An Apple a Day Doesn’t Keep the EU DMA Away

As a distraction from the soap opera of will he/won’t he be leaving SMG, I thought it might be good to brain dump a few ideas about Apple’s recent woes involving the EU DMA and the US DoJ anti-trust suit.

Firstly, Apple looks to be stagnating. While it’s doing very well on the Apple silicon front, making impressive leaps in performance with each generation, the iPhone has started to feel less like a phone and more of a glorified Oojamaflip. Its cameras are undoubtedly brilliant, and a supporting operating system for managing photos, music and other consumable media – also brilliant. It runs third party apps that can extend the use of the phone to do practically do whatever you want it to do. Except you can’t.

It’s just not flexible. At least for developers.

The ecosystem is essentially a for-profit prison in which you’re told what you can and cannot do because security. But the truth is that when I’ve tried to find an app (that usually doesn’t exist – yet), I’ve come across loads of fake, duplicate, cheesy crap which could well be hiding all manner of things. I do not honestly believe as a gatekeeper, Apple is doing that good of job. Quality over quantity? Nope.

The main reason I switched from an iPhone 15 Pro Max to a Pixel 8 Pro is that the raw phone component of the iPhone is utter crap. It has the most basic call handling and filtering that I’ve come across. Third-party apps don’t help – and they’re restricted to what they can do. But the Pixel 8 Pro with Android 14 has more useful tools built-in that it doesn’t require any third-party utilities. It can call screen and transcribe, provide a visual display of a call centre to speed things up, and can notify you when a person has picked up the phone when on hold. It recognises business names and numbers, can filter known spammers and nuisance callers, and you can contribute to that by reporting numbers too. It can also transcribe voicemail, but EE doesn’t support it. Android allows for far more customisation, and makes repetitive tasks substantially easier.

The big bugbear that both the EU and DoJ have is iMessages. It’s an Apple-only feature, but the argument is that why should you have to buy an Apple to have its security functions. You could argue there are alternative options like WhatsApp, Telegram and others – but the point they’re trying to make is that you shouldn’t have to be limited by the hardware or operating system to be able to send secure messages (except when the government objects to it – oh, the irony).

I think it’s about time that Apple concentrated on making more of its services cross-platform – in the same way that Apple Music works on Android and Windows 11 (though the Windows 11 Apple Music app is buggy – it’s enough to make me want to move to Spotify, but Spotify has to do better in some areas first – that’s for another post). I can’t watch my purchased Apple movies and TV shows on my phone – I have to use a PWA (progressive web app) and that only allows me to use Apple TV+.

The only three things that I have which are Apple: iPad Mini 6, HomePod mini and the Apple TV 4K (64Gb). Everything else has recently been replaced: M2 MacBOok Pro was sold and replaced with a Dell Inspiron 16 Plus (highly recommended), the iPhone 15 Pro Max replaced with a Pixel 8 Pro, the Apple Watch Ultra 2 replaced with .. well, that’s a difficult one and again, will be another post – but essentially I’m sticking with the Garmin Instinct 2 Solar for now. I’ve replaced the AirTags with Tile Pro products.

Given everything that’s gone on in the games industry recently, Apple has a snowball’s chance in hell of ever making the Mac suitable for playing triple A titles. It is possible, but many developers aren’t going to spend limited development budgets on converting existing titles or establishing new titles for the Mac. Apple would need to essentially partner with or take over a game studio in order to establish greater dominance in that area.

Apple’s behaviour with Epic Games has been atrocious. I was highly critical of Epic when they deliberately broke Apple’s rules with Fortnite, but Apple has since behaved just as badly – if not more so – when it’s come to the DMA’s rules. All in the name of “security”. Security shouldn’t cost the Earth, for starters. I firmly believe good security shouldn’t be priced out the reach of the ordinary consumer or business.

It’s a complete mess, and it’s not hard to see why both the EU and the US DoJ have had to step in. The next few months are going to be interesting.

Death Stranding: The Director’s Cut (Mac)

Now that Kojima’s Death Stranding: The Director’s Cut has landed on iPhones (15 Pro/Pro Max only), iPads (M1/M2 only) and Macs (M series), I thought it would be a good time to put the game through its paces on a high-end MacBook Pro (M2 Max with 32Gb RAM) and an M2 MacBook Air (24Gb RAM). But first, a word about the iPhone and iPad editions: make sure you get yourself a controller – because the touchscreen controls are insane. It took me five minutes just to get past the title screen.

Now, Death Stranding on an M2 Max with 38 GPU cores is gorgeous. It defaults to 60 frames per second, but I changed that to 144 to match my external monitor’s refresh rate and enabled very high graphics and models. The machine handles the game with absolute ease. I ran this at a 2560×1440 resolution (QHD) It pays every bit as well as the PC edition and it’s really nice to see a game like this run so well on a Mac.

Performance on my M2 Max is outstanding…

But the 15″ M2 MacBook Air didn’t fare as well with the same settings (obviously). Anything above Medium graphics/model settings will result in a horrifically sluggish performance regardless of frame rate.

But after some tinkering, I discovered the best settings for a 15″ MacBook Air M2 is to set the graphics level at Medium and make sure that you set the MetalFX mode, Temporal Upscale, is set to Performance. The settings I’ve used for the MacBook Air are show in the following screenshots.

But generally speaking, when you have the right graphics settings on the M2 MacBook Air, and after a bit of stuttering when the game starts, it all soon smooths out and it’s a very good experience. I managed to get a good hour’s gaming in without any issues. It looks good on the lower-end Mac, though expect the CPU to hit the near 90 degrees (celsius) thanks to the lack of fans in the machine.

It’s also a big beast, weighing in around 77Gb. On the 15″ MacBook Air, I had to enable Game Centre in System Preferences otherwise the game wouldn’t even load – it just sat there until I had to kill it off in the Terminal. So remember, regardless of whatever Mac you use: make sure you enable Game Centre before starting the game for the first time!

I think 505 Games have done an incredible job overall. A MacBook Pro with a good number of GPUs is recommended, obviously, but it’s good to know that the game runs well even on more limited hardware.