This seems to me a replay of when Apple bought out all the capacity of Toshiba hard drives to that effectively blocked other MP3 players from emerging:
Was it to block competitors, or was it because they were selling millions of iPod and needed all the capacity they can get?
The iPod was not first to market and that Toshiba HD was available before but nobody was ordering it in any kind of significant quantity.
You can order parts today that you'll need in four, eight, twelve, sixteen months. You can do that even though both you and the competition plan to release new models in a few months, if you're willing to decide on the storage capacity of your next product already.
So how much you need is a forecast, or more precisely, a range of forecasts that depend on what you and your competitors will sell. Your order will say "I commit to buying x and want an option on y more" and a larger x gets you a lower unit price for the first x you buy.
If the vendor's production capacity is within your forecasts, or near it, why shouldn't you just commit to order everything and get a nice low unit price? You'll lose if your forecasts are very wrong, but then that's true whatever you do. It sucks for your competitors, who did not order according to their own forecasts.
Once they were selling a large enough quantity to begin with they can gamble their profits on overstock for future production, wiping out future supplies for competitors... at which point it's more of a guarantee, if there are multiple viable products and you remove all but one, consumers have no choice.
These are separate things (getting to the point of large scale production and blocking your competitors), e.g they could have played fair with the same initial success without excessive overstocking, allowing their competitors to continue competing and letting market forces decide, and letting suppliers gradually match current demand.
In short, there is no advantage to overstocking to such an excess other than to block your competitors. But you can only do so once you have a foot in the door and enough money to do so.
But there wasn't and will never be any overstock at Apple since Tim Cook started working there. In 2008 Apple still had Texas warehouses with old beige Mac but all of the Mac produced in the Tim Cook era do not last more than a 2 - 3 weeks in a warehouse. This includes components and this is why every January after an iPhone release the business journalists start predicting Apple's downfall because they lower their part orders for display, memory, etc. They don't let any of that stuff sit in a warehouse... EVER.
What I recall is them being production limited over and over again because their best wasn’t always good enough to stay ahead of demand. Nobody has talked about them hoarding.
Blocking competition was a benefit, but not the goal.
Yes, unintentional side effect. I'm sure it crossed the minds of some the executives that they might be screwing their competition by buying out all the chips.
Apple is obviously not going to buy less so their competition can have more when Apple needed the supply.
No one was demanding those hard drives, Toshiba was close to shelving it before going into production. Jon Rubenstein convinced Steve Jobs to invest in them for the music device they were building and 8 million was given to Toshiba so they can start producing these drives.
Not saying you're wrong, but an alternate interpretation was that Apple was just leveraging their large order size to get to the front of the line because they want to make products to sell. If you're TSMC, who are you going to favour - the large single customer who's guaranteeing order size over a period of time, or several smaller customers?
Several smaller customers; anything else would be myopic.
General business intelligence: You do NOT want one of your 'verticals' (companies that you need to buy supplies from, or companies that you sell your product to) to turn monopolistic; after all, once they are a monopoly they can really squeeze you out.
This holds even if you are also nearing a monopoly or are an effective monopoly (in that you're the only one that can supply it at the quantity and quality required).
There are mitigating circumstances, but most of them don't look good for apple:
* TSMC is stupid. Don't knock it - I've seen companies go for the quick buck, then get killed by the monopolistic monolith they enabled and be surprised.
* TSMC laughs in the face of this and simply isn't taking an apple near monopoly on chips particularly seriously. I can definitely see that - the risk is presumably that apple gains massive increases in marketshare of PCs/laptops and smartphones, but TSMC presumably doesn't think it'll be so high as to risk the situation that TSMC can produce more chips than non-apple buyers could buy. In other words, that apple's total 'TSMC fab capacity' needs won't go anywhere near 50% of what TSMC is likely to ever be able to manufacture.
