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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

Apple is a ruthless company.

We should stop personifying them and idolizing the products they make. Look at the chess moves. They're a monster.

It should terrify you that some of the best products on the market are owned by a company that wants to extract as much as it can from the rest of us. They're no different from Oracle, just with good products. It's a winning strategy, and they're now positioned to sink their claws deeper.

They've decimated the competition leaving you with a device that costs too much, isn't repairable, doesn't run untaxed software, and spies on you. The next moves will lock you down even harder.

Like seriously people. We're empowering "I have no mouth and want to scream". We're making it come true.

An Orwellian, Stallman-killing nightmare. The anti-web. In a posh, glossy finish.

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> Look at the chess moves. They're a monster.

Brilliantly said. In the early days of MP3s I ripped all my CDs and refused to get that content locked into Microsoft's platform as I wanted control. Today I find myself so deeply tied to Apple's platform that I don't think I can get out.

I think we need the government to step in and require open APIs when a company is vertically integrated to allow competition in. E.g. you built the phone and the cloud service. Fine every cloud service app on the phone has to support an API that allows me to use the phone with a different vendor's cloud service. And we have precedent for this too, e.g. at one point I could only buy a landline phone from Bell, the gov. came along and told ATT they had to allow other companies to provide landline phones that would run on Bell's network.

My photos library is larger than disk space, so if I wanted to export photos out of the cloud I'd probably have to do it manually in stages. And I've lost my original MP3s somewhere along the line. Yikes.

I recently dug out my CDs and ripped them to my PC. Even bought some new ones, of music I can listen to anytime online with my subscription service.

Aside from the nostalgia, I have appreciated the ability to listen with any program I wish, and listening while offline has happened a few times. I don't know how long I'll continue buying physical media but I'm liking it for now

Re: Photos - if you have a Mac you can run your Photos library off an external drive. I have a 1TB NVME SSD attached via USB and it runs perfectly fine. The Photos Library is just a big folder so it is always possible to get at the raw files if you need them.

Re: Music - I still have my original MP3s and AAC files from ancient versions of iTunes (originally imported via LAME) and have travelled across many Macs and even across to Windows and back. If you've lost the originals I'm not sure what Apple can do about that

Outside the USA , apple is not that much of a big deal. But it s interesting how disproportionately influential They became, because of their appeal to developers and technologists and their bubble

In the European country I live, anecdotally apple were in third place pre-pandemic to Samsung and Huawei for new phones. I haven't been out enough since then to confirm if it's changed, but I imagine the news about Huawei's USA struggles has dented confidence for carriers, if not consumers, as they don't seem to pushed as much anymore in marketing.

The thing Apple does have, and lets them remain in first place (but not the majority like the US), is the long tail of the iPhone 6 or whatever that someone has passed down to their kid or sold second hand that's still working. You don't see the same amount of Galaxy S4s hanging around, even though when both phones were new market share was a lot more equivalent for the two.

I think part of this may be a market difference here. The majority of non-tech people are on prepaid and buying a phone that's <€300 unsubsidised every 3-4 years. So they could get a second hand iPhone that's already 3-4 years old for that price, or they could get some Android mid range model new for like €200 and more people opt for the latter.

> We're empowering "I have no mouth and want to scream". We're making it come true.

I really don’t think Siri will ever be that effective.

Ouch, that sounds true and hurt

Unlike Google and Facebook, say, Apple doesn’t have a strong network effect lock-in. If they stop making the best products they’re much easier to switch away from.

They have some weak network effects with iMessage (in some markets) and convenience around iPhotos, but nothing serious.

Socially it’s limited to iMessage and FaceTime, but I’d say the lock-in if you own a watch, MacBook, AirPods, and /or iPad is very strong. There’s no other company that offers that level of integration across your devices.

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