Several billion dollars is the minimum initial investment cost to compete in this space, to deal with all the patents and legal and regulatory to make your own phone with its own marketplace. If I don't use an iPhone my non-technical family members can't conveniently share photos with me the only way they know how. My friends can't AirDrop me videos. Apple has ensured its products won't interop well with non-Apple products.
...and it hasn't occurred to you to wonder why all of your friends want Apple devices?
There'a a lot to dislike about Apple. But your friends know that airdrop will always work between each other. If Merlin appeared and made airdrop interoperable with your device... Your friends would leave Apple, because all of those experiences would become as fragmented and unreliable as open ecosystems are.
100% cool to hate Apple and wish regulatory doom on them. But don't think that Apple customers will be thankful. They will move to the next closed ecosystem that offers vertical integration and better UX. Because that's what they want.
KDE Connect works as well as airdrop between iOS and Desktop Linux and Android, and isn't a unintrospectable proprietary protocol. (Which is to say honestly it's spotty, but so is Airdrop. It's the underlying Bluetooth that's at fault with both.)
Even then, Apple could choose to let their protocol be reimplimentable by others but they've chosen very explicitly not to. They've locked it down with Apple signatures that can't be used by competitors. As you pointed out, it's a competitive advantage for them to lock others out, so they have. It's working, but it's gross. We can dream about better, but for now, no buying books on the Kindle/Amazon app on your iphone, or buying video off Google Play on your iphone, or Chromecasting AppleTV to your Chromecast (just buy an Apple TV like you're made of money).
I think it has a lot to do with costly signalling - Apple has focused on being the luxury option. That's what a lot of people really want; the closed ecosystem and UX are secondary concerns.
Luxury is just one of their offerings. They are one of the few companies where the "cheap" version of their products is just last years. This is actually super nice and speaks not only to how they're not purely luxury but how they make stuff that lasts a long time.
I don't mean to imply that's it's all bling and no substance - their build quality is indeed generally very good but that's part of it isn't it? Good build quality is a luxury these days, especially in tech.
How is something a “luxury” that is owned by over 50% of the American market?
Since it is easy to pay for a phone on an installment plan, anyone making $15-$20 a hour can pay for one with two hours a month. Even your typical fast food restaurant has to pay that much these days to attract workers.
If I walk into a store and buy the average Android phone for $300 on a no interest 24 month installment plan from T-mobile , I will be paying $12/month.
If I buy a midrange iPhone 13, it’s $24.95 a month.
That’s not even mentioning an iPhone SE that is still faster than high end Android phones for $429 or $17.95 a month.
And that “luxury” iPhone 8 (circa 2018) will have a better resale value and will get OS update for years still runs the latest OS and the iPhone 5s (circa 2013) has had a security update in the last year.
These are all perceptions of status created by the marketing of these global companies.
Saying Apple is luxury is kinda like saying an Applebee’s is luxury - only because there is a cheaper McDonald’s across the street. Phones are definitely status symbols but their ceiling is relatively low.
That being said, in my country iPhones are a much more of a status symbol because everyone really is poorer. Scoffing at Apple’s pricing is the norm here.
Globally, an interesting question is what happens if you take a date to McDonald's. Living in America, that's gonna be the end of your date. Meanwhile, it depends on where in the rest of the globe you're talking about. There are plenty of places in the world where that's a decent, if not high status place to take a date. (There are also non-America places where it's not, mind you.) (A McDonald's-date index would be a fascinating bit of sociology research.)
So are people going to AppleBees only for “status” and not because the food is actually better than McDonalds?
Not everyone wants a $60 Blu R1 HD for $70 no more than everyone wants to eat off the $1 menu at McDonalds. Many people find the entire Android ecosystem janky.
I don’t know what a “Blu R1” is so I can’t bother to go off with you on that tangent. But my point was only that all of these products are designed and priced for global-scale mass consumption. Apple isn’t a Michelin-star restaurant. They’re about as much better as that difference in price is.
I said "the luxury option", not that owning an iPhone is a luxury. Most people will spend whatever they can to get the look they want. Look at their advertising - it's much more about style than features - or notice how you can often tell when someone owns a pair of AirPods because they never take them off. Apple tech is as much about making a fashion statement as it is about the functionality.
They may now have over 50% US smartphone market share but that's only recently the case; however they've had the lion's share of the money for a long time.
