Apple post biggest profits ever.

I don't think "monopoly" means what you think it means. Or "abuse", for that matter! iTunes is a rapidly diminishing factor in Apple's profits, much to their chagrin. People just aren't buying music (like they used to) anymore. Instead it's subscription services instead, which is why they bought Beats last year, although they really haven't done much with it yet.

Oh, and Android apps run on iOS, Winphone devices...?

 

I despise iTunes, but I love my Apples. Just the option to buy Garageband Touch for 4.95 EUR is worth it already. I'm considering a 128GB version just for that purpose, so that I have some more recording space. Of course, I do wish it was cheaper, but to buy any kind of dedicated equipment that matches it is more.

Of course at times the value for money is much bigger on Android devices. I bought my mother a 110 EUR Galaxy Tab 3 8" and that's a wonderful little device (currently seems to be back at 179-199 EUR). But just as often, it really isn't. With the Apple Tablets, you get a lot of performance that is very efficiently used and with a very good display, and in an ecosystem that is not afraid of piracy so that most apps can still be bought rather than ad-funded. That's really worth something ... .

 

I guess they have record profits because they fired their entire Quality Assurance division...
But Apple's next report will show a huge drop in profits due to lots of its customers migrating to Android after being royally screwed by IOS 8.x, that severely handicaped or bricked millions of iDevices. It's the buggiest operating system ever released. My iPad Air is the last Apple product that I'll ever buy.

 

In 2014 I agree with you , in the mid 2000s ? No I disagree , Apple had a monopoly of the mp3 player market and the mp3 sales market. They used that to make their leap into the phone market. They have even admitted that they would erase music bought from other services on their ipods.

Apple doesn't have to do much with beats , they sell $20 head phones for $200 . Its a market apple was made for

 

Those were pretty impressive numbers. They have enough cash on hand to buy something like 480 of the S&P 500 companies. Mind boggling!

 

@eastmen What you describe is still not a monopoly, dude. At no point did Apple actually monopolize either MP3 players* or sales of the songs of the same. They were market leaders in the US, in Europe I dunno. That doesn't make them a monopoly just as Google Search isn't a monopoly either despite cornering like 90-95% of the market.

*iTunes didn't offer MP3s of course, but you know what I mean.

 

Having a very large market share is usually considered to be a monopoly, doesn't necessarily has to be 100%. At 90-95% market share you effectively own the market with little or no chance for other companies to compete.

 

Having 95% of the market makes you a monopoly. But that doesn't mean that you violate the Sherman anti-trust laws. As long as you don't get convicted of that, you can carry on doing what you're doing.

As for the iPhone being successful because of the iPod: it's obvious that it was a logical progression, and that it could ride on its coattails (mindshare, retail infrastructure etc.) but I think the iPhone would have been successful without the iPod. Its appeal was and is way larger. My wife and I can't be the only ones who never ever listen to music on their iPhone, whether it's bought or streamed? That was even true on the original iPhone before it has an App Store. (I had an iPod somewhere in a drawer, but it never got any use.)

What drew me in was the whole UI and the look of that thing. I remember playing with one of a colleague of mine who got it on day one (unsubsidized for $600, remember?), redoing all the gestures and animations and thinking 'I just need to have this', and when the price dropped to $400, resistance was futile.

 

Google is at 75% of the search market


Apple had 90% or so of the mp3 market and Apple used iTunes as a way of shutting out compettion, before iTunes 7 you would be able to import music bought on other services but with iTunes 7 apple closed that up thus killing a lot of music store competition for themselves since non itune music services could not be used with ipods.

apple also used their market share to fix ebook prices ,

 

What sort of gibberish is this?

The only content that didn't work with iTunes were DRM infested third party solutions. You could get around it by burning a CD and then import it with iTunes.

I believe the only way Apple got access to eBook were to give the publishers better volume prices compared to Amazon.

 

So you guys are telling me there actualy are people in this world who go through the trouble of signing in to a store and update their credit card info to buy their stuff legitimately instead of doing a simple google search saying (*artist name* full discography torrent) and clicking the very first link, which will likely be from piratebay or kickass torrents and downloading every song you possibly could in 320kbps .mp3s or lossless .flac within seconds?

 

An anti-trust lawsuit against Apple and in favor of Amazon. Yeah...

