The evils of Apple as a company
Apple is the largest company by market capital1. While they do have competition, Apple has been accused of unfair trades and monopolistic behaviour.
Scores
| Division | Score |
|---|---|
| Privacy | 4.7/10 |
| Right-to-repair | 4.0/10 |
| Envrionmental | 4.8/10 |
| Fair trade | 2.0/10 |
Deeds
Monopoly
Apple has been accused of monopolistic behaviour in many occasions, since the rise of the company till now. This is due to the reason that Apple does not play well with its competitors and uses legal loopholes to establish dominance. One of the prime example is controlling the ecosystem and creating vendor lock-ins, so people cannot leave the company wall2.
In the past, Apple has been responsible for direct elimination of its competitors that benefits them to the day. One example is the acquisition of Beats Music3. This acquisition directly eliminated various completion in audio and music consumer market and helped make Apple Music and Apple wireless earbuds, wireless headphones a reality.
Apple also is responsible for creating class segregation, where they treat the users of another competing platform (Android) second class in their ecosystem. One major example is iMessage and the whole blue bubble vs green bubble ordeal. iMessage color codes SMS as green compared to iMessage texts as blue. This does not happen in RCS, where the distinction is given by adding a lock icon to show that this chat is using encryption or smart features.
Due to the color coding and Apple not supporting RCS, Android users are forced to send texts over SMS to the receivers who use iOS that shows up in a green bubble. SMS lacks smart features, such as encryption, high resolution photos and videos and more features. Apple has created this artificial problem which is a big one in the US, which should not have existed to begin with. Due to the segregation, Apple created a monopoly over iMessage where others cannot enter.
Fortunately, this will end soon, as the rampant push for Apple to adopt RCS and their willingness to circumvent FTC lawsuits has made them accept RCS as secondary protocol. This will allow Android users to send encrypted texts, high resolution photos and videos, smart snippets to iOS devices. Many outlets reported that the green bubble will still remain. Many are welcoming the initiative regardless.
Anti-consumer
Apple has been accused of many anti-consumer behaviours which are mostly true and proven. While Apple succeeds in letting consumers in with nice user experience and product design, this is just the first step of their total plan. Few of the biggest allegations against Apple are:
- overcharging for base models of a product in order to make a premium tier look favorable
- Refusing repairs even for eligible product
- Overcharge for cheap repairs
- Pushing people towards buying a new device over possible repair
- Voiding warranty for nonsensical reason
- Blaming users for manufacturing or design problem 4
- Gradual slowing down of older devices
Apple has issued statements for some of the allegations and cited seemingly sensible reasoning, except for the fact that they continue to restrict a better solution in order for a more profitable option.
For example, Apple slows down CPU for older iPhone models due to aging battery, which is indeed a legit concern, but the ideal solution would be to push both mitigating patches with transparency from the beginning and also provide cheap replacement battery for those devices.
Apple supports their mobile devices through software for a long period, but they won’t do the same for hardware. Instead, there have been too many reports of Apple Care suggesting people to upgrade their old phones rather than fixing it.
The cost of replacement battery is also very high compared to care provided by third party. Currently, it costs $69 dollar to replace an iPhone 7 battery, while the genuine battery itself costs around $25 retail.
It is not surprising Apple would do such thing because they earn significant amount of profit from repairs alone, and the upsells only increases their overall sales.
Anti right to repair
The anti-consumer practice of Apple extends to their active campaign against the right-to-repair movement. Apple employed lobbyists and still spending countless money, so they can push lawmakers towards more relaxed path that will help their anti-repair mindset.
Their lawyers argue that the devices nowadays are much more powerful and complex while also very lightweight and compact, which would have been a compelling fact if there was no other way around it. Several times, it has been proved that complex and compact devices can be built using repair friendly ways.
They also argued that the tools Apple use are sophisticated, and would require more expertise to operate. After facing backlash for many years, Apple in 2023 agreed to supply tools for self repair. And the tools turned out to be cheap Chinese regular tools that are already available and used by all third party repairs. Except, you’d have to pay hefty fees to keep the tools.
The self repair program, also fails big time due to Apple opting to charge more for the self repair. Apple is already charging big with first party repairs, and when users want to repair it themselves, they charge more for it. Which many reviewers cited “unfair” and MacRumor wrote:
“The only obvious conclusion is that Apple wants to offer this program due to right-to-repair legislation, but doesn’t want anyone to use it.”
According to many third party repair shops, Apple has started to make third party repair using even harder by serializing the iPhone replacement parts. So even if you have the genuine parts, you cannot swap the old parts out due to the locked firmware. If you try it anyway, major components will stop working, making the whole repair useless.
The same practice extends to MacBook and other devices too.
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