GP also said to cover cost of app store in the phone, despite only costing its parts.

I consider iOS to be one of the iPhone's parts. I don't understand why machinery engineered from metal is so different from that engineered from bits, that I must consider them two products instead of one. Metal, glass, silicon, bits: one PDA appliance.

Most of iOS's costs are fixed. Even if you amortize the cost of it across the number of phones sold each cycle, it will be insignificant.

Apple employs ~12,000 engineers. If all 12k cost $1million per year, it would cost Apple $12 billion a year. Apple revenue in 2019 was $260 billion, or 4.6% of revenues. Apple gross profit was $104 billion. So if Apple had to somehow cut some rent-seeking streams and eat $12 billion, their profits would only be reduced 12%

Now we know these figures are way overboard. Employee costs aren't $1 million per year for every engineer. All 12k engineers are not working on iOS or the App Store, etc.

Long run marginal cost. Which will be higher than the cost per unit. You can’t sustain a market when you can’t cover fixed costs. Just look at what happened to Detroit.

People have been paying a premium for Apple’s goods for forty years. Instead of complaining about the evilness of Apple, maybe the problem is the incompetence of the rest of the market to make something compelling.

You're completely ignoring price signalling for a start, which provide information to consumers about price elasticity. You're ignoring asymmetries between producers and consumers, which hide information from consumers about price elasticity (and thus affect what people are "willing to pay"). You're ignoring things like decoy effects, in which manufacturers deliberately offer extra items at different price points because of the known impact on consumer psychology. Basically, you write as if consumers are driven by a rational and fully informed decision making process, when we know with absolute certainty that this is not the case, and that manufacturers/sellers have considerable ability to shift "what people are willing to pay for it".

Also, vastly more people buy those Android phones than iPhones, which makes it less clear if the market has failed to "make something compelling" to compete with iOS, or if there is a subset of the population willing to pay a premium for specific perceived benefits, real or otherwise, in the case of iOS devices.

Do you really think consumers don’t know they are paying Apple a premium?

Because there are hundreds of manufacturers of Android ones, and only one for Apple. Microeconomics states that in a competitive market, price will tend to the marginal cost, and this is exactly what happened in Android. It is not "what people are willing to pay", it's that Android phones have competitive pressures that are downward on price. At the high end, people pay as much for Huawei Mate P30s as they do for iPhones, because there are few phones at that tier.

Your rebuttal actually proves my point exactly. If Apple licensed iOS, and let clone makers sell iPhone clones, the price would plummet, even if all of the features were the same -- same OS, same HW performance, etc.

Apple's creation of their own little walled garden, complete with path dependency, and slick marketing, has created a premium that would not exist if independent manufacturers could sell clones.

This is why PCs were cheaper than Macs, when clearly PCs had WAY WAY better HW than Macs, way better CPUs, GPUs, et al, for much lower price points, yet people paid more for Macs. Even back in the pre-OSX days, the PowerPC days, the Motorola days, people paid more for less, again, because of the way Apple locks in a chuck of their market with incompatible path-dependency.

I mean, I had an Amiga in the 80s, it had 4-channel stereo sound, 4096 colors, multitasking, awesome games, on a great C= monitor, and the comparable machine at the time was this tiny 128k 9" B&W display machine, which was hideously slow because it didn't even have enough RAM, and cost well over 200% more. Amiga had vertically integrated all-custom chips like Apple brags about today. It was the premium machine, so ask yourself why some people paid 200% more. It could do substantially less, graphically, and in terms of software available for it. And before you say "desktop publishing", in college I used TeX to do all of my work, and the output quality was superior with less effort. For the home PC user, it was way way overpriced for underpowered hardware and a paultry software selection. This is what Apple was competing against in the 80s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7rKj0DU8Xs

I'm an iPhone user, I've owned every iPhone since standing in line in 2007 to get one of the first. I use a Macbook as my primary laptop. So I'm not anti-Apple, but frankly all of the things I use iPhone or Macbooks for have NOTHING to do with their locked down App Store, refusal to allow me to install third party browser engines, or specify default apps, or side-load apps.

