Comment by endisneigh
2 years ago
I assert it is trivial to not buy Apple products, easy to make alternatives to Apple products and easy to buy feature equivalent devices to Apple products.
In lieu of this what is the problem? If the government has a problem why not say any code should be able to be run on any device?
Honestly I’m curious - what’s the problem? There are android phones that are superior to iPhones and let you run anything you want. Why don’t people buy those?
The government seems to want to make it illegal to have a tight experience, but why? There are open alternatives. It’s like complaining that Teslas don’t support CarPlay. Valid, but does it require legislation? Buy another car.
FWIW I would love if the government made it so all devices should have an option to run any of your arbitrary code.
> easy to make alternatives to Apple products
Please, go do it. You'll be very rich very quick and I'll eagerly buy your products once you succeed.
Unfortunately you'll find out it's not actually easy at all when you realize that consumers care about weight, size, temperature and battery life which are all things apple excels at. Their hardware is really quite good, unfortunately the software is horribly crippled.
This is how the free market is intended to work. This opens up the range for several android phones (which have a near split in the US, and a majority globally last I recall) to offer better hardware.
Modern Samsung phones are very good. You’re asserting that Apple should be punished purely because they make good hardware and are successful - and if their hardware wasn’t good and competitive then you wouldn’t care.
Part of why I have Apple devices as a tech enthusiast is the good software and the ecosystem that comes with it.
Would I like to run an IDE and code on an iPad? Absolutely. But I’d rather have the iPad than the android tablet.
I don’t get why people obsess over the phones. Nobody here is trying to argue Apple has a monopoly on the phone market, that is very obviously not the case (although Apple very much contains a market leader position).
The argument is very simple: due to the dominant position on the overall phone market, Apple uses this power to mess with another market: the mobile app market. And here it is obvious how Apple is issuing bullying tactics to maintain its dominance (Apple TV vs. Netflix, Apple Music vs. Spotify, Apple Pay/iAP vs literally anything).
Wether the US courts come to a similar conclusion as the EU legislators remains to be seen, but there is a precedent
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The ecosystem doesn’t need to go away to be opened up.
Honestly, I am approaching this from another standpoint. Tech has made it more palatable to have walled gardens but battles similar to this have been fought before and the walled gardens have fallen.
I have two solutions for Apple here:
1. Either allow more open participation on your platform.
2. Allow other vendors to write OSes for the iPhone device if you don’t want to open your software.
Without one of these two, the amount of ewaste we’re generating from this hardware is astonishing.
I don’t think Apple the services, should dictate the OS running on Apple the hardware.
At that point, you can run the ecosystem you want. I can choose to run Android, or Linux on this hardware.
And before anyone brings up consoles: yes. This should also apply to consoles.
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> This is how the free market is intended to work. This opens up the range for several android phones (which have a near split in the US, and a majority globally last I recall) to offer better hardware.
Then why isn't this happening? Google's platform is not meaningfully different from Apple's in enough ways to actually make me want to switch. Who's shipping an open phone with amazing cameras that match what the iPhone and Galaxy provide, that also allows sideloading without disabling all of Google's nice software features/cloud storage?
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> Would I like to run an IDE and code on an iPad? Absolutely.
Great, I'd like that too. So let's work with the regulators to make that happen!
The Pixel 8 pro has superior battery life and camera to the iPhone 15. And that’s to say nothing of OnePlus or Samsung.
Real battery life, or marketing spec sheet battery life?
One of the things that impressed me about Apple when I started using their products was that advertised battery life was usually within 10% of what I’d actually get. I was used to those being lies to the tune of 30-50% from other vendors (phone and laptop alike)
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So in a free market you'd expect them to outcompete the iPhone, no? How do you explain the iPhone being dominant despite being inferior?
Edit: in case of confusion, I'm asking this rhetorically in reply to someone who argues there is no monopoly...
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and how’s the data privacy?
