It feels like there is so much work that goes into the Apple ecosystem working so cleanly, that most take it for granted without considering what is really an 'alternative' and its costs.
The only real issue I have with Apple Silicon is that since it isn't open hardware that anybody can buy, I can't run my own software on A-series chips. At least M-series chips are opening up slowly to Linux, though.
They don't see software as an ecosystem, as the actual product that the user interacts with, as their brand differentiation. They see it as a costly problem that they must solve by finding the cheapest viable bag of bits they can throw on devices and not have customers return it the first day. I swear that's the quality bar for some of these companies.
That's how we get TVs that take 5 seconds to recognize a button press, and have UIs that look like they were made from clipart. Proper font kerning? Forget it, they use 16x8 bitmap fonts from the '90s. That's how we get IoT devices that are 0wned the second they connect to the Internet. That's how we get car stereos that display "����������" when you try to play a media file with non-ASCII characters in the name. Many hardware companies don't give a single shit about their software's quality--only that it's cheap and barely works and it keeps the BOM cost low.
For the longest time touch display and navigation software in cars were terrible. Low resolution, small screens, laggy interfaces, and software not connected to the vehicle in the sense where OTA updates can end up fixing and improving aspects of the car.
> Pretty much no company, big or small, can afford to do these things. Yes, Apple has done a great job building many of these products and yes, consumers have come to love many of these difficult-to-manufacture features. But you are not Apple
Which makes it a bit easier to acquire / pre-book the relevant manufacturing capacity, when you know you're going to make a surprise announcement of it as a major feature in the future.
After which, everyone else eventually ends up at the same upstream manufacturers, or trying to duplicate the technology...
Apple is a machine that is fueled by cross subsidizing new platforms (Apple Watch) with their already significant capital investments in the iPhone.
Why can’t another company build better laptop enclosures ?
Zune vs Ipod Galaxy Tab vs Ipad Android wear vs Apple Watch
Hard to reason all those away as just better components
This is a vicious cycle for newcomers, and at the same time a virtuous cycle for the incumbent(s), further cementing their dominant position.
Why couldn't anyone compete against Bell by building a second phone network?
[1] https://financesonline.com/number-of-smartphone-users-worldw...
I'd argue that monopolies should be judged on country and not worldwide. As each country has different iMessage popularity, apps restricted by region, earning power, phone availability, etc.
Apple does have a monopoly on the markets running on all their devices, from apps to media, for ~900 million phones. When Apple doesn't completely own the only available market service to it's hardware (that it exclusively gives itself), it still charges a 30% fee to it's competitors for access to it's markets while actively blocking everyone else.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/06/house-antitrust-subcommittee...
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/02/eff-appeals-apples-mon...
So sure. Not a monopoly. But also not far from a monopoly as you claim.
Their software moat with IOS is everything.
Software itself is innately a hugely monopolistic industry.
IOS is Cisco's router OS. Apple did license it though, to prevent any potential lawsuit...
Companies have a limited output of the materials needed to make a computer. If Apple tells one of these companies you now have an exclusive relationship with us, or else, what is that company going to do?
Anyway, Apple has a monopoly of platform, which is measured between its own base, rather than as an absolute number compared of what % devices are iPhones.
The fact that nobody can attack Apple IS the proof that Apple is a monopoly.
Looking at a similar example, it took a lot for Vanderbilt to build and buy up all the railroads. Once that was done, however, the system was locked in place and nobody could dethrone him.
I think most of arguments against what Apple is doing are based on an incomplete picture of Apple's product. They are based on someone not appreciating an aspect of what Apple is doing. Maybe they don't like the price. Maybe they don't like a lack of complete control over their hardware. The rest of it is always a rant to justify that position.
There is provable value in what Apple is doing, or the app store would not be a success. Some people just want to have their cake and eat it too.
There is provable value in what Apple is doing, by curating a higher quality and better integrated ecosystem than Google/Android offers. Polish which is funded by profits from the App Store.
On the other hand, the App Store's success also benefits from full capture of all iOS users and network effects of releasing when it did.
> Some people just want to have their cake and eat it too.
Some people think you shouldn't be allowed to put cocaine in soda, even if it's tasty. (To use a 1920s metaphor)
btw, you can do nfc beyond payments on ios and have for years; https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...
