razmataz

GeorgeBMac said:

Based on Libertarian, Free Market principles, if that's all one is looking at, then yes, Apple's practices are anti-competitive.

But, if one looks at the whole picture then, like any and every government, Apple sets rules.   And those Rules & Restrictions are designed to protect both the brand and the consumers who buy that brand.   One simply can't separate the two.

Perhaps a good analogy is to look at AT&T:   various private enterprise groups wanted to start their own telephone companies, so they used anti-competitive rulings to take down one of America's premier companies.  The result:  AT&T was destroyed, the start-ups failed and America and Americans lost.
(Interesting side note:   Without AT&T we may not have ever had an Apple as hacking into its systems with their blue box was Steve & Woz's first taste producing a marketable product together)

Personally, I welcome the security and peace of mind ApplePay gives me and do not want that interfered with.   Likewise, I wish that Apple would increase and improve its policing of 3rd party apps on the App Store.

... One of the reasons I favor Apple is its stability, security and privacy protections.  Opening up to third parties would make it more Microsoft like.

....... Perhaps that emphasis on security & privacy stems from the founders initial efforts as entrepreneurs by hacking one of America's most prestigious organzations?

But, with lots of money sloshing around, there will always be people and organizations looking for a slice of that pie -- and (mis)using government to get it.

I doubt the EU can be viewed as market libertarians. But on a wide range of subjects they often express a genuine concern for a "level playing field". I think they are going to investigate this under that lens. We'll see what comes out. The perceived problem with the technology sector is that in many areas it is often winner-takes-all. The argument  against curtailing the leader is that it slows down progress to force competition. Maybe there is a balance to be found once the innovator's position is extremely well established, and I doubt the innovator would ever do it without a bit of prodding.

Out of interest, do you see allowing other payment systems threatening interference with the security and peace that ApplePay gives you? I'm not seeing it.

Rayz2016 said:

elijahg said:

It’ll be interesting to see whether Apple reduces the price of the Macs to correspond to the much cheaper ARM CPUs, I bet they won’t. 

Wouldn't have thought so. 

With Intel, Apple didn't have the R&D costs associated with building its own processor. Now that they're doing the processor themselves, this won't make things necessarily cheaper. Bear in mind that these ARM chips aren't actually ARM. They're  custom-designed silicon from the ground-up that just happens to run the ARM instruction set, and have been crafted to bleed the last iota of performance out of MacOS/iOS. Apple will use every trick in the book to surpass what they had with Intel.

Well, if the rumor is correct (big if) then they aren't going after the Intel high end at first since they are aiming for the lower end Macs. And, unlike Intel, what would be the rush for Apple to invest early in user IPs such as PCIe 5.0 if they integrate the GPU and do something for solid state storage. Apple already architects their own ARM SOCs on rather powerful iPads, lots can be leveraged from that without adding so much cost. If you time it right, you can buy a very good iPad for $300 these days, with a decent processor and a tremendous screen. So it is not a stretch to think they could do better on the Mac price. But I also don't expect prices to be reduced, one of the goals is probably to increase margins to sustain the valuation of the company even though the Mac business doesn't seem so big. The ever rising iPhone prices do a better job of achieving that.

I can't help but think one of the main goal is to gain substantial battery life and better cooling solutions. In turn this will improve the form factor a lot. Then throw in lots of hardware IP to give it an edge over the competition which will require years of standard deliberation to come to similar solutions that are universal and necessarily more complex. I see Windows as the Swiss Army knife of computers, whereas Apple aims to do the mainstream simpler and usually gets there faster. The possibilities are endless with their kind of resources.