I get Tim’s reasoning though with Xbox, Switch, and PlayStation. As it stands, these are not general purposes operating systems. You don’t “install apps” on them, you play games, maybe stream a show, and maybe use a web browser (but realistically few people are doing the latter two with these devices). They’re also typically much more subsidized because Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft can recoup a lot of the hardware cost in game sales (where as Apple and Google increasingly make the most money off of the hardware sales).
Compare that to the Apple and Google case; like imagine if Microsoft and Apple had done this with PCs in the 90s. The world would look significantly different because you couldn’t install various things on Macs. Like as an example, Firefox and Chrome arguably wouldn’t exist (or would be a pain to install), because your system would ship with Safari and Internet Explorer (and the other browsers would just “not be allowed”).
This is hugely anti-competitive in a way that’s far more offensive than Nintendo, Sony, or Microsoft’s behavior on their gaming consoles. These are not general purposes devices (maybe they should be, but they’re not). Basically nobody is doing their taxes on a Switch or PlayStation … but plenty of people use iOS/Android devices as their only computers (they do their taxes there, pay their bills online via these devices, etc).
I get Tim’s reasoning though with Xbox, Switch, and PlayStation. As it stands, these are not general purposes operating systems. You don’t “install apps” on them, you play games, maybe stream a show, and maybe use a web browser (but realistically few people are doing the latter two with these devices). They’re also typically much more subsidized because Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft can recoup a lot of the hardware cost in game sales (where as Apple and Google increasingly make the most money off of the hardware sales).
Compare that to the Apple and Google case; like imagine if Microsoft and Apple had done this with PCs in the 90s. The world would look significantly different because you couldn’t install various things on Macs. Like as an example, Firefox and Chrome arguably wouldn’t exist (or would be a pain to install), because your system would ship with Safari and Internet Explorer (and the other browsers would just “not be allowed”).
This is hugely anti-competitive in a way that’s far more offensive than Nintendo, Sony, or Microsoft’s behavior on their gaming consoles. These are not general purposes devices (maybe they should be, but they’re not). Basically nobody is doing their taxes on a Switch or PlayStation … but plenty of people use iOS/Android devices as their only computers (they do their taxes there, pay their bills online via these devices, etc).