Apple's iPhone is not a monopoly like Windows was a monopoly
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Very true. It's more like if Windows, Intel, and IBM were the same company. And you couldn't buy compatible hardware from anyone else. And you couldn't buy their hardware without their bundled OS, apps and browser. And they didn't just bundle their preferred OS, apps, and browser, but prevented you from changing or removing them. And furthermore, would not let you install any other software except what they approved of. And, of course, would not approve anything that competed with their own products or that they just randomly didn't like. Oh, and if it broke, you had to buy the parts only from them and use their repair service. And if 3rd party repair is legislatively mandated, they just made compliance as worthless as legally (or not) possible, and just intentionally made repairs just about impossible anyhow.
And we all thought bill gates and the halloween memos, etc. were peak "evil".
> Leaving aside the details of those tactics and their legality...
Before the iPod, Apple had a monopoly in nothing. That was translated to the iPhone and building a closed ecosystem around it with engineered incompatibilities. It was mostly these tactics of questionable legality that leads to the situation at hand. It's one thing to deal with a current monopoly and see to break it up. But recognizing how that happened and preventing the means of becoming and maintaining a monopoly should be dealt with directly, rather than dealing with the consequences (of allowing the tactics) in each case.
I however have another issue with Apple with Apple Package. They discourage smaller carriers to work with them. To explain further - Apple don't allow iMessage, FaceTime, Visual Voice mail if you don't commit to buying a specific amount of devices. This kills smaller businesses. It's like Coca Cola not selling you their product if you're not walmart. You'll not become Walmart till you sell products but you're not allowed to get access to products that big retailers have. I think the case is positioned in a way that Apple should win
The author makes a good point. Microsoft's Windows, having reduced the competition to ~3% market share, was pretty d*mn obviously a monopoly. Vs. competitors to Apple's iPhone still have ~36% of the U.S. and ~77% of the global market. (And with current political currents in China, the latter number may be headed for an upswing.)
However sincere the feelings of Apple-haters (or Apple-dominance-haters, or Apple-tactics-haters, or Apple-30%-cut-haters, or Apple-arbitrary-decisions-haters, ...), and however many good points they make - the actual legal case here relies on convincing a rather cold-hearted and skeptical old judge that Apple has a monopoly.
Might you have evidence to the contrary?
This is going to read like an ad, but within 48 hours I realized that barring Apple really screwing things up, I was never going back to Android. It's simply better at almost everything I want a smart phone to do. Also, the integration with the rest of the ecosystem is superb. There is nothing else like it on the market.
I'll admit that there are things that Android does better. The biggest being the variety of hardware available, such as folding screens, gaming phones with built-in liquid cooling, or phones that work with styli for drawing and taking notes. However, when I consider the whole package, Apple is the one that will be getting my money for the foreseeable future.
Also the whole iMessage blue versus green bubble controversy is overblown. Nobody above the age of 18 cares. They may joke about it, but at the end of the day you just use something like WhatsApp or Discord if you need more features than what green bubbles in iMessage can provide.
It’s just so much better. Apps work better, focus modes and Shortcuts are incredible, sharing contact and experiences (SharePlay, shared albums and reminders lists, etc) are just a perfect experience.
The Watch is also orders of magnitude better than Android Wear (or WearOS, whatever its latest name is).
And iMessage lost in the EU so that never been a selling point for me.
I never liked their software practices but I left them because of the software quality actually.
That’s how I feel about the Android platform!
Non-upstream Android and Samsung specific patches on the Linux kernel, a weird Franken-Java runtime that doesn’t support modern Java features, which means most developers use Kotlin now to make for a tolerable developer experience. There’s tons of compatibility libraries that must be bundled with your app to account for the fact that a significant amount of your user base will be running embarrassingly old versions of Android, each with their own unique set of features and bugs.
Like you said though, to each their own.
Anything related to icloud, accounts and the appstore is in a state of decay with custom patches all over the place which break if you are not 100% on the expected happy path. Sometimes just traveling abroad, adding a foreign credit card or upgrading the OS makes the whole thing not work anymore. (Yes all of those happened to me)
And I'm not going to talk about the dev tooling for obvious reasons, it barely works and it's the worst dev environment I ever seen on all platforms. At least the users aren't going to see it, that's the upside I guess.
The whole thing is as sluggish as an electron app and each click takes 2s to do anything.
The app upload process is so broken, Apple themselves issued a third party tool to bypass it.
The config format is undocumented and plays badly with git, I guess that's okay if you are working alone.
Monopoly here is legal jargon for market power. Apple doesn't need to literally hold the deed to the three phone properties, which would entitle them to charge twice the rent or build houses and hotels.
The global market provides interesting background information, but also doesn't have much weight for US anti-trust.
In the roughly 60/40 market that we have in the US, both OS developers likely exhibit strong market power and their related conduct is up for review. Do they use their market power in mobile phones to further distort the market for mobile phones in prohibited ways? Do they use their market power in mobile phones to distort other adjacent markets in prohibited ways?
Personally, I don't think DoJ is going to have a problem showing market power. It's clear that Apple has market power in many countries, including the US. There certainly are many countries where it doesn't, but lack of global market power isn't very relevant.
I don't know whether DoJ will be able to show abuse of the market power. IMHO, the best of the five examples they presented is smartwatches; did they establish dominance in the smartwatch category by limiting deep integration to only their smartwatches, and is that prohibited tying? But we'll see how that holds up at trial.
Cases against Google are more complex because Android allows significant manufacturer customization, so Android the OS has 40% market share, but Google the seller of phones has much less. And Google allows software developers to do a lot more with apps, for better and worse.
Market power and monopoly power are not the same thing. I will let the DOJ explain:
Market power and monopoly power are related but not the same. The Supreme Court has defined market power as "the ability to raise prices above those that would be charged in a competitive market,"(8) and monopoly power as "the power to control prices or exclude competition."(9) The Supreme Court has held that "[m]onopoly power under § 2 requires, of course, something greater than market power under § 1."(10) Precisely where market power becomes so great as to constitute what the law deems to be monopoly power is largely a matter of degree rather than one of kind. Clearly, however, monopoly power requires, at a minimum, a substantial degree of market power.
https://www.justice.gov/archives/atr/competition-and-monopol...
> Personally, I don't think DoJ is going to have a problem showing market power.
For the type of violation they have alleged (monopolization and attempted monopolization under Section 2 of the Sherman Act) they will need to show Apple holds monopoly power, or a dangerous probability of achieving it.
At its core, section 2 makes it illegal to acquire or maintain monopoly power through improper means. The long-standing requirement for monopolization is both "(1) the possession of monopoly power in the relevant market and (2) the willful acquisition or maintenance of that power as distinguished from growth or development as a consequence of a superior product, business acumen, or historic accident."
https://www.justice.gov/archives/atr/competition-and-monopol...