* Apple is putting pressure on TSMC. TSMC knows this is a risk and doesn't want to, but apple does want this to happen and is making some shady deals so that TSMC does the math and decided that the gains in dealing with apple exceed the losses*odds-it-will-happen of the squeeze if apple is a monopoly buyer for TSMC (as in, of dubious legality and certainly of questionable morality, but then, it's apple, a company. Waiting for companies to act morally is silly, you write laws and set up societal systems to incentivize them to do so instead, companies are amoral (not immoral - they just don't really know what it is, by design).
Your comment seems to suggest it's a smart move for TSMC to just sign one giant deal with apple and be done with it: You can send the lawyers and salesfolk to early retirement, get some money upfront, guarantee 100% sales of all your fab capacity with a party that is unlikely to renege or declare bankruptcy.
It's not. It's a dumb move. Either the C-level execs at TSMC are missing something pretty fundamental or more likely we don't know enough to realize that there's sufficient weights on the other side of the balance to counteract the downside of enabling the monopoly on verticals.
The whole post seems a bit myopic, to be honest. First, TSMC is more of a monopoly than Apple is (and ever will be as long as they don’t care about entry level consumer devices).
Then, Apple gets a temporary exclusivity on the new node (which they helped finance), but this leaves a lot of capacity on the older nodes. These processes are still really good, the vast majority of TSMC customers don’t care about being on the bleeding edge for the sake of it.
Let’s be realistic: what would have been the alternative for TSMC? Leave Apple’s investment out of the table and waste time bringing their new process online without it? AMD or Qualcomm would not be in a much better position right now. Or TSMC, for that matter.
What is the end game you’re afraid of? Apple takes its business elsewhere? To whom? Wouldn’t this leave TSMC with paid-for facilities they could now use to produce chips for other customers at a discount?
> First, TSMC is more of a monopoly than Apple is (and ever will be as long as they don’t care about entry level consumer devices).
From TSMC's perspective, the entry level market isn't where they make their money. You can make entry level devices on old processes that have a lot of competition. It would be really bad for TSMC if Apple were to monopolize the high end of the market, because that's what uses the advanced process nodes TSMC makes its money from.
> Then, Apple gets a temporary exclusivity on the new node (which they helped finance), but this leaves a lot of capacity on the older nodes. These processes are still really good, the vast majority of TSMC customers don’t care about being on the bleeding edge for the sake of it.
Except that they do care, because they're competing in the same market. Apple is currently making a lot of hay out of the fact that the M1 is more power efficient than PC laptops, which is attributable in no small part to the fact that they're on TSMC 5nm when everyone else is on TSMC 7nm or worse.
If nobody was on the newest node, or Apple was making products that didn't compete with AMD/Qualcomm/Nvidia/Intel in the market, the others not having it wouldn't matter. When the device customer is going to prefer the best one, and the one on the best node has an advantage, it does.
> what would have been the alternative for TSMC?
If Apple isn't signing some kind of exclusivity deal requiring TSMC to give all of its new capacity to Apple, build more of it using their own money so that when it comes online, there is enough for more than Apple. If they are demanding exclusivity, inform antitrust authorities of this.
> What is the end game you’re afraid of? Apple takes its business elsewhere?
Suppose Apple monopolizes the high end market. They take 75% of it using the process advantage, then take the rest as the network effect from that crushes alternatives. They're now your only customer for the newest process nodes, so they squeeze your margins to zero. At the same time, they buy Global Foundries and pour money into it until their process is better than yours, and you no longer have the money to compete because you let all your other high end customers be destroyed.
>Suppose Apple monopolizes the high end market. They take 75% of it using the process advantage, then take the rest as the network effect from that crushes alternatives. They're now your only customer for the newest process nodes, so they squeeze your margins to zero. At the same time, they buy Global Foundries and pour money into it until their process is better than yours, and you no longer have the money to compete because you let all your other high end customers be destroyed.
It's what Apple did to Imagination Technologies and tried to do to Samsung.
