The US Department of Justice accuses Apple of having an illegal monopoly over smartphones

[jagdtigger]

1 hour ago, wanderingfool2 said:

That shows an ignorance of what is the reality.

I wonder who is ignoring reality here. There is no such thing as a legal monopoly, it shows in their actions pretty plainly too. (See the examples in my previous post.) They lie, they cheat, they steal. A monopoly is rotten to the core and thus cannot be called legal by any stretch of the meaning.

[wanderingfool2]

7 minutes ago, jagdtigger said:

I wonder who is ignoring reality here. There is no such thing as a legal monopoly, it shows in their actions pretty plainly too. (See the examples in my previous post.) They lie, they cheat, they steal. A monopoly is rotten to the core and thus cannot be called legal by any stretch of the meaning.

You are making a blanket statement.  What Leadeater said was correct, being a monopoly isn't illegal.

 

What I said was correct as well, being classified as a monopoly means they have to follow additional sets of rules.

 

You can hate monopolies all you want, but lets be clear it's NOT against the law and insisting that it is is just showing ignorance on the subject.  Show one law that states being  a monopoly is illegal.  Again being a monopoly only means you are subject to more laws, but if you don't break those laws you can be a monopoly AND still be within the law.

 

The statements you also made can easily apply to any company.  Delivery companies for example where they literally instruct their drivers to take the tickets by double parking/parking in a no stopping.  Publicly trade companies which hold a duty to the shareholder, not the customer, so it's to maximize the overall profits.  etc.

 

Again, all a monopoly does is means they play with an additional restriction of laws.

[starsmine]

1 hour ago, jagdtigger said:

I wonder who is ignoring reality here. There is no such thing as a legal monopoly, it shows in their actions pretty plainly too. (See the examples in my previous post.) They lie, they cheat, they steal. A monopoly is rotten to the core and thus cannot be called legal by any stretch of the meaning.

Natural monopolies are legal monopolies. 
do you really think you can buy from different water utilities?

Oh I dont like dominion energy, let me go buy from a different power provider in my area, oh no.

[leadeater]

2 hours ago, jagdtigger said:

Yeah sure, that is why specific laws exist against them..... /s

If you read them you'd know they actually are not illegal. Don't make not reading things such a big problem 

 

Naturally formed monopolies formed/created by non-illegal acts is not illegal, it is not a crime to be good. It's a crime to be "good" and then abuse it.

[LAwLz]

2 hours ago, leadeater said:

If you read them you'd know they actually are not illegal. Don't make not reading things such a big problem 

 

Naturally formed monopolies formed/created by non-illegal acts is not illegal, it is not a crime to be good. It's a crime to be "good" and then abuse it.

Exactly

 

Back when the DOJ investigated Intel (almost 20 years ago) it wasn't because Intel just had a lot of market share. They kept an eye on Intel because they were really big, and they started an investigation when there were claims that they paid companies like Dell to not sell AMD products.

 

Making a good product that sells well and takes over the market = fine.

Using the control of the market to disadvantage others = not fine.

 

 

The threat Apple constantly puts on developers to bend to their will or risk getting kicked off the market is in my opinion a fairly obvious abuse of this power. The only reason why developers even go along with restrictions like "you're not allowed to tell users that they can get your product for cheaper outside of the iOS app" is because Apple holds such massive power over the market. Getting kicked off iOS could potentially kill a company. So developers have to do what Apple says, and Apple uses that power to make sure they get a cut of all the revenue those developers make. They are using threats that only holds water because of their power over the market to make sure they make more money. That if anything is a clear abuse of their monopoly if you ask me.

Them making it so that there are apps on the iPhone only they could develop, like third-party browsers, use of NFC and so on are also a clear example of them keeping others down for their own gains. When Microsoft did that the DOJ forced them to give third-party developers access to the same APIs.

 

 

With great power comes great responsibility. Apple unarguably has great power.

If you are in such a position then you can't use that power to harm others, especially not for your own gains.

