9 ms·

Apple is predatory on a level that 1990s Microsoft could not have dreamed of, which is all enabled by Windows being an open platform while iOS is locked down wi

by jsnell 3y ago

Apple is predatory on a level that 1990s Microsoft could not have dreamed of, which is all enabled by Windows being an open platform while iOS is locked down with strict technical measures. 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.

carlosjobim 3y ago
> Apple hasn't been just making competing harder, but outright impossible. 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.
- kayodelycaon 3y ago
  It makes a lot of sense to me. 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.
  - lolinder 3y ago
    If by "people" you mean "a vocal minority of app developers", then sure. But the average iOS user not only doesn't care about Apple's app store policies, they actively appreciate them (whether they know it or not). 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.
    - havaloc 3y ago
      I'm both a developer, and a user. 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.
      - Hikikomori 3y ago
        In Europe we can do that without Appstore.
    - nonrandomstring 3y ago
      > doesn't care about Apple's app store policies, they actively appreciate them (whether they know it or not). 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.pdf https://developer.apple.com/security/complying-with-the-dma.... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=39580678 https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=39580678 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_(advertisement) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_(advertisement)
- Chris2048 3y ago
  Implicit to that statement is "on apple machines". Android market share is on non-macs, an non-iphones.
- lukeschlather 3y ago
  This isn't about marketshare, it's about Apple making things impossible. You're a hacker, tell me how I can solve this problem: 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.
  - CharlesW 3y ago
    > You're a hacker, tell me how I can solve this problem: 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.
    - lukeschlather 3y ago
      Not a contrived example. happens to me often and iOS users are paralyzed when AirDrop doesn't work. (And like, it is possible but it's a lot harder than it should be.) People who transfer lots of media for work don't even bother, they just accept AirDrop as the only functional solution, which means you carry an iOS device.
      - CharlesW 3y ago
        Gotcha. In addition to the off- and online apps above, it looks like web-based solutions like snapdrop.net work on Safari/iOS as well.
  - evilduck 3y ago
    Without prior downloads happening before going offline I’m not sure you could share a file between mobile operating systems out of the box, regardless of which OS is trying to supply the file. 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.
- cpuguy83 3y ago
  Think in terms of market power, not share.
ubermonkey 3y ago
>Apple is predatory on a level that 1990s Microsoft could not have dreamed of. 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.
- jsnell 3y ago
  Yes, Microsoft had 90% of the desktop OS marketplace, and did use that dominance to gain an edge in other markets. But despite that large market share, their leverage was kind of limited by the platform being open. Apple, on the other hand, has unlimited technical leverage. They can make up whatever anti-competitive rule they want to, and enforce it totally. 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.
kayodelycaon 3y ago
Apple doesn’t have 90% of the phone or computer markets. Microsoft had near total dominance over every desktop computer on the planet. 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.
- lukeschlather 3y ago
  Microsoft never attempted dominance of the kind Apple asserts. You look at threads like this: https://code.briarproject.org/briar/briar/-/issues/445 https://code.briarproject.org/briar/briar/-/issues/445 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.
  - meindnoch 3y ago
    [flagged]
  - jwells89 3y ago
    Platform restrictions aside, maybe I’m missing something but requiring a permanent open socket seems like an awfully brittle design. There’s a lot of network conditions which phones are highly prone to that’d make apps with that requirement barely functional.
  - Retric 3y ago
    That's small potentates compared to what MS was doing. Windows was actively updated to break other browsers and then IE was actively leveraged to kill off competing browsers and server side web technology. For years the only thing that survived their onslaught was OSS. 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.
jonhohle 3y ago
I’m not sure if you lived it, but Microsoft was actively targeting companies to destroy, and destroying companies because they could. Read about Mosaic, Be, their role in the SCO case, the Halloween documents, the Embrace, Extend, Extinguish philosophy. 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.
- SSLy 3y ago
  > Be example https://birdhouse.org/beos/byte/30-bootloader/ https://birdhouse.org/beos/byte/30-bootloader/ msft forced PC makers to ship bootloaders that would lockup on sight of Be's boot chain
  - nobleach 3y ago
    They literally left comments in their code saying, "we should crash here if using DR-DOS". Digital Research had a compatible but different DOS implementation at the time.
- yabatopia 3y ago
  I do remember Steve Jobs wanted "to go thermonuclear" on Android (mostly Samsung and Google), saying "I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product." Other motives, same behavior.
  - rsynnott 3y ago
    No, different behaviour. If Apple had announced its own Android derivative called Apple Android++, somehow forced all major OEMs to pre-install it, designed it such that 'Android' apps written for it wouldn't work on real Android, then killed it, that might be the sort of behaviour that would be closer to the mark. Like, Steve Jobs making vague threats isn't really in the same league as what MS was getting up to in the 90s.
atkailash 3y ago
Isn’t it slightly different since Apple designs and sells the hardware with the OS, whereas Microsoft was manioulating entirely separate hardware companies and not designing their own hardware product (until recently)
steve1977 3y ago
> having the interfaces change with new releases every few years. That's a level of stability many mobile and web developers dream of today ;)
- tambourine_man 3y ago
  Web APIs are forever. What's unstable are the dreadful frameworks built on top of it that people seem to think are essential.
  - jjtheblunt 3y ago
    "gopher" feels forgotten!
    - tambourine_man 3y ago
      gopher is not web :)
DueDilligence 3y ago
[dead]
jonhohle 3y ago
Since people don’t seem to understand Microsoft’s anti-competitive behavior, I recommend you start with Groklaw[0] and decide if you want to dive any deeper. Microsoft was akin to US Steel or Standard Oil. We really haven’t seen anything like it since. 0 - http://groklawstatic.ibiblio.org/staticpages/index.php%3fpage=2005010107100653 http://groklawstatic.ibiblio.org/staticpages/index.php%3fpag...
jjtheblunt 3y ago
One way I think they differ is that Apple is, at its core, traditionally a hardware vendor, whereas Microsoft is not. 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.
- sumuyuda 3y ago
  But only on macOS hardware. All other devices have their boot loader locked.
  - jjtheblunt 3y ago
    It's possible that still buried in legal agreements between network operators and Apple there's a clause requiring Apple to ensure Apple knows what behaviors the network operators' networks will endure when Apple issued hardware connects. 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.
- seec 3y ago
  That's an artifact of them switching to the standard hardware platform of the industry for a while (basically a PC with some niceties on top). When it was PowerPC it was not as easy and your options were pretty limited. 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.
overstay8930 3y ago
Dude what the hell are you smoking Microsoft was 95% of the personal computer market in 1996 you can easily purchase an Android phone with no Apple influence. 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.

