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Comment by ch4s3 | Hacker News Reader

If your value prop to customers is seamless and secure default behavior, then of course blocking insecure peripherals aligns with your financial interests. This doesn't seem nefarious at all to me.

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The post you're replying to meant that it boosts Apple Watch sales because they hobble the functionality of competitors. I think your statement is simply saying that any competitor is insecure. I'd be surprised if that were a widely held view.

Hobbling is a weird way to say that they aren't privileging unknown hardware. Yes, they make their own peripherals work better together. This seems like the only way to do some of what they do, airpods are so good because they use a proprietary standard that is better than bluetooth, using the open standard would be worse.

My point is that it is good that they focus on making their own products work well together, it provides better value than being wide open and trying to work super well with everything. Windows tries to work well with any peripheral, and its a bad experience.

That's not good enough. If you're Apple, and you're worth 3 trillion dollars, you can both do security and behave in a way that isn't anti-competitive. They could interoperate securely. Is it easier to just lock out your competition and use proprietary everything? Yes, duh. It's also blatantly anti-competitive, which is a thing that societally and (arguably) morally is not acceptable.

I hope to read this blog post in an antitrust case from the DOJ one day.

It isn't anti-competitive to not open up your hardware and software security stack to any other OEMs who wander by. You can simply just buy a competitor's product, for less money even.

I mean the results of the lawsuits are it kinda is. You don't have to open it up technologically in the sense that just anyone ole' device can just pair but you should have to give any OEM access that wants to be part of the secure hardware club— they get to use the proprietary bits for interoperability.

Any smart watch vendor should be able to call up Apple and make their own watch which is equally privileged to Apple's. And the requirements to the vendor to do so needs to be not so onerous as to be an effective ban.

Whether or not something is anti-competitive has nothing to do with how convenient it is for the incumbent. It may indeed by quite onerous for the incumbent. The bar for anti-competitive behavior is:

- Is this stifling competition?

- Is that harming consumers?

Per the contents of the blog post, yes this is absolutely stifling competition given that Pebble won't be able to provide the same features/experience as the Apple watch. This directly hurts Pebble which prevents them from competing.

As for how much that hurts consumers, the answer is not a clear "yes". The iOS market share is ~60% in the US and I don't think the majority of those folks wear or are interested in wearing any kind of watch, smart or not.

However, if Apple keeps this up they're absolutely going to go the way of Ma Bell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._AT%26T_(1982) and the eventual Telecommunication Act of 1996 which forced incumbent providers to interconnect with folks who would ostensibly be their competition.

> Is this stifling competition?

This is incredibly vaguely defined here. Saying that apple stifles smart watch competition by not actively working to make iphone more interoperable with non apple smart watches is ridiculous. You'd never say that a car company is stiffing competition by making it hard to install a new engine, or mount after market add-ons.

People have such a confusing hate-boner for apple. Just buy an android phone.

They do, actually. They’re just worse at it than Apple is.

I recommend reading the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which required all incumbent telephone companies to allow any other company to install equipment in their central offices and buy rights to already laid phone lines at a fixed rate, where all the expense of actually building and laying everything laid entirely with the owner of the central office.

Turns out that (fairly applied) antitrust doesn't care how much it money it costs an incumbent company to begin allowing competitors

This is a goofy argument. Telephone lines are a natural monopoly, cell phones are not. I have no interest in a poorly secured grab bag of bullshit blue-tooth add-ons, and there's no government interest in enabling that.

As long as banks require you to install an app, phone OSes are effectively a monopoly.

It literally is, which is why the EU took a crowbar to iOS its built-in limitations.

The EU tech space is a barren landscape of technological dross pumped out by Siemens and some other big consultancies, so I’m not sure I’d want to apply their terrible laws here.

Yeah, judging by how you've been responding elsewhere in this thread you're just a contraction / troll out for a reaction. Bye :)

If you’re Apple and worth 3 trillion dollars then you can also ship a voice assistant that’s competitive with the 5 year old state of the art. It should be simple. Money can be turned into engineering results with absolutely no trade offs.

As a customer I would like to be able to make that decision. I don't need apple to hold my hand. They could inform me in the app store or when I install the app. Here apple is making that decision for me.

Apple is obviously the vendor for people who like to have their hands held. If you don't like that, make your decision earlier, just don't buy Apple. Worked for me the last decade.

I'm happy for them to hold my hand on commodity electronics. I don't ever want to have to think about how my phone and headphones work. I like to fiddle with computers, but not the stuff I need to run my day to day life.

'If you don't like our business practices, don't buy from Standard Oil' type argument

Apple has a monopoly on mobile devices?

They have dominant market position on mobile phones in the US which allows them to act anti-competitively, yes

> As a customer I would like to be able to make that decision.

You can. There are dozens (hundreds?) of phones you can buy that aren’t an iPhone. It’s been well known for nearly 20 years at this point that iPhones are more closed than the competition (of which, again, there is a lot). They are successful because of this, not in spite of it, contrary to internet belief.

I know.

However, apple devices have been just more reliable for me and retain better resale.

Why do you think they are more reliable and have better resale value?

Surely because they can’t be paired with a Pebble

Why doesn't Apple openly market that it's doing stuff in its financial interest? Is it too embarrassed to point that out?

