MyAppleMenu

The Potential-Monopolies Edition Monday, December 27, 2021

Big Tech’s Next Monopoly Game: Building The Car Of The Future, by Leah Nylen, Politico

Indeed, the smartphone wars are over, and Google and Apple won. Now they — and Amazon — are battling to control how you operate within your car. All three see autos as the next great opportunity to reach American consumers, who spend more time in the driver’s seat than anywhere outside their home or workplace. And automakers, after years of floundering to incorporate cutting-edge technologies into cars on their own, are increasingly eager for Silicon Valley’s help — hoping to adopt both its tech and its lucrative business models where consumers pay monthly for ongoing services instead of shelling out for a product just once.

Now, having missed the boat as the tech giants cornered the market on smartphones, some policymakers and regulators believe the battle over connected cars represents a chance to block potential monopolies before they form.

Stuff

Apple Shares Short Clips To Promote iPhone 13 Pro Video Capabilities, by Filipe Espósito, 9to5Mac

Apple this year is really endorsing the idea that having an iPhone 13 Pro is having “Hollywood in your pocket.” Now the company is promoting the video capabilities of its flagship smartphone with three new short clips shared on YouTube and other media.

If You Lock A File In Apple's Notes, Don't Lose Your Password, by Glenn Fleishman, Macworld

The password is not stored in iCloud Keychain, nor can it be retrieved from anywhere else. If you can’t remember and haven’t stored it manually in a password manager, the notes locked with it are unrecoverable forever. Apple can’t unlock them.

Notes

The Year Everyone Remembered That Chips Matter, by Will Knight, Wired

The importance of semiconductors may have faded from view over the last decade as the web, social media, and apps came to the fore. Silicon Valley is arguably now more synonymous with Google’s inescapable web search, Amazon’s ecommerce empire, or Facebook’s FOMO-fueled feed than with Intel’s newest chip. But the past year has provided plenty of evidence that chips are, in fact, more important than ever.

Bottom of the Page

There are at least two ways to boost competition in the marketplace. The easy way is to cripple the front runner. The hard way is to propel the rest of the crowd.

The easy way provides an illusion of competition. But when the front runner starts to lose the race, it will be most likely be replaced by a different dominant player that is squashing competitors in a totally different manner.

Replacing Internet Explorer with Google Chrome is easy. Making sure we have a good diversity of web browsers is the hard part -- and we still don't have that twenty years later.

We really should stop just taking the easy way out, and invest in doing the hard part.

~

Thanks for reading.