Beep boop - this is a robot. A new show has been posted to TWiT…
What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!
Wow - just listened to the first 20 minutes (covering the Apple ruling) and am really unimpressed with the level of discourse involved., There was no discussion at all, for example, of what the Apple executive was accused of lying about.
Apple lied about how they came up with the value of the app store commission. They had already made the decision on what to charge, and at each step of the way choosing the option that was most hostile to developers. They then brought in this effectively-bogus consulting company AG (Analysis Group) to retroactively create a whitewash report to justify the percentages and then lied about when that report was generated. They then tried to hide all of this during the discovery process by falsely claiming the communications on this were covered by attorney-client privilege. This is what Judge Gonzalez meant when she said, “Cook chose poorly”, and was what happening back in September 2024 when she got mad at them for the delay in producing the documents.
Any appeal is going to have to show where the judge erred. That Apple has lied is a finding of fact. It’s not an opinion - it’s fully corroborated by the documents produced and the testimony of Apple’s VP. So it’s not exactly going to be easy for Apple to show how the judge made a mistake. And any criminal contempt charges are a separate issue that they will have to deal with. Even if the DOJ doesn’t bring charges - they will still have to get around the findings of fact. And Judge Gonzalez-Rogers seems like a pretty smart lady - so it might be difficult showing where she got things wrong. Not saying it’s impossible - but it won’t be a slam-dunk.
It takes some big brass hondas to lie to a federal district judge on the witness stand and think you can get away with it without any consequences.
For me - the biggest surprise is that Phil Schiller was the voice of reason on these discussions. I know I didn’t have him as a voice of restraint on my 2025 Apple Bingo Card, but there it is.
Whatever you think about Apple’s ecosystem or how they make their products, this ruling says some pretty damning things about Apple’s executive team and how they made their decisions.
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Regarding predicting horse racing, this has been a thing since the early 80s. The first programs I can remember being advertised in Popular Computing Weekly classifieds were horse racing programs for the ZX81 and up to CP/M.
They had the current stats of all the horses running in the UK and you had to keep the list up to date post purchase, but they would predict either the Grand National (1K ZX81) or any race if you had a more memory and storage. But horse racing and betting has always been part of life in the UK, with dozens of races most days.
I heartily second Privacy.com as a service. It’s absolutely great!
I’m about half way through this weeks show and frustrated. I look forward to tech podcasts as a respite from the news. Leo should really re-title this show “This Week in Politics” and keep the rest the same. I’m looking forward to Security Now tomorrow morning because I know the show will be about Security.
The problem is, TWiT covers tech news and if government decisions directly affect the industry, they colour the news of the industry. For example, if prices are increasing markedly because of tariffs that isn’t political news, it is tech news that has been influence by current governmental decisions. If a company is prosecuted because it broke the law that is a tech story, not a political story, if the president is calling out tech companies or government tech departments because they somebody says something he doesn’t like that is also a tech story, because it directly affects the tech companies that are covered by the show.
As a non-American, I think they do a good job of keeping politics out of the show. Their coverage of European laws covering Big Tech is often more biased, because than US news, because they only cover what is reported in the US tech press, which is often defensive of US Big Tech, without looking at the actual story behing the articles or having somebody from Europe on to couterpoint the stories with facts and a European view of the matter. But that is something I’ve come to live with over the years.
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