> Would you accept a house that only allowed furniture, food, books, electronics, devices from the company that built the house? Do you think it should be legal for a company to make a house with those conditions?
Would I personally buy one? No. That doesn't mean it should be illegal to offer such a bundle. You can simply choose not to buy it.
And guess what? According to current US law, as long as those limitations are disclosed to the buyer at the time of purchase, it is in fact, not illegal to offer such a bundle.
Maybe cars can provide a useful comparison. Car manufacturers can't prevent you from using aftermarket parts or different brands of gasoline on a car, and they can't deny warranty coverage because you had your car serviced somewhere else. Phones are becoming even more ubiquitous and essential than cars, so it makes sense to start looking at them from a similar perspective.
Incidentally, Apple tries to treat phones this way and periodically ends up in legal battles over it - get your phone repaired by a third party instead of an Apple store? Have fun with features being disabled by anti-tamper mechanisms, etc. Obviously there are arguments to be made for it but it sure is unpleasant and shows you how they view their customers' freedoms.
They cannot deny warranty coverage, but are not prevented from arbitrary hurdles that make it hard to create a compatible aftermarket part. They don't have to make that particularly easy.
Installing aftermarket parts always voids warranty. Also, more and more manufacturers are creating sealed off engine bays to make working on them harder. It's just physically impossible to block someone to tinker with that type of hardware. If they could find a way, car manufacturers would love to block you from modifying your car.
Come to think of it, Teslas are pretty much impossible to modify, because they're more comparable to the iPhone, a fully integrated hardware and software stack. However, to continue on cars in general, I cannot load my own maps into my car navigation. I cannot load 3rd party maps into the navigation. If I want to upgrade the maps, I need to go to the dealership and pay them an ungodly amount to upgrade them for me.
> more and more manufacturers are creating sealed off engine bays to make working on them harder. It's just physically impossible to block someone to tinker with that type of hardware. If they could find a way, car manufacturers would love to block you from modifying your car.
It's not impossible, it's just not cost effective for them to do so. The cost of sealing the engine bay to such an extent that the end user cannot modify the hardware, while the garage can, adds more cost than the value gained to the manufacturer can justify.
If they could do it in a way that was cost effective for them, there is little reason to believe that they wouldn't be doing it already.
That is not true, there are many car parts I can replace without voiding the warranty. Tires, oil, windscreen wipers, seats, car stereo, the exhaust, the battery, the list goes on. You are perhaps focusing on engine parts only. Apple is not so lenient.
It’s not easy to distinguish between legal and illegal tying, but that doesn’t mean that disclosure to the buyer is an adequate defence. More commonly, the seller would argue that they lack the market power of which tying is said to be an abuse. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tying_(commerce)
Yes I should have added the caveat "in an otherwise competitive market". If there was only one seller of houses then the tying would indeed be a problem.
> That doesn't mean it should be illegal to offer such a bundle. You can simply choose not to buy it.
Be careful with that. Consider how prevalent HOAs are (In most areas, you can not buy a house that's not covered by one), despite how much people hate them.
Consider the market pressures that resulted in that state of affairs. Everyone who wants to own a home has to make a bargain with the devil, despite few homeowners actually wanting to do that. It's quite possible that those market pressures will lead to a situation where the choice will be made for you.
Would I personally buy one? No. That doesn't mean it should be illegal to offer such a bundle. You can simply choose not to buy it.
And guess what? According to current US law, as long as those limitations are disclosed to the buyer at the time of purchase, it is in fact, not illegal to offer such a bundle.