by jsnell 3y ago

carlosjobim 3y ago

> Apple hasn't been just making competing harder, but outright impossible. 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.

kayodelycaon 3y ago
It makes a lot of sense to me. 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.
- lolinder 3y ago
  If by "people" you mean "a vocal minority of app developers", then sure. But the average iOS user not only doesn't care about Apple's app store policies, they actively appreciate them (whether they know it or not). 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.
  - havaloc 3y ago
    I'm both a developer, and a user. 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.
    - Hikikomori 3y ago
      In Europe we can do that without Appstore.
  - nonrandomstring 3y ago
    > doesn't care about Apple's app store policies, they actively appreciate them (whether they know it or not). 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.pdf https://developer.apple.com/security/complying-with-the-dma.... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=39580678 https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=39580678 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_(advertisement) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_(advertisement)
Chris2048 3y ago
Implicit to that statement is "on apple machines". Android market share is on non-macs, an non-iphones.
lukeschlather 3y ago
This isn't about marketshare, it's about Apple making things impossible. You're a hacker, tell me how I can solve this problem: 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.
- CharlesW 3y ago
  > You're a hacker, tell me how I can solve this problem: 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.
  - lukeschlather 3y ago
    Not a contrived example. happens to me often and iOS users are paralyzed when AirDrop doesn't work. (And like, it is possible but it's a lot harder than it should be.) People who transfer lots of media for work don't even bother, they just accept AirDrop as the only functional solution, which means you carry an iOS device.
    - CharlesW 3y ago
      Gotcha. In addition to the off- and online apps above, it looks like web-based solutions like snapdrop.net work on Safari/iOS as well.
- evilduck 3y ago
  Without prior downloads happening before going offline I’m not sure you could share a file between mobile operating systems out of the box, regardless of which OS is trying to supply the file. 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.
cpuguy83 3y ago
Think in terms of market power, not share.

ubermonkey 3y ago

>Apple is predatory on a level that 1990s Microsoft could not have dreamed of. 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.

