OK, we know iPhones are expensive but... $11 a month for Twitter Blue on iOS?

You would have thought that after Twitter chief Elon Musk and Tim Cook schmoozed a bit at Apple's headquarters, the two would've reached some sort of common ground following that little "misunderstanding" last month. Instead, Musk continued his quest to make Twitter Blue unpalatable to as many people as possible by saying …

[anonanonanonanonanon]

Subscriptions offer different rates

Apple reduce their percentage to 15% on subscriptions that run for more than a year too. I guess it depends if Twitter lasts a year more.

Google used to do the same, but I see now they offer 15% from the beginning since last year.

[Halfmad]

Re: Subscriptions offer different rates

Youtube is cheaper if you don't pay via Apple, by £5/month if you are willing to pay UK rates.

So it's not just twitter that's doing this, but clearly the narrative is Elon bad etc.

[Dan 55]

"Tim was clear that Apple never considered doing so."

Musk might have continued: "as long as I don't try to charge for the subscription outside the App Store."

So Musk got sweet FA from Tim Apple and instead decided to raise prices for Twitter users. Of course this audacious move was praised on Twitter by Musk's simp army.

[Phones Sheridan]

Don't rock the boat to much.

I think it more likely at said meeting that Cook pointed out that Musk needs Apple more than Apple needs Musk. It'd be a shame say if iPhones stopped bluetooth pairing with Teslas.

[aerogems]

Re: Don't rock the boat to much.

There are a couple of things that are kind of telling about the meeting.

1: Twitler went to Cook, not the other way around

2: It's obvious Cook told him that Apple could stage a hostile takeover of all of Twitler's public companies if so desired, and make it an all cash offer with the cash the company has on hand

3: As you rightly point out, Twitter absolutely needs Apple while Apple doesn't really need Twitter

[mattaw2001]

Re: Don't rock the boat to much.

Twitler - either a brilliant Freudian slip, or I am behind on some slang!

[James O'Shea]

Re: Don't rock the boat to much.

'Twitler' has been a thing since His Muskiness first acquired Twitter and fired half the staff.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Don't rock the boat to much.

Half the staff and its faster already and better with higher active users!

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Don't rock the boat to much.

Only if you consider people rapidly upping their step counter without actually changing location as "higher active".

[aerogems]

Re: Don't rock the boat to much.

It's what I've taken to calling him. Some people use Elmo, but I find that insulting to the muppet character who actually teaches young children important lessons. There's also Elmer, which is kind of a double entendre with Elmer Fudd and Elmer's Glue. The former being a feckless hunter always being outwitted by the wabbit, and the later being kind of an oblique reference to his offering a stewardess a pony to give him a happy ending massage. But those tend to require some explaining. Twitler, OTOH, people tend to get pretty much immediately.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Don't rock the boat to much.

Others worthy of consideration.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Don't rock the boat to much.

If you're Scottish, calling him Elmer is definitely appropriate, because he's a fud.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Don't rock the boat to much.

The one thing Apple would never ever do is buy Twitter.

[James O'Shea]

Re: Don't rock the boat to much.

They might offer His Muskiness what it's worth: $1.00. Just to see the smoke.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Don't rock the boat to much.

I thought Musk loaded it up with billions of dollars in debt.

With the debt, the business is worth a negative amount.

It's an interesting communications platform, with great brand recognition, and income from advertising once Musk is removed and sanity restored. So worth a few hundred million if you exclude that debt.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Don't rock the boat to much.

Allow me to slightly correct that one:

It's obvious Cook told him that Apple could stage a hostile takeover of all of Twitler's public companies if so desired, and make it an all cash offer from petty cash.

That is especially true since Twitter's actual (now remaining) value lies well below what Elongated Moron bought it for and he wouldn't even be able to refuse it because his Tesla shareholders would revolt (both because they want to see some value return to their shares and because they'd like Musk to focus on Tesla and SpaceX instead - although I'm starting to get the suspicion that Musk's problem with Tesla is that he doesn't seem to be able to handle competition).

Also, Apple could make it possibly work if they weren't as wholesomely aggressive in filtering as Disney is for 6 year olds, but I digress.

[Grooke]

Re: Don't rock the boat to much.

"they'd like Musk to focus on Tesla and SpaceX"

If I were a shareholder, I'd want to keep his attention as far away from Tesla and SpaceX as possible.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Don't rock the boat to much.