I don’t think they needed to help finance the research. I think the apple volume is likely an order or two of magnitude larger than the next customer. It’s probably an advantage to have the large volume, and sync is making the right choice.
Similarly intels process issues showed up when they started trying to make xeon before the desktop processors.
TSMC may not have needed it but Apple did invest (pre-order) and they will continue to do so. There is not exclusivity but pre-purchased capacity and similar video games and kickstarters. They don't always work out for Apple (the Sapphire glass) but majority of the time they are working out perfectly (iPod Toshiba Hard Drives and the TSMC M1 cpus).
> more likely we don't know enough to realize that there's sufficient weights on the other side of the balance to counteract the downside of enabling the monopoly on verticals.
Because your angle completely miss capacity and resources planning. As the 30 years old joke goes, most expensive Fab in the world isn't the leading edge Fab, it is the Empty Fab. And then there is the initial capital and order guarantee. As a matter of fact, it is nearly the same across all industry supply chain. Insert Pizza Doll, Sausage Rolls, Paper Towels, or the recent pandemic event Toilet Paper, and your skill set from production line are all the same.
It is not Apple is without risk, so to speak. They will have to fill the Fab orders, even if somehow no one buys any iPhone. It just happens Apple has never had this problem. Compared to Qualcomm, AMD, Nvidia which all have their fair share of flops and market did not react as they expected. Or you could end up like Nvidia where they had three quarter worth of GPU stocks sitting channel during the BitCoin crash.
Getting Apple ( or the largest customer )'s order filled with a price premium is and will always be the simplest and effective way for the business.
And there is a huge market in GPU, HPC, AI, and Cloud Computing along with forever increasing chips in all segment. TSMC isn't really beholden to Apple like Dialog or PowerVR IMG.
You're missing that the customers aren't all buying the same thing. Apple is willing to make the investment/commitment and take the pain of shipping a product on a brand new node, and the tooling will last longer than Apple needs it for. That rolls from phones up (eventually) to big pro chips as yields etc improve, but then volume tapers off after a few years as most products move to newer chips on the next process. Apple needs a lot of capacity up front (iPhone launch) so they make the deals so TSMC can scale up. Later smaller players like AMD, NVIDIA, Intel, etc can use the proven nodes with less risk. 16nm/12nm is still perfectly good for lots of things. TSMC keeps the fabs busy for a long time, Apple gets the volume of parts they need at a good price. Apple doesn't directly compete with the other major semis so it doesn't really matter that they always have access to better manufacturing. It's all fine.
TSMC has a market cap of $600 billion, it is a totally different scale, Apple can't just push them around like they do with "small" billion dollar businesses.
I wrote that very badly. What I wrote came out to be about a diverse customer base which is obviously a good thing. What I meant to talk about was "predictable demand". Being able to know your exact order profile for a lead time of years is very valuable in manufacturing.
That said, Apple probably just invested money in their 3nm in exchange for priority (or similar) and maybe TSMC is being a bit short sighted.
> the risk is presumably that apple gains massive increases in marketshare of PCs/laptops and smartphones
Apple is very far from monopolistic market share of smartphones and even much further away with Laptops. Apple with their intentionally overpriced products caters to a branded premium segment. They are not even aiming to take the mass market of low to mid level smartphones that makes up most of the market outside the US
I would also not be afraid if I were TSMC, especially as this is just about the new 3nm process that is catering to the highend market and doesn't eliminate the existing business.
Your comment reads a bit like there could be a distopian world where a shortage of 3nm results in Apple becomeing the only option for phones and laptops
This is HN, the audience should know that VC's have a very strong preference for a large number of small customers over a small number of large customers, and why.
Obviously TSMC doesn't care about VC's, but the same reason why VC's prefer a large number of small customers still applies.
Anyone should prefer lots of customers to a few key ones. The latter have more leverage. They also make one’s metrics risky, as a single defection can swing the firm from profitable to barely eking by.
