was an act of illegal tying. Today, "tying" is an obscure legal theory, but few doctrines would be more useful in disenshittifying the internet. A company is guilty of illegal tying when it forces you to use unrelated products or services as a condition of using the product you actually want. The abandonment of tying led to a host of horribles, from printer companies forcing you to buy ink at $10,000/gallon to Livenation forcing venues to sell tickets through its Ticketmaster subsidiary.

The next phase of this comes when the judge decides on the penalty. Epic doesn't want cash damages – it wants the judge to order Google to fulfill its promise of "an open, competitive Android ecosystem for all users and industry participants." They've asked the judge to order Google to facilitate third-party app stores, and to separate app stores from payment processors. As Stoller puts it, they want to "crush Google’s control over Android":

https://www.epicgames.com/site/en-US/news/epic-v-google-trial-verdict-a-win-for-all-developers

Google has sworn to appeal, surprising no one. The Times's expert says that they will have a tough time winning, given how clear the verdict was. Whatever this means for Google and Android, it means a lot for a future free from monopolies.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/12/im-feeling-lucky/#hugger-mugger

[geopsych]

Visited the other Apple Store.

[theriverbeyond]

to me, the 8th house aesthetic is like if the apple store attempted gothic cathedral

[stas-land]

Shark boy tummy full of phones heehee

don’t leave ur phone out around this mf bc he will go out of his way to eat it right in front of you and he will think it’s the funniest thing ever

[godbirdart]

Reminder for all Patreon users:

New subscriptions made through the iOS app will include an additional 30% fee starting November 4

Creators can choose to either increase their prices for the iOS app or lose 30% more of their income on top of their existing Patreon fees which can range from 5% - 12%:

Creators will be automatically switched to Subscription Billing starting November 2024. Creators can postpone the change until November 2025 through the creator Settings > Billing

Additional Sources & Reading:

Patreon News: iOS in-app purchases FAQ

Patreon Support: Migrating to Subscription Billing FAQ

Patreon Support: How iOS in-app Purchases Work for Fans

Patreon Support: How in-app Purchases Work on Patreon

Patreon Support: Form to Submit Feedback regarding Apple iOS Changes [link sourced from this Patreon News article]

[techramonic]

who is this diva

[one-time-i-dreamt]

Frank Iero did my nails in an Apple Store in some giant city-sized mall that was attached to my house and I met my former self?? I seriously have no idea what happened.

[dig-jules]

[miinxxo]

I need stupid trio art

[pseudophan]

why did a tram yeeted itself into an apple store in oslo, nora?

great question but it was funny as fuck. the way it drove like head on into the apple store looked like it was aiming for that specifically 😭 no one got seriously injured (i think four people were hurt but it wasn't anything extreme) so thankfully i get to joke about it because this photo is SO funny to me i'm sorry

this is the energy dan was channeling when he said he was gonna dig up steve jobs

also tram in norwegian is trikk and because this was right before halloween every comment section i've come accross about the incident has just been filled with 'trikk or treat'. which is a bad joke but one i unfortunately found funny every time

[citrusdownn]

sabolaw...and corabug...like imagine ur not so boyfriend but boyfriend pulling up one day and meeting ur two clown dads....

SORRY THIS TOOK ALMOST A MONTH TO GET TO BUT LOOK SILLY COMIC!!

sabolaw and corabug make me so insane omfg i was originally gonna make some drawings based off your idea where they somehow meet in regular op world but it morphed into me making a modern au comic

also apologies for the formatting of some of the panels i just kinda put shit wherever i could fit it hopefully its readable

[geopsych]

Huh. There were 6 when I bought them.