Spotify Vs Apple, and putting computers in people's heads

Why does everyone hate Apple?

Daniel Ek (the genius founder of Spotify) wrote a long Twitter thread (see below) on his dislike for what the company Apple has become and specifically the monopoly it holds over the App Store.

This might feel odd, for one trailblazing tech entrepreneur to have such distaste for a company that provides the platform of which he has made billions (100+ million iPhone users use Spotify), so let’s dig into his reasons.

What Apple has become

From the outside, Apple is known to be one of the most innovative and forward-facing companies to ever exist. They’ve changed the way people interact with technology forever and in the process made their shareholders trillions. Their market cap (value) is almost the same as the GDP of the UK - just think about that for a second. 

As we noted in our newsletter about the OpenAI’s app store a decent chunk of their value is derived from the revenue they create from fees they charge other companies to host products on their platform. 

For example, if you make an app, put it on the App Store and then someone purchases something through the app, whether that is a monthly Spotify subscription or another £10 in Clash of Clans credits, Apple take a fixed 30% of that. You can see why App developers don’t love this so much.

But what has kicked off this recent feud?

An EU Act called the Digital Markets Act (DMA) came into force in late 2022 and Apple has just released their proposal to comply with it. Without getting bogged down in legal jargon (which I can’t pretend to understand/care about) the long and short of it is that Apple has a monopoly and the DMA was supposed to curtail their aggressive pricing policies and help the little guys (I mean if you can call Spotify a little guy…)

However, the general consensus with Apple’s new policy is that it has been crafted using their ridiculously big legal budget to find imaginative ways to get around these pesky new laws and continue to charge App developers huge fees leaving the likes of Spotify and others quite upset.

Elon Musk and Tim Cook (Apple CEO) had a run in last year when Musk bought Twitter and realised Apple was taking a huge chunk of Twitter’s revenue.

What does this mean?

Broadly it means Goliath is still very much winning this David and Goliath story, and if you’re Spotify or any other app, what can you do? They rely so heavily on the devices (phones, laptops etc) that Apple create they have to comply with the steep fees. 

While I don’t feel hugely bad for Spotify, there are many much smaller App Developers who this genuinely harms so we will see if regulators can ever truly catch up to their much smarter, stronger and aggressive Californian friend.

Will

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Brain implants, telepathy, and computers

What happened?

Neuralink, Elon Musk’s biotech company, put a computer chip in a human being.

How does this work?

If you studied Biology at school, you will know that the brain is the command and control center of your body. It is made up of billions of cells called nuerons. Neurons are like tiny electrical wires that transport electrical energy from one end of the cell to another. This is how your brain controls your hands, arms, speech, and much more.

What the scientific community realised is that if we can connect tiny electrodes (think of these as bridges between neurons and electrical wires) to the brain, we can translate electrical activity from your brain to a computer.

That’s where Neuralink comes in. In 2017, Elon announced that they had implanted a chip in a pig, then in 2021, they showed the monkey…

This is a Macaque monkey playing virtual ping pong, using its brain.

Now, they have put the device into a human brain.

Why does this matter?

Dr. Paul Nuyujukian, who leads Standford University’s Brain Interface Lab, said that the most electrodes he had seen on the human brain was 300, and Neuralink’s device has over 2000. This means scientists have many more connections to the brain which is synonymous with more ways to help people.

The first step is to empower those who have had life-altering brain injuries or diseases by restoring their autonomy. People with a Neuralink device, called Telepathy, can control their “phone or computer and through them almost any device, just by thinking.”

What do I love about this? The simplicity of it. Both the brain and computers are structurally complex systems that simply run on some form of electrical energy. This common denominator reveals there is no law of physics or biology preventing them from interacting with each other. All Elon did was ask “How?”.

Jack