My Great Grandmother (bless her soul) said the same thing about The Beatles.
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Apple needs to be broken up
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This would likely result in higher prices and lower quality. The more entities you add to the development and manufacturing process, the higher the number of companies needing to maximize profits. If the prices are too high for you, Apple has a ton of other competition at lower price points.
Competition is good when splitting up companies that have their hand in too many industries. Not splitting up companies that have control of their processes within one industry.
This is like saying a couple should get a divorce for the sake of allowing their child to have step-parents despite just two parents likely being better for the child.
Weird analogy, I know.
And its not even April Fools’ day yet, this author kinda rushed
Why? There is zero benefit to consumers. They don't have significant, monopolistic control of any of the markets they are in. Their phone business isn't the biggest (that's Android), The Mac certainly isn't the biggest computer (it's maybe 5% of the market) and their software... dude, you are just trying to start some crap.
Also Apple doesn't charge for Mac OS, hasn't for years. Or iOS. Slow down hardware churn? Who is asking for that? I am using the same Mac I bought 8 years ago and it works with the latest OS that was just released. It's still fast, too. I don't run games on it, but guess what? I don't care.
Apple works specifically because it's a closed loop. If you want more choice, if you want cheaper stuff, then don't buy it. The rest of us will just keep getting **** done without viruses and driver conflicts, thanks.
That's a remedy typically mentioned in regard to companies caught using their monopoly power to illegally influence the market.
In which market is Apple a monopoly? Also please explain how they are using that illegally to influence things in their favor.
Dont feed the troll… just look and then hit the back button.
For those thinking Apple should be "broken up" -> why? If you don't like the fact they write their own software for their own hardware buy something else. You do have a choice in the matter. I'd argue that some working professionals who rely on the Apple ecosystem are entitled to actually enjoy it - that simple. This is a capitalist society, and one is certainly "free" to purchase whatever they want.
How would this even work, OP?
Take just the Apple TV as an example. Are you saying the new Apple Hardware company makes the Apple TV and doesn't put any software on it? They just release a 'box' into the market? Maybe it's allowed to have a boot loader on it?
That's just like a PC where you install Linux or Windows on it. So you want Apple Hardware to make bare bones hardware like HP, Dell etc., and let other companies write the software like Microsoft, Apple, Linux? And there's no place in your world for a fully-packaged solution like an Apple TV device that does the hardware and software and communicates with the Mac, iPad and iPhone you've also got? (You'll be wanting Delonghi to split up so your kettle doesn't work until you install an OS, next.)
In this situation, given that Apple Software wouldn't be allowed to know what Apple Hardware are building (terms of the break-up), the pace of innovation slows to a crawl. Think about how long it takes a non-Google Android phone to get an OS update. Will Google also be told that their hardware people can't communicate with their software people, or is this just an Apple whinge?
Things like the Apple TV, iPhone and iPad are closed devices because they're systems that you buy, with hardware and software in one package, with features that you want to use. Just as a toaster or coffee machine is a closed device - the manufacturer makes the hardware and the software. This is the same as an iPhone; you buy it because it does things you want it to do.
How would prices be affected by a break-up?
Why should Apple be forced to split up, and I as a consumer be forced to jump through hoops to get new software installed on my hardware?
Take just the Apple TV as an example. Are you saying the new Apple Hardware company makes the Apple TV and doesn't put any software on it? They just release a 'box' into the market? Maybe it's allowed to have a boot loader on it?
That's just like a PC where you install Linux or Windows on it. So you want Apple Hardware to make bare bones hardware like HP, Dell etc., and let other companies write the software like Microsoft, Apple, Linux? And there's no place in your world for a fully-packaged solution like an Apple TV device that does the hardware and software and communicates with the Mac, iPad and iPhone you've also got? (You'll be wanting Delonghi to split up so your kettle doesn't work until you install an OS, next.)