[Dracarris]

5 hours ago, jagdtigger said:

I wonder who is ignoring reality here. There is no such thing as a legal monopoly, it shows in their actions pretty plainly too. (See the examples in my previous post.) They lie, they cheat, they steal. A monopoly is rotten to the core and thus cannot be called legal by any stretch of the meaning.

At this point, you aren't even trying anymore, right? You just like to flame around.

[Kisai]

On 3/24/2024 at 9:57 AM, Uttamattamakin said:

I agree with this move.  Consider that if you own an Apple computer you need to have an Apple phone or tablet to recover your password.  They act like a monopoly over those who buy into their ecosystem at all.   Then they use their influence to monopolize key applications in various areas.  

For example.  For the longest time there was an app called forflight which pilots would use and it ONLY ran on iPad.  WHY?   Then there is the way Apple more or less ran every other company that tried to forward a new and in some ways better OS out of business.   If it wasn't for Samsung would Android still have decent hardware OR would it basically be a feature phone OS?

Samsung is the only Android vendor that offers a "flagship" Android device, and they've been trying to get rid of Android and be Apple in every way. Why haven't they succeeded? People don't want proprietary devices. I would no sooner buy into the "Samsung Ecosystem" when the devices they offer are clearly overpriced and poorly built compared to Apple, or even Dell.

 

On 3/23/2024 at 8:47 AM, Donut417 said:

The last time I recall Anti Trust laws in the US actually working on a major company was in the 1980's when the Ma Bell was broken up. So again I dont really think Apple has much to worry about.

 

 

I don't think anyone on the forum was even born or old enough to claim they were harmed by the AT&T Bell monopoly in 1984. I'm old enough to remember the fallout, and how all the US television channels were pushing all these CLEC's that we didn't have in Canada, and then there was the LD carriers.

 

Where are all those CLEC's and LD carriers now? They are gone. They've been gone since the advent of wireless phones. I distinctly remember a tick box in **** CRM  (the customer support front end (CARRIER NAME) used, about what LD carrier the Wireless customer was using. But over the time I was there, the (CARRIER NAME) actually eliminated a lot of their own LD costs by using their own LD network.

 

Sometimes customer choice actually increases costs. In order to support "LD carrier" choice, it required a pile of extra infrastructure that increased the actual cost of offering the wireless service. People switched to TFN LD providers that you needed a calling card for, and it largely went away.

 

The breakup was AT&T's idea. People forget that.

 

Verizon and Qwest were never part of AT&T. Verizon was originally the ILEC "GTE". It became Verizon after acquiring two of the baby bells assets and divesting itself of it's share of BCTel. 

 

In another world where AT&T wasn't broken up, it's very likely that AT&T would have acquired all telecom networks in the US and there would be no Verizon, there would be no T-Mobile, there would be no Rogers or Telus in Canada, it would just be all one network, and internet access would be considered a luxury, as nobody would be on it without owning AT&T hardware. Never mind smartphones, we'd probably only ever have seen phones stay phones. But it likely would have also only had competition in the internet space by cable television providers, and that's an entirely other story (remember the @home network that was what was providing the internet access for all the cable providers in North America.) Cable providers are barely competitive in the CURRENT market, imagine one where they only had AT&T to compete with. They'd just collude like they do now and offer the same prices.

 

One does not need to be a monopoly to be harming the consumer. It merely needs to not "be competitive". People often don't make a distinction between the phone and the network it runs on. If they are with AT&T, and T-Mobile offers then a 5 dollar cheaper plan, they can't switch because they still have to payout the "free" phone they got on AT&T. Contract lock-ins and early termination fees are why carriers can keep charging as much as they do, because people can't switch.

 

What needs to happen there is the complete ban of SIM-locking and Carrier-locking. If someone buys a phone, they should be able to use it on any courier, and since everyone is on LTE now, there is no reason to make carrier-specific models. Yet... they still do.

 

But price competition on devices and carriers will only come from regulation, there's not enough competitors in the space, and short of the government deciding to tell Apple they must license or open source MacOS/iOS/iPadOS/TVOS to competitors, nothing is going to change Apple's dominant position in the US. 

