ON MARCH 21, the Anti-Trust Division of the US State Department filed an 88-page complaint against Apple, alleging that the company was engaged in anti-competitive actions to the detriment of the public.
The complaint notes – without irony – that it was an antitrust case against Microsoft and made it possible for Apple to distribute its iTunes software, then necessary to communicate with its iPod music player, on the Windows operating system, steering the company, then routinely described as “beleaguered,” back to profitability.
Today, the sheer scale of Apple’s profitability since introducing the iPhone is now a concern for the State Department. Apple, once on the verge of bankruptcy, is now the second most profitable company in the world, earning profits of US$99.8 billion in 2023 behind Saudi Aramco, who made $151 billion.
Apple operates with sizeable margins across all its product lines and has a robust hold on the mid to upscale market for smartphones.
The iPhone may be the company’s flagship, earning 52 per cent of the company’s revenue, but it’s Apple’s second largest money spinner that seems to have drawn the attention of the US government.
Apple’s services, including AppleTV, Apple Music and Apple Pay, accounts for 22 per cent of the company’s revenue and it’s drawing the lion’s share of the concern articulated in the 88-page document.
To be fair, Apple has been pretty heavy-handed in protecting its moneymakers, ejecting Epic Games and its hit game Fortnite from its App Store because the gaming company wanted to establish its own payment systems within the game, bypassing Apple’s restrictions and 30 per cent fee.
That fee has long been a sticking point with developers, along with Apple’s insistence that software on their app store must adhere to more strict programming guidelines.
Here’s where some personal experience factors in. I’ve long been a fan and supporter of special-purpose, single-task tools that zero in effectively on computing problems.
I’ve spent a small fortune, or to be more accurate, an unholy number of tiny payments to small shop, individual developers who create software I find particularly useful over the last 30 years.
Few of the more adventurous of these developers are present on the company’s app store and many must jump through coding hoops when Apple changes the programming interfaces in its operating system.
For a user with less of a taste for the wild side of software programming, Apple’s online software store does offer a range of special-purpose small apps in a curated environment that safeguards anyone downloading software there.
Some developers create a sanctified version of their software that passes app-store scrutiny while offering a more capable, but edgier version that’s usually available directly on their website without the 30 per cent fee that Apple levies.
More user experience. At the end of 2023, after more than 12 years of using an Android phone with a Macintosh computing system, I got an iPhone.
That decade of experience navigating a m
