[undoware]

The market and I agree that you are misreading things, but we can agree to disagree.

By my lights, winners don't have to take all in order to have won -- approximately half the market is sufficient. Enough to dictate terms for most users most of the time. That's Apple in 2022, and the market is reflecting that fact. In fact, I daresay that if Apple hasn't won, it is, at the very least, mate-in-three, or thereabouts.

A more interesting question is, what psychological comfort is there in minimizing one's perception of their hegemony?

I'm thinking in terms of avoidance of discomfort. Ideologically, I've been a FOSSian my whole life -- I'm in my forties, and I was a teenager when I first installed Red Hat.

But I'm increasingly aware that, despite having won the battle with the NT kernel, we somehow lost the war. Specifically, we were co-opted by Apple, Amazon, and, yes, now Microsoft too.

It puts food on my table but it leaves me feeling a little empty. I don't know about you. <3 Maybe it's the same?

It's hard to admit you're a bird in a cage. It's even harder to admit that the next generation will be.

[smoldesu]

Apple is too smart to want #1. I'll concede to you that they dominate the market through their avoidance of monopoly, but they hardly have a monopoly on tech as a whole. Modern MacOS is truly terrible if you aren't a creative or "business" customer, and it's intuitiveness as a user-friendly OS has waned for a while now. All of their other products are glorified lifestyle devices. How does that constitute a monopoly on anything but vanity?

We can both disagree on our subjective interpretation of Apple's ecosystem, and our subjective opinions on where they're headed as a company. We both seem to agree that they're objectively molesting the market though, so we're frankly not disagreeing on much. Still, "permission to worry" is a silly albatross to wear on anyone's behalf. Sounds like an article GameInformer would write about the Xbox 360, not an article discussing the merits of modern computing.

[undoware]

shrugs

The article is as-yet unwritten -- the premiss will be that in general, the privilege of being permitted to worry about any given thing is, in an organization, the most critical plank of status. The opposite of a window seat.

Pay, equity, everything else -- not as important.

It has little to do with my former employer specifically. It's anthropology.