Mac OS was a thing, but it was different and expensive enough that it was not really a viable alternative to Windows 95 for most people. Solaris and HPUX existed, but were not accessible to home users. The alternative platforms of the late 80s (Atari, Amiga, Acorn) had pretty much died out by the mid 90s. Linux was very much a thing, but without a viable web browser it was really tricky to use on a day to day basis... and the only really viable web browser was Internet Explorer, so you ended up dual booting to Windows. If you (I) wanted to use a computer, that's how it was.
In short, the kind of monopoly that Apple has with its App Stores affects some consumers in some ways, but the kind of monopoly that Microsoft had in the 90s affected almost every computer user in almost every way.
For example, a trademark or a copyright or a patent is a monopoly on the use of that IP, and those are considered "good" by the governments and courts.
In my (IANAL) opinion, I think the important question for a mobile app store needs to be: do users and developers have a meaningful choice between iOS, Android, and just a website?
I really don't know the answer to that, though I expect the market share plays a part in it — if iOS was 10% or 90%, then developers surely would not have any meaningful choice.
As I'm not a lawyer, my understanding of their arguments is going to be strictly worse than ChatGPT's, and I know it.
And all we got was cookie banners
And it didn’t affect the big guys. It just made compliance harder for the little guys
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33561222
It’s a regulatory nightmare for smaller companies.
Apple’s Ad Tracking Transparency did more to affect privacy - according to companies like Facebook that admitted on earnings calls that they projected billions in losses based on iOS users opting out
All of the AI regulations are just going to make companies say - forget it in the EU. How much longer did open AI take to come to the EU as opposed to the US?
IMO arguing about whether or not they are a monopoly is a losing pedantry battle that misses the point. People will bring up exact market share, and what exactly is a market—honestly, some good arguments about whether or not Apple is technically a monopoly—but, who cares? They are clearly a major player and so if they are not competing fairly that’s clearly a major problem.
How has any FTC action worked against a tech company in 30 years? Even Microsoft just got a slap on the wrist
In this case of Apple, we had a real judge in the Epic case saying that Apple is not a monopoly
Related, it also failed in the civil case brought by Epic
Personally I'd avoid comparisons since you're looking at one of the worst situations imaginable, so anything else is bound to seem less harmful.
Microsoft would make competition harder by bundling "good enough" versions of competing software into Windows, with business deals restricting pre-installs of competing operating systems (if you pre-install Windows on 100% of machines, you'll get a massively better deal than when installing on it on 95%), and (arguably) by making interoperability harder by not having stable documented interfaces and having the interfaces change with new releases every few years.
That was bad. But Apple... Apple hasn't been just making competing harder, but outright impossible. It's one thing to compete against a free pre-installed product. It's another thing to try to compete when the platform owner straight out forbids you from shipping a product that competes with them, or applies draconian business terms to the competition that their own business units get to ignore. They weren't just making interoperability harder by not documenting interfaces, but (in the case of iMessage) by actively breaking any attempt to interoperate.
Their monopoly case wasn’t about draconian terms. They were savagely destroying competition as a company culture.
Edit to add: bad terms on a vertically integrated platform is cute compared to Microsoft dictating what the entire PC industry was allowed to sell. It’s not that Windows was the best game in town, it was that vendors couldn’t sell Windows pre-installed if they sold anything else.
example https://birdhouse.org/beos/byte/30-bootloader/
msft forced PC makers to ship bootloaders that would lockup on sight of Be's boot chain
For real it's scary how much developer experience is controlled by Microsoft.
Other motives, same behavior.
Like, Steve Jobs making vague threats isn't really in the same league as what MS was getting up to in the 90s.
Apple sued for patent infringement and that was about the extent of it.
Suggesting that their behavior is at Microsoft’s level is naive.
You're massively understating the scope and scale of Apple's war on Android. Apple transfered patents to a NPE that sued Android vendors - possibly Google itself. Apple also spent billions on this war - Apple et al spent over $4B to outbid Google on Nortel patents, Google spent even more billions to buy Motorola and its patents, prior to that, Google had virtually no defensive parents.
> that was about the extent of it
Apple didn't only sue over patents they already owned: they went out of their way and bought billions worth of more patents to sue with, partnered with patent-trolls who also sued OEMs on their behalf. So we agree, but the breadth and depth of Apple's actions was remarkable - they didn't just sue, they went to great lengths to do so.
If you are absolutely committed to doing zero further analysis, then sure I can see why you would think that.
Both Apple and Microsoft were/are abusive of their market position.
The only argument than can come close to that is Apple has a large share of phone app revenue because people using Android don’t pay as much.
I think Peter Thiel's logic is flawed. Apple does not conglomerate, does not have a monopoly in any sense, and has actively avoided those situations. In order to please shareholders it does need to innovate and attempt new markets (Project Titan is a good example).
Microsoft in the 90s was completely different - they wanted domination.
This doesn't just affect iOS users - if I want to use Briar to communicate, it's just impossible to involve anyone who has an Apple device. They don't need a total monopoly for this to be anti-competitive. They've made it so that if you have 10 devices and you want some feature like AirDrop, it's impossible for that feature to function unless Apple wrote it, because 4 of the devices are Apple devices and Apple monopolizes all network code to those devices.
And that's on the tech side of things, business wise they would do even less ethical things. If Apple bought Briar specifically to kill it because it ran on Android then you might get a taste of what MS was getting up to.
You people are delusional.
That is a sensible definition in some cases because their terms for developers, app store charges etc. apply to that whole market. There is also a lot of lock-in and control: Spotify (much less any smaller business) cannot realistically get people to switch to Android to use their app - and with a duopoly that would not be an effective tactic long term anyway.
I think the answer would be no, and for good reasons.
0 - http://groklawstatic.ibiblio.org/staticpages/index.php%3fpag...
That's a level of stability many mobile and web developers dream of today ;)
That's hilariously wrong.
In the 1990s, there were only two computing platforms to speak of: Windows and the Mac. Windows had *90%* of the marketplace. Microsoft had deals with PC makers that required them to include (and charge for) a Windows license on ever machine they sold. When Netscape happened, Microsoft leveraged their immensely dominant desktop position to squeeze the upstart browser company out -- Gates famously said "I'll cut off your oxygen supply," which is more or less an overt confession to monopolistic behavior.
Nobody has anything close to the kind of market power and predatory behavior that MSFT had in 1996. To suggest otherwise is to either display profound ignorance of that period of time, or to show you have a weird axe to grind about Apple that causes you to overlook actual facts.
When Microsoft chose to neglect the web after IE6, it didn't take that long for competition to work around it. When Apple chose to neglect Safari in exactly the same way (and probably for the same reasons as Microsoft did with IE6), that was it. There was no workaround, nor any way for anyone to compete with a better browser.
PC games are a >$50 billion market, with Microsoft only getting a small slice of that. That's because Microsoft wasn't just able to outlaw direct installs nor competing digital games stores. Games for Windows Live had to compete against e.g. Steam, with the predictable outcome. The size of the iOS gaming market is comparable. Apple collects a 30% cut of it, and will do so indefinitely. Competing with them is literally impossible; nobody else can make a different app store offering better terms or a better user experience.
