Yep, and all parts that can be bough separately should be sold too (so at a chip level, not just "mainboard", "screen assembly", "case", etc.).
Same with cars and other devices... with a car, you can get in a minor crash and even without labour, you can get up to a new car price in parts very fast.
I'm pretty certain M1/2/.. would not exist in an environment like that. There would be no incentive for Apple to develop it unless they fundamentally changed their business model.
I'm pretty sure there was and still is. Nvidia, AMD, Intel, IBM, Motorola, Qualcomm, ARM and a bunch of others I don't recall designed or still design competitive products in this area. The thing they all have in common is that they want to make money from it...
And well unfortunately the general trend is the less open and more proprietary their products are they more money they make from it (or the higher is their share price) and the more money they have to (potentially) invest into future R&D. ARM which is the most open successful company in the sector is almost literally working for peanuts (relatively to their overall impact) compared to Nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm or Intel.
I'm not sure how would you solve that?
I mean if Apple invested X into designing M1/2 because they expected that they'd earn Y from that. However it turns out they have to make this design available to everyone (well maybe not for free but for a royalty comparable to what ARM gets) erasing their competitive advantage and as a result can only make 0.2Y at most? What would they do? Would they still invest X? 0.5X? 0.1*X? Not design a new chip at all and spend their money on something else? Maybe they wouldn't even have any money to spend in the first place because they wouldn't have been able to maintained massive margins by keeping their Software and HW designs proprietary over the years?
Free market also implies that companies can create and protect moats. This means companies have the freedom to NOT provide compatibility or emphasize repairability.
That's why we have regulation, where there is a mandatory 2 year warranty on electronic devices in EU. Also cars need to have dozens of systems that are not really needed to drive the car itself, but help with safety (eg, ABS brakes, etc.)
Just add a few lines to the regulations about schematics, individual spare parts to component levels, no blocking sales by manufacturers, and we're a step closer to a greener world.
The USB-C regulation should also include user-replacable batteries (or at least something that doesn't need additional parts (eg. glue) to reassemble, since the battery is guaranteed to fail with time, even if the rest of the phone survives.
There is nothing to be said for it. If Apple is obligated to just give away the M2 to competitors, they wouldn't have invested to create the M2 in the beginning.
Free market implies that a company can create any service and product they want. It's up the customer to decide if they want to pay for it or not.
This means a company like Apple does not have to provide access to its proprietary M2 SoC to anyone who asks. That makes no business sense. What's the point of investing billions to design and mass manufacture SoCs if "free market" says you must give it away?
> This means a company like Apple does not have to provide access to its proprietary M2 SoC to anyone who asks.
This also means that a disgrunted employee that knows how to build M2 SOC can leave and starts their own production. But currently goverment would send armed goons with guns, at taxpayer expense.
And US government seizes my private property, if I post to myself earbuds from China that look too much luke airpods under the pretence of 'Counterfeit goods'.
You are advocating hypocracy, free market for me but not for thee.
I am all onboard for the real free market, where government does not interfere to protect Apple at my expense.
It's anarchy that says companies can do whatever they want including create and protect moats, sign exclusivity agreements, and do all sorts of anti-competitive things. (Eg: Microsoft licensing deals in the 80's and 90's) In order to have a free market that's actually guided by an invisible hand, it must have competition. A market with monopolists is an unfree market.
It is a concept called "bundling" in antitrust where the valuable M2 is only sold in concert with a less exceptional tablet in order to be able to charge triple markup for the tablet and storage upgrades...
Unbundling is a heavily pro-consumer move and enlightened governments are pushing towards forcing companies to do it (and penalising companies for bundling, though there's far less of that in the last 20 years than there ought to be).
Why are you assuming M2 would even exist in the first place if Apple knew they had to share it with everyone?
Unless they wanted to enter the B2B market they would have no incentives to develop their own chips whatsoever and would just use whatever ARM/Qualcomm/Samsung/Intel have to offer.
> forcing companies to do it (and penalising companies for bundling
As long as they understand that this might have negative effects on innovation. Why invest significant resources into developing something new if there is a cap on how much you can benefit from that?
> but regardless it shows the invalidity of your question
I'm sorry but I really don't see how...
> See all the AI stuff that Google is giving away
I assume they were doing that because they could not monetize it directly yet and believed that by making their research publicly available they would accelerate overall development and benefit more long-term from that than if they kept it secret. Additionally that also increases their public standing, allows them to attract high level talent and deprives funding from any of your potential competitors since they have not yet monopolized any highly profitable markers and simply can't afford to compete with you. Which is great, when it can work like that's how it should work when it can.
Apple (and similar companies have) no such incentives. Apple developed their own processors to differentiate their products and to increase their sales while maintaining high margins. If they had to share their designs with everyone else why would they do that? Makes no sense. You just take whatever is available off the shelf (Intel or ARM etc.) and focus on differentiating your product some other way.
Other companies with very different business model might be able to design just as good chips or better chips, who knows if all chip designs were completely free.. It certainly would not make much sense for a company like Apple to invest into that as much as they did.
I think overall it's pretty simple, even if we assume that most companies/people want to 'do stuff for the greater good of advancing technology' (which is really not that case for every Stallman you have dozens of Larry Ellison's..). How would you fund that? It works great for certain types of software because using/contributing to OSS allows companies to decrease their costs since core components of the OS/databases/browser engines/web server/frameworks/etc. are not the things they would use to differentiate their end product. And that's great because they are able to pool resources together and come up with something much better than they would on their own. But that only works if your core product remains proprietary, if you can make money from offering additional services like consulting/customization/support or by adding an additional layers on top which provide end value to consumers (.e.g. Android, Chrome etc.).
What if your core business model is developing and selling a proprietary general purpose server/workstation operating system and you don't have a massive moat like MS (and well that's has been their business model for years anyways..)? Well tough luck.. you went bankrupt decades ago..
How would this work for companies that make CPUs/GPUs/any other high-end chips (or to be fair any hardware in general)? What incentives would they have to develop anything new if they can't keep your designs proprietary? Do stuff for the greater good of advancing technology?
Well sure why not.. With what money though? Since the market is more or less perfectly competitive everyone's margins are effectively zero. It only makes sense to invest into things which lower costs/increase productivity for your factory/distribution. How exactly could any R&D investment payoff? You want to make you chips faster/more efficient, well sure you can invest 1-5% of your total revenue into that at the cost of making your company total unattractive for investors since you'd not be making any money by doing that.
IMHO if we want to live in a world without IP communism (or something close to it) is our only real option. But we all know how that works out when it's enforced top to bottom....
Same with cars and other devices... with a car, you can get in a minor crash and even without labour, you can get up to a new car price in parts very fast.