 

Cause I assure you, if iOS could be installed to a whitebox smartphone, you'd actually see a lot LESS Android devices.

 

[saltycaramel]

On 3/24/2024 at 5:57 PM, Uttamattamakin said:

For example.  For the longest time there was an app called forflight which pilots would use and it ONLY ran on iPad.  WHY?   

 

Ask the makers of ForeFlight?

 

Maybe because Android tablets never really took off as a premium software platform where real people and professionals spend actual money for premium apps?

 

Maybe because iPads are stable, predictable and dependable hardware-wise across the years? 

 

You may have made the case for the closed system with that example.

 

Looks like it's Apple's fault even when competitors can't get their sh..strategy together. 

[Mark Kaine]

On 3/25/2024 at 11:58 PM, Kisai said:

Cause I assure you, if iOS could be installed to a whitebox smartphone, you'd actually see a lot LESS Android devices.

other way around, if you could install android on iphones it would make sense to own one.

 

they make premium hardware only let down by bad, clunky software and a draconian eco system.

 

[Kisai]

24 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

other way around, if you could install android on iphones it would make sense to own one.

 

they make premium hardware only let down by bad, clunky software and a draconian eco system.

 

Nope. Other vendors would love to dump Android. Probably all of them. Samsung had Bada and Tizen. That's all dead as of 2021.

 

This has always been the case, people want Apple's OS to run it on off-the-shelf hardware. Or are you seriously ignoring the entire hackintosh community that has existed since the switch to Intel hardware, and the likewise AsahiLinux on Apple's PPC and ARM hardware. It goes both ways, People want Apple's mobile hardware because the mobile hardware runs circles around the garbage marketed as Android, and nobody else makes ARM desktops. People also want Apple's MacOS and iOS/iPadOS on MORE POWERFUL hardware, and that was always something you could hack together on the Intel Mac's.

 

Put two and two together. Competitors would love to be able to run iOS on their cheaper hardware, but Apple won't do this because that would mean they would have to innovate on price.  Which means cheapening the devices.

 

But that is the most direct way of "breaking" any perceived monopoly Apple has. Requiring licensing to at least two competitors (Eg Samsung and Nokia) to produce iPhone-compatible models. Apple does not need to sell them the SoC's. That's something Samsung would have to design themselves.

 

[saltycaramel]

https://super.news/en/articles/2024/03/27/apple-faces-landmark-antitrust-lawsuit-over-77-billion-buyback-scheme
 

In other words: “Apple is too efficient at R&D spending and too good at giving back value to investors”. 

[Kisai]

1 minute ago, saltycaramel said:

https://super.news/en/articles/2024/03/27/apple-faces-landmark-antitrust-lawsuit-over-77-billion-buyback-scheme
 

In other words: “Apple is too efficient at R&D spending and too good at giving value back to investors”. 

It is not a crime to make money.

 

Stock buybacks should be illegal, but a company doing so typically means it's products should be suspected of being low quality. See the current Boeing woes that are a consequence of prioritizing stock buybacks and outsourcing instead of quality control.

 

All these companies right now cutting tech jobs right now, are failing to heed this.

 

[wanderingfool2]

2 minutes ago, Kisai said:

Stock buybacks should be illegal

That overall depends, there is an issue with stocks in that they can actually become undervalued early on if you have enough short positions that push down the value.  If the company is in a stable enough position to buyback stocks can help them keep the value of the stock higher, while eventually doing things such as selling back stock when times are good again [if they need to bankroll stuff].

 

Overall buybacks shouldn't be illegal, as they still have to purchase them from shareholders exiting the market; and in some aspects it can help give the current shareholders more control of the company.  It overall has it's time and place.

 

2 hours ago, Kisai said:

Put two and two together. Competitors would love to be able to run iOS on their cheaper hardware, but Apple won't do this because that would mean they would have to innovate on price.  Which means cheapening the devices.