Apple is at around 60% market share in the US. The difference between 60% and 90% is a minor difference in scale. The difference between Apple's absolute control of iOS vs. the limited control that Microsoft had over Windows is a difference in kind. Apple got to choose whether competing software was even allowed on the platform. They could opening up special capabilities to only their own software, and actually enforce that (unlike Microsoft, whose undocumented APIs could still be reverse engineered). They can charge their competitors a 30% cut of revenue, while obviously ignoring it in their internal accounting for their own competing businesses.
We have different definitions of long, and perhaps very different memories of the web from the years 2001-2012[0]
almost a decade for any real traction for competing web browsers to put a dent in Microsoft, and that is after the anti-trust trial and the EU browser ballot mandate.
Don't forget, it was so entrenched that even by 2015 IE had over 1/3 of browser share, really only defeated by Google Chrome (which had the infamous "kill IE" initiative[1]) in 2013 or there about.
To put it simply, a decade of dominance is a long time.
[0]: Data supports that Internet Explorer had majority market-share up through the first half of 2012 (globally), per https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/all/worldwid... and in North America, it held on to majority position through at least 2013.
[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/4/18529381/google-youtube-in...
If Google got complacent and decided to reallocate nearly the entire Chrome and Blink teams to other projects leaving only tiny skeleton crews on them, allowing both Firefox/Gecko and Safari/WebKit to leave it in the dust in terms of features that would be almost a 1:1 analogue for the situation with Microsoft and IE back in the day.
The late 90s early 2000s were a dark period, software-wise. Nothing compares to that, thankfully. People either forget, weren't there or were just oblivious Windows users.
Chrome starts a proposal, implements it and “intends to ship” it before anyone really has time to discuss it. Recently (2 months ago?) they introduced a new WebExtension API that nobody cared about nor really understood the need for, but it’s still there, making it look like it’s a “standard”
Even today, this doesn't mean much if Apple decides to ignore web standards that are harmful to their business model. Web Notifications were implemented by Safari Desktop, Chrome Desktop and Firefox Desktop[0] in 2012 - and Safari Mobile in 2023. That's 9 years that a pretty useful and important API couldn't be relied on by PWAs. And this is just one of many examples.
This has a real effect on what technologies developers can actually use, which is fairly similar to the effect IE6 had on newer APIs during its time.
[0]: Chrome & Firefox desktop because I can't find a way to see historical dates for mobile on caniuse - but it was around that time, or a bit later, for mobile as well
The definition of what is a core feature and what is advanced functionality changes with time. When IE6 came out it was the most advanced browser available, including support for what was considered advanced functionalities back then. But over the long time IE6 existed expectations changed and things which were once advanced or not even thought of were now core. The same is happening with Safari, with the difference that thanks to Apples blocking of different browser engines people cannot just switch to another browser and light a fire under Apples ass.
When I told her I’m using Safari from my desktop she was confused. Her helpdesk script literally didn’t have a path in the reply tree for someone using a desktop and not using a chromium based browser. That should tell you how uncommon it must be. I guess everyone’s just using the App now and doesn’t notice.
Either way it gives the impression to non-technical users that non-Chromium browsers are subpar even if site devs are to blame (especially when “upgrade your browser” messaging is misused to equate your up-to-date Safari/Firefox with some derelict version that hasn’t been updated for years) and will only serve to strengthen Chrome’s hold. The only recourse Mozilla and Apple have are to perfectly emulate Chrome’s behavior and in the case of UA sniffing even pretend to be Chrome, which sounds an awful lot like the bad old days of Gecko needing to emulate IE to make sites work in Firefox.
As mentioned elsewhere, they didn’t get to 90% by selling to a free market. They demanded exclusivity across the entire PC market. They didn’t just let IE stagnate. They told Mosaic they would license their renderer for a percentage of sales and then gave IE away for free.
It would be like Apple saying if you wrote an iOS app you couldn’t write an app for any other platform.
They didn’t chase Google to implement features that solely benefit ChromeOS, but iPhones have completely dominated Android and any other browser engine for mobile rendering performance since the iPhone 4. A miserably slow browser that can receive push notifications is pointless.
Maybe not allowing a website to store GBs of data, run in the background or show notifications is a feature for some users.
My only major complaint is that they replaced the old dev tools by this current atrocity which forces me use Chrome for development.
This isn’t even remotely true. The entire front-end web development ecosystem came to an absolute standstill in terms of browser support for five entire years because Microsoft decided that, since they had killed off the competition, they didn’t need to work on Internet Explorer any more. That’s five whole years without a single new release of Internet Explorer, which had >90% market share.
And then after they restarted development, the next version mainly focused on adding tabs and a few CSS selectors. It wasn’t until Internet Explorer 8 was released that it actually started to properly move forward again. But web developers still had to wait years before enough people had upgraded because Internet Explorer wasn’t evergreen and people didn’t upgrade very often.
Supporting Internet Explorer 6 was still a battle developers were fighting in 2010, nine years after it was released.
Apple releases new major versions of Safari with improved support for web standards every year like clockwork. And people upgrade promptly. And Apple take part in interop efforts with other browser vendors. The two situations are absolutely nothing alike.
I don’t know if you remember how it was back then, but huge chunks of the Internet simply did not work if you weren’t using Internet Explorer.
They would also sink your PC OEM business if you dared to ship a computer with an operating system alternative. They used their 90% marketshare to force companies like Dell to only sell computers with Windows installed. If someone like Dell wanted to provide an alternative like BeOS, Microsoft could terminate their contract or raise their royalty rate to unsustainable levels.
On iOS, maybe. MacOS isn't controlled in that way.
And, again, if you don't like iOS or Apple's rules, there's another completely viable OS you can use on mobile that actually has a larger global market share, so there's no monopoly play here.
<When Microsoft chose to neglect the web after IE6, it didn't take that long for competition to work around it. When Apple chose to neglect Safari in exactly the same way (and probably for the same reasons as Microsoft did with IE6), that was it. There was no workaround, nor any way for anyone to compete with a better browser.>
IE6 was released in 2001, after the consent decree. So the reason other browsers were able to compete was because MS couldn't kneecap them.
<Apple is at around 60% market share in the US. The difference between 60% and 90% is a minor difference in scale.>
30% is a huge difference.
<They can charge their competitors a 30% cut of revenue, while obviously ignoring it in their internal accounting for their own competing businesses.>
What does MS charge game owners on Xbox? Sounds like the exact same thing. Xbox dominates the US console market [1] far more than iPhone does.
[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/console/north-ame...
That's why Android marketshare is much larger than iOS marketshare and why Windows marketshare is much larger than MacOS marketshare.
After reading maybe 8000 posts complaining about Apple "monopoly" I just can't get my head around how hackers can earnestly believe such a thing.
I am with a friend in a place with no Internet access. They have an iPhone. I have an Android phone. We don't have any cables. My friend took a video and I would like them to send me the video right now over Wifi.
