Apple's integrated approach is fostering monopolistic behavior and has started to stifle innovation resulting in user-hostile keyboards and no NFC based apps
When I started Stratechery in 2013, the conventional wisdom was that modularized ecosystems were best.
That matters because the critique anticipates what the corpus documents next: an in-depth look at anti-competitive App Store restrictions that became a regulatory target, and Bloomberg's 2022 case that Apple keeps third parties off its NFC chip for revenue reasons, not technical ones.
First-order effects
iPhone users get keyboards and contactless-payment alternatives shaped by Apple's gatekeeping rather than by competition — the direct cost of integration the piece describes.
Third-party developers are excluded from hardware-level capabilities like NFC, capping what iOS apps can offer relative to Android counterparts.
Second-order effects
Google and other less-integrated rivals gain an openness talking point against Apple precisely where rival services were previously losing on experience.
Regulators get concrete, consumer-visible examples — keyboards, NFC payments — that make abstract App Store gatekeeping arguments politically actionable.
Structurally, the integration-versus-modularity debate shifts from which model builds better products to who controls access to the device's hardware — with contestability, not quality, becoming the battleground.
The trend: Apple's integration moat is transitioning from a product-quality advantage into a gatekeeping liability that regulators and developers increasingly contest.
Ben Thompson on the deleterious effects of Apple's controlled ecosystem. “The superior user experience of Apple's integrated products somehow ended up with Apple delivering the user-hostile butterfly keyboard for four years and counting.” https://stratechery.com/...
Feel like most of the business acumen depends on identifying costs that can't be measured and then applying that heuristics to pin a product selling philosophy, work backwards from there and then decide those little product/design/UX tradeoff that breaks into sprints and so on.. …
I'm certain there are many disgruntled Mac users and many former Mac users as a result. Massive cock-up and reeks of arrogance. Also poignant: https://stratechery.com/...
Stratechery's antitrust argument against Apple doesn't make any sense because Apple isn't extending dominance in smartphones to anything else because it isn't dominant in smartphones https://stratechery.com/... pic.twitter.com/r2Q97b2awy
Latest @stratechery calls out that “Apple's approach to the App Store also raises both competition and innovation questions”. Fully agree. Where are trials, refunds for erroneous purchases and Family Sharing integration in product pages? https://stratechery.com/...
“What makes Apple so brilliant from a business perspective is that it has managed to, via hardware and software integration, earn monopoly profits in a way that would not normally be classified as a monopoly.” 🍎🍎 - @benthompson https://stratechery.com/...
@stratechery: “What seems unquestionable, though, is that innovation in the entire sector [includes finance and transportation] has been retarded because of Apple's total control of NFC chips in iPhones.” Scope from pro-competitive regulation? https://stratechery.com/...
Finally, from @stratechery “Software is a completely new type of good in that it is both infinitely differentiable yet infinitely copyable... any piece of software is both completely unique yet has unlimited supply, leading to a theoretical price of $0.” https://stratechery.com/.…
Integration and Monopoly https://stratechery.com/... Apple has won through integration, but integration combined with network effects and economies of scale can result in bad outcomes that look a lot like monopolies.