Overall one issue Android has is that it has to handle multiple different hardware out there.  Apple doesn't want to open it up because development that supports a bunch of different architectures and configurations becomes a really unwieldy process [as you now have to test tons of different configurations etc].

[saltycaramel]

3 minutes ago, Kisai said:

It is not a crime to make money.

 

Stock buybacks should be illegal, but a company doing so typically means it's products should be suspected of being low quality. See the current Boeing woes that are a consequence of prioritizing stock buybacks and outsourcing instead of quality control.

 

All these companies right now cutting tech jobs right now, are failing to heed this.

 

 

Which is a pretty bold thing to suspect about the company consistently making the best consumer electronic products in the world and breaking new grounds time and time again (see: the Vision Pro).

Almost batsh!t crazy I'd say.

 

I hope the DOJ has a lot more up its sleeve than the current "iPhone users don't actually like iPhones, they're forced to keep buying them; Apple killed Windows Phone and the Amazon Fire Phone" man-yells-at-cloud dumb take.

 

ps: Apple isn't Boeing and Apple isn't "all these companies" doing huge layoffs

[Kisai]

31 minutes ago, wanderingfool2 said:

That overall depends, there is an issue with stocks in that they can actually become undervalued early on if you have enough short positions that push down the value.  If the company is in a stable enough position to buyback stocks can help them keep the value of the stock higher, while eventually doing things such as selling back stock when times are good again [if they need to bankroll stuff].

 

Overall buybacks shouldn't be illegal, as they still have to purchase them from shareholders exiting the market; and in some aspects it can help give the current shareholders more control of the company.  It overall has it's time and place.

The point was that a company should not be buying back stock as a priority. Because every company that does this, eventually goes bankrupt. CEO's who want to see the price go up at any cost.

 

31 minutes ago, wanderingfool2 said:

Overall one issue Android has is that it has to handle multiple different hardware out there.  Apple doesn't want to open it up because development that supports a bunch of different architectures and configurations becomes a really unwieldy process [as you now have to test tons of different configurations etc].

Nah. If Apple was required to license iOS/iPadOS/MacOS to Samsung and Nokia with the stipulation that Apple is still the copyright holder and Samsung/Nokia can not make changes to the OS except to add their own drivers. That would put them on the correct path. Because really... how many parts to a device are 100% unique and proprietary to a device? Zero. Apple's CPU's are not a custom ISA. We know this because Asahi Linux can run on the M series, which are just the A series with a bigger GPU part. 

 

iOS can't run on a Samsung phone because Apple doesn't make it available, to do so, and unless it's forced to, likely will not. It's not like Samsung isn't making Apple's chips either. So it's pretty bold claim to say that Samsung doesn't know how to make a SoC that would be compatible or performance-parity to the A-series.

 

What I would envision is that Samsung would stop building "proprietary" Android flagship devices and instead build devices that can run iOS at parity, and then sell "Android" versions of the same device with the same SoC.

 

This is all theoretical though. I don't see anything that regulators can force Apple to do that wouldn't just kill the Smartphone industry. Some new device will be rolled out that is better than the Smartphone, and this will all repeat again.

 

edit: Just in case anyone hasn't followed Samsung's smartphones. They often build very-proprietary models at a per-carrier and per-price tier level. They aren't Apple, and not even trying to be, otherwise they would be selling just 3 models, everywhere, to anyone, unlocked. Two models with the same name in different countries could be vastly different in performance.

 

Also it's not un precedented. https://www.samsung.com/us/support/answer/ANS00082624/ , the Apple TV app is on Samsung TV's. Apple has some kind of relationship that lets Samsung run the Apple TV app, it's not a leap of logic that Samsung could possibly license other software or the entire OS if Apple were incentivized to.

 

[saltycaramel]

My iPhone 15 Pro Max feels so intentionally nerfed by Apple. 

 

My AirPods Pro 2 are so low quality, those darn share buybacks.

I hate my 16" MBP to my guts, I wish I wasn't locked in this whole ecosystem thing.

 

 

...said no one ever.