Good point, but you would also want to keep him away from anything public.

Or get him to take up mime..

[nautica]

“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time."---Maya Angelou

[chivo243]

Does Tim Care?

I have to think this is a minor nuisance for TC, if at all, doesn't he get more income anyway? And if nobody ponies up for the badge, what then?

[Plest]

Re: Does Tim Care?

Exactly, Musk needs Apple way, way more than Apple needs...well anyone. I say that as someone who has a dislike of all things fruity-tech-badged!

[aerogems]

Like a monkey at the zoo

Twitler is just flinging shit at any and every surface, hoping something will stick.

[VoiceOfTruth]

Apple users can afford it

After all, they seem happy to be ripped off £200 for 8GB of extra RAM. That's, I dunno, about 400 to 500% more than most other makers. Hahahahahahaha. But but it's Apple and it's the bestest thing in the whole world.

[IGotOut]

Re: Apple users can afford it

And that extra is still there at resale, rather than deciding if to use the device as a doorstop or paperweight.

And yes I have both Android and Apple.

[gryphon]

Re: Apple users can afford it

Not just Apple much as I hate to defend them, extra storage is definitely a rip off.

Amazon - Samsung S22 Ultra

256GB = £939

512GB = £1149

I always figure Apple are selling extremely expensive storage which just happens to come inside an iPhone or iPad to actually make use of it.

[Smeagolberg]

Re: Apple users can afford it

"Amazon - Samsung S22 Ultra

256GB = £939

512GB = £1149"

Hmm. £210 for 256GB.

Rhe original example was £200 for 8GB of Apple storage. Some rip-offs are bigger than others.

[aerogems]

Re: Apple users can afford it

It has to do with the storage density of the chips. You take your average NVMe card and the flash chips are like the size of a standard SD card. Apple, Samsung, and the rest, need the chips sized more like MicroSD cards so that they can fit them all in the phone's form factor and still have room left for everything else they need to fit in there. The added density means higher prices. There is some markup, sure, but it's really not even close to what you, or the OP, think.

[elsergiovolador]

Re: Apple users can afford it

I don't know - many simply leave unpopulated footprint on the motherboard.

Now if you could buy these chips on Mouser or similar shops, you could easily solder them yourself. Probably the whole thing - toolset, hot air station and chips would have costed less than £200. You could probably make some money buying more chips and doing upgrades for mates.

Even these tiny BGA chips they come with preapplied solder balls, so soldering them is literally a minute job. Only difficulty is assembly and dissasembly of the device.

But of course as the world is going, we can't have people running their own small businesses.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Apple users can afford it

You also need the expertise to actually fit those chips into a highly integrated device, test if you've done it right and be knowledgeable enough to undo a mistake without (further) ruining the device. Of course, when it goes wrong (yes, I'm discounting the "if" option here - I have done SMD rework) it'll be all Apple's fault and much whining will be heard that they will not be so charitable as to replace that device under warranty so you can have another go and repeat the process following Einstein's definition of insanity.

Seems a lot of ask from Apple for an exclusively negative return. I suspect the option has not been considered for more than maybe a msec, other than for having a laugh.

[doublelayer]

Re: Apple users can afford it

"Rhe original example was £200 for 8GB of Apple storage. Some rip-offs are bigger than others."

Read again. That was for 8 GB of RAM, whereas this was for 256 GB of storage. RAM costs more per GB than storage does, whether marked up or not. Not comparable. Their mobile devices don't offer different RAM options in any case, and I'll admit I've seen some laptop companies with similar crazy markups on RAM and some that appear to use numbers closer to real market prices for the stuff. Apple does have crazy markup for both upgrades, but they're far from the only ones.

[jmch]

Re: Apple users can afford it

One is 256 GB of flash memory, the other is 8GB of RAM. That's apples with oranges... Though both are massively overpriced

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Apple users can afford it

"...they seem happy to be ripped off £200 for 8GB of extra RAM. That's, I dunno, about 400 to 500% more than most other makers."

An amazing lack of understanding of how market forces work. The fact they will pay this much is what you seem to be missing.

Shockingly, companies are out to make a profit, so if the market will bear that price then go ahead and charge it. This is called a successful business and is generally the goal of all businesses.

