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Comment by globular-toast | Hacker News Reader

> trivial to not buy Apple products

Irrelevant. Monopoly doesn't mean coercing people into the market.

> easy to make alternatives to Apple products and easy to buy feature equivalent devices to Apple products

It's not only not easy, it's not possible. Your mistake is thinking of phones as computers. They are not computers, at least not to the vast majority of users. They are devices that connect to other compatible devices to do telecommunications. It's just like if plain old telephones ran a proprietary protocol and only one vendor could make them.

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Let’s hear some examples? Even things like iMessage have fallback to SMS, not to mention dozens of alternatives that work on android, iOS and more. What’s the problem?

You know what the problem is. Nobody cares about technicalities, what matters is practicalities. You can't buy an iPhone from anyone but Apple. It's as simple as that. No, Android phones are not iPhone alternatives and you know damn well they are not.

Why aren’t android phones equivalent? I had an iPhone and pixel and switched from both multiple times with no issues.

Depends on how you use the devices. For many or most users, it's possible they are nearly equivalent. For some, iOS does offer things Android does not. Media creators get access to different kinds of software on iOS than on Android, similar to certain software that is only on macOS. It can make a difference to that sort of userbase. Similar to how if you are into gaming, other desktop platforms are better than macOS. There are also some aspects of the underlying technology that in practice can make a difference. CoreAudio on iOS blows Android out of the water, and the huge ecosystem of electronic music creation software for that platform is very different than what you get with Android.

> You can't buy an iPhone from anyone but Apple

You can't buy a Model 3 from anyone but Tesla either. But that is not what makes a monopoly.

The difference is cars don't interoperate with each other, they operate with the road and the road is an open and public platform. Not only do you not have to buy a Tesla to use the road, you don't even have to use a car.

Apple is the road in this analogy, not the car.

There are a lot of android phone users that will disagree with you here.

You can't buy anyone's product from anyone but the manufacturer of that product, what is this tautology meant to mean?

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