Some of the wording in that suit feels like there's literally someone at the DOJ drinking the stereotypical "Apple hater in every comment section on the internet" kool-aid. That's gonna cost a lot of money (for the years of pointless court battle) to US taxpayers if their case is so weak and Apple manages to turn it upside down. On the other hand, usually they take on cases they can win so they may have some damning evidence (like emails, etc.) up their sleeve. But for the time being, there sure are some dumb takes in that 88-page suit.

[saltycaramel]

Btw doing share buybacks in principle is not that different from paying dividends.

 

Same diversion of company money from investments/R&D to shareholders.

 

Same effect on the stock price.

 

It’s just that dividends look really bad when you stop paying them, whereas with buybacks you’re not as committed to doing it forever at the same rate. Plus tax considerations etc.

 

So I guess if Apple stopped doing share repurchases and instead tripled its dividend that would be fine and wouldn’t imply “low quality products because of artificially reduced competition” any longer..

[leadeater]

3 hours ago, saltycaramel said:

https://super.news/en/articles/2024/03/27/apple-faces-landmark-antitrust-lawsuit-over-77-billion-buyback-scheme
 

In other words: “Apple is too efficient at R&D spending and too good at giving back value to investors”. 

Buying stocks back rarely is about giving value to investors, the two most common reasons are to increase company value for creditor reasons and the second is to lower investor influence over the company. There are others but here whatever it is, benefiting investors is the least likely.

[leadeater]

3 hours ago, Kisai said:

Apple's CPU's are not a custom ISA. We know this because Asahi Linux can run on the M series, which are just the A series with a bigger GPU part. 

Getting something to run on hardware doesn't mean there aren't custom ISA extensions that are significant and meaningful. I mean what you are saying is there is no fundamental difference between Intel and AMD x86 while there very much is.

 

Implementing an ISA is the bare minimum which also means an OS can be made to run on this bare minimum, doesn't mean it can actually leverage the hardware of the device properly. Cryptography acceleration for example are ISA extension that are not required, so if you were to benchmark OS A vs OS B there could be 10x or higher performance difference just for that alone. It just snowballs from there.

 

If Apple were to allow iOS to run on other hardware then it absolutely would effect OS development and support as well as actual features of the OS which rely on hardware support which either won't be there in other devices or implemented in a different way that has issues because no two unique implantations are the same i.e. Intel AVX2 vs AMD AVX2, or fTPM, memory encryption etc.

 

Requiring iOS to run on non-Apple hardware will result in a poor experience for non-Apple device users and will, 100%, eventually compromise iOS development itself in some way either just in cost, increase feature development time or restrictions on what features can be developed due to lack of consensus on hardware level features.

 

There are few times I would ever say Apple is right and justified in restricting something but this is one of those times.

[Kisai]

15 minutes ago, leadeater said:

There are few times I would ever say Apple is right and justified in restricting something but this is one of those times.

Yet we see exactly what happens with Windows and Android. 

 

Look, Apple may be right in that, but that doesn't mean the US government won't insist on doing so. Or some variation of Apple must license at least two third parties to use their OS. Maybe Apple might be forced to license Samsung to produce the same SoC too. This is just speculation.

 

We've seen the compatibility and stability problems in Windows largely because companies don't want to standardize on a smaller set of compatible hardware to support well. Like the entire fiasco with the 12th/13th/14th Intel CPU's and having to nerf the E cores on Windows 10, or Windows 11 not supporting relatively new Ryzen processors because MB's manufacturers didn't implement the fTPM.

 

What I would like to see is Apple having their Arm twisted and being either required to license third parties or open source MacOS/iOS/iPadOS/TVOS, etc. I don't like the idea of a crappy chinese company ripping off iOS and selling their own "iOS" devices that underperform. Nor do I like the idea of what pretty much happened with Android and companies putting it on any piece of junk SoC and pushing it out the door.

 

I would kill for an iPhone that is twice as thick, twice as durable, and lasts two weeks on a charge, but otherwise the same, because the "bumper" cases end up making it twice as thick anyway. Why can't I just get a more durable device or a longer lasting battery in one? OR maybe I don't need the water-resistance rating and could get one with a 3.5mm audio jack and a removable battery. We don't have to limit ourselves here.

