[fitkoh]

I heard Apple won't let phones to be repaired by third parties. Means from iPhone 12 you can only get parts replaced or phone repaired by Apple itself.  No longer you can replace parts with another broken Apple phone. Another way for Apple to increase their profits but forcing users to send phones to be repaired and pay whatever Apple says. I  had heard rumors about it but didn't think it's all true till I watched this video.

It's been a while since I was in school, but lets see if memory still serves me.

I recall learning about "The Great Depression" which was caused mostly by greedy companies using business practices which make it difficult/impossible to compete and creating monopolies which could run rampant and do whatever they wanted, because there was no competition.

As it was taught, there's two types of monopolies: vertical, and horizontal.

A horizontal monopoly is a business which owns all the businesses of one type. The example of this in history class was the Vanderbilts and their railroads. If you wanted to ship something quickly across the country, you had to use the railroads, and the Vanderbilts owned all of them.

A vertical monopoly is a business which owns all aspects of its business from top to bottom so it doesn't need any resources from any other commercial entities to conduct its business. An example of this would be the Carnegie steel business, which owned the quarries the ores were mined from, the transport systems to move the raw materials in and the refined materials out, as well as the refineries themselves.

In the case of Apple products only allowed to be serviced by Apple, this seems to me to be a vertical monopoly practice. So how, when in the US (Apple's home country) we have antitrust laws, is this sort of practice still allowed? Is it because the government cuts deals so the politicians can pocket money? Microsoft lost it's case against the Department of Justice in 1998, but was never disbanded. A similar case was brought against Google last month (Oct 2020). Which makes me wonder what good are the laws if they aren't going to be enforced? I wonder if Google will be disbanded as Microsoft should've been, or if history will repeat itself and Google will make some corrupt politicians a little wealthier.