> Anyone should prefer lots of customers to a few key ones.
I think the caveat/variable is "all else being equal or close to equal."
If having 10 customers will net you $10 total per month, and having one large customer will net you $100 per month, it is really hard to justify going with the $10 customers. But if those 10 customers will net you $10 EACH per month, then the 10customers is a better situation.
Yeah but if 1 of your customers offers to prepaid for 10 years of service at the same price you wouldn't turn that away. Allowing you to maintain your other customers. Apple's pre-order of 3nm will get them priority as they ordered it before it was an option. (see Kickstarter)
But it's not and it has been documented. Apple paid for the 3nm process years before TSMC had the fab ready. I'll bet that the moment a new process is available that Apple will invest in it as well.
Makes your public metrics look better (ie "we have over 500+ customers!!!!") and also demonstrates (in theory) a more durable product.
When people see small number of large customers, the implication is you are basically just running an outsourced dev/consultant/staff aug shop. Less product vision and ability to "scale".
> If you're TSMC, who are you going to favour - the large single customer who's guaranteeing order size over a period of time, or several smaller customers?
This depends on your business strategy: having a single or few customers makes you much more dependent on their whims and their negotiation power. If you have more customers you are in a better position for pricing negotiations.
Big point of strength for TSMC in negotiations is they're the only fab that can make 3nm chips in volume, which gives them a ton of leverage to push back against Apple.
Everyone has forgotten that when Apple moved to Intel, part of the deal was that Apple had the fastest laptop CPU for about 6 months.
To me this says as much about Intel as about Apple. When Intel has a new chip or a bin that has small yields, they can’t supply a large customer. But MacBook had maybe a third of the market share it has now, so that’s a relatively small niche you can supply while you boost your yields.
I wonder if they had the same competitive advantage if they were not allowed to use tax avoidance schemes.
Smaller corporations cannot afford to build such structures so they have more difficulties to compete.
Making motherboards high volume that are faster than your competitors is something small businesses could not afford to do. We’re talking about one process that makes the same chips but more valuable.
And AMD and Qualcomm want more access to it than they have so they complain to the press. This is the supply chain folks.
Tax avoidance benefits build up through years. Basically smaller companies have less money to work with which is compounded by excessive taxes. Big corporations don't have such burden.
I don’t think so. This is the failure of having a choke point in semiconductor manufacturing and centralisation of all manufacturing infrastructure. No business is going to turn down the largest pile of cash being thrown at them. AMD and Qualcomm could of course have invested heavily in reducing this risk but no, they didn’t.
> This is the failure of having a choke point in semiconductor manufacturing and centralisation of all manufacturing infrastructure.
Arguably, bleeding edge silicon fabs are natural monopolies. Pushing transistor sizes down to atomic scales entails non-linear increases in costs to get decent yields. That's why there are very few fabs at the bleeding edge any more.
I’ve worked for a couple places where we as a vendor we’re not given the respect and/or margins that the customer’s road map demanded. It was lousy watching customers crow about us while we were going bankrupt. If a deal is too good to be true, it probably is.
I’m not claiming Apple respects TSMC more than Qualcomm does (but does Qualcomm respect anybody? They are practically the bad guys in any number of stories), but this is what respect would probably look like.
Speaking of Qualcomm, Apple is trying to compete with them on radio chips, so leaving TSMC probably works to that goal.
Why would Apple allow that? They clearly have the money to outbid AMD and Qualcomm just to prevent them from competing, and the leverage to threaten moving their phones to a competitor and drop the prices for TSMC in the opposite case.
The only way to analyse this as something bad Apple has done is to make out a case under competition or antitrust law in some jurisdiction. In Australia we have the concept of exclusive dealing, which the US (I think) doesn't have an equivalent to, but even then, it's extremely difficult to violate this law as a purchaser of goods/services, using money to buy them. This is because ANYBODY can acquire money and compete with you by offering more money. You could hold a monopoly on your own products (and then if you imposed exclusivity arrangements on purchasers of your products you would be abusing your market power to lessen competition), but it's essentially impossible to hold a monopoly on money itself.