I think there are some ways I could solve it, but I don't think there are any ways I could solve it that would be reliable for nontechnical users (and even for me it's hard.) This isn't an accident, Apple is abusing their control over iOS to make this sort of thing impossible. And it's worse than anything Microsoft ever did. Apple is actively standing in my way, even though I don't own any iOS devices.
Of course it is about marketshare. The more you have, the more you can make things hard for your competitors. The less you have, the more you're the weird one with the odd platform.
> I am with a friend in a place with no Internet access
That's a vanishingly rare situation not worthy of legislation, IMO.
In 2003 I bought a PowerBook. It was the only commercially available laptop that could be bought without buying a Windows license. Microsoft had put any competitors out of business by that point and OEMs weren’t ready to sell Linux laptops. Apple only existed because Microsoft injected them with cash to show they had a competitor.
Get a USB drive.
Feem, but I'm interested to learn more about this contrived example where phones don't have internet access and so can't use SHAREit, Send Anywhere, or any number of other solutions.
If I’m allowed to pre-download software before encountering your scenario, running a web server or an app that serves FTP or other server types hosting files is trivial on either OS. iOS may require shuffling the video file into an app sandbox first.
I think a lot of people were less affected by Microsoft’s actions than by Apple’s. After all, Microsoft didn’t stop people from making money off their platform or modifying their computers.
And Microsoft was three decades ago.
Apple is causing people far more harm now than they remember Microsoft doing in the past. (Assuming they were around for it in the first place.)
Edit:
I should have said "a lot of the people talking" instead of just "a lot of people".
I was around for Microsoft and would classify them as evil. The worst you can say about Apple is they are greedy. For all of Apple's flaws, they are competing in the consumer market on merit.
All apps being required to use a single payment system is a great example: it sucks for the app developers but only for the app developers. From the consumer perspective, Apple's app store is the only place in the internet economy where they're not subject to pervasive dark patterns trying to get them to not cancel a subscription, not back out of a free trial, or otherwise separate them from their money. People pay good money for Apple phones in part because Apple successfully protects them from predatory anti-consumer behavior.
Contrast that with 90s Microsoft, where people bought Windows because that's mostly all that was available (because Microsoft made sure of that). Today there are more non-Apple phone choices than Apple choices, and yet a substantial number of people consistently choose Apple.
As a user I love the ability to easily turn a subscription on and off, without having to call someone/chat with someone. Also, did you know that a requirement of the app store is you can delete your data from within the app? It's a great way to reduce your digital fingerprint.
As a developer, we rolled out in app subscriptions and our revenue essentially tripled. They handle refunds. That saves me a LOT of time.
Perfect? No, but I do as most pragmatists do: compromise and make the best of it.
Don't think anyone actually noticed this fly past yesterday [0] but as I commented here [1] Apple have set out their position clearly as patrician and protective (under the dishonest guise of "security").
This is right for some people.
There is a place for the digitally bewildered, like a kind of care home for those who've basically given up on trying to make sense of their place in the digital world, given up all agency, and essentially conceded control of their lives. Ironically the polar opposite of Apple's 1984 Superbowl advert [2].
But we really ought to tell them they're being put out to pasture.
[0] https://developer.apple.com/security/complying-with-the-dma....
That is literally what they did.
Be built a business, lined up customers, and had every one of them fail because of exclusivity agreements with Microsoft. Unless you were a vertically integrated software/hardware business you couldn’t get your OS on PCs because of Microsoft.
It might seem quaint now, but there was a market for web browsers! They weren’t free until Microsoft duped Mosaic into giving them a license for a percentage of sales and then gave it away for free as Internet Explorer, instantly destroying any market for selling web browsers. That’s not only preventing others from making money on their platform, but anyone from making money in that entire segment.
Literally the entire world was affected by Microsoft’s business practices as the PC industry was booming.
This is incredible whitewashing of Microsoft. Microsoft didn’t stop people from modifying their computers? Part of the anti trust case was Microsoft ending licenses with OEMs if they dared to sell a PC with Linux installed.
Granted, drivers were a massive issue.
And if anything, this only furthers the point that Apple isn't anything close to what Microsoft was doing.
Android market share is on non-macs, an non-iphones.
You can, today, for example, install other OSes on Apple hardware, and they themselves have helped significantly to enable such until relatively recent architecture changes.
I, for example, run Fedora on a modern Macbook Air and it's super useful.
It's possible this reality deflects some of the antitrust attention.
I wonder (and can not prove, but remember this concern at Qualcomm and Apple back around then) if the issue was forced by Cingular Wireless originally.
In particular, iOS devices were dependent on carrier cooperation, and Cingular may have required only vetted software builds to connect to their network.
And now with their custom silicon, no other system is officially supported and your "options" are basically hacks that can only use some parts of the hardware.
The platform is notoriously undocumented so it's not like if Apple is making it easy to install any other system. In fact, the best you can say is that they didn't outright block running other OSs but you can't really use the hardware properly that way (for example the fingerprint reader).
When it comes to iThings, they actually go out of their way to make sure you can't even install any version of the OS than what they chose (sometimes people run into cases where it's extremely annoying to be unable to downgrade the OS because the hardware has become way too slow to be useful).
So, when you say they helped significantly that makes me laugh, they used the fact that their hardware that was very close to the common PC could indeed boot other systems as a marketing tool but not much more.
Hell you don’t even need to buy a smartphone, That’s how little it has to do with the modern day. If you wanted the internet you had to go to Microsoft.
It's not to say they don't have a financial incentive to disallow app installs outside of their App Store, but there is a predictable cost in terms of support man hours and device troubleshooting they will incur in addition to lost revenue. So long as it is legal for them to continue business as usual, they have no incetive to allow it and the large majority of the userbase don't care.
> While you may have no issue using a different browser/media player/OS/... and dealing with any troubleshooting, their average user, or most users, don't.
There is also the cost of externalities of more systems being infected that the rest of the connected world has to deal with.
These average users shouldn't come near a MacBook then.
I got him to buy a Mac and for a few years things went well. But then he started complaining about it behaving weirdly or running slowly. I'd take a look and find he'd installed some free utility or some other odd bit of software that was screwing up his machine. I kept explaining why this happened and he never changed his behaviour.
I keep telling him to get an iPad, as at least then everything would be sandboxed and iOS would kill background tasks. But he says, no, he needs a real computer.
PS. Now that you can dock an iPad with an external screen and keyboard and trackpad, try that for him, tell him it's the new Macpad Pro.
ROTFL, someone made this and posted to HN four hours ago:
https://www.macstories.net/stories/macpad-how-i-created-the-...
If this is how he wants to live, it is his right as a free adult. Even if it annoys you.
That's the real problem. People just refuse to learn. They refuse to put in any effort at all. They don't want to have to think about what they are doing.
It's making me become ever more elitist over the years. I no longer believe computers should be for everyone. Computers are world changing technology and they are wasted on people who don't give a shit.
My sister does everything on a phone or tablet and doesn't see the point of a "proper" computer, the guy at the bank plugs an iPad into a monitor.
A MacBook is a work tool, like an angle grinder or a JCB. Most people don't know how to get the most out of them if they were given one.
