This was the old Apple under Jobs.

Tim Cook made it a juggernaut that holds more than half the market in many areas, can buyout whole supplies of a specific technology (e.g. TSMC and their 3nm process?), influences the relationships with a whole country (China) and has the size to weather most battles (e.g. the fight with the EU).

You have two choices for phone ecosystem, and they're both bastards about what you can put on your device. Google uses the tyranny of defaults, deeply buried settings, and scare walls to accomplish much the same thing that Apple does by strictly being draconian. It's mafia behavior over the most important device category in the world.

Both of these companies need to have their asses handed to them. Not just by the US DOJ, but by every country. What we do with our phones is bigger and more important than two companies that got there first. They'll still have their trillions dollar market caps after the DOJ tells them they must allow web installs.

Apple and Google's only role should be to provide a hermetic sandbox with permissions layer and do occasional malware scans. That's it. Once we buy the devices, they're ours, and these companies should have no say as to what innovation takes place and what customer relationships are built after the initial sales are made.

The trial is in the US where Apple does actually have a majority of overall sales.

It's strange how they've convinced people that, considering there's nothing at all luxurious about their products, not even the price...

iPhones are priced in line with other flagship phones.

They have like 57% of all smartphones (and 100% of the app store) in the USA last I saw. 57% of the market doesn't seem at all limited to just luxury end. Frankly, I can fathom how so many kids even seem to have iPhones given the money involved.

That analogy would only make sense if a Louis Vuitton bag was the same price as a North Face one yet outperformed all the competition when you take it on a 3 month backpacking trip

Except it doesn’t