Google and Facebook. The two biggest ad auction oligopolies own virtually all of ad-space between them. Is there real competition? No, there isn't.
Apple. More and more locked down, less and less reliable, more and more expensive. Want to move? Want to repair something out of warranty? That's going to be... difficult.
Ebay + PayPal. If one doesn't screw on fees, the other will screw you on fees. Ideally both will screw you on fees. Now with added Etsy, because also.
Amazon. The giant changes its mind because something something ToS violation and leaves you with n figures of dead inventory and a locked pay out. What are you going to do?
Spotify. You pay us for the music, we don't pay the artists. [1]
YouTube. The record companies get income even if they don't have the rights to it, for the bargain price of a robo copyright claim. Because recognition algos are so very complicated and they make such terrible mistakes, so much of the time.
These aren't just monopolies, they're massive market distortions where money is so dense it warps the Internet into stagnant pools of pseudo-inevitability, with a chilling effect on real innovation and creativity.
And that's not even getting into issues of privacy, political influence, and the market value of personal data.
[1] Not technically true, but considering the pitiful pay outs it might as well be.
To be fair, it's not like the major record labels paid artists well when you bought a CD previously.
Then they can increase prices a bit, although the main profit source is in reducing unit costs now you have a big business and making all your profit through volume.
It's certainly non-ideal for customers, but at the same time I think customers usually get a better service for a lower price than in a world with hundreds of competing companies (where overheads work out much larger)
Now AMD's managed to claw black some of the market for itself, but it is still at a huge disadvantage compared to Intel. And AMD's only lucky that IBM insisted on two independent OEMs for its PC CPU's and that Intel wanted that deal bad enough.
When it comes to the desktop CPU market itself, x86 has an unquestionable monopoly and no new player can attempt to design x86 chips without getting sued. But without x86 there's no point designing desktop chips in the first place.
Even when it comes to the better margin server market there is a move toward both AMD and custom ARM chips.
For creative work? Not so much.
As for the performance, we don't really know yet. Single core benchmarks of a CPU with low core count may play out differently with tens or hundreds of cores, 5GHz frequencies, active cooling etc. You can't extrapolate benchmarks in a linear fashion.
No doubt the A Series is impressive, however it hasn't really been tested in a "Mac Pro" yet, so we'd have to see.
Then there's the issue of compatibility and I fail to see how Apple plans to break the Wintel monopoly on the desktop. Sure, it may be able to transition to ARM with the Mac, but unless its chips are available to everybody, (unlikely), there's hardly a route I see for Apple to end x86 dominance.
The vast majority of consumers are running Mac Pro level hardware. In fact, most computers that are sold are laptops.
Why would Apple care about “dominance” in the PC market? It cares about going after the most profitable share of the market. It’s not like most PC makers are making money hand over fist selling consumer PCs.
In the server market, both Amazon and Google are creating their own Arm chips for their data centers.
Windows' deployed in places Mac never visited, like the majority of world's government institutions, schools, (Chromebooks aren't big outside U.S. & Western Europe).
You may argue that Apple will have the "high-value" market, but in terms of sheer numbers I don't see them competing with x86 anytime soon.
As for the iPad being "pro", once you're able to develop serious software on the device itself, we may have a discussion, (I am aware of rumors that XCode is present in iPad OS 14, really curious about that). The existing "Pro" apps still lag behind desktop in many areas and no serious programmer or video editor uses iPad OS full time.
To be clear, am not doubting Apple's ARM chips being really competent, just doubt it will unseat x86 on the desktop.
As for ARM on the server, probably eventually it will be the majority, but I'd guess another decade. Current efforts are more experiments than anything.
My fear is also that if something does displace x86, it won't be a clearly superior, relatively open platform to develop for, but rather a patchwork of workload specific vendor ARM chips with entirely proprietary ways to interact with them. In that scenario, I'd rather take x86.
For places that must have bespoke internal apps, a lot of them are moving toward dumb clients and some type of Citrix solution.
In terms of “sheer numbers”, the desktop market is minuscule, the laptop market could easily go to ARM if MS could ever figure out a good transition strategy, and the server market runs Linux where power is big as important as overall power consumption.
Don’t you think that Intel would rather be in ARMs position than what it is now? I don’t have numbers on the server market, but outside of that Apple ships more chips than Intel.
Edit: this was just submitted to HN showing the performance of Intel chips to Amazon’s custom designed ARM chips.
Ultimately you were charged for the "free" bundled software, you just couldn't get a line item break down of how of the bundle price was made up by that "free" software.
Not saying that Microsoft should break down their OS prices by bundled software, or that it makes sense. But without that breakdown you can't make the assertion that "They never pushed up costs".
Can you provide a contempory example of this happening?