This makes me wonder who Apple ticked off at the DOJ, because it would be interesting to follow that money trail and see where their lobbying broke down. That's the chink in the armor of all these too-big-to-fail companies, and how we the people reclaim our power.

But the real point that HN commenters seem to be missing is that the Apple we grew up with hasn't existed for a long time. They abandoned their charter decades ago. Which was originally to bring the power of computing to everyone, especially children, to liberate us all from Big Brother and the limits on creativity handed down to us by megacorps like IBM, Microsoft and now Amazon.

I can't list everything that Apple has down wrong that caused me to stop endorsing them. But I can provide at least a start of a vision of what a real Apple would look like with today's technology and expertise. A real Apple would:

  * Strive to reduce the cost of technology through innovation and economies of scale.
  * Sell user-serviceable hardware with interchangeable parts and conveniences like no-tools battery replacement.
  * Use its vast access to capital and resources to innovate, rather than dump its R&D costs onto early adopters with stuff like VR headsets and "high end" computers costing 2-10 times the market rate.
  * Sell value-added services and leverage proven technologies like BitTorrent to provide users searchable access to every kind of media ever created, rather than bowing to the RIAA/MPAA and creating walled gardens like iTunes and yet another streaming service in Apple TV that locks users into a proprietary vendor providing limited usability.
  * Build handhelds with P2P wireless technology that "just works", the way early Kindle had free cellular access, to negate the monopoly power of 5G.
  * Empower users with real revolutionary technologies such as highly multicore processors, auto-scaling CPU clusters and parallelized functional programming languages, not just halfhearted evolutionary proprietary solutions like M1 and Metal which mostly just copy other monopolies like Nvidia.
  * Fund and maintain open source software ecosystems instead of endlessly deprecating previously working frameworks with no backwards compatibility or migration tools, to skim even more profit at tremendous expense to developers.
  * Encourage a developer-first mindset by providing up-to-date documentation instead of expired links and a drink-the-kool-aid mindset comprised of cookie cutter proprietary frameworks handed down from on high by middle managers and designers.
  * Stand up to authoritarianism by selling its products unmodified in foreign markets, rather than weakening encryption or bowing to censorship like Twitter/X did for China and India at the people's expense.
  * Pay the wealth forward into grants, trusts and UBI instead of hoarding an almost $3 trillion market cap that only benefits people of means who can afford to buy AAPL stock and sell it short for almost guaranteed profit at times like this.

I could go on.. forever. I'm just so tired of everything that I'm not sure I can even endorse tech as a whole anymore, since this seems to be what always happens. I wish we could erase everything that happened after the Dot Bomb around the year 2000 and start over on a new timeline. Built and funded by us directly as free agents the way we always dreamed of, instead of pulling the yoke for an owner class whose only contribution is access to capital it vacuumed up from the rest of us through everything from gentrification to regulatory capture.