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How Apple Came To Control the Component Market
An anonymous reader writes "Phillip Elmer-Dewitt draws on several sources to argue that 'Apple has become not a monopoly (a single seller), but a monopsony — the one buyer that can control an entire market.' According to Dewitt, Apple uses its $70 billion cash hoard to 'pay for the construction cost (or a significant fraction of it) of [tech factories] in exchange for exclusive rights to the output production of the factory for a set period of time...' This gives Apple 'access to new component technology months or years before its rivals and allows it to release groundbreaking products that are actually impossible to duplicate.'"
how much other manufacturers are really being stopped from using said components. My inclination from past experience is that most non-Apple companies would choose to use lesser quality components to keep prices down. LCD displays for example, have for the most part been a lot worse on laptops, music players, etc.
And Apple allows the fabricator to sell to anyone after the exclusive period (six months, a year?) is over. So Apple is benefiting but also doing the whole industry a favor. Just because Apple wins doesn't mean everyone else loses. Android isn't losing much, is it?
If I used a sig over again, would anyone notice?
The vast majority of the population are stupid as rocks, apple is making things accessible for them.
Wow, way to be a condescending prick. The whole point of computing devices is to make tasks simpler.
I wonder how you would feel if, in order to feed yourself, you had to hunt or grow your own food. Do you know how to do that? I sure don't. I wouldn't care to be catagorized as a "dimwit" by a hunter, because I don't know how to kill my own deer for dinner. But I'm sure glad that the agriculture industry has come around, and made it simpler to put food in my stomach.
As a software engineer, I'm glad to make shit easier for people to do. Your attitude can go crawl under a PDP-11.