In all, you're characterising Apple, competing fiercely in an open market, as preventing other people competing by being too good at it. That is a bit ridiculous. If AMD and Qualcomm die out as a result, it will be because they couldn't keep up, which is capitalism functioning correctly. Even under those very broad laws, the only party you can remotely fault is TSMC, and even then, they are literally just taking from the highest bidder, which is again capitalism functioning correctly.
Ultimately I'm not making a legal argument. All I'm saying is that it's very bad for the industry and for the public in general that Apple is the only entity that has access to the cutting edge and that it's only available in their golden cage. It doesn't really matter to me if this is capitalism working correctly or not, or if it's legal or not, ultimately all that matters is that because of this computing is being pushed back, we're not seeing as much competition on performance as we could be, and that's generally bad for everyone. I understand that Apple is just looking out for #1, I just think this is bad for the general public.
It's not Apple's fault that Global Foundry and Intel didn't invest in the 3nm. If you read up on Apple and Intel you would know that Apple (Jobs) was ready to use their CPUs for the iPhone but they won't produce anything other than the x86 (note: StongARM is shelved). Same crap happened with the PowerPC consortium. Motorola would not produce any enhancements in the CPU that dealt with graphics processing cause they only cared about their networking devices. IBM didn't care about power efficiency because they just wanted CPU that were going into their mainframe. Apple worked an agreement with Intel to make the Intel processor (not AMD) exclusive for the Mac, Apple would get new top of the line CPUs in quantity and Intel would get access to Apple's PowerPC patents (AltiVec). Intel also started to ignore the laptop market (just sold underclocked existing processors). Apple dabbled in CPUs with the iPhone 4S and years later released the M1.
Right, and I’m saying they are not the only entity with access, because all you have to do to get into the golden cage is have a really good idea and get financing, and that is possible. Letting everyone else get your idea of a fair share of production capacity to produce sub-par chips is not my idea of good progress. If they truly deserve capacity allocated to them, they should demonstrate they can design better chips, convince someone with money to fund it, and do what Apple’s done (buying TSMC a fabrication plant). That they haven’t done this, and they are punished by not having the cash to acquire production capacity, means that they will feel the pain, and have to start innovating their way out. This is what capitalism gives you: the fire under your butt to innovate. That’s how it’s good. If you prefer the lazy to succeed anyway, you are free to feel that way.
Edit, to address what you said exactly: this is the way in which losing out on capacity forces them to compete harder. If they fall behind in benchmarks for a few years, and you read that as a lack of competition, you are wrong: it is perfect competition, they fell behind, and are now working harder than they were before to design something better. Just because capitalism in the long term usually gets competitors to converge does not mean a temporary winner in the lead indicates competition is not occurring. Apple delivered a jolt to a market that had been flatlining, so there is more competition now than there was before.
But the chips are not sub-par. The entire point of my argument is that at an equal lithography the competition can outperform Apple. The performance advantage that Apple can demonstrate is under the margin of improvement from 7nm to 5nm all else being equal (RAM, TDP, etc..)
There was already a fire under their butt before Apple. Both AMD, Intel, NVidia and even Qualcomm are competing against each other. And that competition yielded architectures that are at least on par and very probably better than what Apple can do.
They can design better chips. They just don't have as much money as Apple. It's something that Apple already did before with, for example, the first generation of small HDDs, they bought out the entire production line and their competitors, despite being able to make MP3s that were just as good, had to wait for years to access the parts.
I wouldn't be too worried. If they are competitive designs, they will be able to get money to have them manufactured. There is lots of money to be made doing it, so there is lots of capital available. I don't think this will result in a huge setback to humanity's progress like you are making out.
But for now, you can't fault Apple at all for planning for this better than they did, but you can fault these companies for not raising tons of cash in anticipation this would be an issue. Darwinian capitalism applies to supply chain strategists too.
