The competition is in many things in Asia we also have Amazon competing with homegrown services as well as Chinese large companies. With how much US politicians harp about free market and competition its funny to me to see that China seems to have a freer market and more competitive landscape. As the Communist party does not want any single company to dominate and get out of its control they do not allow any 1 company to dominate too much so all services and products have competitors.
It would be interesting to review how good the end products are. Competition for competitions sake isn’t worth much. You want competition to provide better services. But in a lot of ways, Apple has so much market share because their products are just so remarkably good.
People don’t buy AirPods because they are locked in, they buy them because they are an absolute marvel of technology.
Apple products are absolutely not "remarkably" good though. They aren't bad at all, but certainly not anywhere NEAR equating the value with the cost. Apple is 100% a luxury brand at a very premium price for most items.
Apple has the market share they do because they copied the playbook of fashion marketing and applied it to technology products in a time of significant industry change. They have continued to make some innovations of course, but mainly in business strategy and marketing. Their products are never really cutting edge technology nor are they remotely the best value for the cost.
Apples takes existing but not mature technology and makes it fashionable then ties it to their ecosystem. You can't even use air-tags without fully getting into the Apple system.
>Apple products are absolutely not "remarkably" good though.
That's a matter of opinion. The times I have actually tried the good value competitors options that are supposedly just as good at half the price, it's not a good experience at all. Most competitors put everything it to a couple of specs that look good on a comparison sheet while neglecting the complete experience. Yeah the obscure android phone might have a 4k display and more ram at a lower price, but they only give 1 year of updates and the ROM is full of bugs and malware.
Having gone through a lot of laptops from a lot of OEMs, the current M series macbooks are the only ones which have actually seemed close to flawless. The value you get is incredible.
Airpods are not demonstrably better than other headphones on the market by any other standard than their integration with iOS, that sounds like lock in to me... "Oh you've got an iphone? If you want the headphones that work best with iphone you better buy them from the company that makes iphone!"
This kind of feeds in to the original point though. The iPhone supports the full bluetooth feature set so 3rd party headphones work fine. The AirPods are only able to do a little bit extra by having the ability to have any part of the OS changed to support them better. This is something that requires a high trust level, you could never expose this access to any 3rd party device.
So it put the AirPods on a level playing field with everyone else, we would have to cripple them because they would have to exist in the same low trust environment. Is this actually better for consumers?
It depends on the size of the company doing it - i.e. on how impactful the lock-in actually is. But I feel that certainly a boundary past which not crippling such proprietary integration would be more economically harmful overall, despite the convenience.
Correct. "It just works" means either they're accessing a private API or there's unique parts of the firmware that no one other than Apple has access to.
