Cook revealed the headset's China launch plan in response to a media question on the sidelines of the China Development Forum in Beijing, CCTV finance said on its Weibo social account.
Tim Cook said artificial intelligence is an essential tool for businesses committed to reducing carbon footprints, as the Apple Inc. chief executive officer joined a climate change dialogue Sunday at a forum in Beijing, continuing a week of public displays of his company’s commitment to China.
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“We are making great progress, we are not there yet, and the road ahead requires more innovation,” Cook said on the company’s environmental goal. Artificial intelligence “provides an enormous toolkit for every company that’s wishing to be carbon neutral or to lower their emissions by a substantial amount,” he said.
Wang told Apple’s Cook when they met Friday that China is willing to work with the US to create a fair, stable and predictable business environment for American and Chinese companies.
Apple’s Cook said his company would invest further in applied research in China.
It is probably true that business complaints were the primary drivers of the DoJ’s action, though. An annotation I added to one part about payment apps in the complaint reads “sounds like a bank wrote this”. But protesting this on the grounds of corporate involvement is pretty rich coming from the guy who runs a lobbying firm arguing for the positions of even bigger corporations. Are we really supposed to be mad if Tile benefits?
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That lots of people buy iPhones is not inherently a vote of confidence in each detail of the entire package. If some of those things changed a little bit — the U.S. government’s suit is not a massive overhaul of the way the iPhone works — I doubt people would stop liking or trusting the product.
Venture capitalist and tech analyst Benedict Evans said there's risks to letting developers have the kind of freedom the DOJ is calling for.
"You seriously want to let any developer do whatever they want to a device that billions of people carry around every day?" Evans wrote on Threads, discussing those in favor of forcing Apple to open up its app ecosystem to third-party app stores and side-loading.
The problem is for the case that uniformly all of these are product choices that are entirely consistent not only with what other companies do (like Google’s Android + Samsung) but also with Apple’s own history. A key part of US antitrust law that the DOJ has to overcome is not just to prove Apple has a monopoly, but that it acted illegally to maintain the monopoly. When a company has consistent behavior as it rose from 0% to 50% share, the burden will be on the DOJ to argue that the same behavior is now anticompetitive in a specific legal sense. In other words, a lot of what the DOJ will be arguing is that product choices Apple clearly made to up-level the iPhone offering in terms of security, privacy, reliability, battery life, and more since the introduction of the App Store when the phone was at 10% share are today anticompetitive. The existence of another type of smartphone or ideas for how another type of smartphone should be ideally designed is not enough to prove Apple is being anticompetitive. These design points are not about what you might do today, but what Apple has been doing since inception of their products.
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One of the biggest flaws with this case is presuming that phones are PCs, and that Apple should have built a PC-like operating system, meaning that a phone should just be a PC when it comes to installing software and enabling access to devices and the workings of the OS. This is a technically illiterate position to take. Dumb too. It ignores the progress of abstraction, the heart and soul of computing. Much of this argument falls apart as the complaint even claims that Apple knows what to do since it did so on Mac. It is so dumb I won’t even quote the filing to spare embarrassing DOJ further. Perhaps people are confused because Apple used a PC OS as the foundation of iPhone, but as we all know software always has capabilities that are not made available from one layer to the next. That’s the whole point of abstraction.
While insiders and analysts across the tech industry have speculated the US might end up settling — as they did in a similar antitrust case against Microsoft in the 1990s — not everyone is convinced the suit is a slam dunk for the DOJ.
"Calling Apple a 'monopoly' in phones is laughable," iconic tech journalist Walt Mossberg wrote in a series of posts on Threads. "Every independent analyst estimates iPhone market share at a little over 50% in the US and a little under 25% globally. That's not a monopoly."
Legal experts say this social stigma argument will need much stronger support to hold up in court, because it doesn’t fit with traditional definitions of antitrust. “What is Apple actually precluding here? It’s almost like a coolness factor when a company successfully creates a network effect for itself, and I’ve never seen that integrated into an antitrust claim before,” says Paul Swanson, a litigation partner at Holland & Hart LLP in Denver, Colorado, who focuses on technology and antitrust. “This is going to be an interesting case for antitrust law.”
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Kovacic believes that as the case continues, the DOJ will have to bring forward new evidence and arguments to stand up the cultural aspects of its suit. That could involve tapping theories of economics and the psychology of human behavior to attempt to explain why some technology consumers may unconsciously favor certain products they are emotionally attached to. More likely, he says, the DOJ will have to present contemporaneous business notes that show Apple’s anxiety about competitive apps or emerging technologies, and how the company responded in apparently dubious ways.
There are very real concerns with some of Apple’s practices. But the Justice Department spends less time on those issues, focusing instead on half-baked claims that suggest a lack of familiarity with modern technology.
Highlight of my day: I've had two doughnuts for dinner. And a cup of Ribena.
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Thanks for reading.