hraedon

"Working" is a pretty generous description of a policy that, at a cost of 3-4% of GDP, has raised the fertility rate from its low of 1.23 in 2011 to about 1.55 today. That 1.5ish TFR is pretty stable, too: there's been almost no improvement since 2016.

No country has figured this out, and if getting to (just!) replacement rate requires healthcare-like expenditures as a % of GDP, it is genuinely unclear to me how we do that on a global scale.

This is the theory that people (on HN and elsewhere) have used to argue that Apple's App Store represents a monopoly that should be broken up. It makes no more sense here than it does in that context.

This is true of the switch, but there are versions of both the PS5 and Xbox Series that don't have the ability to play physical media.

Do they skate because users can pay more to get a version of the hardware that has that capability?

This is what I mean! "You, as someone who isn't an Apple customer, can't use this one service" is not evil, for fuck's sake.

Apple restricting a free service to Apple's own users is not even remotely the same as Microsoft's various forms of skullduggery and I don't know how you can make the comparison seriously.

It has never been easier to switch platforms, and the gulf between iOS and Android has never been shallower. Android users not having access to one also-ran messaging service is not some sort of fundamental injustice, and Apple is not a villain for building features that they think will appeal to their customers. It's sort of their whole business!

Not providing every differentiating feature to Android users, primarily

This is such an insane take to me. Apple hasn't done anything but provide a feature that some subset of their customers in a single digit number of markets finds compelling.

Do you really think that teenagers in America wouldn't be bullying the outgroup—to the extent that they actually are frequently ostracizing their peers over this, which is not at all clear—over something else if all the bubbles were blue?

If I want to "interoperate" with friends and family who use Android, I have zero issues doing so. SMS works fine, and the default experience being "bad" is really completely unrelated to any sort of antitrust concern. If we want more features, they're an App download away.

Apple offers a product that has seen significant success in a small number of markets versus android, including the US. Dressing up what is ultimately the normal bump and tumble of competition in a market as antitrust because they're winning enough in the market(s) you care about is silly.

The relevant example here is that Apple supports the lowest common denominator standard: SMS. iMessage is what makes the experience "magical" on iPhones.

The total failure of any open messaging standard to capture the market seems to imply to me that control is actually pretty important to the experience of using the service!

This is a silly argument: Microsoft's bundling of IE resulted in real damage to another company (Netscape) that had a viable and independent competitor product. Beeper doesn't have an independent product: they have a hacky workaround that Apple fixed.

What Microsoft did with IE isn't really analogous to Apple refusing to let another company free ride on their infrastructure. This isn't even as egregious as patching iTunes to break the Palm Pre sync was, and the legality of that action seems pretty settled by now.

The colors functionally denote the features available in the chat. In group chats, having a single non-iMessage user devolves the features available to the group chat to the SMS level. You also lose E2E and high res pictures and video.

The different colors of bubbles are a consequence of iMessage's origin as a protocol that supplanted SMS/MMS messaging while allowing the older protocols as seamless fallbacks; WhatsApp, Signal et al never had a requirement like that, and consequently never had to deal with different feature sets among their users (at least, not to the same extent).

The current subscription price is $1.50 a month or $10 a year, so presuming the same profit the cost would have to jump to a bit more than $5 a month or $53 a year. Apollo also had a lifetime tier that would have to go away, because it was priced without knowing that future costs would be so much higher.

This also entails getting rid of the free tier and imposing usage limits on the remaining subscribers since a few people could easily blow out the average and drive up costs.

There are definitely people willing to pay those costs (I count myself as one of them, as well), but the lack of apps like Apollo being successful at that price point probably means that it is not a sustainable business.

Assuming away all of the constraints that led to this situation in the first place does make solving the problem easier, for sure

I mean, are they wrong? Elon promised coast-to-coast summoning in 2016 with a time horizon of two years! there were supposed to be a million telsa robotaxis by the end of 2020!

Like, putting aside everything else, it had to have been very obvious internally that neither of those goals were plausible in that timeframe without miracles happening.