Nobody is forcing anybody to pay this, consumers are spending that of their own choosing. You're correct in adding "most other makers" have to charge 400 - 500% less because that's what their target market is prepared to pay.

"Hahahahahahaha" indeed.

Feel free to downvote or argue against it but the revenue stats for Apple products are against you on this one!

[VoiceOfTruth]

Re: Apple users can afford it

-> The fact they will pay this much is what you seem to be missing.

I'm not missing that at all. I have highlighted it. There's people out there who would pay for Apple bog roll at £1 a sheet if each sheet had an Apple logo on it.

I picked memory as an example because I don't think that Apple's memory is more expensive at source than, say, HP's or Dell's. But they mark it up in the most egregiously greedy fashion. £200 for an extra 8GB is very very greedy.

So if Apple customers are stupid enough to pay 4 to 5 times the cost for memory, let them pay more for having Twitter.

No downvote from me.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Apple users can afford it

I'm not at all happy about Apple's price gouging on RAM and storage upgrades, but, unfortunately, if I want to have an Apple device, there's sadly not a lot I can do about it. Maybe the EU might start to regard that as anti-competitive and customer-hostile at some point, if we're lucky…

(The so-called "baseline" specs on current Macs are essentially crippling the computers so that Apple can cynically publish a less painful starting price, but 16 GB RAM and 512 GB storage should really be the absolutely minimum baseline nowadays, and shouldn't really cost much, if at all, more than the meagre starting point that Apple try to flog to you.)

[elsergiovolador]

Re: Apple users can afford it

I don't like Apple, but unfortunately - at least - when it comes to laptops they are indeed bestest thing in the whole world.

There is simply no contest. Take any flagship laptop from other manufacturers and you'll see that it is a legacy technology.

If you need a non-Apple laptop, there not even point buying anything new. An old cheap post lease Thinkpad will do just as well as newest non Apple laptops, just make sure you slap Linux on them, none of that Microsoft malware disguised as operating system.

[willyslick]

Re: Apple users can afford it

Apple has cracked the seemingly impossible task of creating gizmos that are both luxury and mass-market.

People pay for the brand, and Apple makes a profit.

My personal experience with Apple products has been mostly positive over the years; in most cases the premium payed has resulted also in longer usage - sure it costs double of another PC but if it runs 3 times longer.....just need to stop updating the OS after a certain period of time.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Apple users can afford it

We simply standardised on Macbooks because the TCO is so much better that we'd get shot by the CFO if we dared use anything else.

The devices last long (to the point where devices that do not become outliers), supporting users anywhere in the world is OK as long as there's an Apple shop nearby or we can ship one from a nearby location (we can even safely spin up a device on remote as long as there's decent WiFi nearby, and all of that without significant extra expense), everything is pretty standard so we have a very low stock of spares, the OS doesn't stop the user every hour from working with Yet Another Update and it's fully Open Standards compliant so hooking it up to our backend is also not complicated which also speeds up M&A integrations.

The moment you incorporate staff time in TCO calculations (as you should if you want to do it right), interruptions and UI consistency become very, very significant numbers that render the higher cost of their hardware no longer a deciding factor.

[Ol'Peculier]

Puzzled...

Am I totally missing the point here or what's stopping you registering on your desktop, then using the account on your iThingy?

[gryphon]

Re: Puzzled...

Absolutely nothing as I understand it, except the iOS app isn't allowed to say there is another option or link directly to it.

[X5-332960073452]

Re: Puzzled...

Yea, so use the browser to sign-up, not the app!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Puzzled...

In principle nothing until Musk gets vindictive enough to filter on the OS data that your browser provides. Not a major issue for the technically competent, but they do represent the majority of the Musk audience..

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Puzzled...

I assume that Musk put up the price to cover the cost (or make a point about) Apple taking a rather generous cut of the fee.

While he is likely as much a vindictive dick as you suggest, if you're not signing up or subscribing via the app, then Apple doesn't get that cut anyway, so I'd assume it wouldn't really matter to him.

[Anonymous Coward]

What's the Point?

A Blue Tick does not signify what it did before Twitter got Musked.

It only signifies that you are mug enough to pay the monthly subscrioption.

Or am I missing something?

[Tim 8]

Re: What's the Point?

I think your replies come below those who do pay, so your visibility is lower.

[Stuart Castle]

Re: What's the Point?

I've never wanted the blue tick myself.