That’d be quite an ignorant POV to take on IMO
>rabid fanbase
I don't think you truly appreciate how comfortable I am handing my parents an iPhone, and how uncomfortable I was helping them with their Windows computer replete with multiple spyware browser toolbars back in the day.
The onslaught of quasi malware on their computers was sickening, and they'd always ask me about insane popups that would show up due to some pre-installed thing nobody had control over.
We've created a very nasty internet - one that isn't safe for the old or the young - and without the law enforcement or age boundaries that we use in the physical world to keep our public spaces suitable for the broader population.
Hardware companies pre-installed any and all sorts of software from vendors. Spyware, adware, gambling games, toolbars, "free" trials to internet services. Computers used to be up to their neck in absolute garbage.
I guess the biggest difference is that the OS manufacturer now gets a cut on those.
And my point still stands anyways, the line between some of those top appstore casino-apps and malware is very blurry.
Talk to your lawmakers to make these sort of apps illegal. Apple is not the government.
An app store (any app store, not just Apple's) can be the former without being the latter.
It took him years to realise Google search results had a scroll bar, and it wasn't just the 3 items that fitted on the screen.
He wrote simulation software for the radio propagation of military IFF transponders before he retired, and his idea of "computer safety" was therefore somewhere between "do not connect them to the internet" and "put them in a faraday cage".
Do you also want to take away everyone's cars because of traffic deaths? That's far more serious than someone's parent installing malware on their shiny digital toys.
What about taking away kitchen knifes? Those things sure are dangerous!
This isn't the same thing. The equivalent in your anecdote is that Car A comes with a three point seatbelt that you don't want to use, and you want Car A to be sold without it so you can use your preferred safety device, despite multiple current owners of Car A telling you that they _want_ the three point seatbelt. And you can always buy Car B if you want to install a lap belt instead.
That this isn't "infantilizing".
> Do you also want to take away everyone's cars because of traffic deaths? That's far more serious than someone's parent installing malware on their shiny digital toys.
My mum did that for my gran when my gran got Alzheimer's and my mum realised she'd been driving for 6 months without paying road tax.
And then the same happened to my mum.
Also, you're giving the exact argument in favour of self-driving cars as soon as the tech is actually ready, and also the reason that crumple zones and seatbelts are mandatory.
And also the reason we have (revokable) driving tests to be allowed to use the vehicles in the first place.
> What about taking away kitchen knifes? Those things sure are dangerous!
https://www.gov.uk/buying-carrying-knives has a high degree of popular support, and has done since I was a kid myself.
No, that's dangerous! Everyone should crawl everywhere while wearing an iHelmet if we were to apply apple's modus operandi to transportation.
> And also the reason we have (revokable) driving tests to be allowed to use the vehicles in the first place.
Hmm, so you think that maybe qualified people should be allowed to use dangerous devices? I'm fine with you taking devices away from your parents. That's up to you and your parent.
> https://www.gov.uk/buying-carrying-knives has a high degree of popular support, and has done since I was a kid myself.
Is your argument that your iphone should not be allowed outside where it might scare other people? Odd take. Even in the UK an adult is allowed to buy & posses a kitchen knife.
I wrote "Back when he was still alive", so… no.
> Is your argument that your iphone should not be allowed outside where it might scare other people? Odd take.
No, and I don't know why you'd think that. In fact, that's such a weird take, I think you wrote that in bad faith.
> Even in the UK an adult is allowed to buy & posses a kitchen knife.
Buy, yes. Possess in public without "good reason" as defined by the police and prosecution, no.
That's the house they chose to live in. It's a house in which no knives existed. Now you're saying "let them put knives in, how dare you restrict them from having a knife!" whereas most consumers are saying "I like this house, wow living here feels great.". It's not a knife issue. You're trying to make it a knife issue.
The success of the iPhone was never obvious from day one. To attribute Apple's success to monopolistic behavior and consumer oppression, rather consumer behavior and expression, is just denying reality.
I wonder if this is because today's interfaces are actually so much worse for scrollbar UX (usability and discoverability) than anything we had since they were invented 43 years ago.
Just look at it... https://scrollbars.matoseb.com/
By the time I was in college, he was on his way towards retiring, and knowing that I was into software, decided that I would be his IT support person. He went through various laptops and desktops (PCs, Macs, he even gave Linux a real try but gave up when he couldn't get his financial planning software to run on it), Android phones, etc. The one platform he liked using in his later years was iOS/iPadOS specifically because, in his words, "there's not a bunch of other s--- here, and I don't need to manage it".
It's ease-of-use dovetailing with computer safety, and that's a _hard_ problem.
Almost everybody has to use a computer for work and other stuff, and they are willing to pay for a safe and sound system. They are not interested in becoming full time Arch Linux root administrators just to conduct their daily business on their device. Just like almost none of the people who drive a car are full time mechanics and welders.
Be real.
Sort of like how you keep bringing up guns, knives, and car safety in a conversation about phone apps, to illustrate your point.
They don't need to if they don't want to.
I'd be one of the users who are not inclined to transform my iPhone back into my days using Linux on desktop and suffering the pains of doing it. I do have the option to turn my computer into that if I want, I do not have that option for my phone even though it's just a computer.
No one would be forcing users into doing that, it's about allowing the users who want that control over their own devices.
You are attacking a strawman.
Any effort to disenfranchise me from those rights is, in my opinion, unethical. If a company were to try to do so under the guise of a semantic argument, I would find it even more distasteful.
The "point" at which such things should apply is when they are large enough that anti-trust laws and pro competition laws apply to them. IE: when they are very very large and are worth hundreds of billions of dollars.
The moment this is a thing is when the social engineering attacks to get people to root their own phones, to set up untrusted app stores that firehose shitware down onto phones, etc. starts to happen. "I'm from Microsoft, you need to add the Microsoft Store to your iPhone, here's how." I get your concern, and in a world less built on open grift I would share it, but our esteemed tech brainlords have built a tech ecosystem that exists to enable scams. (Hell, I almost got popped a few months ago by a scam, and I tend to be pretty cautious about things.)
Unless the opt-in mechanism is something like "open the phone and turn a jumper" or "buy a different model of the same phone" I genuinely think it's way too dangerous for the average target of a social-engineering attack. People buy iPhones to not deal with this shit as much as is possible; taking that away hurts a lot more people than it helps.
Apple offers security and convenience on their devices, which is why many people like them. Windows offers no security but some convenience, Linux offers security and no convenience.
Like I said in another comment, if Spotify is not happy with Apple they can manufacture their own device and sell to consumers. People buy and use Apple devices of their own free will, and developers develop for their devices of their own free will as well. And there is plenty of competition in the market.
I invested money in the ecosystem and now there's vendor lock-in, I'm bound to it unless the usage becomes so unbearable that the pain to change vendors is less than continuing the one I have, the pain threshold only grows for each passing year I'm invested in the ecosystem. Do you comprehend that?
Opening a phone for others to develop apps on top does not encroach anywhere into Apple's sale of phones, it just creates a massive wall to guard against other competitors selling apps to their platform. They charge for the phone, and now they extract rent from something they sold through the App Store. Please, think deeper about this, you are missing the point entirely.
