Apple CEO Tim Cook on Friday will take the witness stand to defend the App Store in a trial being held in California. “Fortnite” maker Epic Games claims the App Store is a monopoly that Apple abuses.
When Epic Games tried to evade the commissions with an alternative payment system in Fortnite last August, Apple ousted it from their App Store. Epic Games then sued Apple resulting in this trial.
Cook is expected to spend more than two hours making what are likely to be his most extensive public remarks on the App Store business, which anchors Apple’s $53.8 billion services business.
Cook fielded a handful of questions about the company’s App Store when he testified before U.S. lawmakers last year, but he otherwise stayed mostly silent as lawmakers grilled the chiefs of Alphabet Inc’s Google and Facebook Inc.
Apple attorneys said they plan to ask him to testify about Apple’s corporate values, how the App Store came about and Apple’s competitive landscape. Throughout the trial, Apple has sought to persuade Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers that whatever rules it imposes on developers are aimed at keeping its customers’ information private and safe from malware.
MacDailyNews Take: This case is a farce. Expect Tim Cook to use his opportunity in this trial to drive home the point that Apple does not have a monopoly in smartphones (or any other market, in fact), so there can be no “monopoly abuse.”
Worldwide smartphone OS market share, April 2021:
• Android: 72.19%
• iOS: 27.00%
I don’t think anybody reasonable is going to come to the conclusion that Apple is a monopoly. Our share is much more modest. We don’t have a dominant position in any market… We are not a monopoly. — Apple CEO Tim Cook, June 2019
Oh really? I thought Tim was too busy drafting his condemnation of violence against Palestinians to be bothered with testifying. Shouldn’t his highest priority be to satisfy the demands of the Apple Muslim Association? Or maybe the highest priority of the Apple Muslim Association should be to STFU and do their damn jobs. Isn’t that why companies hire people? To do their jobs? Isn’t it? Or maybe companies hire employees so that the employees can make demands of their employer that are unrelated to the company where they work.
Perhaps the $3.3 billion in revenue Apple earned in the Middle East in 2018 (much higher in 2021, but I couldn’t find those figures) is unrelated to the company that earned it. Perhaps the impact of regional conflict, as opposed to a mutually acceptable peace agreement, is also unrelated to Apple’s continued ability to earn that income.
Perhaps, but I doubt it.
Will the defendant please rise…
Why the fuck is your stupid ass here? We all know you are sad and pathetic, you don’t need to prove it multiple times a day
Not you dumb@$$… the other one.
I personally think Apple deserves to be spanked a little bit on this, and they can afford it. I am not favoring them in this action. I think to myself that Tim Cook, as insufferable as he is, has got to go, but there is quite literally no one to take his place at this point. Things could be very interesting/bleak over the next several years. Modern Silicon Valley isn’t capable of vision, they are too busy cancelling each other over trifles, and it shows in the products, more and more each year. If I could disavow technology altogether at this point, I would (that is not a realistic possibility in today’s world, and I am a tech person from way back in the 90s who is not at all surprised that it is now publicly known that Bill Gates is a scumbag), and Apple is the last bastion of privacy and a relative notion of user first. That’s it for me. It is a necessary evil, and something I am no longer excited about, not even a little bit. Choosing the lesser of evils is hardly a proposition. I suspect there are a lot of seasoned tech folks out there that feel similarly.
“I personally think Apple deserves to be spanked a little bit on this, and they can afford it”
One of the dumbest things ever said
One of… still can’t hold a candle to you Hal.