Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

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They control computing for 50% of Americans. Not games, not movies. All computing.

And all of the commerce around that computing.

You have to pay their tax to interact with Apple customers in any way.

Who are Apple customers? 50% of Americans.

It's a protection racket and it's anticompetitive af.

Furthermore, you can't use your own software stack / runtimes, have to dance to arbitrary rules, and can't deploy or update when you want or need to.

Apple got this by building an awesome product, but they also played an incredibly evil game that puts Microsoft to shame.

"We're protecting customers" really means "we're tying all of your hands and forcing you to walk the plank".

I totally get how you love your shiny pocket device and you own Apple shares (and may even work there), but this company is destroying our industry and making it unfathomably hard for startups to get off the ground and succeed.

Imagine if Apple hadn't made these draconian choices. We'd still have the technology we have today, but startups would be able to deploy when and how they want. And they wouldn't have to pay their margins away.

>Apple got this by building an awesome product, but they also played an incredibly evil game that puts Microsoft to shame.

It really is funny how we went from a major anti trust case against Microsoft for simply bundling a web browser with their OS [1]. The original decision in that case was actually to break up Microsoft, though was lost on appeal. And here we have Apple doing many magnitudes worse. Even in this original antitrust case, you could always bypass Microsoft entirely to install whatever software you wished. Apple has quite literally never allowed that possibility, has no intention of doing so, and any software you develop for the platform entitles Apple to a 30% cut. There's many markets with a profit margin under 10%, and here we have Apple taking 30%.

And people defend them for it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....

Apple fans are doing evil. They just don't realize it. They're too awestruck by the brand to understand the harm it does.

Talk to your legislators. That is the way to fix this tribulation.

Wanting a sane and stable and reliable device is doing evil? Oh please. If the changes happened that people (who apparently don't use iOS) wanted, iOS would turn into the godawful shitshow that is Android. No thanks.

If you don't like Apple, boycott them. Easy.

That people don't like the UX of Android, I totally understand (I did not like iOS' last time I tried, so it makes sense to me that someone that likes it doesn't like Android's).

But I don't understand why you would suggest Android is unstable and reliable. I have been using miscellaneous Android devices for some time now, and I don't remember having any stability or reliability issues with the OS.

As for the "boycott", I agree as a user, it's easy. But as a an app developer it's certainly much tougher given their large market share.

> Wanting a sane and stable and reliable device is doing evil?

That can be true while at the same time being true that Apple is taking advantage of their position to extort money from developers and end users.

>If you don't like Apple, boycott them. Easy

If your customers demand an iOS app, boycotting them is not easy. It's expensive either way.

> and that Microsoft had taken actions to crush threats to that monopoly, including Apple, Java, Netscape, Lotus Software, RealNetworks, Linux, and others

More than "simply bundling a web browser".

Also they were trying to vendor lock third party hardware, acting in concert with OEM, it was far deeper and wider than Apple controlling access on their own hardware/software/user stack.

Apple damage control party has lost the plot if they're going haywire downvoting snippets of factual information

Yeah, computing is not a market.

I get you are trying to win an easy sentimental argument, but making your own market definitions will not make them a monopoly.

Apple sells products, not "computing". In no market where they sell products they have a monopoly.

How is computing not a market??

Computing covers many of the things people do in a modern society, including:

- Communication

- Banking

- Investing & trading

- Finding information

- Applying to jobs

In what world is that not a critical market?

They have a monopoly on devices running iOS apps, and a monopoly on channels to deliver mobile software to anyone who uses an iPhone (i.e. either their App Store or Safari).

So Does GM have a monopoly on Chevrolets? Does that mean they can be regulated as a monopoly? Chevrolets compete with Fords and Mercedes and Honda, etc; so having a monopoly on your own brand is not a monopoly. I have both an Android phone and an iPhone, so when I hear that Apple has a phone monopoly it just seems like dumb whining.

Using your analogy here...

Imagine there are only Chevrolet and Honda (Apple and Android).

Imagine you could only go to Chevrolet-approved locations. That Italian place you like is on the destination list, but only because they pay 30% of their revenue to Chevy.

The movie theater is protesting the 30% fee, so your car physically can't even visit. It's prohibited.

The new boutique really wants to get business. After all it bought land and paid for real estate in a prime location. But Chevy doesn't like the look of it and asks them to tear it down and rebuild.

All the artists at the market your Chevy brought you to are mad because they have to fork out to Chevy, and they're not even sure what Chevy has to do with any of this. They just want to sell their art.

The builders are complaining because everyone is driving these damn cars with their silly rules, and nobody used to work or think this way. But suddenly everyone thinks Chevy's demands are okay. They're not entitled.

Customers like Chevy.

And yeah, web apps, so you can go through the drive-through anywhere you want. That works fine for some places but it's not at all comparable to parking and properly visiting, for many reasons of capabilities and reliability.

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