Comment by beeboobaa3
2 years ago
> 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
Your list of services where you claim Apple has a dominant position is entirely products where it does not have a dominant position.
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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.
You’ve just removed a massive financial incentive for making the kind of hardware Apple does. Their whole ‘thing’ is a unified experience between hardware and software.
The entire premise of punishing a company for success when they haven’t violated any laws is insane to me, and I think dangerous to the market because you’ll stifle companies wanting to try new things for fear of someone attacking them for success.
Antitrust means that the consumer has no choice - they do they can buy an android phone. Saying “you can’t use other software inside of apples hardware” is an irrelevant argument, since an alternative to that combination is available.
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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?
Ironically, the pixel is the device you want.
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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)
iPhone SE battery life is shockingly poor versus the last 3 previous Androids I had which would last 2 days of light use.
It's probably my number one gripe with the SE. It runs flat when I need it. One time 4 hours walk because couldn't call a taxi (_luckily_ I hitched ride with a dodgy drug dealer instead - battery life matters!). Or staying overnight and not charging so needing to carefully manage power for day. Not everyone has a spare charger for iPhone.
Apple prioritise phone size/weight instead of battery life.
If I could buy a bigger internal battery (maybe needs to replace back of phone too), I would. Carrying a power bank is too bulky. I lose backpacks, and dislike the other alternatives.
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...
Besides the fact that consumers aren't as rational as your question seems to imply, some of the reasons for the iPhone's dominance are the same reasons Apple are getting sued.
Because a phone is not just a battery and a camera?
The Apple ecosystem is part of what you're buying with an iPhone. As a consumer, I really like that I can buy a MacBook, an iPhone, and AirPods, and have them all work seamlessly together because they were designed to do so. I'm even willing to pay extra for each product to ensure that they work together in concert, as well as a subscription for a service (iCloud) that glues them all together.
Marketing - android devices were notoriously janky in their beginning.
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and how’s the data privacy?
Fine, and if you want better, just install GrapheneOS.
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I'll take all of that in exchange for open software and better performance. I'm so fucking tired of the "thinness wars".
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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)