To be fair, all computing business from the 1980's was vertical integration, the exception being CP/M, the university folks porting the UNIX tapes into their vertical integrated mainframes, and Compaq getting lucky on how they reverse engineered IBM PC's.
CP/M systems eventually died, UNIX startups created by some of those university folks were just as vertically integrated as the mainframes they replaced, leaving only the PC clones.
Had Compaq not gotten lucky, and today's computing landscape would look much different, probably like the laptops and all-in-one PCs that are being pushed nowadays as the OEM margins cannot get any thinner.
I love my iPhone but apple is a publicly traded corp lol. The only reason they're embracing right to repair is because of huge efforts of people outside the company to get bills passed that make them embrace it.
Re:Apple cuts off Beeper Mini's access
by mlrtime on Saturday December 09, 2023 @09:13AM
(#38582059)
Not just that but it is no longer Steve's company (If he were alive). It is now a multinational public company with shareholders, employees and 1000's of vendors (and their employees, etc...)
It is all but required for a company of this size to take action in this way.
But it's perhaps a momentary cultural variation in a sea of changing priorities for Apple. They have embraced right to repair: perhaps in future, "hacker spirit" evolves further to become, a "right" for all citizenry of the Apple-verse, backed by their tremendous business model. In the same way that you can conceptualize (again, without judgement or making regard as to truth or not), that "human rights" emerge not out of a vacuum, but out of what the infrastructure of state can conceive and provide.
In other words, today's action may be but the anachronistic kneejerk of some poobah in the Apple bureaucracy. A vestige of the old guard, perhaps soon dying out.
If that makes sense? :)