[AndrewKemendo]

One of the hallmarks of being a hacker is a Democratic spirit. The ethos that we’re forever vigilant and deeply skeptical of structural power.

Apple has too much power, no for profit company or person can responsibly wield with that much power.

[dijit]

Eh... I am not worried (yet). Desktop domination is still Windows for the 30th year in a row. Windows currently is much more of a threat to open computing and has been since forever.

Is it nice to have faster ARM chips? Yeah. Does it mean that Apple has a monopoly position? Not really, they just have an edge right now, I'm sure they pay eye-watering amounts to TSMC.

Intel could compete on the lower price end, but they don't, they're instead trying to convince you that they're the fastest chips on the planet, and funnel a power plants worth of electricity through the chip to get there. But they could come back to prominence with a lower power, slower, lower price chip.

[jjtheblunt]

I'm not sure I understand what you mean by Democratic spirit here, a couple hours after you wrote it and i saw it.

I think it's an interesting question because the power you critique in Apple seems to be market share, and I'm misunderstanding how you think that is not the people voting their own opinions with their own money, thus canonically democratic.

I am sure I'm overlooking something you're thinking, so thought why not ask.

[AndrewKemendo]

I appreciate the question.

Conceptually, the idea that an individual signals their support for a business by "voting with your dollars" makes logical sense. However it breaks down for a few reasons I detail below.

1. Illusion of product choice. Apple and Google are the only realistic options for 99% of smartphone users in America. You'll say look at all these other choices and point to a handful of alternative options, however unless you are in a completely different culture, or decide to join a counter-cultural movement you're going to choose a smart phone from Apple or Google because that's the culture we live in and you will be out of the loop if you do not. You might quibble that people could do something *if they only did [x, y, z]" but that's not how groups of people work and you know it. I think at this point over a TRILLION dollars has been spent convincing everyone that if you don’t have a smartphone (with blue text) then you’re not part of the real culture. Bernays proved long ago that propaganda works and it's literally the driving external motivation for our entire culture.

2. Illusion of organizational choice. But let’s say you did vote with your feet and you want to support Nokia. Great, however now all you're doing is supporting another major corporation that wants to be in the same position as Apple, but they just have different owners in a different country. Switching didn't do anything to actually diffuse power, its simply choosing a different privately owned dictatorship to align to. Apple and Google are really no different here, so choosing one over the other nets the same thing in terms of concentration of economic power.

3. Political power. The power that these companies wield in the regulatory capture game reaches far beyond any choice you may think you have or any chance you have as a small company to have an equivalent voice – if for no other reason than you can’t afford a congressman or supreme court justice. So all those "choices" you want still have to comply with whatever the corporate lobby thinks the law should say about technologies and they aren’t bashful with writing legislation. (Every government has their acquisitions system captured by major capitalist corporations)

4. Companies delegate responsibility for externalities. Recycling is a great example here. It's well known that the plastics industry has decided to "pass the decision" along to consumers by stamping their products with 1-5 recycling indicias. Problem is, most recycling systems cannot process or do not have recycling demand for anything 3-5, forcing consumers to do the work to differentiate. In fact, these same plastics companies KNOW that they are not recyclable yet intentionally do not reduce usage, meanwhile greenwashing their products to convince consumers that they are. Ok now do that for every other externality or illegal practice like slavery wages and wage theft, PFAS, CFC's, child labor etc... and there would be basically no companies in business

5. Consumers must know everything to make an actual informed choice. OK, so you say, “well I’m smart enough, I want to make a purchase that is good quality, has a net positive impact on resource use, uses pro-social labor practices and is inside my budget” in order to do this you need to spend an hour researching every supply chain and review etc… to get past the submarine articles, general marketing propaganda, obscene obfuscation of operating practices and on and on and as a result almost nobody has the time or energy. So then people look to third party review sites (all corporate sponsored) so you can’t actually trust the reviews.

The fact that people COULD do something differently is held back by the fact that most people WONT because corporations have structured everything to support the structure that supports them. In no way is this democratic because it doesn’t actually include what the alternatives could be and WE DO NOT BUILD INFRASTRUCTURE FOR ALTERNATIVES. So doing anything other than scamming people or trying to find a sucker left holding the bag (aka an EXIT opportunity/Liquidity event) is “off the beaten path.”

[jjtheblunt]

cool response! much appreciated

[mvid]

It’s a nice thought, but the reality is statements like this are just “I want google to have the power” and that’s not better

[kitsunesoba]

Or in the case of desktop/laptop computers, "I want Microsoft to have the power". If Apple suddenly vanished, realistically speaking most of its desktop marketshare would fall directly into Microsoft's lap as those users switched to Windows. The only exception would be devs using Linux instead, which at best represents a single digit percentage of computer users.

So in this scenario you end up with Windows being catapulted from its current ~75% global marketshare to a 90%+ virtually-unopposed monopoly, and even less reason for Microsoft to make Windows a good product.

[freedomben]

But ... Apple isn't going to suddenly vanish. It would be a slow fade, and there's plenty of room for different things to happen. All those Mac users aren't going to be in a hurry to run to Windows. It's certainly possible Microsoft could build something attractive to them, but I think it's also quite possible that someone else could too.

But that said, even if MS did get all the market, when the concern is Apple's closed and walled-garden approach, wouldn't an MS world be better? I am certainly no fan of Windows, but it does seem much more compatible, and usable in broader ecosystems than Macs do.

[kitsunesoba]

> But ... Apple isn't going to suddenly vanish. It would be a slow fade, and there's plenty of room for different things to happen. All those Mac users aren't going to be in a hurry to run to Windows. It's certainly possible Microsoft could build something attractive to them, but I think it's also quite possible that someone else could too.

I think it would take quite a significant investment — as much or more than e.g. Framework has sunk into building their hardware business — to smooth the desktop Linux experience out enough to appeal to non-developer Mac users. That last "10%" that the desktop Linux is missing is hard. It'd also probably take a unprecedented level of cooperation from hardware component manufacturers to make high quality Linux drivers available for components from day one (the general consumer isn't going to want to wait somewhere between half and a full generation for robust hardware support, as is the case with the components in many prebuilt computers).

That's not impossible but it'd take a confluence of events that I don't see as particularly likely.

> …wouldn't an MS world be better? I am certainly no fan of Windows, but it does seem much more compatible, and usable in broader ecosystems than Macs do.

Compatibility and flexibility are qualities Windows has now at least in part due to meaningful competition. Make no mistake, Microsoft would love to command a walled garden of their own if they could, and in the absence of Macs they could probably boil the frog into making such a thing reality.

[AndrewKemendo]

I’d challenge you to be more creative with possible alternatives that aren’t just doing the same thing forever.

There’s literally hundreds of ways to organize people’s labor that isn’t just private capital Vs private capital but there seems to be best few leaders that are thinking outside the box.

My preferred approach here is actually building a powerful democratic cooperative, and I’ve written a ton on this site alone on that. That seems like it’s equally as hard as trying to build a direct competitor, with the upside that it’s Democratic. Why shouldn’t we try?