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"Easy" means there are no barriers to entry, not that it's trivial to make a good product.
In particular, there are no barriers to entry imposed by Apple. For any product Apple sell, there are numerous competing products in the same category. Apple's versions uniformly dominate third party rankings of these products, but all that means is that they're good at what they do.
> Unfortunately you'll find out it's not actually easy at all when you realize that consumers care about weight, size, temperature and battery life which are all things apple excels at. Their hardware is really quite good, unfortunately the software is horribly crippled.
They really don't. iPhone is a status symbol, especially for the new up-and-coming consumers (teens)
Apple + Google form a duopoly. Apple has locked down iOS to let them do whatever they want and overcharge as much as they like, and Google has no incentive to be any better, because there's no serious 3rd contender*.
For typical users not buying Apple means having to compromise on privacy with Google, which isn't a great option either. Both are trying their best to create vendor lock-in and make it hard for users to leave.
From developer perspective not having access to iOS users is a major problem. Apple inserts themselves between users and developers, even where neither users nor developers want it. Users and devs have no bargaining power there, because Play Store does the same, and boycotting both stores has a bunch of downsides for users and devs.
*) I expect people on HN to say that some AOSP fork with f-droid is perfectly fine, but that's not mainstream enough to make Apple and Google worried, especially that Google has created its certification program and proprietary PlayStore Services to make degoogling phones difficult.
It's an interesting perspective, but as I understand this case, the case is not interested in a developer's bargaining power against their distributor. The case is interested in the impact on consumers (fewer choices, higher prices). There's certainly no argument to make that consumers lack a variety of apps and app features.
I care about you as a developer, but I'm not sure this case does. Maybe I'm thinking about it wrong.
I think these are two sides of the same coin, because ultimately developers must pass the extra costs to users. The devs aren't subsidizing the 30%/15% cut, it's a tax that users pay.
App Store rules and the greedy cut also make certain kinds of apps and lower-margin businesses impossible to create in such environment, so this blocks innovations that could have benefited users.
When Apple bans competitors, blocks interoperability, drags their feet on open standards, and gives their own apps special treatment nobody else can have, then users miss out on potentially better or cheaper alternatives. This helps Apple keep users locked in, not innovate when they don't want to, and overcharge for services users can't replace.
All of that was more forgivable when smartphones were just a novelty, and digital goods were just iTunes songs. But now a lot of services have moved online. Mobile phones have become a bigger platform than desktop computers, and for billions of people they are their primary or the only computing device.
> *) I expect people on HN to say that some AOSP fork with f-droid is perfectly fine
As you explained yourself, it's not a real alternative, because it relies on Google itself, who can always decide to break it. A real alternative is GNU/Linux phones, Librem 5 and Pinephone. And yes, they are very niche and not easy to make.
Google has a huge incentive to compete because Apple has 50% of the US market, which is the most consequential market in the world
Your mobile device is a gateway to much of the world. You seem to think it would be okay for a car manufacture to make it impossible to use your car except to drive to business that pay the car maker 30% of every purchase. I'm guessing you'll say people should be able to opt into such a car if they want but if that car has 60% of the market now it's effectively influencing the entire economy. Prices of groceries are 30% higher. Prices of clothing are 30% higher. Any company who wants people to come to their store are forced to sign up to pay the car company 30% or else they won't have access to 60% of the population.
Can you see the issue now? It doesn't matter that people could by other cars. It matters that Apple's market is so large that its influence is too big to be left as is.
The question is, can you buy a car from a different manufacturer? When it comes to cars, yes you can.
Is apple a monopoly? Probably not, because you can also switch to android. Does Apple have a large enough share of the market to influence the market? Likely, which is why the EU has DSA and DMA now.
No, the question is "does one company have too much influence over the digital economy". The answer is yes. Apple has influence over 60% of the population. They extract 30% from all digital transactions. If you want to sell digital content to iPhone user's you're required to give Apple 30%. That's too much influence for one company.
