Apple has a monopoly over the "M-chip" personal computer market. They have a monopoly over the iOS market with the app store. They have a monopoly over the driver market on macOS.
Like, Microsoft was found guilty of exploiting its monopoly for installing IE by default while still allowing other browser engines. On iOS, apple bundles safari by default and doesn't allow other browser engines.
If we apply the same standard that found MS a monopoly in the past, then Apple is obviously a monopoly, so at the very least I think it's fair to say that reasonable people can disagree about whether Apple is a monopoly or not.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
The relevant thing here isn't the chips, it's tying things to the chips, because those would otherwise be separate markets. If you could feasibly buy an iPhone and install Android or Lineage OS on it or use Google Play or F-Droid on iOS then no one would be saying that Apple has a monopoly on operating systems or app stores for iOS since there would actually be alternatives to theirs.
The fake alternative is that you could use a different store by buying a different phone, but this is like saying that if Toyota is the only one who can change the brake pads on a Toyota and Ford is the only one who can change the brake pads on a Ford then there is competition for "brake pads" because when your Toyota needs new brake pads you can just buy a Ford vehicle. It's obvious why this is different than anyone being able to buy third party brake pads for your Toyota from Autozone, right?
> It’s also probably relevant that MS was not selling PCs or their own hardware.
This is the thing that unambiguously should never be relevant. It can't be a real thing that you can avoid being a monopoly by owning more of the supply chain. It's like saying that Microsoft could have avoided being a monopoly by buying Intel and AMD, or buying one of them and then exterminating the other by refusing to put Windows on it. That's a preposterous perverse incentive.
Move the most important aspects of your software to hardware. Hard for MacOS but for a Chromebook style thing you could write the browser into its own pice of wafer.
Google should pay me to be this evil.
So now you have a piece of silicon with a two year old version of Chrome with seventeen CVEs hard-coded into it, and still have all the same antitrust problems because the device still also has an ordinary general purpose CPU that you're still anti-competitively impeding people from using to run Firefox or Ladybird.
But the M series are an Apple product line designed by Apple with a ARM license and produced on contract by TSMC for use in other Apple products.
Don’t assume the facts from another case automatically apply in other cases.
Or as Justice Jackson once put it: “Other cases presenting different allegations and different records may lead to different conclusions”
Microsoft was found guilty, so clearly the bar is not what you're trying to claim.
Go ahead, I'll wait.
There are plenty of Linux distributions that use immutable root volumes. They protect the user in a huge number of ways by preventing the system from getting hosed (either by accident or by malicious unauthorized users / malware). Apple made the decision to do this for their users, and it has prevented a HUGE amount of tech support calls, as well as led to millions of happy users with trouble-free computers.
It also hasn't stopped users from installing Chrome and/or Firefox on their Macs, and millions of ordinary users have.
You seem to be ignoring the part where you can't install the Chome and/or Firefox browser engines on iOS and the apps with those names on that platform are just skins over Safari. Notice in particular that the iOS version of "Firefox" can't support extensions.
But hey, maybe some weird shit happened during the clone years that I’m not privy to.
Just an example… and yes, I know the EU ruling but it’s still fitting.
Compare the games console market. Nintendo is allowed to say you have to go through them to sell games for the Switch, ditto Microsoft with the Xbox. Sony doing the same thing with the Playstation is exactly equivalent, but they're approaching the sort of market dominance where it might soon be illegal for them (and them alone) to do that in some markets.
Copyright (e.g. over iOS) and patent (e.g. over iPhone hardware) are explicitly government-granted monopolies. Having that monopoly is allowed on purpose, but that isn't the same as it not existing, and having a government-granted monopoly and leveraging into another market are two quite distinct things.
> Compare the games console market.
Okay, all of the consoles that require you to sell you to sell through their stores shouldn't be able to do that either.
> but they're approaching the sort of market dominance where it might soon be illegal for them (and them alone) to do that in some markets.
Wait, your theory is that a console with ~50% market share has market dominance but Apple with ~60% of US phones doesn't?
The monopoly that Microsoft held was the home computer operating system market, first through DOS, then later through Windows. Holding a monopoly like that isn't illegal unto itself. What they were actually found guilty of was unfairly leveraging their monopoly on the OS market to gain the upper hand in a different market (the browser market). The subsequent range of issues we had with IE6 (compatibility, security, etc) was a result of Microsoft succeeding in achieving a monopoly on the browser market through illicit means.
Likewise, "Apple has a monopoly on the App Store" is just the same amount of nonsense. What you could argue is that Apple has a monopoly on the home computer market, or the mobile phone market, and that the way they integrate the App Store should be considered illegal leveraging of that monopoly, but that argument simply doesn't hold water — Microsoft's monopoly on the OS market at the time was pretty much incontrovertible, you simply couldn't walk into a shop and buy a computer running something else (except maybe a Mac at a more specialised place). Today, just about any shop you walk into that sells computers will probably have devices for sale running three different OSes (macOS, Windows, ChromeOS). Any phone place will have iPhones and Android devices, and probably a few more niche options. Actual market share percentage is nowhere near the high 90s that Microsoft saw in its heyday. At most, Apple is the biggest individual competitor in the market, but I don't think it hold an outright majority in any specific product class.
Mind you, I think that there is a good argument to be made that the Apple/Google duopoly on mobile devices does deserve scrutiny, but that's a very different kettle of fish.
When a company is deemed an illegal monopoly, the DoJ basically becomes part of management. Antitrust settlements focus on germane elements, e.g. spin offs. But they also frequently include random terms of political convenience.
I don’t think we want a precedent where companies having a product means they have an automatic monopoly on said product.
Intel sold chips to anyone. Anyone could make Intel computers.
Apple does not sell chips to anyone. Nobody else can make m-series computers.
Your argument is basically that Ford has a monopoly on selling mustangs because standard oil had a monopoly on selling oil.
If we have a right to repair (we broadly do not, AFAICT), then that doesn't necessarily mean that we have a right to modify and/or add new functionality.
When I repair a widget that has become broken, I merely return it to its previous non-broken state. I might also decide to upgrade it in some capacity as part of this repair process, but the act of repairing doesn't imply upgrades. At all.
> No OS provider should be allowed to dictate what software you can or not run on your own device and / or OS you have paid for.
I agree completely, but here we are anyway. We've been here for quite some time.