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The market will tell Apple what its role is. And the market wants a walled garden. It’s half the reason I buy iPhones. If you want a computer, get a Linux box.

The market will tell Apple what its role is. And the market wants a walled garden. It’s half the reason I buy iPhones. If you want a computer, get a Linux box. The iOS guardrails are a major selling point.

echelon 2y ago
The free market is not sophisticated enough to remove monopolistic forces. Without government intervention we'd still have Standard Oil. Without Microsoft being forced to invest in Apple in the late 90's to avoid DOJ scrutiny, Apple would have gone bankrupt and we wouldn't even have an iPhone. And before "iPhone is not a monopoly" arguments, there are only two smartphone platforms and both are strong arming marketplace participants in a function essential to navigating the modern world. Google is being told to relinquish Chrome and that's good. But we need both Apple and Google to relinquish control over what can be installed on devices as well. The time for scare-free web installs by default is now. Apple and Google will still keep their trillion dollar market caps, but the rest of the market will be able to innovate with many more degrees of freedom.
- bdcravens 2y ago
  Without the threat of forced compliance by the government (courts), Elon Musk wouldn't have bought Twitter.
- aleph_minus_one 2y ago
  > The free market is not sophisticated enough to remove monopolistic forces. It is (in most cases). The problem is rather that most people don't care: the market delivers, and turns into an oligopoly.
  - echelon 2y ago
    > most people don't care This is why the DOJ function is essential. Most people aren't informed enough to understand how this effects them or even have the awareness that this is happening at all. Ordinary citizens would need hours of lectures and study to understand the dynamics at play and how that impacts everyone in the market negatively. That's why this is a job for the DOJ.
realusername 2y ago
There's no "market" anymore, it's a duopoly. Apple doesn't need to care about what app makers or even consumers want anymore.
- echelon 2y ago
  And this is why they (and Google) shouldn't have any right to police or even participate in what people want to do with the devices they purchased. Imagine if the car you bought could suddenly stop driving you to Publix or Starbucks because they didn't pay the tax to the manufacturer.
  - realusername 2y ago
    I'm all for it personally, or it's like you had only two supermarket brands in the whole country and you had to pick a single one. The situation on mobile is ridiculous.
blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
There is no free market in a duopoly with high barriers to entry and lots of anti competitive practices. This absolutely needs regulation. It would not affect you if you want to keep your phone in walled garden mode. But people should have a right to use their devices freely.
- FredPret 2y ago
  People already have a right to buy any of the hundreds of models on sale right now, many of which allow putting your own OS on it. People also have the right to start a new phone brand (if they feel like burning a couple hundred billion). The reason it’s so hard to break into this market is because its mature. The duopoly will only be supplanted by the next tech - smart glasses perhaps. No amount of regulation can change technological realities.
  - blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
    I feel like you are making the case for regulation. If there cannot be competition until the next tech, then society can force the existing players to behave in an appropriate way using regulations.
    - FredPret 2y ago
      What I'm saying is regulation slows down all of society to solve yesterday's problems, when we should put as much resources as possible into developing tomorrow's solutions. How much does it bug you that Xerox has (had?) a monopoly on copiers? Or that Windows + Intel dominated the 90's? Or that the train barons had their monopolies in the 1800's? The best solution is to make a monopoly irrelevant by supplanting it. Apple is either going to invent the next big thing, or they will go the way of IBM. Even now their peak quarterly revenue was back in 2022.
II2II 2y ago
> And the market wants a walled garden. The most you can say is that a segment of the market is willing to accept a walled garden. Some may want it. Some may not care about it. Some may not want it, but feel there are compelling reasons to use iOS and put up with the walled garden. An honest question here: is it actually a walled garden you want or is it an extra layer of security that the walled garden provides? (I can see people wanting the latter, but have a bit of trouble wrapping my head around people wanting a business to control who can offer which software on a device.)
- CharlesW 2y ago
  > An honest question here: is it actually a walled garden you want or is it an extra layer of security that the walled garden provides? Definitely the latter, with the App Store being is one of many elements of that. It's that old marketing adage: People don't want to buy a drill, they want to buy the ability to make holes. And really, they want to buy the ability to hang a picture of their family on the living room wall, to install a shelf for their daughter's awards, etc.
- ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
  Most folks aren’t geeks. Their relationship with technology is very different from most folks that post here. They don’t want tech. They want functionality, and in as approachable and “don’t make me think” fashion as possible. Apple provides that. There are many reasons, and many of the cynics are right. But at the end of the day, Apple has a three trillion-dollar market cap. Can’t argue with the results.
- kevinsync 2y ago
  A couple barely-coherent thoughts on the topic: I honestly believe that the overwhelming majority people with a phone or computer don't actively want a walled garden, or a non-walled garden, good security, bad security or anything else that we pontificate about. They just want a device that kinda-sorta "works" -- web, email, Amazon, YouTube, Instagram, etc -- even though most websites, software, services we pay for, etc actually are constantly changing, constantly having issues, constantly under-delivering on even the most basic promises -- and on top of that, people want everything to be free too. With the way the world is these days (dancing on the razor's edge of chaos, and I'm not necessarily speaking politically; just that everything cuts corners, moves fast, breaks things, and rarely fixes them once they’re broken) it's better for the average consumer to restrict what they can and can't do for the sake of the entire ecosystem remaining functional. That Apple even attempts to keep their stuff "just working" at all is an anomaly with regards to most of the industry.
perihelions 2y ago
- "The iOS guardrails are a major selling point." It's specious to conflate guardrails against spam and malware with—what this story is about—"guardrails" meant to enforce copyright! One's about the consumer's best interest; the other is not at all.
- 1234letshaveatw 2y ago
  It isn't in the consumers best interest for the artist to make money and create more content?
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- WesolyKubeczek 2y ago
  But Tim Cook has multiple lunches and games of golf with executives of record labels and movie studios that hold copyrights on all kinds of stuff, and you don’t. You, the consumer, are being treated livestock to be eaten, or milked, or sheared. Livestock’s reasoning about freedoms is usually ignored.
HumblyTossed 2y ago
> And the market wants a walled garden. This is just not true. People who want an iPhone, get an iPhone - warts and all.
sunaookami 2y ago
Ah yes, the "invisible hand" of the market which is invisible because... it doesn't exist, duh.
jMyles 2y ago
While I think most of us agree with the spirit of your argument, we may have different impressions about the degree to which market forces _are even allowed to operate_ in this environment. Consider the combination of: * winner-picking trade policies * regulatory capture * establishment-protecting intellectual property regimes * enormous state interplay with TSMC and Qualcomm (both economic and regulatory, both publicly known and classified) Taken together, this configuration amounts to an insurmountable subsidy of the status quo, such that there are no serious opportunities to explore market appetite for an ecosystem which is more empowering to the user.
cratermoon 2y ago
Ah yes, the Free Market Fairy. https://bitworking.org/news/2008/01/the-free-market-fairy/ https://bitworking.org/news/2008/01/the-free-market-fairy/