That said, it did have a use in that it did signify that Twitter had made some effort to verify you are who you say. This could be important if you are a celebrity, brand or any account that has lots of followers.

My account doesn't have lots of followers, and I don't give a rat's if you believe I am who I say. I just use my twitter account to comment on other people's tweets, so I don't want a blue tick, but I think now the Blue tick is just a sign you are paying $8 (or $11) a month, so I'm definitely not bothered now.

[Plest]

Re: What's the Point?

In a nutshell, yes!

"Hello I'm stupid enough to pay extra for this company to put my incoherent, mindless bollocks above all the other mindless, incoherent bollocks on this platform!"

[TangoDelta72]

Re: What's the Point?

SPOOON!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Benefits (and responsibilities) of being a mug

Apart from the Blue badge, Twitter Blue members will get early access to new features. Twitter says some features coming to subscribers include fewer ads (50 per cent less), better visibility of profiles and posts, and the ability to post longer videos.

Of course being a mug comes with responsibilities too -

Twitter says users who want to get the Blue badge on their profiles will need to verify their mobile numbers. The company introduced this security option as many spam and parody profiles got verified last time when the Blue subscription was rolled out. Twitter is also taking measures to restrict verified users from changing their profile names. The last time Twitter Blue was available to users, many parody accounts changed their names and DP (display image), mainly to imitate famous personalities like Elon Musk. This caused a lot of confusion and misinformation. Twitter says, "Subscribers will be able to change their handle, display name or profile photo, but if they do, they’ll temporarily lose the blue checkmark until their account is reviewed again."

(Have they thought about burner phones?)

[James O'Shea]

Re: Benefits of being a mug

Google Voice and Magic Jack and many other VoIP services, many of them free, exist.

[navarac]

Re: Benefits (and responsibilities) of being a mug

A Blue Badge generally means you are a disabled driver. A Blue Twitter tick indicates you are a disabled Twitter user. What will someone try to monetise next? Greedy shits.

[aerogems]

Re: Benefits (and responsibilities) of being a mug

Given Twitler's history, there's no chance in hell I'd want him having my phone number. People seem to forget how in the early days at Tesla, any time someone was quoted in a story about an accident with their Tesla, he'd go to the effort of finding the logs for that person's specific car and then trying to find something in there to use to smear them. It's one of the things that always made me uneasy about the guy, even before he ripped off the mask during the covid lockdown and let the world get a good look at the true asshole he is. I also found it a little unsettling that there would be logs for him to pull in the first place.

In any event, if you do something to bring yourself to his attention, he now has your phone number that could be sold to advertisers who will spam you day and night. I don't want any of my PII anywhere near where Twitler could access it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Benefits (and responsibilities) of being a mug

That's basically why I would *love* to have Musk's phone number.

So many double glazing and insurance ads, so little time..

:)

[James O'Shea]

And yet another reason

to never, ever, use Twitter.

Hmm. What if I were to set up Twitter using a web browser (say, Firefox, rigged to report that it's on Win10, when it might/might not be on Win 10. Or it might/might not actually be Firefox...) and get the blue tick using the browser? Would His Muskiness charge me $8 or $11? I don't know if you're required to use an app to use the blue tick, as I've never used Twitter, but if I had to use the app, what's stopping me from downloading it on Windows, Linux, Android, anything except iOS or macOS? Has His Muskiness never heard of, say Parallels or VMWare or even (shudder) Virtual Box? Note that it's perfectly possible to emulate Android on Windows and Mac. See https://www.laptopmag.com/articles/create-android-emulator or https://thedroidguy.com/best-android-emulator-for-mac-1090626 for just a few possible contenders.

This would assume that I was sufficiently desperate for a Twitter fix that I'd go to all that trouble. I have, I repeat, never used Twitter.

<cough> I might, however, be convinced to change my heathen ways if, for example, I could have multiple emulators running in different VMs and use them to poison their stats, troll the hell out of them, and generally screw with them. Even so, I probably wouldn't spring for the blue tick, given that the odds are that they'd yank the account sooner rather than later. Whereupon I'd just fire up a different VM and create a new account, lather, rinse, repeat. And I'd only connect from a large network, such as a major school site. The University of Miami is literally just down the road from me, I can connect to their guest wireless easily, and if the Musketeers tracked the IP address they'd see that it's coming from a location with tens of thousands of users. The main campus (there are seven) of Miami-Dade College is even closer than UM; Miami-Dade is the largest tertiary education institution in the United States, with something like 174,000 students. (No, I'm not making that number up.) Go ahead, Musketeers, block their IP... And MacDonald's and such fast 'food' places with wireless abound. Go on, block Mickie Dee. Hmmm.

