Couldn't you make that argument for literally any anticompetitive practice? Like in the 1990s: "Microsoft isn't making an OS for people that want to try different browsers"
Yes, you could. It's indeed troubling to see this mindset on HN. We have an overflow of professional "explainers" these days, we need more doers and fighters.
You can both use macs and criticize Apple to be and do better. Why would they change for no reason? I've heard this myth about companies listening to customers :)
I have never had an issue with WiFi drivers as an Arch and EndeavourOS user for 6 years now. And for the last 3 years my Framework Laptop does just work as my daily driver.
I think it is unjust to share strong opinions about previous issues that Linux distributions had without recent evidence.
Congrats? I've personally experienced driver issues on my laptop and desktop, both from the hardware being too new for the kernel (or at least the version being used by that distro), within the past two years. And this is LMDE, not some fringe one-man fork.
If we want to pile anecdotes, it just works for me as well. The most recent driver problem I had was Windows, needed to preload something during the installer to get it to recognise hard drives in proxmox working if I remember correctly, and that's not even speaking of printer problems on Windows compared to the seamless integration they now seem to have on Debian (or is my desktop environment responsible for that? Not sure, I'm not super deep into Linux stuff)
Yeah, I'm running PopOS woth minimal issues and have been doing so for 5 years. The only issues I have is that they built it on a jank stack of Gnome, but they're fixing that at this moment.
It sounds like a lot of the "I used to use Linux, but nothing worked" crowd are either previous Arch-users (no shit you had to do everything manually) or older folks.
Emphasizing voting with your wallet means those with the most money dictate how things work. Google and Apple vote with their wallet all the time. When they’re buying competitors, buying preferential treatment for each other, and buying law makers and regulators.
We aren’t going to out bid them on any of these things. We have to make it illegal, and vote in people who will enforce the laws.
It depends on how you define success; the EU has certainly managed to achieve a great deal of standardization and compliance, at the cost of rate of progress and business model innovation. You might think this is a worthwhile trade off, but people differ in their priorities.
The OpenAI grift, the Facebook & Google stalking advertising, the Uber “independent contractors”, and the Amazon two-for of workers pissing in bottles and squeezing your suppliers so prices rise everywhere.
SAP, NXP, ASML, Hexagon, Infineon... These are all companies guaranteed to be touching hardware or software, they you use today, and will use tomorrow.
You jest, but milk production in Europe is far more sophisticated than in the US. Innovation has occurred there [0]. There's no stagnation, despite being a heavily regulated industry. There are new products coming to market, the market is growing at a predictable and fairly decent rate.
And if you need market cap to understand these areas, both Nestle (France) and Lactalis (Switzerland), outpace the entirety of the US industry.
The average person probably thinks that their phone, or websites, show no innovation, despite the rapidly changing underlying technologies.
He is conflating progress and business model innovation with profits. That since the US allows its corporations to get repugnantly large and wealthy, enough to rival many developed nations' GDPs, the US necessarily has more progress and business model innovation. It's just American exceptionalism.
We’re in agreement that it is a viewpoint. I think it’s bad for productive conversation to state viewpoints as absolute facts that everyone else holds.
If you want an alternative, android exists. I actively want a tightly integrated system that I know works well together. I don’t want to worry “does this device really work with this other device, even if it says it’s compatible” which was a constant source of issues I had on Android.
Your desire for Apple to become an open system removes my choice to opt into a closed ecosystem, when you already have an open ecosystem to play in.
>I actively want a tightly integrated system that I know works well together. I don’t want to worry “does this device really work with this other device, even if it says it’s compatible” which was a constant source of issues I had on Android.
Yeah, I mean Linux is an abject failure, nothing ever works or runs on it. Nobody needs open data formats or open protocols for interoperability. Binary blobs for the win! /s
>Your desire for Apple to become an open system removes my choice to opt into a closed ecosystem, when you already have an open ecosystem to play in.
Don't worry, it's easy to lock down any open system and we can give you that should you desire it.
I don’t think this comment is in good faith. I gave you a reasonable viewpoint and you just dunked on me with snark.
>, I mean Linux is an abject failure, nothing ever works or runs on it. Nobody needs open data formats or open protocols for interoperability. Binary blobs for the win! /s
I didn’t say anything of the sort. I said I actively choose a “more closed” ecosystem. Linux has similar problems IMO - “I want to buy a GPU” shouldn’t come with trying to figure out whether the device drivers will actually work, to me. If you want that, you have that choice.
> Don't worry, it's easy to lock down any open system and we can give you that should you desire it.
Only within the constraints of what you want which is that everything should adhere to a standard and be interoperable. Which, again, as I said you can have on android. Go buy a pixel phone, and a samsung watch and see how good the experience is.
I’ll say this again - there are open ecosystem alternatives for you out there, in android. Some people, even technical people, are ok with a smaller ecosystem knowing that there is lock in. If you don’t want that, don’t use it. But if you push your choices on me, you restrict my options and remove my preferred platform to have one more platform you want
You have your own viewpoint, and are assuming its "resonable" and so by definition I'm "unreasonable" is GOOD FAITH? No thanks, no interest in engaging with you.
No I think you’re being unreasonable by making strawman arguments against me and using those strawmen to attack my character, which you’ve done again here.
> Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors.
The DoJ can sue over whatever they want. They also lose suits all the time. So now it's up to a court decision to make the determination, and it may very well be that Apple is not, contrary to the DoJ's assertion.
> At which point does a monopoly becomes a monopoly?
It's generally in the 70-90% range. Right now, it's much easier to argue that Android has a global monopoly.
> There is no need to have a "clear" monopoly like Windows in 1990's to abuse your power and presence in the market.
Well it depends what you mean by "abuse". I mean, even small companies can "abuse" their customers by not building the interoperability their customers want. But we generally prioritize individual freedom, that private businesses ought to have free choice in what they work with or don't. That's important.
That only becomes a problem when consumers aren't able to switch to a competitor. I.e. when there is a monopoly provider. I.e. which controls 70-90%+ of the market.
> it's much easier to argue that Android has a global monopoly.
Sorta. My understanding is that Google Play has the global monopoly. If it were plain Androids that users bought to own, to do with as they wanted, I'd be much less sombre about where mobile ecosystems are headed (namely, that governments, banks, public transport companies, and many other organisations will require a DRM-locked device if you want to live a normal life, buying bus tickets while passing the algorithmic fraud checks instead of needing to travel to a remaining ticket counter for example). It's barely even the future anymore, bank and transit company apps already mostly only run if you have a Google account and are on a locked-down ("Google Safetynet") device or go to great lengths to hide that you've got full access to your own data on your bought-to-own device
The median in the first chart is 53%. So not really. Apple is just seasonally high in Q4 presumably because iPhones make good Christmas presents. And still below 70%.
If it's not a duopoly, then why there's no competition between the play store and the app store to get developers or users from each other?
The only tariff change ever made on the appstore was as a reaction to an antitrust lawsuit and copied straight to Google. Just that is enough of a proof.
Well, no, at least not honestly, because in the 1990s Microsoft was sitting on a true monopoly. Apple is one of several (3, at least) players in desktop computing, and one of two in mobile. Nobody has the kind of power Redmond wielded now.
I honestly don't care about Microsoft bundling a browser. The real problem was that they intentionally broke web standards to push websites to "work best on Internet Explorer," so even those who chose not to use Windows were caught up in it. Whereas, Android users aren't affected by what Apple does here.
They still bundle Edge, and keep setting it to default. But idc, it's just one of 1000 reasons I don't use Windows.
> The real problem was that they intentionally broke web standards to push websites to "work best on Internet Explorer," so even those who chose not to use Windows were caught up in it.
Microsoft tried to build their own extensions to the internet standards, like activex and proprietary DOM/JScript extensions, explicitly designed to lock devs into IE’s ecosystem. It's quite impressive that they managed to miss this opportunity to Adobe. And how Adobe then just... squandered it. I would expect that "being the necessary proprietary piece in significant chunk of internet" would have some deep strategic advantage, but both tech giants couldn't be bothered to do a good job.
Apple do this too with their products - but in more subtle ways.
For instance, try to play a video game on MacOS. While Vulkan is available on every playform, it's not available on MacOS or iOS despite the fact that it would take an engineer at Apple a weekend to implement (figuritively speaking). Apple are also killing off OpenGL support for MacOS.
Generally, Apple deliberately build a "dependence ecosystem" for their consumers on the product side while also actively preventing engineers from using portable technologies on their platforms.
The fact that MacOS is as open as it currently is is a miracle and I am sure executives hate that.
They create the fastest and most ergonomic mobile hardware on Earth but, outside of web browsing, video editing and some engineering workloads, there's very little you can actually do on it.
Oh yeah, Mac video games sorta don't exist. The dev can jump through all those hoops and still have random OS updates break it constantly. Almost as bad just for regular apps.
Re executives being mad: The thing is, they make money off Mac hardware, and even then its profits are dwarfed by iPhone and iPhone accessories. Which are of course locked down.
Unlike Microsoft of the 90s, there are alternative mobile operating systems that are actually competing with iOS and Apple, so the argument isn't the same. In fact, people point out that iOS doesn't have majority share when you look at global usage, and only has a small majority when you look at the US. Microsoft's next nearest OS competitor didn't make a browser, and a lot more than half of computer users were using Windows.
Making your own products interoperate better than competitors' products is pretty typical and I don't think it rises to the level of "anticompetitive practice."
If you don't like it (and I can totally understand why), there are numerous other smartphone makers out there with products that allow better integration with these watches and you're free to buy one.
MS didn't get into trouble because they went after competing browsers, they got into trouble for doing that while also having a monopoly on PC OSes. Apple doesn't have anything like a monopoly in this market (their US market share is about 50%, worldwide is around 28%).
Microsoft absolutely got in trouble for purposefully making other Office suites not work correctly on Windows, for using private Windows APIs in Office that other companies didn't have access to, etc.
If Apple makes a watch that can receive and send iMessages then there is no reason any other device shouldn't be able to use the same APIs that Apple uses.
It absolutely creates a system where competitors literally cannot compete with the same features.
They got in trouble for doing that stuff while having a monopoly on PC OSes. Using private stuff to give your own products an advantage is (legally) fine if you're not leveraging a monopoly to do it.