> Like I said in another comment, if Spotify is not happy with Apple they can manufacture their own device and sell to consumers.
No, they can't. That's not their business, they don't have the capital to develop and foster a whole 3rd platform of devices + OS just to move away from Apple's ecosystem, that's the whole point of developing a platform: creating a massive lever against competition because of network effects. Network effects are very hard to break from, hence why most major tech companies try to leverage that (look at Meta/Facebook, they are shit but still it's very hard to compete against due to their size).
> People buy and use Apple devices of their own free will, and developers develop for their devices of their own free will as well. And there is plenty of competition in the market.
There's only 1 competitor in the market: Android, manufacturers using Android are not 1 competitor each since none of them are providing a full platform, the platform is Android on top of some devices.
Free will is a massive naïvete to throw here. Is there free will when there are no other options to reach a market? Is there free will for online sellers in the USA to not put their products on Amazon since you'll be living on the outskirts of the market without any meaningful way to penetrate into it if other competitors have an advantage simply by paying the Amazon tax and selling their products through Amazon?
I think you are too naïve and ideological, that blinds you from understanding market forces and markets in general.
I know you're being sarcastic, but it is extremely trivial and simple to buy another phone. Because you can also keep the phone you have!
There is a hang-up among hackers that think it is impossible to use different phones, different computers and different browsers. You can have one phone for this and another for that. You can use both vim and emacs to edit a document and you can have several computers with different systems. Hell, you can even have different sets of cutlery at your home.
> No, they can't.
They sure can. Being incompetent or lacking in capabilities is an acceptable excuse for a person, not for a billion dollar company like Spotify. I have here on my desk a pocket music player of excellent quality that was manufactured in 2023. It is not Android nor iOS and the company making it is much smaller than Spotify. So why can't they? "Not our business"? If they're that incompetent, the CEO and the leadership should apologise for being failures, step down, pay back to shareholders all salary they have received and go hide away.
Yes there is free will for sellers to not put their products on Amazon. That's called retail, and it's a tough market. If your product is good enough you can sell it without putting it on a third-party marketplace. Just like with hotel aggregator websites and food delivery apps. Companies are doing fine without being there.
> There's only 1 competitor in the market: Android
There's thousands of different Android phones in the market, that's the competition. And it's not that difficult for a tech company to develop their own mobile OS if they'd like. Microsoft made Windows Phone which many people liked, Nokia made the excellent and ahead of its time Meego OS, BlackBerry 10 OS was excellent as well. And there is absolutely no blame on Apple for these tech giants discontinuing their OSes. They were discontinued because they weren't profitable enough for the owners taste. So now Apple should be forced to make sure that their competitors can make a profit from their customers? Because that's the core of the matter. Other companies do not want to do the work and investments that Apple did to get a loyal customer base willing to spend money, so they're using EU regulators to freeload.
No sympathy to any of them. Make better ecosystems if you want to compete, you have the money and the means. Try giving a fuck about your customers and your business. That's something that the general public and consumers also would benefit from.
Well, actually, it seems that spotify won the lawsuit.
So, it is instead that Apple will have to pay a fine, and if they don't like it then they can pull out of the EU entirely.
> people buy and use Apple devices of their own free will
And Apple participates in the EU market of its own free will, and can shutdown if they don't like the law.
And users who buy from Apple will be free to install or not install whatever they want on their devices soon.
If those users don't like it, then they can simply not install apps that they don't like and are free to only install apps from Apple.
Everybody always jumps to Apple’s defense by explaining how iPhones are built for inept users that just want a phone that works with no BS. Therefore, they claim, it’s a good thing that Apple has a highly locked down environment. But what good is this locked down environment if Apple will happily allow scam apps to charge their customers for features the phone already does for free? What’s the difference between a user downloading a scam app from an untrusted source and downloading it directly from the App Store? If Apple is going to have a locked down environment, at the very least, they should make it effective.
This isn't because of Apple, or at least it isn't in my case.
Even as an iPhone app developer with the means to do so whenever I want, and even though I find Apple's content restrictions derisory and "big brother"-y, I actively don't want a system that can install "whatever".
This is due to all the malware everywhere on the internet, and owing to this unfortunate reality, also means I think it is unwise even to have 3rd party libraries as project dependencies. I have an entire spare computer dedicated to learning scientific python because I don't feel I can rely on the absence of vulnerabilities in the stuff.
This makes me sad. I miss the old days of 2002 where I didn't feel any reason to worry about random apps from random websites. But part of my carefree youth was that I had a Performa 5200 running OS 8, which wasn't a popular targets for malware authors, and another big part was that my bank didn't have an app.
But before someone replies to point out that malware gets past the App Store tests: yes, of course it does, I see all this as a "defence in depth" strategy, not a silver bullet.
If the bad actors were all shady fly-by-night looking companies it’d be one thing. But once the gates are opened, if it’s easy enough, you’ll see people being pressured to open the gates by all sorts of companies that they will have no choice but to comply with. Imagine, for example, if your insurance company, in order to pay your bill, starts making you install the app through some alternate pathway that brings a side-dish of keylogging to adjust your rates based on your browser behavior.
> my bank didn't have an app
Exactly my reasoning last week when I read about one more dependency attack on GitHub.
Do you have a mac? What's your setup? I need CoreML so VMs are not an option, and I'm a freelancer so I use my own MacBook for work. I have a different session for each client, but at this point I don't even know if it's useful at all. Of course I also have a personal session with banking stuff... which is what made me realise I was probably doing something dumb.
Yes, two.
(Well, three, but the third is in a box waiting to go to recycling or someone who wants it "for parts", as that's from 2013…)
> What's your setup?
It's literally an entire second mac. I bought an MBAir/M1 second hand, then was given an MBPro/M1 Pro; the Pro became my main machine, the Air became my "mess around" box.
There is a large class of technology users that is uninterested in installing whatever they want on their device. They want their device to be predictable, they want their app store to be curated, and they don't want to deal with dark patterns on a company by company basis. These customers choose Apple because it provides a tightly integrated experience.
Forcing Apple to alter enough of their rules will eventually cause that user experience to no longer be an option, which is bad for consumer choice.
The alternatives that most here on HN are pushing for would ultimately lead to a walled garden no longer being an option for consumers at all. I think the status quo is preferable: consumers who don't want to participate in the walled garden can choose to not buy devices that are explicitly sold as being part of said garden.
Why do apple fans always come up with bizarre fantasies like this? This isn't a problem for Android today, and it won't be a problem for mainstream apps when apple is finally forced to open up thanks to the EU.
More than 99% of the users will never install anything other than from the official Play store. But they are allowed to without Big Daddy Apple telling them "No". And that's what matters.
The difference between Android and iOS is that Apple actually has rules that are strict enough to motivate the likes of Facebook to actively encourage people to side load if given the chance. I'm not comfortable looking at Android as a precedent, because Google is extremely lax with what kinds of things they allow on the Play Store, so the path of least resistance is acceptable to basically everyone. I do not believe the same would be true of Apple's store.
