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Comment by Jerry2 | Hacker News Reader

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Jerry2

> Apple is about to get bitten hard for being a monopoly.

A monopoly in what? In making their own products?

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Monopoly is the wrong word but Apple's practices are at least bordering on anti-consumer.

The only monopoly apple have is over their own customers i.e. switching away from apple isn't cheap

Sure it is. Android phones are cheap, windows computers can be cheap, a home-build with linux would be cheaper.

The only 'expense' is the few hours to relearn a few keystrokes.

Yes, that might be an oversimplification, but it's really not that expeisve or difficult to move from one platform to antother.

And if you've bought apps? The same is true the other way around of course, i.e. if you've bought apps on android

To borrow an analogy from another post: If I buy a BMW and later switch to a Honda, do I get to be mad if some of the BMW parts don't fit?

You get to be mad if your third-party child seat doesn't fit.

I'm confused - what does the third-party child seat map to in the iOS world?

Third-party content purchased while using the BMW/iPhone that you want to use with your Honda/Android. Plenty of apps are cross-platform, like child seats.

So if I buy a Macbook, we should require Apple to make available all software I had on my Windows PC? That makes no sense.

I never said that. My point is that moving devices isn't as simple as just buying a new one - i.e. it's not good enough to say just move to android (up to a point). There's nothing you can really do about it's just how software works.

Unless your friends are on iMessage, all your documents, contacts and calendar events are on iCloud, your photo library is on Apple Photos, all of which lock you into the Apple ecosystem and aren't available on Android. Sure, you can transition everything off, but I wouldn't call that a pain-free switching cost.

But why should it be pain-free, though? Or rather, why is it suddenly the government's responsibility to make it pain-free?

Because using your market dominance in one area of business in order to establish and maintain a foothold in a related business is long established as the type of anticompetitive behaviour that antitrust laws were built to regulate.

It's actually dirt cheap. As a consumer I've moved from and to apple repeatedly over the years. The cost has always been nonexistent. I never buy Mac only software.

Replacing hardware is the expensive part. But again, if you want to change technology vendors, there's always a cost.

> Monopoly is the wrong word but Apple's practices are at least bordering on anti-consumer.

As always, monopoly depends on how you define your market. If the market as iOS apps then Apple is clearly a monopoly.

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