"As with Boeing in the late 1990s, Apple is financializing; it now spends twice as much on stock buybacks as it does on R&D, and that’s because it faces no meaningful competition that forces it to innovate. For sure, Apple has fantastic development capacity, as illustrated by the Vision Pro, but it increasingly degrades the quality of its own flagship product - the iPhone - for the purpose of maintaining its market power." @matthewstoller https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/why-the-apple-antitrust-suit-matters
via the same @matthewstoller piece, from the DoJ complaint (I think), a good explanation of the kind of thinking that leaves Apple Mail languishing in sucktitude despite the trivial amount of investment it would take to maintain it as a great mail client.
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/why-the-apple-antitrust-suit-matters
Text: For example, Apple's vice president of iPhone marketing explained in February 2020: "In looking at it with hindsight, | think going forward we need to set a stake in the ground for what features we think are ‘good enough’ for the consumer. | would argue were [sic] already doing *more* than what would have been good enough.” After identifying old features that “would have been good enough today if we hadn't introduced [updated features] already,” she explained, "anything new and especially expensive needs to be rigorously challenged before it's allowed into the consumer phone.”