Do it then. Explain why we shouldn’t have Apple.

Huge companies concentrate power and distort the market. They can then extract rent from the economy by forcing others to play by their rules.

Talking about Apple specifically, they haven't released an innovative phone in years, but are still selling their phones for premium prices. They invest huge amounts of money in marketing to influence consumers to buy their products for prestige rather than any cost/benefit analysis. They extract rent in the form of their 30% cut of all iPhone transactions. They have colluded with other giants to keep programmer salaries lower. They are sitting on huge amounts of cash which are prevented from doing useful work in the economy. They can afford complex tax evasion schemes. They operate at a huge profit, which means their shareholders get a disproportionate amount of value compared to their buyers and workers. They have outsized influence on web standards and other commons (they have sometimes used this for good purposes, but there is no reason to allow such power in the hands of an autocratic power).

Note: Apple's competitors are just as bad or worse. My point is that huge corporations are a malady, not that Apple is worse than Google or MS or [...]

If Huawei or someone else was building a better mobile experience people would be buying that over Apple.

What is an innovative phone? The iPhone 12 looks marvellous, runs great, is secure, gets constant updates unlike android and tries to preserve privacy. Apple Pay is awesome, makes me spend more cause of how fluid it is but still is an amazing experience. The software with the hardware makes apple great.

>If Huawei or someone else was building a better mobile experience people would be buying that over Apple.

Just what is it with HN and pretending that customers in general care more about functionality than anything else?

Marketing and hype are the main motivators for your average customer. As long as the product isn't utter shit when compared to the alternative, those are far more important for sales than the product itself being good.

Apple Pay didn’t come out until 2014, the rest of the world was paying with contactless on phones for years before that - Japan from 2004 onwards.

America’s strength is taking what other people do, slapping a flag on it for the lucrative US market, and marketing it globally.

This feels like a straw man argument. It is pretty widely recognized that innovation in the US is ahead of the vast majority of the rest of the world, even Europe. Only China is now challenging the US in that regard. I think that the late adoption of contactless payments by Apple is the exception, not the rule.

Huawei was starting to make such phones, but got blocked by the power of the US state to help protect Apple, Google and others. Even if they hadn't been, Huawei is another giant, controlled by an even worse regime.

And of course, the iPhone 12 is a pretty good phone. So we're the iPhone 11, X, 8, 7, 6 etc. In fact, apart from the camera, they are essentially the same great phone, but people keep buying newer ones, mostly because of marketing reasons (sure they have more powerful processors and more memory, but virtually no one really needs the power of those, since they use their phone to browse the web and get directions).