I really hope Big Tech, including but not limited to Apple, gets broken up, they've gotten too big and have expanded far beyond tech, and I'm not sure we're all the better for it.
Apple raked in $93bn in profits last year. It's such an aberration compared to other companies I feel like there must be anti-competitive barriers somewhere. You expect me to believe that no competition is able to take a slice of that? It's too juicy not to! Competition should be eroding those margins to a more reasonable figure and it's not IMO.
IMO they don't have competition. Nobody's actually directly attacking them at the specific thing they do.
I really, really wish they did. The current situation makes it hard to get away from them when they release (relatively speaking) dud products like certain MacBook revisions.
AMD is steadfastly refusing for provide software support equivalent to CUDA for their GPUs. They’re leaving a trillion dollars on the table. NVIDIA isn’t being anti-competitive, it’s AMD being un-competitive.
The Windows & Linux PC ecosystem badly lags behind Apple on a number of basic features. E.g.: literally just color! If I want to edit videos in HDR (which is just better color), I have to start with… buying a Mac. Windows essentially can’t do this without enormous effort, and Linux is hopeless. MacOS and all Apple hardware “just works”.
No Android phone manufacturer even begins to provide the quality and the service that Apple does. I give my old iPhones to my relatives to use and they still get updates and full support after six or more years! I can walk into an Apple Store, and they’ll fix or replace my phone on the spot. Etc…
How's Google going to credibly do that, especially without going wildly into monopolist territory by freezing out ad & spying competitors while surely still allowing their own? Why would they when getting more eyes and ears on "their users" and defending against a rise of platforms that might hinder them was the point of not just developing Android, but making it free so that others would stop trying to do their own thing?
Microsoft could maybe try, but is running fast the other direction instead, probably for similar reasons of wanting to grab that sweet, sweet data (gotta feed LLMs, now; more reason than ever!)
To viably compete you need:
1) Software that actually works really really well (perfectly? Not even close. Wildly above the median in the world of consumer software, even from big vendors? Oh my, yes). Lots, and lots, and lots of such software. So very much. Operating systems, server-side systems of several kinds, an "office" suite, advanced camera-related software, mapping software, utilities galore (things like Preview and Digital Color Meter are great and are absolutely part of Apple's "moat")—maybe even a browser, if you want to approach things like Apple's real-world-use battery life on MacBooks. So much software. And it'll need to all work together well enough not to look pathetic next to the relatively-excellent integration that Apple's stuff has.
2) You're gonna have to have tight integration with probably-custom hardware across several fairly-different product lines to achieve a similar quality level on #1, and to approach their levels of profitability. That's a huge investment, and hard. Your organization needs to be able to S-rank procurement, logistics, packaging, and hardware design on some balance of a functional and aesthetic level—at least more often than not.
3) You're gonna need to be able to play the "privacy defender" card and not have your pants immediately combust—whatever you think of Apple's credibility on this, it's surely well above the other tech giants. That also means forgoing or abandoning other opportunities at income (Apple's tentative move into ads is... worrisome, for this reason)
> without going wildly into monopolist territory by freezing out ad & spying competitors while surely still allowing their own
You mean like killing off third-party cookies while retaining a way to track and advertise to users via FLoC-turned-Interests? You can argue Firefox disables third-party cookies, but they're not an ad company. >85% (last I checked) of Google revenue is advertising or adjacent to it, and their legal team signed off on an action that harms their competitors and helps the ad network with the soon-to-be most accurate tracking
Samsung posted $3.2B profit in Q4 2022. Extrapolate that to $12.8B yearly. And they're one of several Android device makers, with about 1/3 of that market share. Apparently Samsungs profits fell dramatically in 2023 because just over half of their business is structured towards memory chips, and they have too much inventory and not enough demand. Meanwhile, Apple in-housed their CPU design and their new chips are crushing it.
Are these numbers not big enough to qualify as a "slice"?
> I feel like there must be anti-competitive barriers somewhere
That's not a very compelling argument. By all means look for them, but show results, not hypotheticals alone.
It could also be that Apple is just competing much better, and each X gained per year leads to X+n gains the next year, compounding. They're vertically integrated from end user software services to OSes to devices to ISA's, and they have decades of experience in each. You don't just go out and raise a series A and knock them out of the lead.
The barrier is inventing and organizing the logistics of delivering the most cutting edge technology and the accompanying software and support to hundreds of millions of people around the world every year.
If anyone else could do it, they would do it. Samsung and Alphabet come sort of close.
LOL, nothing Apple does is cutting edge. They took Linux and made it easy for corporate system admins. Touchscreens were invented back in the 60's. GUI's were created by Xerox.
Steve Jobs was a hack and a douche by all accounts, the reverence people have for him is laughable. But this is the behavior of the oligarchs and the monopolies they run; they have such centralized power that they're able to vacuum up all competitors, even potential or tangential ones.
If your going to troll, have the decency to get your facts straight.
* Edited for clarity
Microsoft profits are over $150bn.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MSFT/microsoft/net...
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MSFT/microsoft/gro...
Many of our retirement and wealth portfolios would beg to differ. S&P minus FAANG is virtually flat for the past few years (and depending upon which estimate you observe, likely negative if you factor inflation); almost all of the growth in the S&P 500 is from tech growth.
I don't know if this is true or not; but regardless, that's the whole point of this. The US won't be moving to file sweeping anti-trust cases against failing companies.
We need more competitors, we need more diverse tech companies. A few large players that are siphoning all the value and dictating how technology evolves isn't optimal for the things I value.
The growth will happen regardless, don't worry.
I do not see why this has to be true (especially with declining fertility rates). Scale itself is a competitive advantage, especially when competing against a well oiled machine like China. The game is global, not national.
The market itself is reinforcing this distorted incentive structure, so even if you break them up into 100 smaller companies they will keep doing so in a more secretive way since they will still operate in the same market with aligned incentives. Breaking up works effectively only when you can effectively split the market those are operating on, something like AT&T or Standard oil. Big techs are not bound on geographic areas, so you're going to spend several years on uncertain fights only to make it even worse.
What we really need is precisely targeted legislation that will prevent anti-competitive business practice itself. EU has been successful here with GDPR, DMA and they're willing to extend them even further. US is holding everyone back here. This is a highly political problem. Any judicial treatment will only be temporary mitigation and those will quickly find out a way to circumvent it.