[Aldo_MX]

If Apple wanted to destroy Spotify they would simply drop prices by 30%, and Spotify would be unable to compete with that pricing because of the Apple tax.

Why should Apple have that much leverage? They didn't even "build the platform", they took an Open Source platform, put the Apple logo to it, and then proceeded to EEE like good old Microsoft.

Apple is in the wrong here, or they charge the Apple tax to music apps, or they have Apple music. They can't have both.

OTOH, I don't see Apple paying 30% of their revenue to the Open Source maintainers that made "the platform" possible.

[jerojero]

If only price was the only signal people used when buying or renting services.

But that's not the case. And Apple themselves know this as they charge premium prices for the brand alone.

If Apple drops their prices by 30% there's no guarantee that it would "destroy spotify" at all. For one, no one on android would think of switching to apple music anyway, the concept just seems so foreign. Second, Spotify is winning the marketing/cultural battle with their wrapped. It might sound silly but the advertisement feature of Spotify wrapped is worth a lot of money.

So what's more likely to happen if Apple drops the price? Well, I'd say they'd be locked into a PR nightmare everytime they need to raise prices because there's a precedent that the service is cheaper. They wouldn't really gain significant market share against Spotify and they would just end up leaving money on the table.

In these things, price is a component of the decision that is made, it's not really the deciding factor. Not to mention that a significantly lower price also signals "worse quality" to costumers. People might easily go "Spotify costs 3 dollars more because it is worth 3 dollars more". Because people will try to justify higher prices with higher quality even when that's not the case.

[ralfd]

So you are arguing that companies should avoid using open source?

[Aldo_MX]

No, I'm arguing that if Apple feels entitled to steal 30% of my hard earned money, then the open source maintainers should also feel the same entitlement, because without their work there would be no iOS, and no App Store.

Apple owes their existence to the Open Source maintainers the same way Apple claims I owe my existence to their proprietary APIs.

[Someone]

> No, I'm arguing that if Apple feels entitled to steal 30% of my hard earned money, then the open source maintainers should also feel the same entitlement

If the people who explicitly stated “feel free to use my software for free for any purpose you see fit” feel entitled to get any money for the stuff they wrote, they shouldn’t have said that, and, I expect, Apple would have used something else.

Writing a halfway decent OS kernel isn’t that hard, and performance-wise, you don’t really need more than halfway decent).

Also, Apple paid for many of the higher layers of iOS and/or developed them in-house (NeXT wrote NeXTSTEP, Apple bought NeXT, and then spent years before releasing Mac OS X)

[rob74]

That may be true, but those suckers (the open source maintainers) chose to give their work away for free, so they deserve what they get (nothing). Apple won't be making the same mistake!

(sorry for the sarcasm)