> The question is, can you buy a car from a different manufacturer? When it comes to cars, yes you can.
You can, but why would you if you have no idea that your Apple purchase comes with all of these negative consequences?
I would guess that most Apple users don't know the implications of their purchase, and therefore they have no real incentive to look outside of Apple. Garland even addressed this in his speech: Apple disincentivizes you from choosing non-Apple products. They make it look like their products are better, but really it's the opposite: they make their competitors look worse due to their own purposefully terrible interoperability.
Contrast that to an Apple Car that only lets you drive to Apple Grocery stores with a 30% toll: the user is going to see how bad that is and naturally they'll find better alternatives on their own.
> Is apple a monopoly? Probably not, because you can also switch to android.
It's a duopoly. Android is far worse in many ways, e.g., privacy.
Just a note that it is more like prices are 42% higher - because the 30% is a cut off gross, and 100 / 70 = 1.4287
I'd say that is the problem of the people that choose to buy such a stupid car, not of the one selling it, or of the people that choose not to buy it.
There is no choice: It's a duopoly.
Poor analogy. This is already an issue with servicing automobiles. Overly-complicated construction and proprietary tools that can only be acquired by licensed dealerships. Read: Audi, Mercedes-Benz.
> I assert it is trivial to not buy Apple products
While it is easy to not buy Apple products, I think the thing that often gets missed is that once someone is significantly invested in Apple's ecosystem, getting out of that ecosystem is highly disruptive and difficult.
For example, suppose you are a person who for historical reasons owns a MacBook, and iPad, and an iPhone, and a large chunk of your friends group also has those. The default choice then for you to use a cloud storage solution is Apple's iCloud Drive. The default choice for you to store and share photos is Apple's Photos App. The default choice for you to message your friends is the iMessage App. The default way for you to store passwords is Apple's Keychain Manager.
If you then decide "you know what, I'm fed up with Apple, I'm going to buy an Android", suddenly your cloud storage solution, your photo storage and syncing solution, your messaging solution, and your password management solution are all not supported, so you not only need to find an alternative on your new device, but you also have to do so on all your other devices if you want your phone to be in sync with them. This is a really high friction environment, and makes it so that a lot of people feel trapped in Apple's ecosystem.
So you can be a person who would not choose to buy Apple products today if you were starting from scratch, but you can feel compelled to continue buying them because Apple has made it so that switching in the future is very inconvenient and impacts all your other devices. It's specifically people in this situation who are being taken advantage of by Apple and why Apple's practices are labelled as monopolistic.
Apple spent a long time acquiring customers and coaxing them into their walled garden, and now they're switching tactics to milking those customers now that it's inconvenient for them to leave the walled garden.
There is no hand forcing you to be so overleveraged in apples products.
It doesn't matter if someone was forced into buying too many apple products or not. Governments have a responsibility to prevent Apple from abusing their market position and captive audience.
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You seem to totally misunderstand the whole concept of what the competition law is about.
It's not about whether people can choose not to buy an iPhone, really at all. It's about once they do choose iPhone, is Apple unfairly using their control of the platform to influence whether they choose Apple's product vs a competitor for future things they buy.
Seems to me that if I already own an Android device and am in the market for a tablet, I would probably choose Android again because a lot of the apps that I have bought & paid for include a tablet version as well. Not sure if most would consider that anti-competitive.
I just bought Garmin GPS Watch. I'm appalled that it only let's me download apps from the Garmin watch app store. It's unfair that I can only install Garmin's OS on it. I bought the watch. I should be able to do anything I want to it. I need Garmin's software engineers to develop open solutions so that anyone can do anything on the watches they sell.
Do you see what the problem is with the above statement? How far does the government go? Shouldn't all products (electronic or not) be "open" if Apple loses?
