Arguably, bleeding edge silicon fabs are natural monopolies. Pushing transistor sizes down to atomic scales entails non-linear increases in costs to get decent yields. That's why there are very few fabs at the bleeding edge any more.
I’m not claiming Apple respects TSMC more than Qualcomm does (but does Qualcomm respect anybody? They are practically the bad guys in any number of stories), but this is what respect would probably look like.
Speaking of Qualcomm, Apple is trying to compete with them on radio chips, so leaving TSMC probably works to that goal.
We're in the middle of a chip shortage, though.
In all, you're characterising Apple, competing fiercely in an open market, as preventing other people competing by being too good at it. That is a bit ridiculous. If AMD and Qualcomm die out as a result, it will be because they couldn't keep up, which is capitalism functioning correctly. Even under those very broad laws, the only party you can remotely fault is TSMC, and even then, they are literally just taking from the highest bidder, which is again capitalism functioning correctly.
Edit, to address what you said exactly: this is the way in which losing out on capacity forces them to compete harder. If they fall behind in benchmarks for a few years, and you read that as a lack of competition, you are wrong: it is perfect competition, they fell behind, and are now working harder than they were before to design something better. Just because capitalism in the long term usually gets competitors to converge does not mean a temporary winner in the lead indicates competition is not occurring. Apple delivered a jolt to a market that had been flatlining, so there is more competition now than there was before.
There was already a fire under their butt before Apple. Both AMD, Intel, NVidia and even Qualcomm are competing against each other. And that competition yielded architectures that are at least on par and very probably better than what Apple can do.
They can design better chips. They just don't have as much money as Apple. It's something that Apple already did before with, for example, the first generation of small HDDs, they bought out the entire production line and their competitors, despite being able to make MP3s that were just as good, had to wait for years to access the parts.
But for now, you can't fault Apple at all for planning for this better than they did, but you can fault these companies for not raising tons of cash in anticipation this would be an issue. Darwinian capitalism applies to supply chain strategists too.
You can't just raise cash magically. I assure you AMD and NVidia were and are doing everything they can to raise as much money as possible and were trying as hard as they could to get capacity. They just couldn't outbid Apple. There is nothing that can be done for them to outbid Apple. They could have a 50% performance advantage and they still will never outbid Apple, because the majority of Apple processors aren't even being sold on performance.
Yes there is lots of money to be made. The issue is that selling processors is very competitive. There will never be enough profit to be made for them to outfinance Apple unless iPhone sales nosedive.
Can you give some examples? And a time frame in which AMD, Qualcomm, Nvidia can use the same tech as Apple?
Unrelated, I am shocked, shocked that people on this Silicon Valley hideout are downvoting me because they do not like the reality of capitalism. This is like complaining that Germany is unfairly occupying all of France's land in 1941, why can't they let the Allies have a small parcel of land up in Brittany or something, when Germany won it fair and square under international law. Apple owes them nothing. Get used to it, folks, if you think this is all very unfair, you have seen NOTHING, wait till you see what companies do when they decide they don't want to play by the rules!
AMD didn’t run a monopolistic business with 90%+ profit margins for years, and couldn’t have done so.
Apple has never had a monopoly on anything.
They just use the same silicon for a lot of products and have good profit margins, so they can place large orders with TSMC.
> Apple has never had a monopoly on anything.
We'll see what the EU antitrust commission says about that, so far there's been no legal decision in an independent jurisdiction yet.
Independent of what?
But from a physical perspective, they've never had the kind of monopoly Intel enjoyed for decades.
The courts have ruled that the iOS App Store is not a monopoly.
The alternative is that you don’t know what monopoly means and you are just using it a general way to say you don’t like Apple.
When I, as european, wrote monopolistic, then that definition can still hold, as the European definition of that term is not decided by US courts.
They do on thier secoundary markets, (esp App Store) but they are also being monopolistic with replacement parts and repair.
Apple sells tools and parts to anyone who wants them, so it’s not really clear what you are talking about when it comes to repair.
But even if there was some merit to that point, it’s silly to suggest that their repair policies have anything to do with them buying a lot of silicon from TSMC.
