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Comment by Spivak | Hacker News Reader

Kind of a silly argument as Apple has a monopoly on nothing except their own products. From a consumer point of view you can pretty much ignore Apple's existence and not even notice.

You wouldn't call Nintendo a monopolist because they dictate the rules of the Switch, would you?

The irony being that I think most Apple users are happy they've strong-armed their developers into a single payment product instead of everyone rolling their own. Android is a mess in this regard; I wish everything used Google Pay.

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OK, Apple is avoidable but that leaves...one option, really? Still not enough. It sucks to have only two cable providers (usually both bad), even two political parties.

I’m leaning towards wanting legislation that treats duopolies almost as harshly as monopolies.

If there must be only “two” of something, it at least shouldn’t be two entities delivering the whole stack. Right now, if you like any aspect of a system you have to accept the whole thing: if you like Apple hardware, you need to like their software, their store, their other services, you can’t just get nice hardware and mix in something else.

What are you saying the other option is? There’re countless other options.

Other than Android, what else?

Apple's 30% is very restrictive and I applaud companies trying to breach this moat. But that's roughly the same for Nintendo but you wouldn't call their behavior monopolistic, right?

You have to use Nintendo's software, their store, their online service, their games, etc. You can't just get their nice hardware and play PS4 games on it.

Well They might do, If the Gaming Console market was a Duopoly, Considered as Essential in every day lives ( Which is hard to argue Gaming being Essential ), has a 30%+ MarkShare, even 50%+ in Key market, up to 50%+ in Total App Store Revenue, taking 30% cut on their own Platform AND selling their own games to competitor's console.

It wouldn't be a problem had Apple Music kept it within the Apple Ecosystem. Only works on Apple's product, and require some sort of Listening fees like MFi for all AirPlay 2 and Connecting Apple Music devices.

>You wouldn't call Nintendo a monopolist because they dictate the rules of the Switch, would you?

It's not monopolistic, but it's another kind of problem. Locked down ecosystems and companies that actively work to stop any kind of unauthorized access to their locked down systems are stifling innovation and creativity to a degree in exchange for a somewhat false sense of security and the larger motive of control and continuous profit off their products.

Whether this is good or bad sort of depends on what you value more.

It also does push back a certain type of customer, whether companies want these customers or not is a different story but, personally I would never buy an apple product because of the way their ecosystem is. As for the switch, I was pretty unexcited about it until I seen the videos of a working linux install on it, my excitement lessened when I read Nintendo intended to release hardware and software updates to fix the exploits that allowed that.

But this is just me, though I can't be the only one that feels this way, and again there's a good chance neither Apple nor Nintendo would want my business anyway.

I don't necessarily see a problem with locked down devices because if I have a right to control what runs on my computer, then so does Apple or Nintendo on theirs.

One might counter, saying something like "but you 'own' your iPhone, you should be able to do whatever you want with it." But I think such an argument is more to do with not having a common word to describe this kind of transaction -- we understand things like leasing and renting but we still describe 'buying' managed devices with the same terminology that we do a toaster. IT people get close to this model with managed on-prem appliances but it's not quite the same.

The same problem exists with copyrighted works because when you buy a DVD you don't own the movie, you own a single transferrable non-commercial personal-use license losely attached to the physical medium.

We would do well to make these business relationships more explicit and better defined but I wouldn't expect the relationships themselves to change.

> You wouldn't call Nintendo a monopolist because they dictate the rules of the Switch, would you?

If the Switch controlled the entire ecosystem that drove half of peoples’ interaction with the world, yes.

Where do you get half?

He made it up. Because it is nowhere near that. It is actually not even 1/4th.

http://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/worldwide

Worldwide it's less then 1/4, but for obvious reasons, its market share is much higher in wealthier countries. From a brief search, it's 46% in the US, and has the majority in a handful of European countries including the UK and Norway. So regulators in those countries still have a reason to look at it.

> You wouldn't call Nintendo a monopolist because they dictate the rules of the Switch, would you?

We really should.

They make a specific product and closing it off to consumers using it a certain way or manipulation doesn't make it a monopoly. I would guess that's most products on the market. They have healthy competition in consoles and consumers ability to buy and play games with other products through PC, PS4, and Xbox One's, maybe even AI.

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