This maybe sounds smart until you take a few seconds and notice the crazy amount of work these companies put into doing the exact opposite of your premise: preventing you from installing alternative operating systems and preventing you from using alternative marketplaces. When Apple claims they have to do extra work to make their devices support alternatives that is them lying to you and you are apparently eating it up :/.
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If you have above X% market share, yes (e.g. 20%).
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For every thing that the DOJ is complaining about there’s a Google version: Chat, Wallet, Auto, Pixel, etc.
This suit reminds me of the phrase, “I’ve been convicted by a jury of my peers… who couldn’t get out of jury duty.”
Apple is under the gun because their main competitors (at least Google and Samsung) aren’t as good / successful, even when they have greater market shares.
Also, Android is.. ahem.. “open source”.
The difference is that the underlying protocols in those android apps are open, and so can be communicated with by any other app that anyone chooses to write an app.
Apples apps are built on top of proprietary protocols which they do not allow anyone else to use, and so there are lots of features and functionality that can only be used by Apple giving them the edge over anybody else.
> and so can be communicated with by any other app that anyone chooses to write an app
...and so, win?
> Apples apps are built on top of proprietary protocols which they do not allow anyone else to use
So Google let's anyone use their APIs but no one does, because developers would rather "win" by writing to more limited APIs that Apple controls and keeps for themselves.
Doesn't make sense to me.
Google's continuity in general, and in Android, is shoddy. Their support across "n" platforms is weak. Compare remote mobile automated QA services for iOS devices vers Android devices. The latter is a nightmare.
Even giving everyone full (but not really, because there are closed and controlled private APIs to Google services, too) access, as you say, can't bring them greater success. Because developers hate open platforms. /s
What they hate is poorly architected, sadly supported and non-revenue generating platforms.
> In lieu of this what is the problem?
You assertions are immaterial to the fact that they are breaking the law. Monopolies and monopolistic practices are flatly illegal.
You're also viewing this exclusively through the lens of the "consumer" experience while fully ignoring the effects on the "labor" and "supplier" market.
> The government seems to want to make it illegal to have a tight experience
Is there some evidence that a monopoly is absolutely required to have a "tight experience?"
Your first sentence is incorrect. Monopolies are not illegal.
From the press conference this morning: "It is not illegal to hold a monopoly, Garland said. "
"That may sound counterintuitive in a case intended to fight monopolies. But under US antitrust law, it is only illegal when a monopolist resorts to anticompetitive tactics, or harms competition, in an effort to maintain that monopoly."
https://www.cnn.com/business/live-news/doj-apple-antitrust-l...
My first sentence is completely correct. I just happen to disagree with Merrick Garland's blatant misrepresentation of the Sherman Act.
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> Monopolies and monopolistic practices are flatly illegal.
You are mistaken.
Section 2 of the Sherman Act makes it unlawful for a company to "monopolize, or attempt to monopolize," trade or commerce. As that law has been interpreted, it is not illegal for a company to have a monopoly, to charge "high prices," or to try to achieve a monopoly position by what might be viewed by some as particularly aggressive methods. The law is violated only if the company tries to maintain or acquire a monopoly through unreasonable methods. For the courts, a key factor in determining what is unreasonable is whether the practice has a legitimate business justification.
https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...
This has absolutely nothing to do with consumer choice. Apple device popularity among consumers has created a market of apps and technology that exists. That market is larger than the GDP of most countries. It is governed by Apple’s policies, and those policies are anti-competitive against companies wishing to participate in that market.
Spotify, just by virtue of the fact that someone installs their app, must pay Apple 30% of their revenue. Imagine trying to compete in a market where you have to pay your largest direct competitor 30%… And on top of all that, Apple keeps the internal fancy APIs all to themselves. It’s insane this hasn’t come sooner
> I assert it is trivial to not buy Apple products... Honestly I’m curious - what’s the problem?
Is it trivial to move to alternatives once you've already bought said Apple products?
I bought a pixel and there was a process that transferred everything over. Not sure how much easier it can be.
