Panel:
- Bart Busschots (host) – @bbusschots
This solo show starts with a quick followup from recent months before diving into just a few regulatory stories, one quick legal story, quite a bit of HR news, and some highlights from Apple’s services and original content. The four main stories are the impact of Google being judge an illegal search monopoly on Apple, Apple’s assault on Patreon, Apple’s continuing journey towards DMA compliance, and the continuing rollout of Apple Intelligence. The show finishes with a rundown of a few other quick Apple-related stories that made the news in August.
You’ll find detailed show notes below the fold, and if you enjoy this free show, please consider clicking on the donate button at the top of the left side bar – the show is free for you to listen to, but not for Bart to Produce!
Updates & Followup
Quick updates to long-running stories the show continues to track, and to stories covered in recent shows.
- The rise of the emulators continues: Classic PC game emulation is back on the iPhone with iDOS 3 release — arstechnica.com
Regulatory Rundown
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Apple reportedly succeeds in getting the un-published anti-trust finding against it by the Competition Commission of India (CCI) thrown out on a technicality — appleinsider.com/… & www.macobserver.com/…(the final is reported as containing privileged and sensitive information, and Apple are also said to have other criticisms, chiefly that their 5% market share is too small for them to be a monopoly)
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UK drops App Store investigation, says it has better things to do — appleinsider.com/…
Legal Latest
- University of Wisconsin denied new trial in decade-long chip patent battle against Apple — appleinsider.com/… (this case may finally be over )
Apple HR & Acquisition News
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Apple is doing some substantial staff reorganisations:
- Apple lays off about 100 services employees across Apple Books, News — appleinsider.com/…
- Apple give 121 workers the choice to move to Austin Texas or lose their jobs as they close down their Data Operations Annotations team in San Diego — www.macobserver.com/…
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Apple splits App Store team in two, introduces new leadership — arstechnica.com/…
- Current App Store Vice President Matt Fischer is leaving Apple
- Carson Oliver will lead the Apple App Store division
- Ann Thai will lead a new alternative app store team
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Effective from the start of 2025, Kevan Parekh will replace Luca Maestri as Apple's Chief Financial Officer (CFO) — appleinsider.com/… & arstechnica.com/…
- "Maestri will continue to lead the Corporate Services teams, including information systems and technology, information security, and real estate and development, reporting to Apple CEO Tim Cook" — Apple PR
- Kevan Parekh joined Apple in 2013, and is Apple's current VP of Financial Planning & Analysis.
- A nice tribute to Maestri from Jason Snell: Bye, Luca (sort of) — sixcolors.com/…
Apple Services & Original Content Highlights
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Apple TV+:
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Apple, Major League Baseball announce September “Friday Night Baseball” schedule — Apple PR
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Apple has cut back the theatrical release for Wolf (an action comedy starring George Clooney & Brad Pitt) from thousands of cinemas across the US to just a limited 1-week run — www.macobserver.com/…
- Additional Unconfirmed Reporting: Apple is scaling back their movie ambitions to just one or two big titles a year, and caping the budgets for other movies at $80M.