So 50% plus of Americans only buy a phone because of the “look”?
Bluetooth headphones and not taking them off has been a thing since they first became popular. Even before that as far back as the Walkman people have walked around with headphones.
Maybe "premium" would be a better word than "luxury"? Apple are trying to be the premium option and people like showing off the premium items they own (which is referred to in scientific circles as 'costly signalling').
Again have you ever thought that something is “premium” based on its feature set and how well it works - not just to impress people?
The difference is that you can buy an iPhone for $17-$25/month compared to $4-$12/month for an Android phone. It’s like going to McDonalds and choosing not to eat off the value menu.
Over 50% of the market including my 80 year old mom are not buying iPhones to impress people.
What does that advert say? We have the best sound quality? We have the most storage? We have the best value for money? None of those things - it says you should buy this because it will make you look cool.
I didn't say every single person who buys an iPhone is just trying to look cool. But that is first and foremost how they sell their products.
> But your friends know that airdrop will always work between each other
The funny thing is, I've literally heard my friends muttering to each other in the car that their airdrop isn't working. Unfortunately most people aren't quite so understanding if an open source equivalent ever breaks for any reason, even if it's just as reliable on average.
> Your friends would leave Apple, because all of those experiences would become as fragmented and unreliable as open ecosystems are.
The reasons for that are also anticompetitive.
Open standards that are not battlegrounds can simply work and be implemented easily. TCP, SSH, BGP, and thousands more work basically flawlessly no matter who is building the software.
So how’s the consumer UX for BGP? Your parents like it ok?
Ingredients can be standardized and commoditized. Apple uses the standard networking protocols (mostly), normal stainless steel formulations, typical interconnects for their display controllers.
But a product, in the sense of something a person decides to buy and someone sits in front of and uses, cannot be standardized while providing a good user experience. That’s literally the truth under the “better mousetrap” saying: people will throw money at you if you make something better, and therefore different, from what’s in the market today.
Yes, differentiating your products is anti-competitive, in the sense that you’re trying to get people to buy your products instead of someone else’s. But it is also fiercely competitive, in the sense that you are competing for business.
The critical insight here is that purchasers value UX over the benefits of standardized, commoditized, undifferentiated products. You can legislate and regulate to prohibit differentiation, but left to their own devices that is not what people want.
The consumer UX for BGP is awesome. It’s invisible.
To fix your argument, let’s pick one that end-users actually interact with: HTTP.
The UX for raw HTTP is pretty rough, and very few people could even use it without at least a refresher on the commands. However, since HTTP is standardized, anyone can make an application with excellent UX and even applications that have excellent UX for specific markets (devs, visually impaired users, non-technical boomers, non-technical millennials, etc). This is typically what people are arguing for: let companies compete at the application level and keep the underlying technologies as open standards.
It's not abusive to build really good experiences for your customers and it's not a mystery why they don't waste their resources developing for the competition.
So? There are ample ways to share a video that aren't based on single-platform features.
If Apple invents a way to do some thing X between two of its users, that's great. That's a platform advantage. There's no legal or moral standing that allows us to insist that they open that to other platforms.
But the result will suck. Sure you can do it but you'll be competing against Apple and Samsung who have invested billions and have the results to show for it. And you'll also end up as a system integrator because millions doesn't buy you your own chips so you'll be at the whim of the other companies investing billions like Qualcomm.
How much does it take? I’ve pondered this a few times over the years for various business ideas, so yeah, I’m genuinely asking in a non snarky way… what does it cost to do an OEM phone ?
I’m referring to the millions and of course cost per unit go down depending on how many units you commit to.
The hardest part is dealing with manufacturers and suppliers. In the US, building phones this way is not as popular as building vertical market hardware for kiosks and special putouse devices.
You choose your screen size. memory, SOC etc. It’s been awhile. But I spent a few years working in field services during the transition from companies using Windows CE to Android for industrial ruggedized devices.
Still pretty pricy, but it’s a lower bar than most people probably think it is if the comments here are anything to go by.
Does make me wonder if there’s anyone out there playing middleman and doing a white label service at an even lower price point, they eyeball the market for design trends and OEM some generic phone designs and then sell them on to smaller shops like small MVNOs that don’t have a few million to spare doing a complete OEM phone of their own.
There have been white label phone manufactures since the original Windows CE based phones. HTC use to manufacture close to 80% of Windows CE phones sold by different brands.