Not really. They are pretty strict, actually.
> The difference between Android and iOS is that Apple actually has rules that are strict enough to motivate the likes of Facebook to actively encourage people to side load if given the chance
I doubt it. Especially after Apple will have submitted to the rest of the DMA.
And Apple is known for being just so diligent with their App Store reviews, huh? https://www.pcmag.com/news/beware-theres-a-fake-lastpass-app...
And those limitations are?
iMessage? The world outside the US doesn't use iMessage that much. It's Whatsapp, and Facebook Messenger, and Telegram, and Viber, and...
Apple Photos? I have Google Photos on my iPhone, and they work better and faster than Apple's own
Actually, I struggle to think what Apple-exclusive things I use apart from Safari (and I've been using it on macs since 2007 or so).
You can't see the things that aren't allowed, because they don't exist. The Briar team hasn't even built an iOS app because they know it would be rejected.
I can use WhatsApp, Signal, Google Chat for messaging instead of iMessage. I can use Spotify, YouTube Music, Sirius instead of Apple Music for streaming music. What do you mean by zero consumer choice for interoperability? I see plenty of choices.
> Everyone is limited to what Apple allows in their walled garden whether they choose it or not
What software is Apple not allowing? I see competitors’ software available on their platform. The only issue is that these competitors want to avoid paying fees to Apple and argue under the guise of protecting consumer freedom.
Porn apps and hate speech mostly.
They supposedly also bar a lot of outright scams and malware, but a lot also sneaks through.
The problem is that same leverage can just as easily be used to enforce rules that benefit Apple at the expense of their customers. In theory competition from other platforms limits the extent Apple can abuse their position in that manner. But there's only one other major platform in the mobile space. That's not a lot of options for the market to optimise around.
Further, Apple is a large, vertically integrated company which does a lot to try to lock consumers into their ecosystem. If I'd like to chose a more open mobile phone operating system but feel like I can't because Android isn't allowed to interoperate with iMessage or AirPlay or AirDrop or AirTags or Apple Watch or iCloud and I like those products and want to continue using them... well, that's a problem.
There's also the software freedom issue. As a consumer, once Apple sells me a piece of physical hardware it should no longer be their place to dictate what software I'm allowed to run on that device. If I want to install an app that's not on Apple's App Store but Apple doesn't want me to, there's no question in my mind as to whose rights should win out in that scenario.
Overall, my take is that Apple should be allowed to offer a closed ecosystem to users who want that, but they shouldn't be allowed use technical measures or anti-competitive bundling to force or coerce consumers into remaining inside that ecosystem. If consumers want to buy their apps exclusively from Apple's app store because they see a benefit from that, then they should be allowed to. But if they don't, Apple shouldn't be able to hold their entire ecosystem hostage from the consumer as leverage to prevent them from leaving.
I realize this gives Apple a bit less leverage in their ability to advocate on behalf of their customers when dictating the terms under which companies can sell products within their walled garden, since those companies will now have the option of going over Apple's head and selling their product directly to consumers, sans Apple's rules. But that's how free markets work, in contrast to the monopoly-like situation we're currently in. If enough consumers see the value in Apple's rules to avoid other app stores with less restrictive policies, companies will still have to comply with them to access those consumers. (I'll note this is basically how things already work on Android. Google still operates the most popular app store on Android despite competition being allowed, and they're still able to dictate the terms under which apps are allowed in that store.) But if those terms are so egregious that consumers start to prefer alternative app stores instead, that's a good thing too.
I’m glad someone in this thread gets it. If anything, my main criticism of Apple’s App Store curation is that they have too light of a hand on cracking down on scammers and other abusive business practices. Indie developers making honest mistakes get jerked around but the professional skeezeballs keep gaming their way through.
But the tone of a lot of the regulation seems to be trying to push Apple to make the thing I value about its ecosystem worse while adding me nothing I actually care for. With the phone, in particular, I am almost always using it while I’m half distracted with something else. I’m much more open to tinkering on my PC or even my tablet, but as far as I’m concerned having my phone being as locked down as can be and imposing as little additional cognitive burden on me as possible is a huge feature.
Whether Safari is this way deliberately or by chance, is something to be found on a court. But Apple's behavior here isn't different from the Microsoft one with IE.
Apple still has great customer experience and they still sell their products to willing customers and their damage is essentially to their competitors and the users might be losing out on even better service or can be overpaying.
Microsoft was considered the Devils incarnation. Awful lot of people still hold grunge towards Microsoft due to the suff they had to face because of the Microsoft's abuse of their market position. People who are really really angry with Apple are not that many, it's mostly people who get sherlocked or were denied the ability to publish their idea on the AppStore. Also, there a few who think they could make more money if Apple didn't take a cut or didn't stop them from collecting data.
If Microsoft was Saddam, Apple would have been Lee Kuan Yew - Singapore's dictator.
It was a lot easier to see how Microsoft was being mean-spirited for consumers versus Apple. I'd argue that Apple's policies are consumer agnostic, and the only people really up in arms about Apple are developers and some of its partners.
Also the US is no longer in a position to be punching it's own companies, given the onslaught of Chinese companies that are seeking to undercut in even auto manufacturing now.
Couldn't be more wrong. It's not even remotely comparable.
Yes Microsoft had a 90% OS market share but it was an open OS running on open HW platform wich had many players, so users had the freedom to install whatever non-Microsoft SW and HW they wanted on it and SW developers could develop software for it without needing Microsoft's permission for sales or distribution on their OS, or giving them a 30% cut of their profits (other than buying MS Visual C++ maybe).
Apple has a 60% market share (though it's currently 87% amongst US teens today[1] so it's only a matter of time till it reaches 90s' Microsoft levels of monopoly amongst US gen-pop) but it's a closed OS running on closed HW with attestation, so costumers and SW developers have absolutely no choice but to run only Apple approved content on them. Vastly more restrictive than what Microsoft of the 90's could do.
>It was a lot easier to see how Microsoft was being mean-spirited for consumers versus Apple.
How? Just like Apple, Microsoft was only being mean spirited to SW and HW vendors and competitors, not to consumers.
[1] https://www.barrons.com/articles/apple-stock-teens-iphone-e5...
The actual thing that Microsoft got in trouble for was technical and legal restrictions Microsoft put in place, especially on OEM/hardware manufacturers, to prevent prebundling of the paid Netscape product.
This is very similar to how Google lost against Epic on it's "open" Android, while Apple (mostly) won https://www.theverge.com/24003500/epic-v-google-loss-apple-w...
Interestingly enough - the one point Apple lost on in the Epic case is exactly what they're being fined for by the EU.
Also, you could have developed whatever you wanted, but made an active choice to try to extinguish those applications with OEMs, ISPs, and content providers to squeeze out Netscape. It's truly lost on people today how Bill Gates was an absolute killer back in the day.
> How? Just like Apple, Microsoft was only being mean spirited to SW and HW vendors and competitors, not to consumers.