1. I'm not sure I'd describe an ecosystem where Netflix and Amazon get sweetheart reduced revenue cuts while small devs have zero negotiating power is one I'd describe as working "cleanly" FOR USERS. Again, forget the devs here for a second, let's just think of the users. The AppStore is not just a "monopoly", it is a monopoly enabler. New platforms are traditionally one of the best places to disrupt the old big players -- and as a user, I'd love a place that let small upstarts be nimble against the likes of Amazon or Netflix. But if Apple specifically lets Amazon compete at reduced revenue cuts, this becomes impossible. No one can compete in an already difficult space like a Music app (or even a Comic Book app!) if Apple is giving the world's largest corporations better deals. Forgetting Apple's dominance in phones, they are also helping me have less choice in terms of these other services.
2. And consider this, 30% revenue split for a small app shop can mean the difference between being able to afford a new dev on your team, or a full time QA person, or full time support person, etc. Literally, if you are a 2 person team, getting that extra 30% would allow you to roughly afford one more hire at the same wage. Those are bug fixes, features, and support I'm missing out on as a user. I sure as hell don't "feel" that 30% from Apple. I already paid them $1000+ for my phone, why do I have to pay them a 30% markup on my ToDo's app? It sure as hell isn't going into writing the 3 lines of code to make even exact string matching work in AppStore search, so I'm fairly certain that money would be better spent by the devs, again, purely from a selfish user perspective.
3. Which brings us to the larger "ecosystem" and store. They suck. It's hard to find anything on the store, it's full of scams, to the point where I am terrified of my kids someday being given any access to it and the casino-like games they allow. An equally "tyrannical" Apple that was values-based and tried to stop both overt scams but also was more opinionated about the subscription-addiction junk they allow to get sold to children, would be far more defendable in my opinion. I might be like "well, philosophically I disagree with this, but you can't argue with results!". Currently, it's "well, I disagree with this philosophically, and wow is this mismanaged. Like, I think you'd have a hard time finding someone that could have less pride in what you see when you scroll through the charts." I think Apple's own Phil Schiller put it best in 2012: "Is No One Reviewing These Apps?"
4. None of the "security" on iOS comes from the 30% cut, or even the AppStore review process. It's all stuff that's built into the sandbox model. If anything, there's an argument that the AppStore makes iOS more insecure since it puts the "Apple Review Seal of Approval" on a bunch of apps that just rip you off.
5. The apps themselves are pretty meh. I don't even know how anyone could hold any opinion on native vs. web anymore, unless you're big into games, at which point, sure, some native thing is going to have better graphics. All the things "native does better" these days are mainly because the browser isn't allowed to do those things, and Apple doesn't allow any competing web engine on iOS. And some things the iOS "wild west web" still does better: like having Picture-in-Picture work everywhere. To be clear: I 100% believe iOS apps used to be clearly better, and they could 100% still be clearly better, but Apple's dropped the ball on their tooling/frameworks/resources and there's just not much exciting taking place there anymore. The Apple Pencil was a big watershed moment with this: they shipped the thing with barely any developer docs so you had the few key players making some cool apps (like Adobe of course), but otherwise nothing really revolutionary was enabled on the iPad. I think the Pencil could have been a game changer, but Apple was more content with selling a couple $150 trinkets to iPad die-hards vs. really expanding their lead in the tablet space by doing something bold (like just including a Pencil with every iPad to create huge incentives to make every Apple developer make their apps "Pencil-ready" just like with all the "in device" features like 3D touch or whatever), or by even just integrating the Pencil more meaningfully in their own OS to lead by example. We didn't get the ability to have the Pencil "just work" in any text field until 6 years after its initial release.
iOS is increasingly just something I kind of have to use. Or else lose iMessage or whatever. I think the opportunity cost that more interesting is what if things were different than this. For the record, I think ironically the result would be that Apple would act more like the old Apple, and be forced to make a compelling case for being on the Store and not using a third party to process payments (and I think there's lots of interesting stuff Apple could actually do there, as opposed to... nothing). Again, I'm not arguing about whether they have the right or not to do any of this, just what the consequences would be if they stopped doing it.