 

Many of Apple's innovations aren't really pro-consumer ones. If a competitor is willing to make such a device they should be able to license the current SoC design and the iOS software and just do it. Just such a thing would only be possible by Samsung (who can make the SoC) or a company with hardware experience building cell phones (like Nokia), which is why I keep mentioning those two companies. I wouldn't trust Microsoft to build a phone, they've ultimately proven they can't. 

 

 

 

[BrandonTech.05]

Seeing any other company get punished for being outrageous because of their size, does it really make that big of a difference to sue them? Look at Microsoft. They got the anti-trust lawsuit and after it cooled down they are right back to shoving their browser down your throat and setting it as the default and making it increasingly difficult to change it. 

Genuinely I am asking... will this actually change Apple? 

I know they care a lot about their brand so hopefully this makes a difference? 

What are your guys' takes?

[Commodus]

29 minutes ago, BrandonTech.05 said:

Seeing any other company get punished for being outrageous because of their size, does it really make that big of a difference to sue them? Look at Microsoft. They got the anti-trust lawsuit and after it cooled down they are right back to shoving their browser down your throat and setting it as the default and making it increasingly difficult to change it. 

Genuinely I am asking... will this actually change Apple? 

I know they care a lot about their brand so hopefully this makes a difference? 

What are your guys' takes?

It may make Apple change certain policies, but it's not going to prompt a fundamental rethink of the company's strategy. It's still going to be vertically integrated and sell based on its ecosystem.

 

As others have said, the goal of a case like this isn't to end any monopoly; it's to make sure that rivals can compete fairly. And while regulators can impose terms, that doesn't stop companies from finding new ways to reassert themselves (see: Microsoft). Apple will keep soldiering on, and it'll still be easier to use an Apple Watch or iMessage on your iPhone than a Wear OS watch or WhatsApp.

[Dracarris]

27 minutes ago, Commodus said:

WhatsApp

Besides the vastly superior feature set, denser and more concise UI, and being cross platform, my WhatsApp stuff actually syncs way better with the desktop app on my Mac compared to iMessage and the Messages app on iphone & Mac. Only downside of WA are backup related, where you can easily screw up if you lose/damage your phone.

[starsmine]

8 hours ago, saltycaramel said:

https://super.news/en/articles/2024/03/27/apple-faces-landmark-antitrust-lawsuit-over-77-billion-buyback-scheme
 

In other words: “Apple is too efficient at R&D spending and too good at giving back value to investors”. 

Buy backs are not giving value back to investors the way you think it does. 

 

8 hours ago, wanderingfool2 said:

That overall depends, there is an issue with stocks in that they can actually become undervalued early on if you have enough short positions that push down the value.  If the company is in a stable enough position to buyback stocks can help them keep the value of the stock higher, while eventually doing things such as selling back stock when times are good again [if they need to bankroll stuff].

 

Overall buybacks shouldn't be illegal, as they still have to purchase them from shareholders exiting the market; and in some aspects it can help give the current shareholders more control of the company.  It overall has it's time and place.

Hard ban on buybacks no, but they need to be regulated HARD. Buybacks as they have been used in the US during last 30 years has not been productive in the slightest vs when they were mostly illegal before that. 

Currently there are next to no regulations on the use of that tool and its been... abused for very short term thinking that is no benefit to anyone but golden parachutes. 

[Obioban]

4 hours ago, leadeater said:

Buying stocks back rarely is about giving value to investors, the two most common reasons are to increase company value for creditor reasons and the second is to lower investor influence over the company. There are others but here whatever it is, benefiting investors is the least likely.

Lower investor influence sounds freaking great.

 

Objectively, a lot of what the DoJ actually wants Apple to do is not act in a profit maximizing way. As long as Apple is beholden to investors, they're required to act in a profit maximizing way. If Apple could use its profits to own itself, no such constraint would exist-- they could do what they thought was best.