Dude, Apple is the enshitifier par excellence (I type on an iPhone). Here’s a vignette:
I’m being issued a new credit card, and it’s going to be a pain in the ass for me if I decide to renew my Spotify subscription. Why? Because I can’t renew it via the app. Why can’t I renew it via the app? Because the App Store takes a 30 percent (30 percent!) vig from anything sold via an app in its App Store.
So Spotify can either lose the massive global iPhone market, or it can pay the 30, or it can make the user experience shitty and I will have to go via the browser to renew (I’ve forgotten my password) and honestly I may just say fuck it at this point.
And here’s the thing— Apple doesn’t charge all apps the same. Apple wants me to use Apple Music and there I can subscribe via the app. And sometimes Apple picks winners— Uber does not pay a 30 percent, but smaller ride shares do. Competition!
And of course I’m totally locked into Apple. Two factor authentication. Photos. Shit in the cloud. When I need a new phone I for sure want to just image my iPhone to the new one; trying to move to Android makes me shudder. And— key point— my choices are Apple and Android, basically, for a functioning OS. And also it’s a felony to jailbreak my iPhone to move shit.
Remember, iPhone is supposed to be easier. User friendly. Seamless. Unless I want to use a streaming service I like more than Apple Music. Then it’s not, and that’s enshitification. Pure rent-seeking; and we could regulate this shit and say “Apple, you basically have a monopoly on apps. You have to extend them all the same terms of use and fees.” We could say “we aren’t going to make it a felony for people to move their own data from one phone to another.”
And this is everywhere. Getting commercials on Amazon Prime streaming— after you cut the cord and bought a sub— is enshitification. The entire Amazon search is a grift scheme designed to have sellers compete for how much they will pay for product placement and you the buyer have to work harder to find what you want in a sea of drop-shop slop. That’s enshitification. I am sure it’s creating shareholder value but it’s not creating value.
And back to AI— what OpenAI is doing is getting OpenAI in EVERYTHING. Walmart, your bank, whatever. And then once it’s there and you can’t get a toilet plunger at the Wal-Mart without it Altman will jack up the price and reduce support and add on features to make it even more impossible to dislodge. And that’s where the shareholder value comes in. This is not “creative destruction.”