5 ms·

There's a lot of things to criticize about Apple, but how on earth are they monopolistic?

by geofft 5y ago

fundad 5y ago
Monopoly on new ideas if anything
djohnston 5y ago
Lots of ways - there are hundreds of articles about this, but here's a recent high profile dispute: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/techtank/2021/06/02/the-epic-apple-app-case-reveals-monopoly-power-and-the-need-for-new-regulatory-oversight/ https://www.brookings.edu/blog/techtank/2021/06/02/the-epic-...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
gnuj3 5y ago
People tend to dislike companies that are popular/successful in many sectors at the same time and they mistake popularity with monopoly. Do a lot of people are "Apple-mad"? Yes, they are. They would buy anything with Apple logo on it no matter the price even if there are better alternatives available burt that doesnt mean Apple is monopolistic, as long as there is a choice. You can buy Android mobile phone, listen to your music on Spotify with Cambridge Audio headphones on, buy Yamaha speaker for your house, watch Netflix on Lenovo laptop with Ubuntu on it if you want.
NoSorryCannot 5y ago
I think people tend to use "monopoly" as a catch-all for anticompetitive practices. Apple is not a monopoly except in contrived ways, but they can still be behaving in an anticompetitive way and some of those behaviors may violate regulations. U.S. antitrust has a lot of discretion and is pretty political but the core metric they lean on, for good or ill, is consumer prices. Can it be argued that the green bubble is increasing consumer prices?
- geofft 5y ago
  Hm, I think I'd argue that the problem with this is that it results in muddy thinking. Practices that improve your ability to make money are what the market is fundamentally about. Ideally, those are practices that develop the best products/services at the best value, but there are a whole number of ways to make money as a small participant without doing that. Loyalty cards / buy-nine-get-one-free punch cards are a great example of this: the punch card from my local deli serves only to make me decide not to try out other, perhaps comparable delis. Then the other delis all introduce punch cards, and then they maintain their same set of customers, and a marginal improvement in product at one place will result in attracting far fewer customers than it otherwise would. The whole system is, unquestionably, anti-competitive. But what do you do about it? Certainly there's no monopoly. Do we want to make this illegal, and on what grounds? To be clear, maybe we should make it illegal - but what does that world look like, exactly? Do we also make it illegal to drip-market customers with discounts? To offer them subscriptions (a la Amazon's "subscribe and save", or a la Lyft Plus)? To sell products that are larger sizes so people make fewer decisions about who to purchase from? etc. Even before we get to the problem of appropriate use of government power, there's the question of what we want society to ideally look like. Is it inappropriate, even if it's legal, to do any of the things above? Or put another way, the grounds for anti-monopology legislation is that it is one of the rare known failures of the free-market thesis, that competition will incentivize people to offer the best products/services. But if every tiny deli finds themselves incentivized to be anti-competitive, what should we do about it?
- Someone 5y ago
  I think people use “anticompetitive” as a catch-all for both anticompetitive and competitive practices. Making your product better than that of the competition, as Apple did with iMessage (moving between-iPhone data traffic out of the, certainly at the time, expensive and limited amount of SMSes included in many phone plans) isn’t anti-competitive. You could even say they built competition for the SMS network, just as WhatsApp did later. I also don’t see how signaling, in the UI, which messages are subject to different rules would be a anti-competitive. And yes, that is useful even today. My smartphone subscription has a limit of 200 SMS per month (any following costs about a quarter of a dollar)
iamstupidsimple 5y ago
There was a post here recently about how 87% of US teens are using iPhones. As somebody who was a "green bubble" in the past I can see how peer pressure inflated that number. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29817807 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29817807 I do agree that defining a market as "cell phones for teenagers" is a bit disingenuous but I definitely feel like there's something really unfair about not having iMessage for Android. The green bubbles are basically a marker of not being part of the in-group even if you have something more expensive than an iPhone.
- cwalv 5y ago
  The lack of feature parity on the sms side (poor quality videos, stupid text responses when ppl like something) is annoying .. but if you're ostracized because of the green bubble, that may turn out better for you anyway. My kids don't have phones yet, but I'm pretty sure I would be very unsympathetic to pleas for an iphone so they can fit in. It's hard being a kid/teenager, but I'd rather them learn early how stupid/shallow this is, even if (or because) it's painful.
mulmen 5y ago
When FaceTime was announced Steve Jobs promised Apple would create an open standard so it could be used by anyone. They got wrapped up in patent hell and chose to limit the service to their own devices rather than pay for licensing. The alternative would have made Apple less money.
- paulryanrogers 5y ago
  How did Skype and other video services deal with the patent challenges?
  - macintux 5y ago
    I thought perhaps looking at the patents might help answer your question, but I changed my mind about doing the research upon retrieving them. Quite large. https://patents.google.com/patent/US7921211B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US7921211B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US7418504B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US7418504B2/en
- greg5green 5y ago
  You can do it now! https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212619 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212619 I mean, you can't start a FaceTime call, but at least they finally let you join one.
noahtallen 5y ago
While iPhone users are free to use any messenger they wish, iMessage still has monopolistic properties. The key one is that it’s very difficult to convince an iMessage group to use a different app. iMessage isn’t even objectively better — in many cases, other messaging platforms have faster, less buggy, more secure iOS apps with more features than iMessage. (Speaking from extensive experience with iMessage and other apps.) As a result, iMessage has a stranglehold on Apple users because of Apple’s design goals and business decisions. It’s designed to feel like you need to use it for texting someone. It overrides standard protocols (SMS), doesn’t implement new messaging protocols (RCS), and doesn’t allow any other apps to process text messages. So iMessage has a monopoly on the default carrier-based messaging solution on iOS. And its group lock-in makes it very hard to choose to use an android, since you’ll have to spend a large amount of social capital to get everyone into a different messaging app. I would not consider iMessage to have monopolistic properties if it did the following: - Implemented modern carrier messaging protocols, like RCS. - Had good apps for other platforms, including android and the web. - Allowed 3rd party apps to handle SMS/RCS. But iMessage is a huge benefit to Apple because it keeps people locked into the ecosystem. Not because it’s an excellent messenger. That’s why it’s monopolistic.
- geofft 5y ago
  I agree that iMessage is a huge benefit to Apple because it keeps people locked into the ecosystem more than because of technical merit. I disagree that it is monopolistic, because they don't have a monopoly! Think about airline mileage programs and status. They keep people locked into the airline's ecosystem. But no single airline has a majority market share, and labeling a dozen active competitors in a market "monopolistic" would make no sense.
  - dane-pgp 5y ago
    The switching costs are different, though. You can switch between airlines without having to convince everyone else on your flight to do the same. Also, buying two flights on two different airlines to fly to two separate destinations on two separate days makes much more sense than buying two phones to talk to two different people.