Didn't stop you from selling your SW for the Windows platform without paying Microsoft a dime or Microsoft having any way to stop you. Look at WinRar or the thousands of other small companies who made a living selling SW for Windows without paying Microsoft a cent.
>The consumer experience for iPhone users is much better than that of Windows users back in the day.
UX is subjective and debatable. And there's a difference between one having poor UX, and one being "mean spirited towards users".
Microsoft would charge you up-front for things like dev tools (Visual Studio), documentation (MSDN), server software (MS SQL, Windows Server), etc. Yeah, you could get alternatives, but it wasn't until the very end of the 90s that you started to see FOSS really take off in a way that would be appropriate for an enterprise-style environment.
App stores take a cut of revenue, while Microsoft would get its revenue before your project shipped.
> Didn't stop you from selling your SW for the Windows platform without paying Microsoft a dime or Microsoft having any way to stop you.
But did Microsoft take their money like Apple does today?
The internet and shareware distributions was also a thing back then, where you get the SW for free from anywhere, and send a payment to the developer and received an activation key over the phone/post.
Something that is a surefire success in one platform is not necessarily a surefire success in another. Which is why saying in hindsight "this is monopolistic behavior!" is such a silly thing to do.
If I'm not mistaken you also had to pay to redistribute or link to system libraries so yeah, you had to pay a pretty penny to play.
The EU always seems to be the one doing the work with this sort of regulation. Maybe the evil solution is just: avoid anti-competitive behavior in the EU.
And this article is about the EU where iOS is less than 40% and Apple Music is less than 10%
All the PCs I bought in 90's Europe came without Windows OS preinstalled. What you're talking about it the deals between Microsoft and the likes of Dell/HP/Compaq, etc, but nobody forced you to buy those brands as there were plenty of other local assembled alternatives without OS in the shops back then.
Please stop making up arguments that are not in good faith.
The reply was that there were other computers sold in Europe by the non big brands that did not include Windows.
You could not in fact run the “same” Windows software if you were not running Windows
Sure they can. You can install free emulators on Android, can't you? Just side-load it, and Bob's your uncle.
Apple was nearly dead. Microsoft literally gave them a big investment to keep them alive [1] , in part to avoid monopoly-related issues [2].
Microsoft was doing everything in its power to kill the only other serious browser at the time, Netscape, and it basically had "won" the desktop and server market. It's pretty astounding that Apple was ever able to do as well as it did in the server, laptop, and desktop market.
1. https://www.neowin.net/news/a-quick-look-back-at-when-micros... 2. https://www.engadget.com/2014-05-20-what-ever-became-of-micr...
Apple then turned around and used $100 million to buy PowerComputings Mac assets. Apple continued to lose millions after that. The investment did not “save” Apple
The $250M was largely symbolic, everyone knew that.
> Apple was nearly dead. Microsoft literally gave them a big investment to keep them alive
https://www.promarket.org/2019/09/05/how-robert-bork-fathere...
In short, nobody wants to be perceived as the one that cooked the golden goose.
And in 2022 tech was a big reason why the S&P 500 tanked, dropping 30% when the rest of the market dropped 20%.
Live by the sword die by the sword.
All the companies today learned from MS. They have armies of lobbyists and court politicians. They are all ruthless business people, but come across as more human and cuddly. They have become key parts of the US economy. I think there's also some fear that if they do go after big tech they could inadvertently make things worse for constituents. Remember, the only thing a politician thinks about is getting re-elected.
Now the Overton window has moved and people no longer believe a company can be broken up.
1) Break them up 2) Fine them
From history we know that #1 is really friggin hard to get right (see: AT&T). We also know that #2 is usually ineffective and can harm consumers that are still locked into the monopoly.
There's other options!
* End the company (corporate death penalty). Auction off all their assets and force all their intellectual property into the public domain.
* Force FRAND-style licensing of all their products and services. Make it so that if they want to make money they *require* 3rd parties to sell customized versions of their stuff.
* A combination of forced public domain on their intellectual property and FRAND-style licensing. Possibly with forced selling of assets. Basically, just force the company out of whatever market they were abusing.
It behooves society to look past these short-term consequences though and look towards the future. The longer a monopoly goes on the more it stifles the future. It may feel like you're cutting off an arm when you end a really big, powerful company but it's more like cutting off a tree branch. More and better branches will grow in its place and younger, nearby trees will now have access to more sunlight.
Unpopular opinion (here on VC-funded HN): The way capitalism is supposed to work is that large, old companies are meant to be overtaken by newer, more nimble ones. It shouldn't be so easy for large companies to acquire smaller ones. That's a big reason why tech monopolies persist! SO many of Microsoft's "staple" products wouldn't be part of their portfolio today if it weren't for acquisitions.
[1]https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/federal-antitrust-ov...
Microsoft at the time provided only software and put legal and technical restrictions on PC manufacturer’s ability to uninstall Internet Explorer.
Somehow, that is repeated so often as if it was the truth. Making both HW and SW makes it even worse, not better.
There is one supplier for the hardware: Apple. One supplier for the OS: Apple. And for phones, tablets, TVs and watches, only one supplier for software: Apple's official store.
Apple hardware like a gaming console. You buy an Xbox because you want/need an Xbox. You don't start fantasising about installing Arch on it and playing indie games from itch.io. You're perfectly happy getting what's available in the official store.
IMO there are good reasons for some regulation of platforms.
The monetary proportion that big-tech contributes to US GDP. It would be silly to assume the US would ever kneecap it's most profitabile and rising industry. After killing its manufacturing industry, tech and finance is all ti has.
Manufacturing's share of US real GDP has remained relatively stable over time: https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2017/april/us-manu...
i.e. the quantities of goods produced is growing about as fast as the economy. The reason manufacturing is dropping as a percentage of nominal GDP is that inflation for manufactured goods has been lower than for other goods.
From that point of view the situation back in the '90s was a lot more fluid, as at some point there were even talks of an Europe that would have extended "from Lisbon to Vladivostok" (so leaving the Americans out of it altogether).
To begin with, the European nuclear deterrent when it comes to keeping Russian on their toes is a joke compared to what the American have as part of their arsenal.
The UK has a quasi-independent deterrent (we developed our own and then agreed to abandon it and buy the US option instead), but is not part of the EU any more.
The only true independent EU nuclear deterrent is France.
An under-appreciated aspect of the NATO/EU defence situation is that the US does not actually want the EU, or any of its constituent countries such as the former Axis powers, to become too capable. Or develop a local manufacturing capability that outsells the US one. The US actually prefers a weakish Europe defended by US troops to one strong enough not to need them and even to contemplate removing them.
Ultimately, Europe is capable of doing its own thing - US or not.
And the security of the American chip industry depends on ASML machines and American airline passengers depend on EU made airplanes. What's your point? Every post-WW2 economy is dependent on the other economies nowadays. There's no fully independent economy that can survive on its own anymore.
US companies get fined because they break EU laws, it's not done out of spite. If they dont wanna get fined they should stop breaking the laws. Simple.
That type of action is off the table for the foreseeable future, and the same goes for the other big US tech companies that are operating in Europe in defiance of the spirit of EU laws, such as Alphabet and Meta (anything related to Musk is a special case because of politics-related concerns).
