Sure.
I still think that Apple's dictatorial grip on their platforms broadly stifles innovation and has a negative impact on competition.
That's not a monopolistic issue, that's just the systemic underregulation we have come to expect from the US.
Does make me wonder if there’s anyone out there playing middleman and doing a white label service at an even lower price point, they eyeball the market for design trends and OEM some generic phone designs and then sell them on to smaller shops like small MVNOs that don’t have a few million to spare doing a complete OEM phone of their own.
https://www.fiercewireless.com/developer/htc-to-shed-white-l...
https://us.nuumobile.com/android-oems-vs-odms-5-things-you-s...
I’m referring to the millions and of course cost per unit go down depending on how many units you commit to.
The hardest part is dealing with manufacturers and suppliers. In the US, building phones this way is not as popular as building vertical market hardware for kiosks and special putouse devices.
You choose your screen size. memory, SOC etc. It’s been awhile. But I spent a few years working in field services during the transition from companies using Windows CE to Android for industrial ruggedized devices.
The only two companies that aren’t just integrators are Apple and Samsung yet there are dozens of Android Manufacturers.
There'a a lot to dislike about Apple. But your friends know that airdrop will always work between each other. If Merlin appeared and made airdrop interoperable with your device... Your friends would leave Apple, because all of those experiences would become as fragmented and unreliable as open ecosystems are.
100% cool to hate Apple and wish regulatory doom on them. But don't think that Apple customers will be thankful. They will move to the next closed ecosystem that offers vertical integration and better UX. Because that's what they want.
Since it is easy to pay for a phone on an installment plan, anyone making $15-$20 a hour can pay for one with two hours a month. Even your typical fast food restaurant has to pay that much these days to attract workers.
Someone making 20 dollar can also afford to eat caviar, that doesn't make it mainstream.
Apple just made sure that it's spoons, forks and plates only accept caviar and not cereal or lasagna.
If I buy a midrange iPhone 13, it’s $24.95 a month.
That’s not even mentioning an iPhone SE that is still faster than high end Android phones for $429 or $17.95 a month.
And that “luxury” iPhone 8 (circa 2018) will have a better resale value and will get OS update for years still runs the latest OS and the iPhone 5s (circa 2013) has had a security update in the last year.
Saying Apple is luxury is kinda like saying an Applebee’s is luxury - only because there is a cheaper McDonald’s across the street. Phones are definitely status symbols but their ceiling is relatively low.
That being said, in my country iPhones are a much more of a status symbol because everyone really is poorer. Scoffing at Apple’s pricing is the norm here.
Not everyone wants a $60 Blu R1 HD for $70 no more than everyone wants to eat off the $1 menu at McDonalds. Many people find the entire Android ecosystem janky.
I don’t know what a “Blu R1” is so I can’t bother to go off with you on that tangent. But my point was only that all of these products are designed and priced for global-scale mass consumption. Apple isn’t a Michelin-star restaurant. They’re about as much better as that difference in price is.
They may now have over 50% US smartphone market share but that's only recently the case; however they've had the lion's share of the money for a long time.
Bluetooth headphones and not taking them off has been a thing since they first became popular. Even before that as far back as the Walkman people have walked around with headphones.
Again, not what I said. I feel like we're talking across each other really, sorry about that.
Incidentally I'm not an Apple fanboi if that's your concern - I own an iPod nano from about 2010 but that's it.
edit to add: nor do I intend to knock Apple products, just trying to make an objective assessment of their marketing strategy.
Does that make it clearer?
The difference is that you can buy an iPhone for $17-$25/month compared to $4-$12/month for an Android phone. It’s like going to McDonalds and choosing not to eat off the value menu.
Over 50% of the market including my 80 year old mom are not buying iPhones to impress people.
Remember the iPod ads? https://youtu.be/NlHUz99l-eo
What does that advert say? We have the best sound quality? We have the most storage? We have the best value for money? None of those things - it says you should buy this because it will make you look cool.
I didn't say every single person who buys an iPhone is just trying to look cool. But that is first and foremost how they sell their products.
Diamond rings are marketed as a luxury, and are probably owned by a similar proportion of the population.
The funny thing is, I've literally heard my friends muttering to each other in the car that their airdrop isn't working. Unfortunately most people aren't quite so understanding if an open source equivalent ever breaks for any reason, even if it's just as reliable on average.
Even then, Apple could choose to let their protocol be reimplimentable by others but they've chosen very explicitly not to. They've locked it down with Apple signatures that can't be used by competitors. As you pointed out, it's a competitive advantage for them to lock others out, so they have. It's working, but it's gross. We can dream about better, but for now, no buying books on the Kindle/Amazon app on your iphone, or buying video off Google Play on your iphone, or Chromecasting AppleTV to your Chromecast (just buy an Apple TV like you're made of money).
It's a weird refusal to understand how markets and platform advantages work.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326928162_One_Billi...
The reasons for that are also anticompetitive.