Can it transfer the photos you have in iCloud? Or the passwords that Apple will “conveniently” store in its internal password manager? Or the bookmarks you have on safari? Or the messages you have on iMessage? Or the notes you have saved in your phone? Or the reminders you have set up? Or the alarms that you have?
I also recently switched from Android to iPhone. There was also an app that automated a lot of it. But there are a ton of tiny things that build up and lock you in to a platform. And they’re all marketed as helpful little addons! Why not backup your pictures to iCloud or get more storage space? It’s great in theory, but it makes that transition so much harder. It’s funny too, I’m actually very unhappy with my iPhone and want to switch back to an android, but I’m waiting. Why? Because it took me like 3 days to fully switch all my stuff over the first time and I don’t feel like going through that again.
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Now convince a billion people to do the same…
While we’re waiting for that to happen, hopefully this might help explain to you what the lawsuit is actually about. Because it has nothing to do with what you’re arguing
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=A69-8XxLbJ4
Including the apps you paid for on iOS?
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1. That’s moving goalposts.
2. It is fairly trivial to move, there are dedicated apps for that for iOS->Android and macOS is still kind of BSD so it’s very compatible.
The most compelling argument I can see is that due to its market share businesses cannot avoid dealing with the app store and it's fees.
But they can though, there are plenty of apps that are android exclusive.
Would it be OK for your bank to exclusively support Android? Would it be OK for government apps to only support Android.
Of course not.
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You don't think losing access to ~50% of the market is a disadvantage for a business?
No they can’t because consumers have already made that choice. It’s done. We are talking about this moment in time, not some fantasy world where everyone ditched their iPhones.
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> The government seems to want to make it illegal to have a tight experience, but why? There are open alternatives.
> Buy another car.
That argument goes both ways.
Once Apple is forced by law to allow other app stores, then you are free to continue to just use the Apple app store.
Just don't install other app stores. It is even more trivial to do that. So please don't complain about other app stores in the future, as your own exact argument refutes it.
Apple and Tesla aren’t competing in the same market
> It’s like complaining that Teslas don’t support CarPlay
It would be like that if the Tesla dash App Store somehow generated $1.1T annual revenue while taking 30% off the top of third party app manufacturers, while using that revenue and their own competitive advantage (not paying 30%) to grow and erode secondary markets via their own first party apps
Why does the percent taken matter? How much is appropriate? Ultimately they’re transparent about the fee, the choice is the developers.
In any case there should be a way to put your phone into some insecure mode and then you can explicitly download any app you want, yes.
But about Tesla - if you could make money, lots of money, selling Tesla dash apps, who cares if they take 30%? The alternative is today, you don’t really make anything at all.
> Why does the percent taken matter?
These are legitimate businesses taking aim at Apple's predatory anti-competitive behavior. If the percent taken was 0, there would be no case. Why does it matter? Because profit margins
> How much is appropriate?
It depends. That's what this case is about. In the case of Spotify, probably 0% because Apple is their largest direct competitor. It's the definition of anti-competitive.
> Ultimately they’re transparent about the fee, the choice is the developers.
Stop saying there's a choice... There's no choice. Again, that's what the whole case is about. The market is what it is. Consumers are using iPhones. A business like Spotify can't choose to reduce their revenue by 50%. They have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders.
> if you could make money, lots of money, selling Tesla dash apps, who cares if they take 30%?
You keep missing the part where Apple is a direct competitor. So in this very terrible analogy, say my app was a music app, and after seeing that my music app is making lots and lots of money, Tesla releases their own music app, they would effectively earn 30% of my revenue and could freely use it to drive my business into the ground. 30% extra to advertise, do research and development, and acquire more music licenses. It's impossible to compete in a market where your competitor has their hands in your pockets. So in that (again very terrible) analogy, yes it would be anti-competitive, and who cares? I would.
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Apple is not transparent about the fee at all. Developers are not allowed to use other payment processors, can't mention that prices are cheaper elsewhere, or tell users why the prices are higher.