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Apple Music now lets you export playlists to YouTube Music — www.cultofmac.com/…
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Apple Maps Look Around is coming to cities in Morocco, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, China, Belarus, Turkey, Bulgaria, Mexico & Slovakia — appleinsider.com/…
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Apple Podcasts Is Now Available as a Web App — www.macstories.net/…
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Apple Wallet: Digital Drivers licenses & state IDs are coming to California & Hawaii — Apple PR & appleinsider.com/…
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Apple Card: Apple offers all-time high $300 welcome bonus for new Apple Card signups — appleinsider.com/…
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Apple Cash: To comply with US financial regulations, users will need to complete identity verification to make transfers of $500 or more from October — www.macobserver.com/…
Main Stories
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The Judge in the DOJ Anti-trust case against Google has ruled that they have an illegal monopoly — appleinsider.com/…
- Next steps: Google will appeal this initial finding, but the case moves on to litigating the remedy
- Google’s Search Engine Deal with Apple Deemed a Monopoly — www.macobserver.com/…
- Apple VP: No Bing, even if Microsoft “give us the whole company” — www.macobserver.com/… (Eddy Cue testimony)
- Expert Analysis: All the possible ways to destroy Google’s monopoly in search — arstechnica.com
- Analysis: Google's Antitrust Loss, Why Apple Doesn't Just Build a Search Engine, and What Comes Next — www.macstories.net/… (it would be more difficult and expensive that many assume)
- Opinion: Existential thoughts about Apple’s reliance on Services revenue — sixcolors.com/… (Apple's definition of services does not line up with what users think of as services, and services profit is almost equal to all hardware profit)
- Opinion: Why Apple’s dodgy deal with Google should have ended years ago — www.cultofmac.com/… (The Google deal makes a mockery of Apple's privacy promises)
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Apple force Patreon to completely change their payment structure in their iOS App (TL;DR, creators like me will lose 30% ) — Patreon PR
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Patreon have until November to switch app pledges of support made via the iOS app to Apple's billing system, requiring changes to the subscription types creators can offer (e.g. per-creation plans are impossible), and requiring a 30% cut on all subscriptions to Apple (yes, 30%, because in total, Patreon 'makes' more than a $1M)
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Opinion: John Gruber's takes — daringfireball.net/… & daringfireball.net/…
- "The whole notion of a platform like Patreon just doesn’t fit with the App Store’s model of taking a fee out of every single transaction for digital goods or services"
- "This might epitomize the way Apple can be penny-wise but pound-foolish when it comes to the App Store … I refuse to believe it’s worth the further degradation of Apple’s brand …"
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Opinion: The price of payments – by Hamish McKenzie — on.substack.com/… (Creator platforms should be a special category on the App Store)
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Apple's journey to EU Digital Markets Act (DMA) compliance continues:
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Apple alters App Store linking rules and fee structure in EU — www.cultofmac.com/…
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Apps can provide links to alternative deals and payments outside the App Store mechanism, and Apple don’t get to enforce design limitations.
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Users will get the power to disable Apple’s warning when using external payment providers
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All developers, regardless of whether they opted for the standard developer agreement or the special EU one can use external links (within the EU)
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Regardless the agreement the developer chose, there is always an Initial Acquisition Fee of 5% on sales made through a link within a year of installation.
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All developers also pay a Store Services Fee, but the rate varies depending on the chosen developer agreement (remember, developers under the standard agreement don’t pay the Core Technology Fee, but developers under the EU agreement do):
- Under the standard agreement the fee is 20%, reduced to 7% for members of the App Store Small Business Program, or a subscription renewal after the first year.
- Under the EU agreement the fee is 10%, dropping to 5% in the same circumstances.
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Spotify, Epic Games call Apple’s latest EU App Store changes ‘confusing’ — www.cultofmac.com/…
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Analysis & Opinion: Apple Announces New Fee Structure and Updated Guidelines for Apps in the EU That Link Out to the Web for Purchases — daringfireball.net/… ("a convoluted mess of a compliance plan for a convoluted mess of a law")
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iOS 18 will bring big changes to app defaults in the EU — www.macstories.net/… & www.cultofmac.com/…
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Browser choice screen changes:
- Links will now have icons and short App Store descriptions, and a link to the browser’s App Store page.
- Install and download can be done from the choice screen with progress indicator.
- The new browser will replace Safari in the Dock or on the Home Screen.
