Consoles are a super interesting comparison. In principle, I agree that they should have to be open too.
On the other hand, consoles' hardware is nearly always subsidized by expected future software royalties, while Apple makes a lot of profit just by selling the hardware alone.
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But these are internal details that shouldn't matter at all when deciding if a business practice is valid or not. If I want to sell a toaster (regardless of whether it's sold at loss or gain) that only toasts bread that I bake, I should be perfectly entitled to do so. And if users flock to my toaster due to its simplicity, predictability, and ease of use, then the fact that other bakers are upset about this shouldn't matter in the least bit.
Whether a toaster or console or smartphone is sold at a loss or gain is an internal detail that isn't even public. It's totally irrelevant.
Once it's in the hands of the user, they have the freedom to make it work with whatever bread they want
Well, sure, and you can try to and some even succeed in jailbreaking their iOS devices. That doesn't mean that Apple should be anything but hostile to such attempts.
We've reached the first point in recent history where we're really seeing products with actively anti-user features at scale. Coffe machines that only take proprietary coffe pods, printers that have DRM on ink cartriges, and more. These are all on a much smaller scale than a computing device that we use for a significant portion of our lives, both for management and entertainment.
Another comparison would be a car that can only drive to restaurants that agreed to give the car company 30% per customer that arrives in one of their cars, and there have to be fences around it to make sure you're not walking to the restaurant next door by foot.
I'm not sure I agree with "I should be able to sell anything with any anti-features I want" anymore to a certain extent, since it does affect such a large part of our lives, as general computing machines.
Arrangements that subsidize a large purchase (printer, paper towel dispenser, coffee maker, razor, smartphone, tractor, etc.) by locking the purchaser into an exclusivity agreement for consumables from the same company (ink, paper towels, coffee pods, razor blades, smartphone apps, tractor maintenance, etc.) are as old as these have been feasible. This innovation tremendously benefits both parties. I'm not sure why you'd dispense with it really.
A simple line of reasoning, like the Earth being flat. Big companies love it because it's the perfect way of avoiding competition, leveraging existing monopolies to build new ones, locking customers, using assimetry of information to hide true costs from them, etc... It has plenty of regulation against it, although it is not truly enforced thanks to deep pockets.
It's a line of reasoning that follows the original intended definition of liberty. Anything I should be free to do in my basement and sell to my neighbours I should be free to do at massive scale. There's no avoiding competition. If someone out there innovates the next generation of personal computing, they will eat Apple's lunch, just like Apple ate RIM's.
That's just ideological propaganda that ignores the last 200 years of economic theory and observations.
It's ideological because this whole idea of forcing terms onto Apple to open it's store is basically socializing parts of Apple infrastructure and parts of its workforce. To me this is totally unacceptable. Apple's innovation has advanced the state of the art a great deal. This company literally invented the concepts that we're now seeking to rob it of. Why can't we just be grateful that the free market was able to produce such a marvel, be glad for the nice devices we all carry around, and leave the org and its investors well enough alone?
Also which economic theory am I ignoring? Didn't Apple itself enter the smartphone market by massively disrupting the existing players and forcing the entire industry to play catchup for over a decade? Didn't they do this without any regulatory intervention to weaken the market incumbents at the time? Why can't we expect that the next smartphone-level innovation to personal computing will come without similar intervention on our parts?
Lol sure let's invalidate all patents for starters, if you want a free market. Copyright next. See how much will be left of Apple's hegemony. Or just admit that regulations are a thing we use to get socially optimal outcomes and not get trapped in market failures like monopolies, duopolies, and negative externalities. Your fetish for unregulated capitalism is not as popular as you think even in the US.
>Apple makes a lot of profit just by selling the hardware alone.
Do you suppose that means Nintendo, which has sometimes turned a profit on their consoles, should have an open system? Interesting take, and I wonder what, in your mind, the threshold is for "makes a lot of profit." I.e., if Apple cut the price of their devices to make as much profit as Nintendo, would they get a pass?
To be honest, I haven't thought about that much, and don't have the mental capacity right now to really think about the answer. It's a good point.
On the spot though I'd say that that would make Nintendo the ones that should open up their system in my mind though, provided they are making a sizeable (10% including stuff like R&D over the span of a few years) profit.
> On the other hand, consoles' hardware is nearly always subsidized by expected future software royalties
Legally that has no bearing on the matter though.
It would be interesting to see the reaction if consoles had to be open to other store (my opinion is that they shouldn't since their are not general purpose devices per se). When the Epic Game Store appeared, the pc gaming community was up in arms against it because it was a Steam rival (sort of a tribal reaction) but were complaining against the NVIDEA GPU monopoly
How would you feel about a, say 100€, fee to "unlock" your PS5 and turn it into a general purpose device that can run ubuntu?
And I think if you put your xbox into development mode you can run your own code on it, like RetroArch although I don't know to what extent that goes.