echelon 2y ago

The free market is not sophisticated enough to remove monopolistic forces. Without government intervention we'd still have Standard Oil. Without Microsoft being forced to invest in Apple in the late 90's to avoid DOJ scrutiny, Apple would have gone bankrupt and we wouldn't even have an iPhone. And before "iPhone is not a monopoly" arguments, there are only two smartphone platforms and both are strong arming marketplace participants in a function essential to navigating the modern world. Google is being told to relinquish Chrome and that's good. But we need both Apple and Google to relinquish control over what can be installed on devices as well. The time for scare-free web installs by default is now. Apple and Google will still keep their trillion dollar market caps, but the rest of the market will be able to innovate with many more degrees of freedom.

bdcravens 2y ago
Without the threat of forced compliance by the government (courts), Elon Musk wouldn't have bought Twitter.
aleph_minus_one 2y ago
> The free market is not sophisticated enough to remove monopolistic forces. It is (in most cases). The problem is rather that most people don't care: the market delivers, and turns into an oligopoly.
- echelon 2y ago
  > most people don't care This is why the DOJ function is essential. Most people aren't informed enough to understand how this effects them or even have the awareness that this is happening at all. Ordinary citizens would need hours of lectures and study to understand the dynamics at play and how that impacts everyone in the market negatively. That's why this is a job for the DOJ.

realusername 2y ago

There's no "market" anymore, it's a duopoly. Apple doesn't need to care about what app makers or even consumers want anymore.

echelon 2y ago
And this is why they (and Google) shouldn't have any right to police or even participate in what people want to do with the devices they purchased. Imagine if the car you bought could suddenly stop driving you to Publix or Starbucks because they didn't pay the tax to the manufacturer.
- realusername 2y ago
  I'm all for it personally, or it's like you had only two supermarket brands in the whole country and you had to pick a single one. The situation on mobile is ridiculous.

blackeyeblitzar 2y ago

There is no free market in a duopoly with high barriers to entry and lots of anti competitive practices. This absolutely needs regulation. It would not affect you if you want to keep your phone in walled garden mode. But people should have a right to use their devices freely.

