On every discussion about this topic on HN, there has been at least one but typically many more commenters saying they love the walled garden and they would pay a premium for it. They trust Apple so they are OK with paying them 30% more instead of paying the app developers directly. They would never dare recommend Windows or Linux or Android to their parents but they would happily recommend them to get iPhones and iPads because they would not end up with a virus-ridden device.
Personally, this is so different from the way I think that I find it utterly surprising, much more so from the tech savvy audience of HN. But apparently preferring walled gardens and being willing to pay extra to obtain one and even more every time you buy something on it is not an uncommon opinion to have.
First, I embrace your choice to not go with a locked down, un-free device. That is entirely within the spirit of being a hacker.
Second, I very much argue that if there was no app store, consumers would pay 30% less. The app store and ecosystem provide something for developers, and if you remove the app store, the developers either do it for themselves, or pay somebody else to do it for them.
Of course, if there was meaningful competition, the fees might be less, or the value provided to developers might be more. But I doubt that prices would drop the full 30%.
I say this as someone who worked in tech distribution. Great things can happen when you cut out a middleman, but it's often surprising how difficult it is to replicate the middleman's distribution advantages.
All that being said, I'm not here to debate whether prices would fall 30%, 27.2%, or even 10%. I agree with your basic premise: tech-savvy people have less upside and more downside from owning locked-down devices.
Hmm... I'm pretty tech savvy I'd say, but I don't think there's anyway the benefits I'd gain outside Apple's wall garden would compare to the ecosystem I live in now.
Apple's rent seeking a bit with the App Store, but I have faith in their privacy protections, that they'll continue to support my devices for a long time after purchase, and that they'll be fairly prompt with security updates to all my devices.
And cobbling together the connections between ear phones, watch, phone, computer and TV would be quite tedious, probably no where near as smooth, and a pain in the ass to upkeep.
At the end of the day, besides my computer, I don't really give a hoot about side loading apps from different app stores, or I dunno... customizing things more I guess? I'm not really sure.
There is the possibility increased app store competition (say, if it was ruled anti-competitive to only allow Apple's App Store on Apple Products) would make Apple's App Store better though. Discovery can be kind of a pain in my opinion.
So, I'm not opposed to there being more app stores, but it'd probably take a fair amount of nudging to get me to actually try one.
Personally, this is so different from the way I think that I find it utterly surprising
Seven billion people on the planet. It shouldn't be surprising to learn that not everyone thinks the way that you do.
I wonder if it's an age thing. When you're young and have more time than money, tinkering with the technical hassles of your phone is worth it to save a buck or two. When you're older and have more money than time, you happily pay $399 for an iPhone if it means getting hours or days of your life to spend on other things.
Age was it, in part, for me. I used to do lots of hardware and OS tinkering. Now the last goddamn thing I want to do is troubleshoot graphical glitches in x-windows, or try to get my audio to handle changing outputs correctly, or cross my fingers while "dist-upgrade" runs, or fix scaling and font rendering in GTK apps, or whatever, when I'm just trying to do something else.
At some point I became acutely aware of every time I was doing something with a computer that was simply fucking with the computer, and not actually getting anything that I wanted or needed to get done, except to the extent that making my computer be not-broken is required for those things. Around that time I was exposed to macOS and iOS and finally had an actual choice to (mostly) not have to do that when I don't want to, and if I decide I would like to tinker then I can use... any other option on the market.
I'd probably be screwing around with trying to run NetBSD on Android phones and turn them into mobile computers I can plug monitors and keyboards into and embedding RPis and Arduinos in all kinds of crap around the house, if I were 16 again.
At the age I am now, though, you'd literally have to pay me to even think about doing any of that. Even when I screw around with getting allegedly set-it-and-forget-it RPi media projects (think: kodi, lakka) working I usually end up regretting it. I do know how to work with those sorts of things. I also very much don't want to any more, but do still want computer-things doing stuff for me with few or no hassles. Luckily these days you can pay to get that, in some categories at least. Largely from Apple, if you want them to last a while—I do wish they had actual competition in that sense. More options that don't spy (much) and Just Work (mostly), please.
I also like having a car with an automatic transmission and engine instrumentation that tells me when to get the oil changed and perform maintenance. My interaction with my car is strictly monetary and burns none of my mental cycles.
I have 4 other people in my house, plus I'm the "tech guy" for maybe another dozen people. I appreciate how simple that job is when everyone has iPhones.
Just to make a vast generalisation with no hard evidence: I wouldn’t be surprised if it often came down to age. When I was younger, I had the desire, and more importantly the time, to keep everything I used as open source as I could afford.
Fast forward a decade (or maybe 2) and while I am still very pro open-all-the-things, I am happy to pay more for a controlled environment to run things I rely on but don’t care to spend time on maintaining and configuring.
I'm curious, how many apps do you have installed on your phone, and how many of them are paid ones? Especially, ones using subscription models? Less than 10, or dozens?
I have over a dozen and I really appreciate the ability to manage (or at least view) those in one place. Managing my non-app (website) subscriptions is quite a mess.
And it is only one advantage of the walled garden. I don't have to think much when I install an app - is it from the developer, or someone has tampered with it?
Personally, this is so different from the way I think that I find it utterly surprising, much more so from the tech savvy audience of HN. But apparently preferring walled gardens and being willing to pay extra to obtain one and even more every time you buy something on it is not an uncommon opinion to have.