I will never understand why John Gruber holds water for a multi-trillion dollar corporation.

Probably best if Apple separates MacOS into a Secure Edition that contains their desired security layers and a European edition that adds in all the holes that the EU wants in their users software.

Then, if Europe wants to shit all over user privacy and security, well, that's their users' problem and good luck with that.

Reading this I felt embarrassed for the author. It is strange to me that for a place for "hackers" that ostentatiously love technology, there are so many free passes and wishful mental gymnastics given over to a profit driven company that has no qualms stifling innovation through platform abuse and litigation. Here its own projection is simply a confession of itself.

This article serves as little more than a mouthpiece to sway public opinion and maintain a sense of exclusivity for being locked into an ecosystem. The author uses a particular set of features and that's why the EU is wrong, what?

Complying with the rulings will not somehow break the platform. This trillion dollar company will do just fine, usually in the form of weaseling out of its obligations, a tactic it has honed to an art over the years. And if not weaseling, it has the resources to solve those problems.

No, the author's post, and often hn comments, are more complaints about opening up the platform to others, and is reminiscent of the same complaining that playstation fans went through when formerly exclusive titles were being ported to other platforms. It turns out many played certain games only because they were exclusives.

Lets analyze this: 1. Paragraph: intro and an citation

2. paragraph:

2 wrong things, Airdrop is proprietary, the opensource programs are reverse engineered and the EU gave Apple two options that they can do within the timeframe they gave: open it for others to use and implement or to replace it with an existing public solution.

3. paragraph:

Mostly the authors opinion

4. Paragraph:

captures what the EU intends to do. Apple could allow an service to read notifications or send the notifications themself to an device by making the protocol public.

5. Paragraph:

Another Opinion. Nothing to judge at.

last paragraph:

The Allegory is in my opinion wrong: not all doors need to be open. To stay in the Hotel:

The customer checks in but he needs to use an unreliable keycard instead of his phone for opening the door, because only Apple devices can open the door to the room. With an Appledevice the room is already at the temperature, the light is at an prefered color and the staff knows at which time you want to be waked up. with any other phone you have to manually adjust the temperature, the lightcolor is an uncomfortable white that can't be changed and you have to inform the staff by going down about the wakeup time.

John Gruber's mental gymnastics are a fascinating read sometimes. Here, he basically says 'Apple (and the other giants) will try to not comply with the spirit of the EU regulations, so less regulation it is better for customers'. Weird argument, IMO.