Not that I'd actually advocate doing anything like this, of course. No matter how much fun I could have playing with the Musketeers. </cough>

[Plest]

As for Twitter, do humanity a favour Mr Musk and...

"Nuke it from orbit. It's the only way!"

[Delay]

This is how commerce works… when a retailer like Apple takes a bigger cut, the price is higher at that store, why would it be any different online? If you buy through Twitter directly you can still use all the same twitter iOS apps and it costs less money.

[Vimes]

‘You’re one of those condescending Mac users!’…

https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxmasterrace/comments/3las1l/dilbert_had_it_right_back_in_1995/

[Toe Knee]

Here’s a nickel…

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/include/math-emu/double.h#L29

That is all.

[juice]

I'm still bemused by the whole idea of making the blue badge a profit centre

As I understand it, Musk's aim is to get half of Twitter's revenue coming from subscriber payments, rather than advertising, etc.

However, with revenues of around $5 billlion, this means that they need to earn around $200 million per month from blue-badge subscriptions.

Which in turn means that they need about 26 million users to sign up to it [*]. Which is somewhere between 10-15% of the total monetisable Twitter userbase.

https://mashable.com/article/twitter-blue-elon-musk-subscriber-numbers

Is there really that many people willing to pony up $96[**] per year, for the privilege of having a blue badge by their name, an edit button and a slight boost to their visibility ranking? Especially since if Twitter does actually manage to get that many people to sign up to the blue badge, that'll effectively render the boost mechanism utterly meaningless...

[*] Maybe a bit less, depending on whether or not this new Apple-specific charge will be included in the revenue numbers

[**] or $144, in Apple-land

[Jim Mitchell]

Re: I'm still bemused by the whole idea of making the blue badge a profit centre

"Is there really that many people willing to pony up $96[**] per year, for the privilege of having a blue badge by their name, an edit button and a slight boost to their visibility ranking? Especially since if Twitter does actually manage to get that many people to sign up to the blue badge, that'll effectively render the boost mechanism utterly meaningless..."

For those that use Twitter for business purposes, to reach an audience, etc, then paying to increase your relative tweet visibility makes sense. You pay for visibility in most mediums. A "regular" user who uses Twitter within their own sub group and doesn't want to expand that has no real reason to pay. The question is how many people are in which group.

[Paul Crawford]

Re: I'm still bemused by the whole idea of making the blue badge a profit centre

Paying for genuinely useful aspects makes sense. The much wider question though is will Twitter still be attractive to businesses willing to pay for premium ranking, etc?

[DS999]

Re: I'm still bemused by the whole idea of making the blue badge a profit centre

There's no way there are 26 million people using Twitter for business purposes.

There's also the issue that the blue checkmark used to be fairly exclusive. If 26 million people have it, your tweets are only visible above the masses, but are no different than the other 25,999,999 users in your now very much not exclusive blue checkmark club. Unless Musk adds a gold checkmark and platinum checkmark at even higher prices.

I wish there were stats on how many Twitter users tweet per month. They only list how many were "active", which could mean anything from "logged in" to liking a tweet, to replying to a tweet, to retweeting, to tweeting out genuine original content themselves. I'd be quite surprised if the number is nearly as high as 26 million when talking about actual tweets rather than retweets or replies - the headline number could very well could be logins or even count people like me who will follow a link and read a tweet anonymously but never login. I mean, I probably follow a Twitter link at least once a day - though on my PC I have an extension installed that goes to nitter.net instead of twitter.com to avoid the recently added login nag when you try to scroll down the comments.

Gaining visibility for your tweets only matters if you tweet, or or if you reply to a tweet from someone with tons of followers and are willing to pay for yours to be shown somewhere in the first 500 replies rather than way down in the 3000s somewhere.

[KarMann]

Re: I'm still bemused by the whole idea of making the blue badge a profit centre

Is there really that many people willing to pony up $96[**] per year....

[**] or $144, in Apple-land

Just a minor FYI correction, that's $132 for Apple-year, unless I've missed something about $12/month, or a buy-12-months-pay-for-a-13th-month special deal.