In this situation, given that Apple Software wouldn't be allowed to know what Apple Hardware are building (terms of the break-up), the pace of innovation slows to a crawl. Think about how long it takes a non-Google Android phone to get an OS update. Will Google also be told that their hardware people can't communicate with their software people, or is this just an Apple whinge?
Things like the Apple TV, iPhone and iPad are closed devices because they're systems that you buy, with hardware and software in one package, with features that you want to use. Just as a toaster or coffee machine is a closed device - the manufacturer makes the hardware and the software. This is the same as an iPhone; you buy it because it does things you want it to do.
How would prices be affected by a break-up?
Why should Apple be forced to split up, and I as a consumer be forced to jump through hoops to get new software installed on my hardware?
I have a potentially unpopular opinion on this, but has more competition ever actually resulted in better outcomes for consumers for this type of business?
I'm of the mind that competition is actually the opposite of what we need, and that what we need is more openness and collaboration.
I'd rather see Apple make more stuff public and transparent than to see more competition. My favorite parts about Apple products are that they work so flippin' well with the tools I use to collaborate with colleagues and fellow developers.
Competition always seems to favor the entities with more money over the ones with better ideas, and I'd rather us have better products and ideas than more competition. More choice is not always better, I find that frequently it's just more of the same crap, but competing on price.
I'm not sure where to go to answer this. In general, it's good to have competing technologies, but quite frequently the best product does not actually "win". Beta vs VHS, 2 flavors of 56k modems, etc, etc, etc.
Define "competition" and "better outcomes"...
In the 1980s, IBM (already the subject of antitrust accusations) realised they were missing the boat on personal computers and produced the IBM PC - a perfectly unremarkable personal computer based on a clone of the already established CP/M operating system and the 8086 processor (a 'placeholder' 16-bit design produced by Intel while they worked on a true 32-bit chip). Yes, it was "open architecture" - meaning that anybody could write software or produce expansion boards or peripherals for it, but that was only remarkable in comparison to the closed-shop practices common in the mainframe market: it was already de-facto, if not formally, true of most existing personal computers (notably S-100 bus=based CP/M systems, and the Apple II, both with a large range of independent software, expansion cards and complete systems in the case of CP/M/S-100). Open-ness in the personal computer market was never an IBM innovation, and the one thing you couldn't do was make a 100% compatible IBM PC clone without IBM's proprietary BIOS ROM. You could make an 8086 system with the same expansion slots and run generic MS-DOS or CP/M86 but those OSs didn't have the hardware-independent APIs of modern OSs so anything more sophisticated than scrolling-text applications would need patching (before IBM, CP/M applications like WordStar came with a patch/configuration tool to adapt them to different hardware). I doubt anybody would have given the IBM PC a second look if it hadn't had "IBM PC" in large, friendly letters on the front (well, it probably had the best keyboard...) - but it was exactly what was wanted by "serious businessmen" who were suspicious of hippies in polo-necks and computers named after Star Trek characters (and who were probably already IBM customers). Pretty soon there was a lot of business software that only ran reliably on IBM PCs - but the IBM PC was too expensive for small businesses and home users. So, no competition = bad.
Then some clever person produced a legal "clean room" clone of IBM PC BIOS in the late 80s and "100% IBM Compatible" machines appeared on the market, there was tremendous competition, resulting in low prices and good consumer choice. So success for competition... except it killed off anything that wasn't 100% IBM compatible, including technically superior systems (certainly compared to late 80s PCs), nearly killed off Apple and, eventually, even killed IBM's PC business. By the mid/late 90s, there was a huge choice of bargain-priced PCs, PC components like graphics, sound and other expansion cards, peripherals like printers and scanners etc. and even several competing makes of x86 CPUs, but with one fly in the ointment: the PCs all had x86 chips and ran MS Windows, the expansion cards usually only came with Windows drivers and even the cheaper printers only worked with Windows. Want to use Mac, or Linux? At best you'd be looking at a reduced range of more expensive expansions, peripherals and software - and you'd probably have to go to a specialist store to get them.
