> Let’s look at the set top box market and integrated smart TV OS. There is Roku, Amazon, Samsung and LG off the top of my head. All of them suck compared to the AppleTV and use cheaper hardware.
> Android OEMs have been customizing Android for years and they are all worse than either Apple or even stock Android
The thing you're objecting to here is the anti-competitive behavior. If the software it comes with is worse than stock Android then people should be replacing it with stock Android, or a community Android fork which is even better. Except that they're prevented from doing this by the OEM or Google, which is the anti-competitive thing that should be prohibited.
And isn't the hardware being cheaper the advantage? They're all fully capable of playing the video, so why would you want the device to cost more than necessary to perform its function?
> In the PC market which was commoditized like you want, have you seen the crap the OEMs do to their computers when left to their own devices?
The PC market has both OEMs that install crapware and those that don't. But they get paid to install crapware, which allows them to charge slightly less, and then because it's not a locked platform, you can remove it. Which means it can be to your advantage to take the discount and then remove the crapware rather than paying more, which makes that option popular. The option to pay slightly more for one that comes without it is also available.
That's the benefit of competition. You get to choose what you want.
> “Other than that, how was the play Mrs. Lincoln?”
Third party support comes from market share, which yields a massive incumbency advantage. The #1 and #2 desktop operating systems are both from companies founded in the 1970s.
Meanwhile Linux desktop market share is up to 5% this month, +40% YoY: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1lpepvq/linux_breaks...
And unlike the long-term trend of that coming at the expense of Windows, this year it came at the expense of Apple.
Because the user experience is actually good and the market share is getting high enough that the third party support is getting better.
> User experience means for me - long battery life, runs cool, app availability, integrates well with my other devices, runs quietly.
Battery life, runs cool and runs quietly are all related hardware design trade offs. To make that happen you either need a low-power processor (low-performance or you need the latest fabrication process to get high performance at low power which is high-cost), or you need a big battery and heatsink to make a high-power processor quiet with long battery life, which adds weight.
None of that has anything to do with vertical integration. Apple is taking the trade-off in favor of high cost, but a competitive market gives you every one of those options and lets you choose. It also has Apple Silicon as a separate company whose chips are available in any device that wants to pay for them.
And "integrates well with my other devices" is the thing where you want open standards. Nobody has any trouble with Safari or Chrome "integrating" with nginx or apache even though they're made by independent entities. The problem only comes when some unrepentant oligopoly is trying to lock you into a specific ecosystem while you're trying to use devices from a different one, which is the thing that ought to get them in hot water.
> That makes absolutely no sense mathematically.
Are you actually disputing that ($20 x 1.10) + ($25 x 1.10) is the same total as ($20 + $25) x 1.10?
> So you suggest I go through a middle man with their own markup?
I feel like you're misunderstanding how markups work in a competitive market.
If a company is doing nothing of value and yet has no monopoly on anything, nobody patronizes them.
An aggregator is doing something of value. It's doing something that a vertically-integrated monopoly would be doing internally, but doing it as a separate entity. If that thing is made reasonably easy to do then lots of competitors offer aggregation services which keeps their margins thin because the customer will choose the one offering a reasonable level of service at the most competitive price.
Which makes the margin they can add less than the one the monopolist would, because unlike the monopolist, the company operating in a more competitive market can easily lose your business to a competitor if they try to charge more.
> And when I have a problem, I talk to one organization.
If you don't like the oranges you got from the supermarket then you talk to the supermarket rather than the orange grove. That still doesn't require them to be the same entity.
> Are you suggesting I should go through a third party now to do all of that? What do I gain?
You get a more competitive market and in turn more options and lower prices. If Google Cloud has TPUs and Amazon S3 has cheaper object storage then the aggregator offers you both from a single source and prevents you from getting locked into a single cloud. Meanwhile the aggregator itself has competitors which require them to keep their own margins thin.
> And out of all those companies, who have top of the line mobile chips or desktop chips that are designed in conjunction with their hardware and have a good experience?
The state of the market is poor because they're allowed to keep buying each other. New chip companies are formed that start to offer the things customers want and then Qualcomm or Broadcom buys them up. Apple is allowed to buy out all of TSMC's leading-edge fab capacity.
> If you like commoditized phones and computers where dozens of manufacturers can choose what to pick up off the shelf, you are welcomed to buy a PC or Android device.
Android isn't a real competitive market. It's captured by Google and has limited competition on the hardware side. In particular, the ability to run stock Android with a vanilla Linux kernel on a competitive phone is quite lacking.
> AWS is not a monopoly in cloud computing and devoutly doesn’t stop someone from using a Colo.
AWS is not a monopoly, but who was claiming that they were to begin with? They do some unsatisfying things to lock you into their platform if you make use of them, but computing infrastructure is a fairly competitive market in general.
It's iOS and Android that are the trouble.
> None of these big tech companies are hard to avoid.
What practical phone can I use that avoids both Google and Apple?
Even less than that, show me even a mid-range Android phone that can run the vanilla Linux kernel with in-tree drivers.