The designs are competitive, and they can't get the money to have them manufactured. By the time AMD and NVidia have access to 5nm Apple will be about to move to 3nm. They are going to have a full node of delay for the foreseeable future.
You can't just raise cash magically. I assure you AMD and NVidia were and are doing everything they can to raise as much money as possible and were trying as hard as they could to get capacity. They just couldn't outbid Apple. There is nothing that can be done for them to outbid Apple. They could have a 50% performance advantage and they still will never outbid Apple, because the majority of Apple processors aren't even being sold on performance.
Yes there is lots of money to be made. The issue is that selling processors is very competitive. There will never be enough profit to be made for them to outfinance Apple unless iPhone sales nosedive.
Right, so 5-10 years ago, seeing the writing on the wall, one of these companies should have bought/merged with another to pool more resources so as to remain a big enough bidder in the face of an entrant who would soon be massive. If the goal is to get a 5nm chip out the door today, maybe it seems hopeless, but if the goal is to compete with Apple, there are so, so many things to be done. It's a fair fight, they're just losing. I don't really have anything more to contribute, but this has been a good talk.
I just gave you both. Merge, and 5-10 years. Also shepherd or buy your own chip manufacturer like Apple did.
Unrelated, I am shocked, shocked that people on this Silicon Valley hideout are downvoting me because they do not like the reality of capitalism. This is like complaining that Germany is unfairly occupying all of France's land in 1941, why can't they let the Allies have a small parcel of land up in Brittany or something, when Germany won it fair and square under international law. Apple owes them nothing. Get used to it, folks, if you think this is all very unfair, you have seen NOTHING, wait till you see what companies do when they decide they don't want to play by the rules!
They haven't, in the level of generality you imply. The ruling was much narrower: that Apple doesn't have a monopoly in the market of "digital mobile gaming transactions".
For the store? Most definitely, considering I can see what costs I expense for self-hosting all the infrastructure I need, developing the software, etc compared to what they want for it. That’s almost 2 orders of magnitude difference.
hmm, Nintendo, Sony, Sega and MS all have a monopoly on their stores. In fact, Target has a monopoly to their retail stores. You can't just sell your crap at Target because you want to. Also to probably lose 50% to the retailers.
The App Store was ruled in court not to be a monopoly.
Apple sells tools and parts to anyone who wants them, so it’s not really clear what you are talking about when it comes to repair.
But even if there was some merit to that point, it’s silly to suggest that their repair policies have anything to do with them buying a lot of silicon from TSMC.
> The App Store was ruled in court not to be a monopoly.
The App Store is a de-facto monopoly, it may not fit the legal definition of a monopoly but it practice it is (or what other App Stores can end-users install on iOS?). I'm not making a legal argument.
> Apple sells tools and parts to anyone who wants them
Where can I buy the tools needed to pair serialized replacement parts with the system? Regarding replacement parts, I don't work in the repair industry so I don't have first hand experience buying apple parts, but Louis Rossmann is telling a different story, do you have a source contradicting him?
> it’s silly to suggest that their repair policies have anything to do with them buying a lot of silicon from TSMC.
I'm responding to your claim that apple never had a monopoly on anything.
> The App Store is a de-facto monopoly, it may not fit the legal definition of a monopoly but it practice it is (or what other App Stores can end-users install on iOS?). I'm not making a legal argument.
Ford has a monopoly on Ford-branded floor mats! I mean you could choose other floor mats, but if you want Ford-branded ones they got a monopoly. A large audience is not a monopoly. I may not like Android phones, but they are sufficiently good, have almost all the same apps, and plenty of people have them.
Let’s not focus too much on the use of ‘monopoly’, but why we care about monopolies. A company doesn’t have to have one to harm consumers and markets, and harm can be things other than high prices. See: Lina Khan.
