Apple's hysterics over new EU antitrust law have led to two climbdowns already

What do the Huawei phones use for maps and search?

"Ahead" means the wind will blow from behind somewhere in front of you, where you are going.

If by mobile you mean transportable, yes they are. But sometimes they are less convenient than some smaller desktop devices[1]

If by mobile you mean they can be used in anywhere, you can say more or less. Yes you can use them on your lap, or even very uncomfortably standing up with the laptop in your hand but you are unlikely to do so for more than a few seconds. Apart from students and business travelers, most laptops are just moved from the living room to the kitchen, a desk to a meeting room while powered on, and only transported from home to office.

If by mobile you mean you can comfortably use them anywhere on the go, without too much hassle, well they aren't as mobile as smartphones or even tablets. If you look at real estate agents, they mostly only carry their smartphones or a tablet if they want a bigger screen. Very rarely will they pull a macbook from a bag to show you something. When an executive in my company is joining a videocall while parked in his car, he usually use his mobile phone because they find it less convenient to open a laptop, trying to cram it somewhere on the dashboard and share their mobile connection.

[1] Even as "transportable" items laptops are sometimes not the best proposition. When I was still working in an office and commuting by bike, I asked my IT department if I could switch from my company issued laptop to a much smaller and less fragile mini barebones computer like the Gigabyte Brix or an intel NUC. They fit more easily in something as simple as a large handlebar bag and can be more easily protected from the elements.

Bad faith tactics from tech companies aren't a new thing, and certainly aren't a response to AI.

There a re plenty of examples for Apple here https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Litigation_involving_Apple_I.... And if you look at Microsoft there's stuff going back to the 80s.

Because every corporation when gets big enough will attempt that.

You have to remind yourself that corporations do not like nor want competition, competing is hard, it's expensive, it requires resources that would be otherwise paid back to investors/shareholders. No corporation wants competition and if there wasn't regulations against monopolies every single corporation would have as its goal to become a monopoly.

Once AI reaches that level, it won’t be a smaller group coming together. The big corps will be there first with more money to get the AIs to come up with a million plans per day and execute a bunch of them a lot faster than small groups can. Currently no one really knows what to do except cook up snake oil, but if indeed AI becomes more competent, the big corps will unfortunately own it and use it at scale.

Nintendo/Sega/Sony did essentially do the same thing in the 90s that Apple does today with cartridges and CDs in their consoles. I guess Microsoft just didn't have enough leverage to push a closed platform (considering previous non-IBM PC platforms were also open) in the 90s (licensed boxed software) or in the 2010s (windows store).

But Microsoft has a much tighter grip of the software market today than they ever had. They are in almost every vertical and they are number 1 or 2 in each. That's probably worse than a near monopoly in only one of the verticals.

If you look into it with a "fresh eye", you may find that this is about several companies competing to replace _the internet_ with an abstracted platform they own and monetize exclusively.

We're just so deep into that journey already that it's not that obvious anymore, not noticing how some of those companies actively limit their contributions to open standards in favor of having proprietary advantages in this competition for "the next internet".

All this behavior is not sufficiently regulated (because 20 years ago it wasn't necessary as tech companies HAD TO collaborate across industries to make big things happen), but I'd argue that it should be.

Microsoft was in monopolistic position and yes it was a serious issue, but at least it was on standard computers. It was a de facto monopoly but you were mostly free to escape by removing Microsoft from your computer (which basically meant installing Linux).

Nowadays, our platforms are heavily locked, which gives Google and Apple an unprecedented power over all the computers of the world.

For sure, if you aren’t satisfied anymore with your phone / tablet because your OS vendor changes the rules months or years after your purchase, you are "free" to switch … as long as you are ok to lose all your investment in the platform, as long as you have hundred of dollars to throw into another phone for the the same usage, and as long as you are confident that the only other OS vendor will not make another stupid decision for the years to come.

The world is trapped between two aggressive monopolies and everyone acts like the market offers enough competition to fulfill everyone’s needs.

The state of affairs is bad enough that the most probable new competitor could have only been Microsoft.

Without regulation on what defines acceptable competition, everything is acceptable competition.

Don't think so because you can sideload. Alternative app stores are a solution looking for a problem.