In the years that followed my first glimpse of the iPhone, I’ve used more phones than I could possibly recall or count. And over the years, I’ve seen them get faster, more reliable, and harder to distinguish from one another. A new technology can’t wow us forever; eventually, it’s everywhere. History has shown us that one company can only claim dominance over that technology for so long — and the bigger it gets, the more energy it takes to maintain it.
A bill newly approved by the Cabinet to regulate IT giants is chiefly aimed at forcing Apple Inc. to allow its App Store on its iPhone devices to face competition from other marketplaces for apps, thus ending Apple’s monopoly on the mobile app market for iPhone users.
The government aims for the bill’s passage during the current Diet session. But Apple is poised to block its passage, intensifying its lobbying of lawmakers in both the ruling and opposition parties.
It makes sense that you might want to share tracks and playlists with friends and family, but you likely don’t want to reveal all your musical tastes to the world at large. That’s why it’s worth running an audit of what you’re sharing and with whom in the music apps you’re using.
The hit comedy series Ted Lasso is currently only available to watch via Apple’s streaming service, Apple TV+. Finally, more than four years after its season one premiere, it appears that the exclusivity window is finally going to end and the show will soon be getting a physical disc release.
A surge of interest in podcasts on YouTube, which added features making them easier to play and discover last year, has made video hard to resist for a wider range of podcasters. It is now the top platform for podcast consumption in the United States, overtaking both Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
I am pretty sure that there is at least someone somewhere in Cupertino that is dreaming of starting all over again with a brand new phone with a brand new operating system. A clean start, with all the lessons learnt in updating the operating system, moving from Objective C to Swift, from UIKit to SwiftUI, and all the demands from courts and regulators and governments.
There is one word reply though: Netscape.
(Or maybe: Edge.)
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Thanks for reading.