FredPret 2y ago
People already have a right to buy any of the hundreds of models on sale right now, many of which allow putting your own OS on it. People also have the right to start a new phone brand (if they feel like burning a couple hundred billion). The reason it’s so hard to break into this market is because its mature. The duopoly will only be supplanted by the next tech - smart glasses perhaps. No amount of regulation can change technological realities.
- blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
  I feel like you are making the case for regulation. If there cannot be competition until the next tech, then society can force the existing players to behave in an appropriate way using regulations.
  - FredPret 2y ago
    What I'm saying is regulation slows down all of society to solve yesterday's problems, when we should put as much resources as possible into developing tomorrow's solutions. How much does it bug you that Xerox has (had?) a monopoly on copiers? Or that Windows + Intel dominated the 90's? Or that the train barons had their monopolies in the 1800's? The best solution is to make a monopoly irrelevant by supplanting it. Apple is either going to invent the next big thing, or they will go the way of IBM. Even now their peak quarterly revenue was back in 2022.

II2II 2y ago

> And the market wants a walled garden. The most you can say is that a segment of the market is willing to accept a walled garden. Some may want it. Some may not care about it. Some may not want it, but feel there are compelling reasons to use iOS and put up with the walled garden. An honest question here: is it actually a walled garden you want or is it an extra layer of security that the walled garden provides? (I can see people wanting the latter, but have a bit of trouble wrapping my head around people wanting a business to control who can offer which software on a device.)

CharlesW 2y ago
> An honest question here: is it actually a walled garden you want or is it an extra layer of security that the walled garden provides? Definitely the latter, with the App Store being is one of many elements of that. It's that old marketing adage: People don't want to buy a drill, they want to buy the ability to make holes. And really, they want to buy the ability to hang a picture of their family on the living room wall, to install a shelf for their daughter's awards, etc.
ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
Most folks aren’t geeks. Their relationship with technology is very different from most folks that post here. They don’t want tech. They want functionality, and in as approachable and “don’t make me think” fashion as possible. Apple provides that. There are many reasons, and many of the cynics are right. But at the end of the day, Apple has a three trillion-dollar market cap. Can’t argue with the results.
kevinsync 2y ago
A couple barely-coherent thoughts on the topic: I honestly believe that the overwhelming majority people with a phone or computer don't actively want a walled garden, or a non-walled garden, good security, bad security or anything else that we pontificate about. They just want a device that kinda-sorta "works" -- web, email, Amazon, YouTube, Instagram, etc -- even though most websites, software, services we pay for, etc actually are constantly changing, constantly having issues, constantly under-delivering on even the most basic promises -- and on top of that, people want everything to be free too. With the way the world is these days (dancing on the razor's edge of chaos, and I'm not necessarily speaking politically; just that everything cuts corners, moves fast, breaks things, and rarely fixes them once they’re broken) it's better for the average consumer to restrict what they can and can't do for the sake of the entire ecosystem remaining functional. That Apple even attempts to keep their stuff "just working" at all is an anomaly with regards to most of the industry.

perihelions 2y ago

- "The iOS guardrails are a major selling point." It's specious to conflate guardrails against spam and malware with—what this story is about—"guardrails" meant to enforce copyright! One's about the consumer's best interest; the other is not at all.

1234letshaveatw 2y ago
It isn't in the consumers best interest for the artist to make money and create more content?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
WesolyKubeczek 2y ago
But Tim Cook has multiple lunches and games of golf with executives of record labels and movie studios that hold copyrights on all kinds of stuff, and you don’t. You, the consumer, are being treated livestock to be eaten, or milked, or sheared. Livestock’s reasoning about freedoms is usually ignored.

HumblyTossed 2y ago

> And the market wants a walled garden. This is just not true. People who want an iPhone, get an iPhone - warts and all.

sunaookami 2y ago

Ah yes, the "invisible hand" of the market which is invisible because... it doesn't exist, duh.

jMyles 2y ago

While I think most of us agree with the spirit of your argument, we may have different impressions about the degree to which market forces _are even allowed to operate_ in this environment. Consider the combination of: * winner-picking trade policies * regulatory capture * establishment-protecting intellectual property regimes * enormous state interplay with TSMC and Qualcomm (both economic and regulatory, both publicly known and classified) Taken together, this configuration amounts to an insurmountable subsidy of the status quo, such that there are no serious opportunities to explore market appetite for an ecosystem which is more empowering to the user.

cratermoon 2y ago

Ah yes, the Free Market Fairy. https://bitworking.org/news/2008/01/the-free-market-fairy/ https://bitworking.org/news/2008/01/the-free-market-fairy/