I want Apple to stop locking down freedom and when they sell me a computer or phone, let me OWN IT an do what I want with it. If Apple's ARM OSX Macs turn into a locked down system like their ARM iPad/iPhone, then this Macbook Pro and Mac Pro I own will be the last Apple devices I own, and it's hello Hackintosh or Linux desktop.

Due to Apple's extraordinary success and complete dominance of smartphone profits, I think it is safe to assume the vast majority of users love the App store model. They don't read Hacker News, they don't understand how computers work, and they don't care. What they know is find an app, hit a button, boom. No worries about payment security, malware, etc. (Ok, no malware is a slight overstatement, but not by much.) Software updates are handled automatically.

It is undeniable that people are willing to pay for the current experience. None of this other stuff is really relevant. If you want sideload capability, don't buy an iPhone. There is no deceptive marketing here. Everyone knows the deal with respect to software. The vast majority of users have no thought towards side loading or even what that means. I think any representative survey would find that the single app store model is a feature for the vast majority of their customers, not a detriment.

None of this means it is a consumer desire, and none of this says consumers want only one way to pay for something and don't want side loading. For almost every case of something Apple doesn't have, you can make the same argument. So consumers don't want big screens right? Consumers don't want small tablets right?

This is the always the excuse with Apple. Anything they don't have, it's obviously because consumers don't want it -- right up until Apple introduces it, and then all of a sudden, it's what they wanted all along.

Steve Jobs said consumers shouldn't be trusted to know what they want.

Also, all of this is a complete SMOKESCREEN for the fact that Apple could easily introduce something like WebPayments, a driver model for payment providers, and reuse the same UI for Apple Pay to delegate to partners who are vetted.

Likewise, they already allow 'side loading' in the enterprise, so the question is, why can't they allow THOSE WHO WANT IT to flip a switch, own their smart phone fully, and side load, even if it invalidates the warranty. Let people jailbreak the devices they paid >$1000 for without relying on exploits.

And when it comes to PC operating systems, it still does even though according to you Apple has this magical ability to keep the masses ignorant and uninformed about alternatives.

Also, all of this is a complete SMOKESCREEN for the fact that Apple could easily introduce something like WebPayments, a driver model for payment providers, and reuse the same UI for Apple Pay to delegate to partners who are vetted.

Does any retailer have a method that allows consumers to avoid payments? Can I buy imaginary money from Epic from another payment provider and use within Fortnite?

Likewise, they already allow 'side loading' in the enterprise, so the question is, why can't they allow THOSE WHO WANT IT to flip a switch

You are perfectly allowed to buy an Android phone like 85% of the rest of the world.

There was no lock in with Macs - the same Software was available for Windows and more. Have you ever thought that it wasn’t just about the hardware?

Did Apple have a lock in on marketing that kept Microsoft and Google incapable of marketing their own devices?

Did Apple stop Commodore and Atari from executing?

Nope, the MS-DOS and Windows market was too big by then to introduce a new incompatible system. Ask OS/2 how it worked out.

> There was no lock in with Macs

Sure there was. Firstly, many schools across the country had been convinced to by Macs through the educational discounts Apple gave, and school bureaucracies like all government bureaucracies move very slowly, so aren't going to switch, but simply maintain and grow the bureaucracy. Secondly, if you had actually invested in a bunch of Mac software and a LaserWriter, the sunk cost fallacy would lead many people to stay in.

And then there's Cognitive Dissonance.

> Have you ever thought that it wasn’t just about the hardware?

Mac software and hardware was inferior until the Intel switch-over. Sure, MacOS was more consistent, but the software available for the platform was worse. And in some categories, practically non-existent compared to Windows.

Almost every single response I see from you in threads is like a paleo-libertarian response that "things are the way they are because they are what the market intended" without almost no insight into how consumers can be manipulated by corporations.

After everything you have seen the US government do with regards to technology, you still want more government power? I haven’t seen anyone on HN that supports the DMCA, laws trying to make encryption illegal, etc.

My fight against government control is because I don’t trust the government. I can more easily leave a company than I can a government.

Why was Apple able to survive the consolidation behind MS DOS and Atari, Commodore, etc. weren’t? They all started around the same place.

Don’t blame Apple for other company’s failures.