Some of the trust-busting policymakers’ discussions about tech products are painful to listen to, but it’s all trying to recalibrate anti-trust law to the rise of vertically integrated products, which have created amazing user experiences but but also high switching costs that create the conditions of a monopoly, without meeting the technical definition.
> Some of the trust-busting policymakers’ discussions about tech products are painful to listen to,
Because they are wrong.
> but but also high switching costs that create the conditions of a monopoly, without meeting the technical definition.
Because they are not monopolies.
If there is a problem, they should address that rather than trying to distort what is happening, otherwise they will simply make bad policies because they are being dishonest.
Pardon me, I think you misunderstand what I claim they have a monopoly on. They (obviously) don't have a monopoly on the mobile(or mobile software) market. They have a monopoly on the iOS software distribution market(a secondary market spawned by apple themselves). On an iOS device you cannot install a different App Store, therefor the end-user has no other choice than using Apple's App Store to download/buy software(=monopoly).
TL;DR iphones don't have a monopoly, the _AppStore_ has.
On Andoird the situation is a bit murkier, you technically can install software from outside Google's playstore, but you have to click trough scary dialogs(warnings about the danger of doing so), and App Stores installed that way don't have the same device permissions than googles play store have(you have to manually confirm each software update, for example). so yeah, on android it's debatable, but that's a story for another time.
Everyone has a monopoly on their own products. Samsung has a monopoly on Galaxy phones. Tesla has a monopoly on Model Ss. It’s meaningless to say that Apple has a monopoly on a certain part of the iPhone infrastructure, since it’s their product.
Of course they don’t have a monopoly on mobile apps or app stores or phones. There are competing products.
You're conflating the phones themselves with the secondary markets they create.
The problem is that Apple has a monopoly in selling/distributing Apps to iphone users. This is not the case on other operating systems, technically not even on android(eg. Samsung) and has nothing to do with a "monopoly on their own products".
Here's what developers get for their 30%, and yes for very little effort on the developer's part:
- 24/7 worldwide availability, instant payment/app download
- Easy re-install after deletion, you still own the app even if deleted
from the device
- Region restriction
- Separate app pricing by region
- Revenues paid to developer from multiple region currencies without
conversion fees
- Tax calculation and collection
- Instant customer refunds
- User rankings and reviews
- App store advertising in category listings
- Video previews of the app in operation
- Packaging of media content allowing developers the ability to load game
levels as needed. This allows a user to start playing your game quickly.
- App sales stats
Also the App Store ripped 70% fee rates out of the carrier’s hands.
Apple’s 30% was a huge deal in the mobile software space when it hit. That’s why so many people defected. And when they started turning profits, others followed. Most of the millionaires IIRC came out of the second and third wave, before everyone and their mother were doing it and people were making money telling you how they made a million 2 years ago (tricks that didn’t necessarily still work).
I agree that it’s a shame that Apple hasn’t periodically lowered their fees. Even a couple percent would make news. However, a different group would cry monopoly (dumping) because it would have kept more people focused on IOS exclusive applications.
They did eventually bow to public opinion and they lowered the fees for small developers to 15% a couple years ago.
I keep hoping they lower the fees for everything except in-app purchases. I think it would do their customers a lot of good.
So what if it amortized? That's why Apple made that investment in the first place, so that they can make profit out of it. If any app developer tried to re-create it now it would cost them much more than 30% of their revenue.
No it can’t. Almost nobody uses fdroid for good reason. It’s also simply not comparable from a business standpoint, dealing with the taxation and regulation in a hundred countries seamlessly.
But what if I don’t care about that? Why should I pay extra for something I don’t care about? I don’t need the marketing, I don’t need to be featured in the front page of the store, I don’t need taxation and regulation for 100+ countries.
Why should I pay for these things I don’t care about? Why can’t these be separate costs, which I could opt-in? Why can’t they be unbundled?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod
https://9to5mac.com/2021/10/23/20-years-ago-today-ipod-chang...