Open standards that are not battlegrounds can simply work and be implemented easily. TCP, SSH, BGP, and thousands more work basically flawlessly no matter who is building the software.
Ingredients can be standardized and commoditized. Apple uses the standard networking protocols (mostly), normal stainless steel formulations, typical interconnects for their display controllers.
But a product, in the sense of something a person decides to buy and someone sits in front of and uses, cannot be standardized while providing a good user experience. That’s literally the truth under the “better mousetrap” saying: people will throw money at you if you make something better, and therefore different, from what’s in the market today.
Yes, differentiating your products is anti-competitive, in the sense that you’re trying to get people to buy your products instead of someone else’s. But it is also fiercely competitive, in the sense that you are competing for business.
The critical insight here is that purchasers value UX over the benefits of standardized, commoditized, undifferentiated products. You can legislate and regulate to prohibit differentiation, but left to their own devices that is not what people want.
The consumer UX for BGP is awesome. It’s invisible.
To fix your argument, let’s pick one that end-users actually interact with: HTTP.
The UX for raw HTTP is pretty rough, and very few people could even use it without at least a refresher on the commands. However, since HTTP is standardized, anyone can make an application with excellent UX and even applications that have excellent UX for specific markets (devs, visually impaired users, non-technical boomers, non-technical millennials, etc). This is typically what people are arguing for: let companies compete at the application level and keep the underlying technologies as open standards.
So? There are ample ways to share a video that aren't based on single-platform features.
If Apple invents a way to do some thing X between two of its users, that's great. That's a platform advantage. There's no legal or moral standing that allows us to insist that they open that to other platforms.
Apple did what they do, but their stuff is locked to their phones.
Google made their OS free for everyone. So now a phone maker can spend a HUGE amount of money building an OS and getting apps, or they can just use Android. Spending the money to not use Android looks like a folly.
Except Google trained everyone Android comes with the Play Store.
So either a phone maker has to contribute to Google’s stranglehold on the non-Apple smartphone market, making themselves a commodity, or skip including Google services and consumers won’t accept it.
So we’re now at a place where even if an alternate OS could get applications somehow, I can’t imagine any company being willing to put the money into developing it. Only a state like China could in an attempt to force Android out of their market.
Repeat ad nasuium for your favorite monopoly/duopoly.
Currently. one of the big dogs needs to make a big misstep in order for a smaller company to come in and win. Like car companies being complacent and Tesla seizing the opportunity. Electric cars had been around for a while, hobbyist putting them together but no capital to compete with Ford/GM. Now that Tesla has shown there is a path forward, look at all the capital that has gone to create new car companies.
Apple is not a phone or computer company. They are a luxury brand that is functional. Trying to compete with Apple is like trying to compete with Disney; you cant just be putting out a cartoon movie, you have to have the theme parks, the toys, the cruises. Maybe you can pull it off, but not very likely.
They didn't. Standard Oil was cheaper, faster, easier, higher quality, more consistent.. why use anybody else? They weren't being manipulative, they weren't strongarming competition, they just made the best product and everybody wanted it. What's wrong with that?
I'm not really sure what is wrong with that, but the US Supreme Court seemed a bit troubled by it. There's a reasonably well cited summary on Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Oil_Co._of_New_Jersey...
In an adversarial court system, it’s worth keeping in mind that while the Court is who you need to convince, the Court is not your adversary.
On the off chance you’re not making a joke, the story is fascinating and far more nuanced than that. This is one of my favourite biographies and worth a read if you haven’t already!
Because an open platform would need first to convince hundred millions of developper to port their App on their platform just to exist.
And the cost does not justify the benefits of that "an open platform" brings.
Apple and Google knows that very well and abuse of it.
Just as a side note I would add: There were a time where Internet explorer was a de-facto (shitty) Monopoly everywhere with terrible consequences.
Technological Freedom and the ability to have the choice brought us Firefox. It tools 10 years of competition to get there.
And The result was a better web for everybody.
Apple with its App store makes a Firefox style scenario impossible: they do decide of the life and death of everything on their platform. Including, ironically, the Web browser.
Your point just a subjective opinion about Android that does not bring anything to the debate.
In the US however as a result of differing strategy behind text and data costs by telecom providers in the 2000s Apple were lucky that it disincentivised using data for messages, so there wasn't the same internet-based messaging app uptake that took place elsewhere globally and basic SMS remained dominant.
Then when iMessage launched in 2011 telecom providers plans had changed enough so that data wasn't as expensive, so it became seamless to keep using the default iPhone messaging app to talk to everyone.
Profit-seeking companies flocking to the most profitable jurisdiction is natural. If that jurisdiction was not available, most of them would simply go to the next most profitable one.
Also, not Brits, but without the European hardware and hard as fuck to build components in the 60's, 70's and the 80's, you would be doing... nothing today. No comms, no teleco hardware, no modern Arpanet and Internet, nothing at all.
Have a look on Siemens, or Ericsson. Or ARM. A lot of low-level teleco and electronics has an European development.