How is that transparent?
> trivial to not buy Apple products
Irrelevant. Monopoly doesn't mean coercing people into the market.
> easy to make alternatives to Apple products and easy to buy feature equivalent devices to Apple products
It's not only not easy, it's not possible. Your mistake is thinking of phones as computers. They are not computers, at least not to the vast majority of users. They are devices that connect to other compatible devices to do telecommunications. It's just like if plain old telephones ran a proprietary protocol and only one vendor could make them.
Let’s hear some examples? Even things like iMessage have fallback to SMS, not to mention dozens of alternatives that work on android, iOS and more. What’s the problem?
You know what the problem is. Nobody cares about technicalities, what matters is practicalities. You can't buy an iPhone from anyone but Apple. It's as simple as that. No, Android phones are not iPhone alternatives and you know damn well they are not.
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> I assert it is trivial to not buy Apple products, easy to make alternatives to Apple products and easy to buy feature equivalent devices to Apple products.
Swap the name Apple with Microsoft and you might see a different perspective. Microsoft was beaten over the head for anti-competitive practices with browsers back in the day and Apple is behaving no different. It's easily arguable that they are behaving much worse in multiple aspects to what Microsoft was up to.
It may be trivial for a consumer to buy an Android phone; it is not trivial for a developer to decide to not support iOS or Safari.
I fear we're going to see this argument in absolutely every thread on this topic for the next few years and it's going to be argued ad nauseam. "You can just buy an Android phone" barely scratches the surface of the arguments being made.
For example (given the EU gives great context to this): Apple owns and maintains the only App Store that's allowed on the iOS platform. So they have a monopoly on the iOS app market. Is that right and fair? I'm sure plenty will read that want to reply "yes of course it's fair, Apple can do what they want with their own platform" but that's your opinion. Controlled app stores are a dramatic shift from the way software used to be distributed and as a society/whatever we've never actually had a discussion about it. It just happened.
> The government seems to want to make it illegal to have a tight experience, but why?
I'd argue the government seems to want to make it illegal for a tight experience to be the only experience available. And it's not hard to see the argument for why: competition is good. Multiple app stores or whatever would open up the market, Apple would have to make the case for why they should get 15/30% of an app developer's revenue. They might be able to make that case very easily, they might not. But a monopoly means they don't even have to try.
IMO talking solely about Apple and/or arguing about whether they have a "monopoly" isn't going to be that effective (sorry DOJ). The reality is that we live in a world that requires us to be connected, that connection is currently controlled almost exclusively by two tech giants to the extent that even a slightly smaller tech giant, Microsoft, utterly failed in launching a competitive third platform. Is this duopoly good for us as a society? Is it what we actually want? It's fair to at least be asking the question.
Can a argument be made that by not supporting other software on their platform, essentially platform is inhibiting competition, which hinders true price discovery and customer loses ? Like if cars don't allow other FSD on their platform, what choice does the customer has.
Yeah, cars should totally allow third party FSD integrations, provided they are certified to be safe. We can't risk pedestrians getting hurt just so we can have more app choices.
But side-loading apps or having an alternative App Store only exposes you to liability, not other people. So it's not the same thing. We should be free on our own risk.
> easy to buy feature equivalent devices to Apple products
For some users, this isn't true. More thoughts here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39784413
You could read the linked document and see for yourself what they think the problem is
The problem is monopolization of markets that are typically contestable. All computers are Turing machines and all the code is just assembly. There is zero technical rationale for the restrictions Apple imposes. And the assumption in free market capitalism is that of competition. In tech world this means adversarial interoperability. Which, by the fun fact, is how every current Big Tech company grew. Facebook used to interoperate with MySpace in dislike of MySpace in a manner that today we would even categorize as infringing on IP laws. Adversarial interoperability is demonstrably beneficial for the user. When a company implements social and technical barriers to it, the state has all the right to reign in such behaviour in the benefit of markets being contestable.
