The framing here is off. It’s fair to say that catching up with Apple is next to impossible. This has absolutely nothing to do with monopolies, and everything to do with their velocity.

The idea that we have to somehow overthrow Apple in order to build better things is the problem.

Ironically Apple itself had this problem when Steve jobs returned. Microsoft was seen as the ‘problem’ to be overcome and thinking that way prevented Apple from seeing what else was possible.

Jobs explicitly rejected this kind of thinking “We have to stop thinking that in order for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose.”

The same holds true now - we need to stop thinking that in order for others to win, Apple has to lose.

Apple’s solutions are not the only possible solutions. We don’t have to mimic them.

I don't understand why you keep talking about Apple's direct competition? Vertical consolidation is a very different, potentially more harmful problem than "a mobile phone monopoly".

More competitive phone market is pretty boring. Good ARM CPUs are not boring, there are all kinds of places those would be amazing that Apple isn't going to bother using them.

Apple doesn't have to lose, in a healthy market they'll be able to buy good ARM CPUs just like I will.

The problem is that Apple's solutions are the only solutions that get to use certain technologies because they don't want other people to compete with them.

> The problem is that Apple's solutions are the only solutions that get to use certain technologies because they don't want other people to compete with them.

This just misunderstands what vertical integration is about.

Apple’s solutions aren’t general solutions. They are narrow solutions that work in Apple’s ecosystem.

Apple hasn’t developed general solutions that other people could use. This is the whole point. It’s why they can move faster than a modular ecosystem can.

This has nothing to do with not letting other people use their technologies. They don’t actually have technologies that anyone other than Apple can use.

> ARM is inaccessible to most companies, including companies that don't compete with Apple.

What are you talking about? ARM is literally the dominant CPU architecture for years now, with a lot of CPU/SoC vendors for everyone's choosing. An architecture license is expensive, yes, but you only need it if you want to roll your own cores (and there is at least a dozen AL holders). Everyone who's fine with stock cores can use ARM Flexible Access where you only have to pay per-product fees at tapeout.

That's the reason why all other competitors (Hitachi's SuperH and MIPS being the biggest ones) have all but vanished.

>In a world where we prevent vertical monopolization, those very nice ARM CPUs Apple and Amazon have on lockdown become commodities and spur all kinds of innovation in other areas.

I agree it would be better if everyone were able to buy Apple's CPUs, yes, but the real secret behind Apple's performance is that they own the OS stack and can ruthlessly optimize it for performance. Technically, everyone can take the Android AOSP code and do the same for a given hardware stack, it's just a lot of work that is not much in demand.

> Who do you think pushes Qualcomm to deliver better quality when the two primary consumers of those CPUs aren't buying from third parties?

Uh, Samsung also buys from Mediatek, not just Qualcomm's Snapdragon and their own Exynos line... anyway there are lots of smartphone vendors who could go ahead and differentiate their products by focusing on quality, if they wanted and the consumers would want it. Samsung and Apple together only have 39% of market share (per https://www.counterpointresearch.com/global-smartphone-share...), there's a lot of room for competition.