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.
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).
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326928162_One_Billi...
It's a weird refusal to understand how markets and platform advantages work.
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.
Diamond rings are marketed as a luxury, and are probably owned by a similar proportion of the population.
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.
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.
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.
The only two companies that aren’t just integrators are Apple and Samsung yet there are dozens of Android Manufacturers.
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.
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...