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Comment by newfeatureok | Hacker News Reader

What's so special about computers?

Should car manufacturers be forced to use interoperable wheels, lights and other proprietary components? Maybe so.

Take a basic 36V drill, companies such as Black and Decker and Dewalt use different methods to lock the battery onto the accessory. Should the government also mandate these are interoperable?

The list goes on - construction tools, consumer electronics, appliances, etc.

To what extent should the government force industries to do things?

By the way, I personally would love if the answer to the questions above were yes, but I wonder how successful the government would be in pursing these things.

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> By the way, I personally would love if the answer to the questions above were yes

I was about to say... :)

Remember when cell phones all used proprietary adapters and you had to buy expensive chargers if you lost yours? This is one of the great things governments can do to protect us. (I think we owe Europe for that one.)

If your solution to creating margin is being anti-competitive / anti-consumer, there's something fundamentally wrong.

It’s not actually anti-consumer to create products that people want.

> It’s not actually anti-consumer to create products that people want.

Big tobacco.

And that's a great analogy. And just like tobacco might be something the consumer wants, it's bad for the broader system.

Apple is creating negative externalities that ripple across our industry, all the while bringing smiles to consumers that don't know about the cost.

Tobacco is clearly not analogy by your own argument, since tobacco harms the user. Are you claiming Apple harms its users?

Apple creates fewer negative externalities than any of their competitors. This is well documented.

I don’t see how this analogy works.

> Are you claiming Apple harms its users?

Yes!

The people building the future that don't happen to work at Apple have to work that much harder. They are less productive because of the toll Apple extracts.

App Store rules, policy conformance, release restrictions, and Apple tax impose a huge overhead on everyone. There are higher order, dynamical impacts that tough even non-Apple users. (Kind of like secondhand smoke!)

Apple users are serving their device by surrendering freedoms to it. It should be the other way around. Apple users pay more, they get less, and the software delivered to them is 15% less good than it could be.

Competition can't get started or survive. The ocean is being over-fished, and natural evolution has been artificially controlled by one entity.

Apple users are worse off than in the parallel universe where App Store didn't happen.

I’m glad you said this:

“Apple users are worse off than in the parallel universe where App Store didn't happen.”

What you are saying here is that your argument is based on conjecture. There is no factual basis to it at all. This is literally a fantasy.

“App Store rules, policy conformance, release restrictions, and Apple tax impose a huge overhead on everyone.”

Only in a world where these things are not part of why Apple is successful.

These are not problems, they are solutions to the complex problem of creating a market in which consumers are willing to spend money on software.

This is not conjecture. It is a fact borne out by the huge amounts of money people do in fact spend on Apps.

We wouldn’t be having this discussion of Apple hadn’t created a marketplace people trust.

Believe it or not, I actually want a parallel universe where Apple isn’t the only trusted platform, and I want the alternative to be open, not just another giant corporation.

However, the only way to make that happen is is if we build the technologies to enable it.

We won’t be able to do that if the government regulates software distribution.

Not commenting on the proposals in this thread but a vast amount of regulation is precisely about protecting consumers from themselves.

That is also the argument for why Apple’s restrictions are beneficial.

If we create regulation it will end up reproducing all of the restrictions that Apple imposes, plus whatever else the government wants.

The biggest difference is that nobody will be able to compete with it, and even open source will be forced to comply.

I disagree. If all companies are forced to use the same components, it removes the incentive for companies to innovate on those components. Why bother building a better battery lock if you're not allowed to use it in your products without giving it to your competitors first?

What are you disagreeing with? I'm not advocating for the standardization of components - I'm just saying that there is nothing special about software standardization.

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