The Bell System comes to mind, which had a monopoly on telephone service for nearly a century & tightly controlled which devices could run on their network (so they were kind of more analogous to something like "Apple+{Verizon+ATT+TMobile}"). Toward the end of that telephones were definitely the primary medium of communication.
> Under §2 of the Sherman Act 1890 every "person who shall monopolize, or attempt to monopolize ... any part of the trade or commerce among the several States" commits an offence.
IANAL, and I'm assuming USA since that's where Apple has 90% market share on the young, but this seems to imply that monopoly in and on itself is illegal.
You seem to be ignoring 130 years of law that happened since what you are quoting.
Courts quickly began struggling with the Sherman Act's broad and vague language, recognizing that interpreting it literally might make even simple business entities like partnerships illegal.[9] Federal judges began trying to develop legal principles for distinguishing between "naked" trade restraints between rivals that suppressed competition and other restraints that were only "ancillary" to other cooperation agreements that promoted competition.[9]
Because, again, IANAL, and I don't really understand what that means. If the law is vague, so is this paragraph, at least to my unknowlegeable self. I am also not from the USA and have very little experience or awareness of their laws.
Monopoly can be unintentionally abused, simple things like not providing a compiler in the box or trying to add security can be seen to crush competition (like in secureboot, and the current apple App Store distribution issues)
It also goes without saying that the law trails ethics and morality; not the inverse.
Being unable to use any other operating system on your PC was definitely seen as harming the user, and after lots of battles secureboot is optional on x86 windows PCs (but not arm)- in the same vain we managed to successfully argue that people other than Microsoft should have secureboot keys too, and thus redhat also have secureboot keys.
Not having a compiler though? That’s what put back computer science and education 10 years in the Microsoft era, the barrier to programming was a lot higher than it was prior to the late 90s and only recovered in the late 00s where we saw a resurgence of young people learning programming with the availability of WAMP and later django and rails.
You can thank Microsoft that less and less people each year understood native programming.
Microsoft hid their compiler suites behind complex systems, if they had been included or easy to access this would not be the case. But it was a choice on the side of Microsoft that only determined people really need a compiler anyway.
Apple is doing the same thing. But Apple at least ships with some interpreters of some languages like python or ruby. Windows didn’t even have those. Only vbscript (which is not a general purpose language)