Europe is extremely dependent on American tech.
Oh no, what am I gonna do then?! Oh wait, I can just contact people by GSM voice or SMS, or use Signal or Threema the secure Swiss messanging service.
FYI, the US communication can be disrupted too because they're using Nokia-Siemens 5G stations since the US has no local players in this space anymore.
Let's stop being childish, ok? This isn't a CoD lobby for edgy 8 yearolds.
Regulation isn’t innovation.
Also, personally, I don't even use WhatsApp since I can communicate with my family using Signal. It's so easy that even my grandma uses it.
In the past few years Apple's faced significant regulatory and legal action over it's App Store in the US, South Korea, Japan, United Kingtom, Australia, and the EU.
The EU has just forced Apple to open up to alternative App Stores and enforce browser ballots when you first open Safari.
Microsoft had a monopoly with the ambition to capture the whole market: “A microcomputer on every desk and in every home running Microsoft software.”
It is impossible for Apple to do that, it is against their DNA. They only sell limited product categories, all their hardware products would fit on a desk in their Apple Store if the merchandize wouldn't be so spaced apart. Their products are targeting a higher price point and if a product spirals to a race to the bottom (mp3 players, wifi routers) they leave the market. They dislike to partner with other companies. They are targeting consumers/prosumers, not business market. This all means there will always be very large gaps in the market which Apple won't cater too.
Just wait until they've integrated their entire supply chain.
Things are finally changing on that end (far moreso in the EU because big tech basically keeps pretending it's just the backyard rather than to be taken seriously and it's pissing off regulators), but it's still somewhat of an oddly prescient fact that Silicon Valley/US tech companies broadly more or less "invent" old corporate crimes that take a decade to get enforced because regulators don't get that the difference between a physical form of fraud and a digital form of fraud isn't really that big.
EU is catching on and has been passing landmark regulations specifically to attack this crap, while the FTC is doing what it can in spite of the GOP having been pulling it's teeth for the past 20 years.
Competing with MS was hard or even impossible, but they didn't try to control what you code or run on your machine, didn't try to interfere with software vendors' revenue streams and didn't even go after piracy the way they could.
Those was right calls that made Windows so ubiquitous.
By contrast, microsoft has consistently spent 9-10 million a year. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1043105/lobbying-expense...
Could it be a coincidence? Obviously. But it does seem like if you play the game, you’re less likely to get burned. Of course, that’s a very US centric approach and it makes sense that the EU is the one bringing on these challenges.
Standard “my opinions are my own” post script.
We could re-qualify mobile phones as general purpose devices (which technically they could be but in reality they are not), that would make the parallels much closer, and we could also have the service ecosystem made non-optional (it still is optional) to make it a bundled requirement, that would make the parallels even closer.
Other than that, the landscape and context have drastically changed, especially when it comes to presence, attention, personal attachment and the abuse of all of that (addition, mass media consumption, personal information that gets stolen or mined, attacks on devices that have a real world impact). So even if we were to make it just a browser war it wouldn't really be the same.
It's a shame Palm, RIM, Microsoft and Nokia are no longer playing the same game, it would have been interesting to see what their take on the market would be. Considering all of their hardware and software had the exact same model (release it as an appliance, all software and in some cases all traffic goes through them), it would have allowed more people to have some perspective.
I would argue this is 100% false. They are general-purpose computing devices! The only reason why people think they're not is because they're locked down.
Apple got away with it so Google did the same. Yet there's really no reason why these devices should be locked down the way they are. It should be much easier to take control of our phones than it currently is and I'd argue that with the recent EU decisions regarding app stores we're about to get just a tiny little taste of what these general-purpose computers in our pockets could be.
If we arbitrarily classify things based on what we desire instead of how they are brought to market, we might as well stop classifying things at all.
As for 'general-purpose computers in our pockets', they exist, and they are brought to market as such for about two decades. They did however not turn out to be useful or viable.
Blackberry phones were sort of similar, but as enterprise-first devices they always had a reputation of being mostly a work email device, not personal. They still had filesystem access and microSD expandability though.
They didn't have a "glass slab" style phone until literally every other phone had been like that for years and years. They were also late to the game with cameras, IMUs, and other hardware features that we've all come to take for granted.
My guess: They listened too much to their enterprise customers. Enterprise customers have very, very specific needs that are essentially the opposite of "general purpose" that would translate into useful features for anyone else.
They didn't even try to innovate!
What the market was saying in 2008 was it didn't actually give a shit about BES, didn't give a shit about BBM, software keyboards were fine if they didn't suck, and real browsers on phones were important.
Instead of really listening to the market RIM just kept making the same devices as before. The iPhone and even early Android phones blew the doors off BlackBerries. By the time RIM decided to join the rest of the world it was too late. They were releasing devices in 2010 that couldn't compete with iPhones and Androids from 2008. The BlackBerries were up against the iPhone 4 by 2010, they were a joke in comparison.
I went from a BlackBerry Pearl to the first iPhone. Even in the admittedly early state of iOS 1.0 it was vastly superior to the Pearl. It wasn't even funny how much better of a device it was. Every iPhone after that just increased that gap over whatever RIM was selling.
Huh? Apple chips are not Turing-complete? Or are they "not general purpose computing devices" because Apple would like us to believe so?
HTML+CSS is considered Turing complete [0], but we wouldn't call that a complete GPC environment.
[0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2497146/is-css-turing-co...
Apple is selling a system made of a combination of hardware they make and the software running on top of it.
It's just a combination of hardware and software running on top of it
In a sense they have been doing that to themselves by not knowing how it works, or how to write code, which already restricts them to things other people made.
They then further restricted themselves by migrating most of their work to mobile devices that run software that only the vendor realistically can be in charge of (mostly due to NDAs for the IP Cores like baseband and SoC, but the amount of kernel patches you get with Android hardware is insane... good luck trying to get a recent kernel for those).
As a result, there are mostly behaviour based problems that remain, most technical problems have disappeared. That is an effect (and limitation) that we cannot deny.
They tried, but completely failed competing with the jaws that were a) Apple taking all the profits at the top and b) Android taking the rest of the market
These smartphone providers had to compete on both fronts and it was too much for them (even for Microsoft).
The iPhone in 2007 was like alien technology compared to anything released before then (and I was a skeptic).
If you buy an Android phone, you can use Uber, Instagram, Spotify, banking, maps, accurately render web pages, taxes, etc. There's nothing essential to modern mobile that's iOS only.
MS had ≈ 95% global market share back then, Apple has ≈ 30% of mobile market share now.
You may not like Apple's attitudes, but claiming they have a monopoly on mobile is comical.
I don't think we're going come up with a universal measuring stick to apply here though I'm sure some tech reporting outlets will try.
I was not in tech in that time, but I was cognizant about the fact that entire segments of media and policy makers just dunked on Microsoft due to anti-competitive practices back then, and I recall congressmen and congresswomen, members of DoJ and so on openly talking about break Microsoft in pieces and I wonder why we do not have those conversations today in the biggest markets (China, US and EU)?