There's a lot of things to criticize about Apple, but how on earth are they monopolistic?

by geofft 5y ago

There's a lot of things to criticize about Apple, but how on earth are they monopolistic?

fundad 5y ago

Monopoly on new ideas if anything

djohnston 5y ago

Lots of ways - there are hundreds of articles about this, but here's a recent high profile dispute: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/techtank/2021/06/02/the-epic-apple-app-case-reveals-monopoly-power-and-the-need-for-new-regulatory-oversight/ https://www.brookings.edu/blog/techtank/2021/06/02/the-epic-...

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

gnuj3 5y ago

People tend to dislike companies that are popular/successful in many sectors at the same time and they mistake popularity with monopoly. Do a lot of people are "Apple-mad"? Yes, they are. They would buy anything with Apple logo on it no matter the price even if there are better alternatives available burt that doesnt mean Apple is monopolistic, as long as there is a choice. You can buy Android mobile phone, listen to your music on Spotify with Cambridge Audio headphones on, buy Yamaha speaker for your house, watch Netflix on Lenovo laptop with Ubuntu on it if you want.

NoSorryCannot 5y ago

I think people tend to use "monopoly" as a catch-all for anticompetitive practices. Apple is not a monopoly except in contrived ways, but they can still be behaving in an anticompetitive way and some of those behaviors may violate regulations. U.S. antitrust has a lot of discretion and is pretty political but the core metric they lean on, for good or ill, is consumer prices. Can it be argued that the green bubble is increasing consumer prices?