jsnell 3y ago
Yes, Microsoft had 90% of the desktop OS marketplace, and did use that dominance to gain an edge in other markets. But despite that large market share, their leverage was kind of limited by the platform being open. Apple, on the other hand, has unlimited technical leverage. They can make up whatever anti-competitive rule they want to, and enforce it totally. 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.

kayodelycaon 3y ago

Apple doesn’t have 90% of the phone or computer markets. Microsoft had near total dominance over every desktop computer on the planet. 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.

lukeschlather 3y ago
Microsoft never attempted dominance of the kind Apple asserts. You look at threads like this: https://code.briarproject.org/briar/briar/-/issues/445 https://code.briarproject.org/briar/briar/-/issues/445 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.
- meindnoch 3y ago
  [flagged]
- jwells89 3y ago
  Platform restrictions aside, maybe I’m missing something but requiring a permanent open socket seems like an awfully brittle design. There’s a lot of network conditions which phones are highly prone to that’d make apps with that requirement barely functional.
- Retric 3y ago
  That's small potentates compared to what MS was doing. Windows was actively updated to break other browsers and then IE was actively leveraged to kill off competing browsers and server side web technology. For years the only thing that survived their onslaught was OSS. 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.

jonhohle 3y ago

I’m not sure if you lived it, but Microsoft was actively targeting companies to destroy, and destroying companies because they could. Read about Mosaic, Be, their role in the SCO case, the Halloween documents, the Embrace, Extend, Extinguish philosophy. 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.

SSLy 3y ago
> Be example https://birdhouse.org/beos/byte/30-bootloader/ https://birdhouse.org/beos/byte/30-bootloader/ msft forced PC makers to ship bootloaders that would lockup on sight of Be's boot chain
- nobleach 3y ago
  They literally left comments in their code saying, "we should crash here if using DR-DOS". Digital Research had a compatible but different DOS implementation at the time.
yabatopia 3y ago
I do remember Steve Jobs wanted "to go thermonuclear" on Android (mostly Samsung and Google), saying "I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product." Other motives, same behavior.
- rsynnott 3y ago
  No, different behaviour. If Apple had announced its own Android derivative called Apple Android++, somehow forced all major OEMs to pre-install it, designed it such that 'Android' apps written for it wouldn't work on real Android, then killed it, that might be the sort of behaviour that would be closer to the mark. Like, Steve Jobs making vague threats isn't really in the same league as what MS was getting up to in the 90s.

atkailash 3y ago

Isn’t it slightly different since Apple designs and sells the hardware with the OS, whereas Microsoft was manioulating entirely separate hardware companies and not designing their own hardware product (until recently)

steve1977 3y ago

> having the interfaces change with new releases every few years. That's a level of stability many mobile and web developers dream of today ;)

tambourine_man 3y ago
Web APIs are forever. What's unstable are the dreadful frameworks built on top of it that people seem to think are essential.
- jjtheblunt 3y ago
  "gopher" feels forgotten!
  - tambourine_man 3y ago
    gopher is not web :)

DueDilligence 3y ago

[dead]

jonhohle 3y ago

Since people don’t seem to understand Microsoft’s anti-competitive behavior, I recommend you start with Groklaw[0] and decide if you want to dive any deeper. Microsoft was akin to US Steel or Standard Oil. We really haven’t seen anything like it since. 0 - http://groklawstatic.ibiblio.org/staticpages/index.php%3fpage=2005010107100653 http://groklawstatic.ibiblio.org/staticpages/index.php%3fpag...

jjtheblunt 3y ago

One way I think they differ is that Apple is, at its core, traditionally a hardware vendor, whereas Microsoft is not. 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.

sumuyuda 3y ago
But only on macOS hardware. All other devices have their boot loader locked.
- jjtheblunt 3y ago
  It's possible that still buried in legal agreements between network operators and Apple there's a clause requiring Apple to ensure Apple knows what behaviors the network operators' networks will endure when Apple issued hardware connects. 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.
seec 3y ago
That's an artifact of them switching to the standard hardware platform of the industry for a while (basically a PC with some niceties on top). When it was PowerPC it was not as easy and your options were pretty limited. 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.

overstay8930 3y ago

Dude what the hell are you smoking Microsoft was 95% of the personal computer market in 1996 you can easily purchase an Android phone with no Apple influence. 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.