 

Well I'm a very happy Spotify premium customer. 9 quid a month and BAM. Only thing, it does not have every single release. Example, the last Bjork album still hasn't appeared, though i'm sure it will as everything else is in there.

 

I have owned Samsung Captivate, Galaxy S and Galaxy S3 phones. All were plagued by numerous software issues that drove me nuts. With the Galaxy phones, every now and then some process would get stuck and drain the battery really quickly (the phone would get hot in my pocket). I had a tough time figuring out what was causing it as I always killed all apps after using them (some people on the web said it was related to Google Maps), but updating the OS never fixed these issues. We changed carriers and I decided to try out the iPhone 6 and have been very happy. The phone is about the same size as the Galaxy S3, but I have had no issues with battery drain (in fact, the phone can go 2 days without a charge if I don't surf the web on it). I do believe that Apple could improve the iOS user interface (have you ever tried to organize 7 pages of apps in iOS? Horrible!) but the phone works great, although I think the camera is overrated.

As far as tablets go, I have iPad 3 and the iPad Air. At the time of purchase, the iPad 3 was the best tablet around so upgrading to the iPad Air was a no-brainer. BTW, I never buy music from iTunes. If I purchase any digital music, I get it from Amazon since they are DRM-free (and I prefer shopping at Amazon). The Amazon software automagically drops the songs into iTunes for easy transfer to any Apple devices you have. I use the Kindle software to read books as well.

One complaint I have about Apple is that iOS development requires that you have a Mac, which I don't.

I certainly wouldn't consider myself a "sheep", but I saw no reason to try another Android phone given the problematic experiences I had with Samsung phones.

 

So you agree that apple locked out other companies from selling mp3s to apples 90% mp3 player market share ? Which is abuse of a monopoly .

Apple price fixed books keeping them at higher prices in a deal with the publishers who were unhappy that amazon would sell them cheaper than the hardcover books in the store. When I first got my nook I was paying $10 for new books and now its up to $15 and in some cases $18

 

It's ironic that the $10 you paid for your ebooks was due to the monopoly position of Amazon. Apple tried to make their iBooks more attractive to sellers by promising them more pricing freedom than what Amazon allows. But it's ludicrous that this was somehow the move of monopolist.

 

Absolutely not, Apple can't be enforced to support 3rd party DRM or even obligated to support it. They never wanted DRM in the first place but their hands were tied in the early days as they had no bargaining power with the music industry. When they penetrated the market and had the users, they choose to abolish DRM altogether as it didn't make for a good user experience.

They basically forced the entire market to drop DRM on music.

Now a question for you; would you much rather have the music industry that existed before with the stupendous DRM schemes that only served to make life a miserable hell for those who wanted to play music on their MP3 players?

Let me say this, you could play any MP3 with iTunes 7 and remove bullshit DRM by burning the tracks to a CD and then import them. They even had a page dedicated to explain this in detail, to get rid of DRM.

 

I don't think you understand. ITunes used to support 3rd party music and then changed it. once upon a time you could buy music from real networks and sync it to iTunes. That happened in iTunes 7 through 7.5. All iTunes music had fairplay . So apple used their market share to force out 3rd party content stores and then used fairplay to lock in anyone who bought iTunes music.

For me , I'd rather have actual competitors in the market. Look at zune and zune hd and the strides those players made , now imagine if there were a bunch of companies competing with products and trying to wrestle market share from each other. This didn't happen because of the amount of share apple had.

I don't call buying low quality mp3s with drm on them , then burning them to a cd so taking a 128kbps song and transforming it to a wav file then back to a mp3 . To then use them on another player an easy way around it.

It would cost money and time b urning the cds and then what do you do with them toss them ?

Real network Harmony would actually add fairplay to the files before putting them in your iTunes library.

I had 3 ipods and then moved on to my zune. luckly I had only bought about $50 worth of music so it wasn't a big deal to rebuy. But it did suck a bit.

 

A Zune.

A ZUNE!!!

If that's not being a MS super fan, I don't know what is!!


j/k

 

I will continue enjoying my DRM free media. Even Real Networks lost their case against Apple, saying iTunes 7 were anti-competitive. The only reason Real Networks MP3s worked with iTunes were because they cracked the FairPlay DRM that were forced upon Apple from the music industry. They were never supposed to be compatible and the music industry wasn't interested in that either.

Apple abolished DRM, Real Networks and the music industry didn't.