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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

At this point iPhone isn't a product. It's control, manipulation, and extortion of the free market well beyond any notion of fair competition.

Apple won 51+% of American consumers. Now it taxes all of the computing and commerce workloads they engage in.

Imagine if Tesla charged Starbucks money to drive you to coffee. Because that's exactly what Apple has been doing for the last decade. They've buttoned up every single industry and put them all under thumb.

Apple is taxing the internet, basically. (And Google's scary and hidden side loading isn't much better.)

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The iPhone isn't a product. The Apple ecosystem is. I purchased it to ensure (A) nobody can take my phone, punch in my passcode and Apple ID and install malware that hides itself or otherwise flash the software to look like iOS but with malware on top, and (B) when I use native apps, the chance of having malware distributed to me there is almost 0.

Pegasus says hi.

Apple IS a product and the world isn't America. There is not a monopoly of Apple products all over the world. The people and specially in America can vote with their money and buy an Android if you disagree with Apple. Apple is not taxing the Internet when you have other options.

> At this point iPhone isn't a product.

What? This is a weird statement. iPhone is 100% a product. There are many alternatives.

> Imagine if Tesla charged Starbucks money to drive you to coffee. Because that's exactly what Apple has been doing for the last decade.

This is not the current scenario. Using your example, it would be like if Tesla owned a building, a coffee shipping company, and coffee making equipment and Starbucks sold coffee using Tesla resources. In this example, it would be expected for Tesla to charge Starbucks a premium for this full service coffee company being white labeled by Starbucks.

>Apple is taxing the internet, basically.

No. Apple is charging a fee to list products for sale on their store. Similar to every other store in existence.

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