geofft 5y ago
Hm, I think I'd argue that the problem with this is that it results in muddy thinking. Practices that improve your ability to make money are what the market is fundamentally about. Ideally, those are practices that develop the best products/services at the best value, but there are a whole number of ways to make money as a small participant without doing that. Loyalty cards / buy-nine-get-one-free punch cards are a great example of this: the punch card from my local deli serves only to make me decide not to try out other, perhaps comparable delis. Then the other delis all introduce punch cards, and then they maintain their same set of customers, and a marginal improvement in product at one place will result in attracting far fewer customers than it otherwise would. The whole system is, unquestionably, anti-competitive. But what do you do about it? Certainly there's no monopoly. Do we want to make this illegal, and on what grounds? To be clear, maybe we should make it illegal - but what does that world look like, exactly? Do we also make it illegal to drip-market customers with discounts? To offer them subscriptions (a la Amazon's "subscribe and save", or a la Lyft Plus)? To sell products that are larger sizes so people make fewer decisions about who to purchase from? etc. Even before we get to the problem of appropriate use of government power, there's the question of what we want society to ideally look like. Is it inappropriate, even if it's legal, to do any of the things above? Or put another way, the grounds for anti-monopology legislation is that it is one of the rare known failures of the free-market thesis, that competition will incentivize people to offer the best products/services. But if every tiny deli finds themselves incentivized to be anti-competitive, what should we do about it?
Someone 5y ago
I think people use “anticompetitive” as a catch-all for both anticompetitive and competitive practices. Making your product better than that of the competition, as Apple did with iMessage (moving between-iPhone data traffic out of the, certainly at the time, expensive and limited amount of SMSes included in many phone plans) isn’t anti-competitive. You could even say they built competition for the SMS network, just as WhatsApp did later. I also don’t see how signaling, in the UI, which messages are subject to different rules would be a anti-competitive. And yes, that is useful even today. My smartphone subscription has a limit of 200 SMS per month (any following costs about a quarter of a dollar)

iamstupidsimple 5y ago

There was a post here recently about how 87% of US teens are using iPhones. As somebody who was a "green bubble" in the past I can see how peer pressure inflated that number. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29817807 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29817807 I do agree that defining a market as "cell phones for teenagers" is a bit disingenuous but I definitely feel like there's something really unfair about not having iMessage for Android. The green bubbles are basically a marker of not being part of the in-group even if you have something more expensive than an iPhone.

cwalv 5y ago
The lack of feature parity on the sms side (poor quality videos, stupid text responses when ppl like something) is annoying .. but if you're ostracized because of the green bubble, that may turn out better for you anyway. My kids don't have phones yet, but I'm pretty sure I would be very unsympathetic to pleas for an iphone so they can fit in. It's hard being a kid/teenager, but I'd rather them learn early how stupid/shallow this is, even if (or because) it's painful.

mulmen 5y ago

When FaceTime was announced Steve Jobs promised Apple would create an open standard so it could be used by anyone. They got wrapped up in patent hell and chose to limit the service to their own devices rather than pay for licensing. The alternative would have made Apple less money.

paulryanrogers 5y ago
How did Skype and other video services deal with the patent challenges?
- macintux 5y ago
  I thought perhaps looking at the patents might help answer your question, but I changed my mind about doing the research upon retrieving them. Quite large. https://patents.google.com/patent/US7921211B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US7921211B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US7418504B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US7418504B2/en
greg5green 5y ago
You can do it now! https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212619 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212619 I mean, you can't start a FaceTime call, but at least they finally let you join one.

noahtallen 5y ago

While iPhone users are free to use any messenger they wish, iMessage still has monopolistic properties. The key one is that it’s very difficult to convince an iMessage group to use a different app. iMessage isn’t even objectively better — in many cases, other messaging platforms have faster, less buggy, more secure iOS apps with more features than iMessage. (Speaking from extensive experience with iMessage and other apps.) As a result, iMessage has a stranglehold on Apple users because of Apple’s design goals and business decisions. It’s designed to feel like you need to use it for texting someone. It overrides standard protocols (SMS), doesn’t implement new messaging protocols (RCS), and doesn’t allow any other apps to process text messages. So iMessage has a monopoly on the default carrier-based messaging solution on iOS. And its group lock-in makes it very hard to choose to use an android, since you’ll have to spend a large amount of social capital to get everyone into a different messaging app. I would not consider iMessage to have monopolistic properties if it did the following: - Implemented modern carrier messaging protocols, like RCS. - Had good apps for other platforms, including android and the web. - Allowed 3rd party apps to handle SMS/RCS. But iMessage is a huge benefit to Apple because it keeps people locked into the ecosystem. Not because it’s an excellent messenger. That’s why it’s monopolistic.

geofft 5y ago
I agree that iMessage is a huge benefit to Apple because it keeps people locked into the ecosystem more than because of technical merit. I disagree that it is monopolistic, because they don't have a monopoly! Think about airline mileage programs and status. They keep people locked into the airline's ecosystem. But no single airline has a majority market share, and labeling a dozen active competitors in a market "monopolistic" would make no sense.
- dane-pgp 5y ago
  The switching costs are different, though. You can switch between airlines without having to convince everyone else on your flight to do the same. Also, buying two flights on two different airlines to fly to two separate destinations on two separate days makes much more sense than buying two phones to talk to two different people.