What has Europe created in the last 30 years during the Internet age and arguably the greatest period of technological advancement? Not much at all compared to the US. For every company of note, the US has a match, plus 50x more with the best in AI, self-driving, space, consumer, cloud, silicon, and so much more.
Intel's design it's really bad, stacking layers and layers over 8086. Ditto with AMD64, a modern design but chained to i386's legacies. At least with Pentium IIII and beyond did it right; but further RISC and OpenPower will put Intel/amd64 aside. Even more with the climate change and ultra low-power ARM based servers.
On AI, China has goverment funded project far ahead of the USA. And scarier for civil rights, OFC. But that's another question.
You trully innovated in the 50's, 60's and 70's. You are very far from the innovation of that era. Even the infamous Crispr technology was build upon the basis started from a Spaniard.
Back in the day you had Unix, VMS, Tops 10, Tops 20, and ITS from MIT with C, LISP... with crazy new and cool features which didn't ever exist in any place in the world. Today you are rehashing 90's tech over and over. Such as Go built upon Plan9/Inferno/Alef and plan9's C compilers.
Where's the new cool stuff? The MIT machine with ITS with Emacs and RMS with GNU looked like alien technology from another dimension.
If you were as revolutionary as the 70's, we would heave cheap, reliable desktop and laptop sized machines with Risc-V chips and free software available for any citizen. No, not a laptop for $1200, but much cheaper, making the ideal STEM/creativity machine.
Huh? We have Waymo and Cruise, both of which operate a taxi service with no driver in the car in a major city, on top of many other smaller players including Tesla. Waymo has a stellar safety record to boot. Bad compared to what exactly? Not human drivers, not anything built anywhere else.
>The cloud it's just rehashed mainframes, every Unix users in the 90's (and Athena) did that.
If everyone was doing it, how come the top 3 players are all in the US? Why is Europe reliant on US cloud instead of having its own? And just like everything else, only "competing" with it by kneecapping it with regulation.
>On space, ok, but China it's getting closer daily.
Not Europe though, is it?
>Consumer? Europe's food it's far better and cheaper.
Consumer technology... which is what this conversation is about.
>On AI, China has goverment funded project far ahead of the USA.
Again, what does this have to do with Europe? Further, what projects exactly? If you can't use them, they don't exist. OpenAI is making entire job functions obsolete today.
Reminder that the population of the US is 350M, EU 450M, Europe 750M, and China 1.5B.
What is the point of antitrust law? Of policing anticompetitive behavior? My naive hope is that it is a service of our government to protect consumers from companies who use their considerable power and influence to otherwise abuse or extort money from them.
The way the App Store and apple’s ecosystem is structured, they are able to extort as much money out of their users as they care to.
Let’s suppose they get crazy and jack their fees up to 100%.
Will people stop buying iPhones? Not likely — many people now have a lot of their life stored on iCloud.
Will they stop buying their apps? I guess they could, but where the hell else are they going to get apps for their phone?
Will developers switch platforms or ignore iOS altogether? Probably not, since really their bottom line wouldn’t be affected. They’d just pass the fees on.
This is yet another big blow to the consumer. And I can’t understand why _populace_ isn’t the primary focus of these decisions. Companies don’t need protection. Epic is not threatening apple’s position in any way and whatever resultant requirement from the court wouldn’t have substantially hurt Apple, only made them work a bit harder. I know, boo hoo for the $3 trillion company.
If you think Apple could do increase their fees to 100% without any consequences why are they not doing it? Do they not like money?
Apple has no monopoly. Apple is not abusing its market dominance. It doesn't have enough of the market to come CLOSE to the kinds of chicanery that has typically generated antitrust interest from DOJ. Think back to Microsoft in the 1990s, or read up on it if it was before your time. They had a stranglehold on computing. You literally couldn't buy a PC without paying for a Windows license, even if you didn't want it.
All this grousing about Apple's closed platform is just grousing. If you want what Apple has built in their garden, work to make YOUR garden better. Most people use something else.
If that’s the case, where is all of the “innovation” on Android that average consumers would care about?
It's not simply an advertising premium for the App Store - it's a license to run your software on their platform period (not dissimilar to console games).
If someone wanted to produce a competitor to Netflix, YouTube, Spotify, Uber and the like - their startups could never be cost competitive on iOS because they wouldn't operate at the same scale as competitors.
The argument of "what more could you want from your device that the mega corps don't already provide" ignores the fact that you'll never know what you're missing out on because those products never got off the ground.
I'm not saying iOS is bad, it's that Apple isn't incentivised to create a marketplace that encourages competition, instead they actively hinder things that would make their platform richer for the user.
The market has demonstrated that success is contingent on such practices. Without regulators stepping in to change the rules of play, it's unlikely we will see an environment less hostile towards competition in digital products/services.
Netflix and Spotify haven’t allowed in app purchases for years and don’t give Apple any “cut”. Uber doesn’t use in app purchases. It gives you the option of using Apple Pay which charges standard credit card rates.
Again, if it’s only Apple, why wouldn’t all of these “innovations” be happening on Android.