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In iOS 18 EU users will be able to assign their own default apps for:
- Dialling phone numbers
- Adding Call spam filter
- Sending messages
- Navigating with maps
- Managing passwords
- Using alternative keyboards
- Translating text
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Just about every default app will become un-installable, the exceptions being Settings and Phone, that means EU users will be able to remove:
- Apple’s App Store
- The default Messages app
- Apple’s Camera & Photos apps
- Safari
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The roll out of third-party app stores continues
- Thanks to a commitment from Epic Games to cover the Core Technology Fee, the first 3rd-party store, Riley Testut's AltStore PAL becomes free — www.cultofmac.com/…
- Epic Games Store goes live for EU iPhone users — appleinsider.com/…
- Opinion: Apple is still standing in the way of Epic’s app store — www.theverge.com/… (Apple's EU fee structure means Epic finds it very hard to attract other devs to their store)
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- Spotify are not opting to use the new rules for external links, they’re opting for the new Music Streaming Services Entitlement Apple announced in response to the streaming music antitrust ruling earlier this year that has nothing to do with the DMA.
- Spotify can add text, but not links.
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Related: Having agreed to open access the NFC chip in iPhones for EU developers last month to settle an antitrust investigation that pre-dates the DMA, Apple has announced a similar program for developers in some other countries — Apple PR, appleinsider.com/…, www.macobserver.com/… & arstechnica.com
- Starting in iOS 18.1, developers in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, the U.K., and the U.S will be able to request access to a new NFC and SE entitlement (other counties will follow, but no timescale given).
- The new entitlement will provide access to NFC & Secure Element API enabling secure and private use of NFC for contactless payments, car keys, public transit, corporate badges, student IDs, home keys, hotel keys, merchant loyalty and rewards cards, and event tickets (government IDs to will get support later).
- Users can open the matching app to use NFC, and there will be an option to change the default app brought up by double-clicking the lock button.
- Developers need to enter an additional commercial agreement with Apple and there will be associated fees (no details provided yet).
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The work to roll out Apple Intelligence continues
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More Apple Intelligence betas are released:
- Apple Intelligence Photo Clean Up shows up in iOS 18.1 beta — appleinsider.com/…
- Users Outside the US Can Now Test Apple Intelligent, but EU Users Still Cant — www.macobserver.com/… (testers outside the US can now leave their region as-is, but still need to change their Siri language to EN-US to use Apple Intelligence)
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Apple released an academic paper describing their foundation model, and the results of their tests of the model against leading competitors like GPT-4 & Llama: Apple Intelligence Foundation Language Models — arxiv.org/…
- Apple's model is on a par with the competition for writing
- Apple's model is ahead of the competition in terms of function calling, i.e. doing things based on user prompts
- Apple's model is noticeably safer than the competition
- Analysis & Opinion: Apple shows why it’s ahead in AI, not behind — www.cultofmac.com/…
- Related: Discovered Apple Intelligence prompts show Apple's attempt at preventing AI disaster — appleinsider.com/…
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Reporting from WIRED finds that many major sites have updated their
robots.txtfile to block Apple Intelligence (and other AI scrapers) — www.wired.com/…- Including Facebook, Instagram, Craigslist, Tumblr, The New York Times, The Financial Times, The Atlantic, Vox Media, the USA Today network, and Condé Nast (who own many media sites, including WIRED)
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Quick Stories
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Some environmental initiatives from Apple:
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Customers can now extend AppleCare+ up to 45 days after it expires — appleinsider.com/… (in Australia, Austria, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States)
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New Beats firmware brings audio sharing to Beats Studio Pro — appleinsider.com/…
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Apple collaborates with Kim Kardashian on limited-edition Beats Studio Pro — appleinsider.com/… (Three shades of apparently fashionable brown)
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Apple Sports app piles on new features in time for football season — www.cultofmac.com/…
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Apple announces “Glowtime” event on September 9 — sixcolors.com/…
Legend
Note: When the textual description of a link is part of the link it is the title of the page being linked to, when the text describing a link is not part of the link it is a description written by Bart.
| Emoji | Meaning |
|---|---|
| A press release or official statement. | |
| A link to audio content, probably a podcast. | |
| flag | The story is particularly relevant to people living in a specific country, or, the organisation the story is about is affiliated with the government of a specific country. |
| A link to graphical content, probably a chart, graph, or diagram. | |
| A link to an article behind a pay-wall. | |
| A pinned story, i.e. one to keep an eye on that's likely to develop into something significant in the future. |