[juice]

Re: I'm still bemused by the whole idea of making the blue badge a profit centre

Fair point - for some reason, my brian decided that it was $12 per month, not $11!

[Michael Wojcik]

Re: I'm still bemused by the whole idea of making the blue badge a profit centre

I'd give Brian a stern talking-to, if I were you.

[VicMortimer]

Re: I'm still bemused by the whole idea of making the blue badge a profit centre

With sales tax where I am, $11 sticker price puts it just over $12. So you're actually correct.

[theAltoid]

It's over

Twitter is over. Even with his billions and a blue check mark, Musk just got booed for 10-minutes live on stage. Could going full pizzagate spewing hate-filled pedo tweets have anything to do with it? And TLSA is down 50%. Who wants to by a Telsa, or a blue check? Cry me a river.

https://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-booed-stadium-crowd-dave-chappelle-sf-boo-1849881192

[DS999]

Better yet

A guy who posted a video of that had his Twitter account removed almost immediately. I guess to allow Musk to claim in a tweet "only 10%" of people were booing, which those who saw the video said it showed pretty much the opposite - lots of boos and only scattered cheers/applause.

Free speech for all, except when you criticize his holiness!

[Brewster's Angle Grinder]

When we released our first iPhone app we had to agree not to sell it for less on other platforms. I don't know if that rule is still in force or whether the small print allows Musk to get away with it (e.g. allowed on the web, but not on Android).

[aerogems]

This is an in-app purchase, not the app itself. The Twitter app is still free on Apple and Google's respective stores, but the cost of the "blue" program is more via the Apple app store compared to if I just went to the Twitter website in a browser and signed up there.

[Brewster's Angle Grinder]

Our first app was free with in-app purchases and I'm fairly sure it applied. But, as I say, the rules may have been loosened or it only have applied to other mobile phones.

[Guido Esperanto]

Tim probably told Elon, that apple users are used to...nay happy to pay more..so...win/win

[Macka]

"we can imagine"

You don't have to imagine, he's clearly set the price to drive his business away from the iOS App Store and onto the web. He gets his $8/m either way so no skin off his nose. Likewise, Apple won't care as they weren't making any money out of Twitter in the first place. However, if this idea spreads and other businesses follow suit, it might make them sit up and take notice.

[Chet Mannly]

Re: "we can imagine"

I think he's just said Twitter costs $8 and added the Apple transaction costs on top of that. So it's being neutral in a way, kinda like when an online seller adds a credit card surcharge instead of wearing the costs themselves and passing the costs on through prices to everyone.

[WolfFan]

Re: "we can imagine"

If Apple notices that he’s charging extra for access by the Apple Store, Apple may simply heave Twitter out of the Store.

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple fanbois buy into overpriced everything from the day they choose Apple. Deal with it.

[Captain Scarlet]

"30 percent tax"

I hate such a large cut is taken (By all such stores including Steam/Epic/Play/Amazon), but hosting and running infrastructure does have costs.

I wouldn't call it a tax, more an overpriced service charge

[that one in the corner]

Re: "30 percent tax"

"Service charge" is the most honest and accurate description.

Calling it a "tax" implies that it is being taken by a governmental body and (theoretically, at least) is then being used to service the public good.

And in this particular scuffle, which player do we think is actually harder t govern - nay, rule - the people (at least, the way they think)?

[DS999]

Re: "30 percent tax"

What Musk is doing by charging more is how people should respond if they don't like the 30% hit, rather than trying to get courts to force Apple to change it.

If everyone starts subscribing via website instead of in-app and Apple starts seeing revenue decline, then the market will force them to change. If most people just accept the higher price and pay it, then it clearly wasn't as big of a deal as it was made out to be.

Though Apple already drops the charge to 15% for subscriptions after a year, so if Musk keeps that ~30% higher price after a year he'll be the one screwing over his users not Apple!

[VicMortimer]

Re: "30 percent tax"

I much prefer the legal approach. Apple should be required to allow app installation from any source, not just their own app store.

Once that's fixed, I don't care if Apple charges 99%, but until then they should only be allowed to charge reasonable processing costs, not an extortionate 30%.

I don't care about Twatter at this point, though. I deleted my account and deleted the app from all my devices, and it'll stay that way until Space Karen is no longer involved with it.