The App Store is a de-facto monopoly, it may not fit the legal definition of a monopoly but it practice it is (or what other App Stores can end-users install on iOS?). I'm not making a legal argument.
> Apple sells tools and parts to anyone who wants them
Where can I buy the tools needed to pair serialized replacement parts with the system? Regarding replacement parts, I don't work in the repair industry so I don't have first hand experience buying apple parts, but Louis Rossmann is telling a different story, do you have a source contradicting him?
> it’s silly to suggest that their repair policies have anything to do with them buying a lot of silicon from TSMC.
I'm responding to your claim that apple never had a monopoly on anything.
Ford has a monopoly on Ford-branded floor mats! I mean you could choose other floor mats, but if you want Ford-branded ones they got a monopoly. A large audience is not a monopoly. I may not like Android phones, but they are sufficiently good, have almost all the same apps, and plenty of people have them.
Some of the trust-busting policymakers’ discussions about tech products are painful to listen to, but it’s all trying to recalibrate anti-trust law to the rise of vertically integrated products, which have created amazing user experiences but but also high switching costs that create the conditions of a monopoly, without meeting the technical definition.
Because they are wrong.
> but but also high switching costs that create the conditions of a monopoly, without meeting the technical definition.
Because they are not monopolies.
If there is a problem, they should address that rather than trying to distort what is happening, otherwise they will simply make bad policies because they are being dishonest.
TL;DR iphones don't have a monopoly, the _AppStore_ has.
On Andoird the situation is a bit murkier, you technically can install software from outside Google's playstore, but you have to click trough scary dialogs(warnings about the danger of doing so), and App Stores installed that way don't have the same device permissions than googles play store have(you have to manually confirm each software update, for example). so yeah, on android it's debatable, but that's a story for another time.
Of course they don’t have a monopoly on mobile apps or app stores or phones. There are competing products.
The problem is that Apple has a monopoly in selling/distributing Apps to iphone users. This is not the case on other operating systems, technically not even on android(eg. Samsung) and has nothing to do with a "monopoly on their own products".
What the court actually ruled was that Epic didn't make a good enough case.
Also, what the court said is that Apple does have "considerable market share of over 55%", but was not demonstrated to be an "illegal monopolist".
Which sounds to me like they were declared to be a monopoly, even without getting into related scenarios that are commonly lumped under "monopoly".
> Apple sells tools and parts to anyone who wants them, so it’s not really clear what you are talking about when it comes to repair.
What? They have a strong history of not doing that in recent years.
Weird read. They were declared to have just over half the market and not be a monopolist.
You choose to read that as then being declared to be a monopoly.
This does provide helpful insight into why so many people seem to claim apple is a monopoly.
- 24/7 worldwide availability, instant payment/app download
- Easy re-install after deletion, you still own the app even if deleted
from the device
- Region restriction
- Separate app pricing by region
- Revenues paid to developer from multiple region currencies without
conversion fees
- Tax calculation and collection
- Instant customer refunds
- User rankings and reviews
- App store advertising in category listings
- Video previews of the app in operation
- Packaging of media content allowing developers the ability to load game
levels as needed. This allows a user to start playing your game quickly.
- App sales statsApple’s 30% was a huge deal in the mobile software space when it hit. That’s why so many people defected. And when they started turning profits, others followed. Most of the millionaires IIRC came out of the second and third wave, before everyone and their mother were doing it and people were making money telling you how they made a million 2 years ago (tricks that didn’t necessarily still work).
I agree that it’s a shame that Apple hasn’t periodically lowered their fees. Even a couple percent would make news. However, a different group would cry monopoly (dumping) because it would have kept more people focused on IOS exclusive applications.
They did eventually bow to public opinion and they lowered the fees for small developers to 15% a couple years ago.
I keep hoping they lower the fees for everything except in-app purchases. I think it would do their customers a lot of good.
Worth noting that this covers almost all developers.
You don't need most of that, and what you do need can be had extremely cheaply at 10-50€/mo + 0.2%
Why should I pay for these things I don’t care about? Why can’t these be separate costs, which I could opt-in? Why can’t they be unbundled?