I'm not sure I follow? Every company does what is in their own financial interest. Even b-corps and non-profits have to keep an eye on their balance sheets.

The point is that Apple does not actually care about you on the basis of principles. It only cares about you to the extent that it serves its own financial interests.

This is important because Apple could one day decide that caring about you no longer serves its interests. This has already happened with user experience, where even the Settings app now has built-in ads pushing Apple's services. It has also happened with security, where Apple uses its robust security infrastructure to prioritize media company DRM over users' interests.

Do people expect a computer company to love them individually?

> Apple uses its robust security infrastructure to prioritize media company DRM over users' interests

You mean they follow the law so that they don't get sued into the ground?

> Do people expect a computer company to love them individually?

I expect corporations to be honest and sincere, and present the full argument for why they're doing what they're doing. I don't know if "people" in general expect this, but if they don't, then their expectations are too low.

I am quite sure there is no US law which says Apple must build out support for media company DRM. Linux doesn't support it and hasn't been declared illegal.

> I expect corporations to be honest and sincere

Mate, have I got bad news for you regarding literally the entirety of human commerce.

What kind of response is this? I'm aware that expectations don't often match reality. That is a reason to recommit to expectations, not to lower them.

It’s a reason to readjust your expectations and change your actions so you don’t keep slamming your foot with the door.

I personally expect them to sell me a product that does what it says on the box, and Apple does that for me.

Well, my expectations are significantly higher than yours, and I believe I'm right to have them.

Many people who believe they are right end up miserable and right.

I would suggest dispensing with meta-level arguments and engaging on the object level.

I’m a grown adult who can make my own decisions. If my phone no longer meets my needs, I’ll get a different one, or not use one at all.

I also care about other people, those who might not have the "choice" to do so. (I don't believe "choice" is a coherent concept in the first place.)

This is (I guess) not what OP meant. Apple obviously also gains financially from blokcing everything outside of there ecosystem, mainly because the majority of Apple users will only buy Apple hardware. Obviously, yeah, keeping the hardware a bit more safe also helps, but the main financial gain is definitely not coming from this.

Note that I said seamless AND secure. Having preferential treatment for a limited set of well known hardware makes the experience seamless. I like the secure and easy hand-off between apple devices. I wouldn't want to give up the security to make it work.

> I wouldn't want to give up the security to make it work

Android shows that you don't have to.

Your argumentation itself is nefarious, because you're implicitly equating third-party with insecure.

Something I learned a while ago is that there's a particular brand of very vocal person online who has a bone to pick with Apple. Sometimes it's for a good reason, sometimes less so, but the point is that they come to discussions of any Apple topic with a conclusion ready in hand and then work backwards from that. In this case the conclusion is, "Apple is wicked, perfidious, and monopolistic."

Truthfully there isn't much you can say to people in that mindset.

I think trillion dollar companies should not exist. They are inherently destructive to humanity.

Case in point. If the topic was that, then I'd welcome the discussion, but when you simply bring that to every discussion about Apple... it gets old. After all your statement only really needs to be said once for people to understand it, which makes the repetition over the years very grating. "Single issue posters" are generally the least engaging on the internet.

I'm not a single-issue poster. I'm an established engineer with a large amount of public writing, much of which has been on the HN front page!

Apple is a poster child for why there should be limits on the power of wealth

Closing your mind to the possibility that Apple is throughly rotton is probably soothing, but the possibility remains that we are right, you are wrong, and each time the conclusion is the same, and correct

Big Tech monopolies sniffle innovation and hord resources

Apple and the like are only worth as much as they are because of intellectual property laws. Without that, you'd have a million iPhone clones (perfect copies, minus the dumb stuff) on the market a few days later and Apple would soon be worthless.

Intellectual property laws is not some natural law of the universe. It only exists because the people (i.e. the general public) want it to exist. They could do away with it on a whim, but choose not to. Which isn't irrational as it may first seem. Their own careers probably rely on the status quo, and their retirement savings no doubt rest on companies like Apple being worth a fortune, so there is a lot of incentive to not rock the boat.

IP laws are not all or nothing. It is possible to have property law that allows the good things (personal property, rewards for innovation) without the bad (market domination, monopoly and oligopoly)

We have not tried, and it is not due to "we the people" it is due to "them our overlords"

> it is due to "them our overlords"

Funny enough, the state of intellectual property tends to be much more relaxed where overlords are actually found (e.g. China). It's easy when one guy can make things so. Far less easy when you have millions upon millions of people afraid that any change will impact them personally.

This seems arbitrary. What is the limiting principle here? Should there be no 100 billion dollar company? How about after 50 years of inflation?

You’re more than welcome to adjust for inflation on that number.

it's tiring isn't it?

The fucking article is about this, so it's very relevant.

Yes. Probably in approximately the same way I find that there's nothing you can say to Apple fans that find a way to justify anything the Apple does.

"We should not discuss how much of a monopoly Apple is. It's impossible to convince some people that it's actually not a monopoly."

Interesting conclusion given that pro-Apple comments with provably incorrect claims routinely end up at the top of the HN's comment section, this thread included. Information directly refuting those claims often gets downvoted and suppressed. Why is that?

Aren't all you apple defenders with very similar opinions also "a particular brand of very vocal person online"?

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