Their platform is big enough that it affects the market even if you never use their products. Idiotic decisions that they make can ooze into other unrelated products in order to compete with them. Try buying a flagship Android with a microSD slot and a headphone jack. Now recall where the trend of eliminating those two things came from. The average consumer is not very keen to these things. They see the biggest player, Apple, gut a feature and lie to them about it being a good thing, and they will believe it. Now to recapture the average consumer the other players in the market have to adhere to those changes.
> There are android phones that are superior to iPhones
Sorry to report this is not true for my grandparents, father, mother, brother and sister and in fact my entire extended family. iOS is far easier to use by a thousand miles. Just some anecdata.
My theory: the problem is iCloud encryption at rest. The solution is to hang this over Apple until they relent.
If that were the case, why wouldn’t Apple come out and say this is what is happening?
Same reason you don’t go to the cops when the mafia extorts you - it will only make it worse.
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I agree with this wholeheartedly. The USA is a surveillance state and Apple’s security posture combined with its market share is a considerable hindrance. The arguments against anti-competitive and consumer-hostile mechanisms ad nauseam pale in comparison to this. I very much want to see real numbers, perhaps survey data, supporting the narrative that customers are locked in, unhappy with their experience, or otherwise underserved by Apple. Because IRL, I see nothing but happy customers.
The majority of people I see complaining about apple’s walled garden ecosystem are people who are also proud to admit they don’t use apple products. It’s never made sense to me why people who don’t even use the products care so much about it. If people wanted to be able to do the things they claim they want to, they would switch to android but they don’t.
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This is basically the only actual reason for the suit.
If their tight experience is so superior, why do they restrict competition? Wouldn't they win anyways?
IMO it's clear that without abusing its position, we would actually have competition for all of the bundled services from Apple.
But this is capitalism. The ultimate goal is always monopoly, so they'll keep chasing that by whatever means necessary.
>easy to make alternatives to Apple products
What? This is plain false. Entering this market is extremely expensive and hard to do. The duopoly is there for a reason. Even giants like Microsoft tried to enter it and couldn't.
> If their tight experience is so superior, why do they restrict competition? Wouldn't they win anyways?
iOS today regularly updates with improvements across the full software stack, up to the Apple apps themselves. Sometimes these changes are major. In the world the justice department is asking for, big changes to —for example, Messages app— would have to be coordinated with every app developer in that category. Changes would takes much, much longer, and in many cases would have to be watered down.
They're already making the changes they want to, except they give themselves special treatment.
All they have to do is give everyone the special treatment.
If Apple buy up all the fab capacity how exactly can you make yourself (with a spare billion dollars) an iPhone?
If you're genuinely interested in this below are a couple things you could read to help get some background. Its actually a pretty fascinating history.
Judging by your phrasing, your interpretation of antitrust stems from Robert Bork and has been the mainstream thought for a long time. Read The Antitrust Paradox by him to see how we got here and why the courts have acted how they have for the past 40 years.
The current chair of the FTC, Lina Khan, was actually an academic prior to working for the government and has a long paper trail of how she interprets the law. In short (and extremely oversimplified), it modernizes the Brandeis interpretation that bigness is bad for society in general, regardless of consumer pricing. EX: If Apple were a country its GDP would surpass the GDPs of all but four nations. They argue this is bad flat out.
Can't say it was the only cause, but Khan's paper, Amazon's Antitrust Paradox - note the reference to Bork's book - is partially what resparked a renewed interest in antitrust for the modern era if you want to check it out.
The 0.01% who hate apple anyway can't live without the need to turn the iphone into an android because it's what's good for the children (users). It's really amazing the lengths folks talk about how superior android on these threads and apple is the root of all evil.
The other 99.9% could care less and I predict they will be unhappy with the results of forced-enshitification of iOS.
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Yes.
Okay, because the linked court documents explain why it's not that easy.