[johncolanduoni]

Mac market share is less than 10% in the US, even lower in other countries. I personally know at least one person who is considering not buying one next time around just because of this incident. Some people use tools that lock them onto a Mac, but most of that is just people that have to develop for Macs (and they’re stuck no matter what Apple does, because they need to test on Macs). The iOS/App Store monopoly arguments are one thing, but 10% is a monopoly now?

Just because a company sells a product that has some things one might want that no other market players bother combined with some things that they don’t like, doesn’t mean they’re “exploiting a monopoly”.

[AnthonyMouse]

> The iOS/App Store monopoly arguments are one thing, but 10% is a monopoly now?

It goes the other direction. If you want to develop for iOS you have to get a Mac even if you don't want one.

Moreover, this behavior is objectionable regardless of market share, because a platform excluding alternative stores segregates that platform into a different market. If you're a developer whose customers use a Mac, and Apple starts operating the Mac App Store the same as the iOS one, it doesn't matter that they have 10% market share because that 10% of the PC market is 100% of your app customers and the relevant market isn't PCs, it's app distribution to a given customer base.

[johncolanduoni]

That argument applies to literally any product that another business wants to built their own product on. I don’t see how that doesn’t turn into every business being required to make the business model of every other business whose products are built on theirs work in perpetuity. If you make a commercial OS, are you arguing you can’t ever remove any feature in a future version if it would make another company’s product impossible to upgrade?

[AnthonyMouse]

It's not about removing a feature, it's about keeping it there but monopolizing access to it. If the feature goes away entirely, that's fine. And then somebody else can come back and implement it themselves.

But if the company gives themselves access to that feature and not anybody else (even with the permission of the device owner), and restricts anyone else from reimplementing it, that creates a monopoly which they would then be abusing by restricting what competing app developers can do.

Security is the owner of the device controlling what runs on it. Monopoly abuse is the manufacturer of the device doing so against the will of the owner of the device.

[musicale]

> It goes the other direction. If you want to develop for iOS you have to get a Mac even if you don't want one.

Very annoying that you can't use an old Lisa development system like the ones Apple required for the original Macintosh.

[greggman3]

Apple isn't just Macs. iPhone has 50% or greater market share in the USA. iPad has 65% or market share as well. Apple certainly does exploit a monopoly in various different ways. One is their monopoly on browser engines in iOS that lets them dictate web standards because if they don't implement something then the 1.5 billion iSO devices don't get it period.

[johncolanduoni]

You can always fashion a monopoly by adding “they have a monopoly on X on their own product” for any proprietary hardware or software vendor. If you want to argue that proprietary hardware or software shouldn’t be allowed then do that, but don’t try to tie it to monopoly. It has little to do with either the legal or economic implications usually associated with that word.

[amelius]

> Mac market share is less than 10% in the US, even lower in other countries

Do people on other platforms have so many security issues that Apple's measures are justified?

[stephenhuey]

Windows may be better but any of us born before the 90s may still have PTSD from all the pain of troubleshooting malware infestations. 17 years ago I was the primary developer of a commercial Java web app and wanted nothing to do with support phone calls but on many I had to walk our web app users through the installation of Spybot Search & Destroy just so they could get rid of something interfering with their usage of our product!

I was traumatized a few weeks ago when my parents sent me a particularly jarring video of their Windows computer with audio playing telling them to call a number to get rid of something nefarious-sounding but quickly Googled it and realized it was a bunch of popup browser pop ups pretending to be worse than they were. I don’t run into stuff like that when using Firefox on my MacBook.

[quelsolaar]

I would say no. Windows/Linux machines are generally secure.

I think it matters a lot what you consider "Secure" to mean. Most security people are focused on stopping an attacker from remotely installing and executing malicious code on your device. Huge amount of effort is dedicated by security people to adding hardware to stop buffer over runs, make memory protected, signing code and so on, to stop these types of attacks. A more locked down system like iOS/Android is at least in theory more secure then a device ruining Windows and especially Linux, that lets the user install and run what ever they want.

If you on the other hand define security as in control over your device and your data, then the Mobile devices are terrible. A lot of apps are full of "telemetry" (read spyware) that in practice makes most Mobile device leaks a huge amount of data. You have very little control over this. This is an attack vector that is mostly ignored by these companies, because they dont see it as an attack vector, but rather as a revenue stream.