joshhsoj1902

I thought I listed a bunch of cases where there were options (and not monopolies). But yes, 100% inside many ecosystems are monopolies, and those ecosystems/walled gardens have been slowly expanding every chance these companies have.

I'm saying the competition can only exist because products that actually fill the same need.

If you decide that you need product A, and have multiple options on where to get that, you have competition.

So if you're looking for a Cola, you have options.

If you're looking to play StardewValley, you have options where you want to buy it and which platform you want to play it on, you don't need to buy a new game system to play it.

If you're looking to play the latest Zelda game, you don't have options, you need to buy a Switch.

If you're looking to watch Ozarks, you don't have options, you can only watch Netflix.

If you're looking to just have something playing on TV and don't really care what it is, you have options.

If you're looking to listen to music, you have options, most of the steaming services have most of the music.

If you're looking to be able to text friends, you have options, any phone will work.

If you're looking to be able to iMessage friends and for your case only iMessage will work, iPhone is your only option.

Competition is complex and is more dependent on a consumer needs than just classification of what a product is. In your earlier point you used Apple as an example of a company that can increase prices despite competition, but really Apple is a prime example of a company putting up walls to an ecosystem making it really hard to leave once you're in.

Generally in the current tech landscape there barely is any competition outside openish platforms. But with tech, you often can't look at competition as product A vs Product B. Like while we can say that Window competes with OSx, it's harder to say that a Mac laptop competes with a given Dell laptop (because what you can do with each OS is different to different people).

This is why I like to think of all the tv streaming services as different types of food stores. There is no supermarket that supplies everything, you're forced to have memberships to the single butcher, the single milk man, the single bakery, etc. if you want a particular food, there is currently no (or very little) competition. You can certainly survive on just bread, and people are happy to do that, but that bakery can and will increase prices whenever because they aren't really competing with the butcher.

I still think you're looking at competition slightly wrong.

Coke and Pepsi do compete with eachother, along with the rest of the drink market. And overall prices in that industry are pretty low, some people will buy other competitors (the store brand Cola's). But overall competition is working.

Apple only kinda competes. Sure a phone is a phone and a laptop is a laptop. But unless someone is entering the market for the first time. They already have applications they are looking to use, so if you need an iPhone, you need an iPhone, and same for a Mac. But if you're an android or Windows user, suddenly you have a lot more choice because there is lots of competition!

The reason companies setup walled gardens, or pay for exclusive access to a piece of media is to erode competition. If a user wants that thing, they can only get it from that one place.

It's only competition if they provide similar products.

The current landscape is like farmers markets and butchers. Sure they both provide food, but they don't really directly compete with eachother.

This isn't completely true, but it is the current standard.

A website can detect and block many user/password attempts from the same IP and block IPs that are suspicious.

Websites can detect elivated login fails across many IPs are react accordingly (It may be reasonable to block all logins for a time if they detect an attack like this)

I'm sure there are other strategies, I don't know how often they are actually employed, but I wish companies would start taking this sort of attack more seriously (even if it's not at all hacking)

Keep in mind that buying photos isn't the only application of NFTs. People stopped buying valueless photos, but other implementations of NFTs kept on being used.

I work on an ARM Mac, it's fine. If you're just doing light work on it, it works great! Like any other similarly priced laptop would.

Under load, or doing work outside what it is tuned for, it doesn't perform spectacularly.

It's a fine laptop, the battery life is usually great. But as soon as you need to use the x86 translation layer, performance tanks, battery drains, it's not a great time.

Things are getting better, and for a light user, It works great, but I'm much more excited about modern x86 laptop processors for the time being.

Your statement only works if you're also accounting for accidents prevented by lane assist technology. It's also worth factoring in cases where these technologies were able to make an accident less severe.

Hmm, I have a system running a 6000 series i7 (released mid 2015) and it was upgraded to Windows 11 a few months ago.

The version must be more of a recommendation than a firm requirement

Is this because the free upgrade to Windows 11 is too large of a download?

Of course, percentage just help show relativity. It's why people can look at a 0.5% increase and dismiss it as not significant.

Would it help if I translated the percentage for you? Linux surged 600000 to 2.3 million.