Might not have been so bad if the original IBM PC had been designed as a platform to lead computing into the 1990s - but it wasn't, it was just a "me too" pseudo-32-bit CP/M system locked to a very specific hardware/firmware platform - introduced just when true 32-bit personal computers, industrial-strength operating systems like Unix with hardware-independent APIs etc. were becoming a possibility. Even Intel's "proper" 32 bit CPU never emerged - subsequent x86 chips were hamstrung by the need to retain 8086 compatibility.
So, yeah, the (involuntary) break-up of IBM's PC business (by clone makers rather than regulation) meant that, in 1996, you could buy a half-decent Windows machine for $500 rather than $2000 - and probably drove a lot of economic growth - but also meant that it was an uphill struggle to buy/use anything else.
More to the point - open standards and collaboration are essential for healthy competition - because healthy competition depends on genuine choice.
As I said above, from some perspectives competition in the Windows PC market has been successful - but that arose because IBM originally used their power in the mainframe/office equipment to impose a de-facto PC standard. The Android phone market is another good example of successful competition - but that is partly dependent on the power of Google (another candidate for breaking up) & relied on the iPhone to pave the way.
If your entire music portfolio is in Logic Pro files, that greatly restricts your choice to buy a Windows PC or switch to Linux. If your small business runs on MS Access files then switching to MacOS would be nigh impossible. That makes the PC industry highly vulnerable to software lock-in, which leads to monopolies. Some regulation to prevent monopoly abuse is necessary - there's nothing magic about free market competition that will stop monopolies forming.
You can't fix that completely with either collaboration or regulation - but it helps if you don't have proprietary, trade-secret/patent/copyright protected file formats that can change arbitrarily. There was an attempt to do this with document file formats - the Open Document Format was established as an open, ISO standard for documents, spreadsheets etc. and (particularly EU) governments started to require ISO standard formats for government funded work (so, no forcing it on consumers - but providing an incentive for software producers to at least import/export standard formats).
Unfortunately, this was at the peak of MS evil-ness and they invented their own "open" standard and managed to get it ISO certified (with many alleged shenanigans such as allowing blobs of ill-defined word/excel data to be embedded)...
There's now a lot more choice and competition in IT than there was in the 1990s. The biggest steps forward have come from MS/Intel failing to control the mobile market - which probably helped break some of the stranglehold of MS Office and Internet Explorer, the rise of the open-standard-based Internet and the success of Linux in the mobile (Android) and server market.
Sideloading is NOT a consumer benefit. It is a power user benefit. For standard consumers it is a booby trap!
Gee just regurgitate Apple's marketing. The point is to let consumers have the choice. It worked for the Mac all these years.
Yes and I have already removed malware from macs from clueless users.
Consumers have a choice. It’s called android.
This is by design and has always been by design. The hardware is tailor-made for the software and vice-versa and allows for Apple to take advantages of the additional efficiencies that this creates.
Should Apple let Samsung put iOS on Galaxy devices too? This is silly.
You missed the point. Rather than ask apple to update their ecosystem or asking f the government to regulate apple in a way that kills the greatness of our tech platforms there is a platform that does what you want….vote with your $$$.
Breaking up Apple would not benefit consumers, the seamless nature of Apple devices would inherently be disrupted removing a key selling point.
It is down to competitors to offer alternative solutions that draw customers.
As for the monopoly, why shouldn't they have the monopoly? They make the hardware and software so surely are entitled to benefit from their sales?
Other businesses have their own monopolies in that sense.
I can only see downsides to breaking Apple up, now do not get me wrong I do not think they are perfect, but breaking them up will not solve problems only create more.
Or require them to break up into McPatties, McSpecialSauce and McBuns restaraunts.
Exactly. It’s a bit anti-consumer for McDonald’s to hold a monopoly on their special sauce. What if I want a KFC chicken sandwich with McDonald’s special sauce. It’s unfortunate that big fast food has been allowed to do this for so long. 😂