I, on the other hand, have a lot more sympathy for Apple: Many highly successful people and many businesses have never owned any of there products. They are not a monopoly. Why can't market forces just regulate them ??
Apple may not have a monopoly, but they have enormous market power. By themselves, monopoly or market power are neither illegal or even undesirable.
However, they become undesirable when they are abused to undermine cometition in other markets. For example: Apple has successfully prevented competition to Apple Pay for a long time, by only allowing their own products access to NFC. This meant that parties that were already specialized in handling payments, had no chance to compete, despite them being in an excellent position to do so.
If this behaviour is left unchecked, over time we will end up with one single company dominating most markets. I feel that's undesirable. Given the number of dystopian novels on that premise, most of society considers that future to be undesirable.
Because personal computer market (let’s face it: the primary or only personal computing device of most people today is a phone or a tablet) are a duopoly, with the other actor also being one of the monopolistic tech giants.
Just to emphasise, the mobile device market IS a duopoly because you may have multiple sources for Android phone hardware, but for software you have exactly two options: iOS and Android.
As a user, I was quite happy with my personal Android phone while developing for iOS, both for hardware and software, because absolutely nothing is requiring consumers to buy Apple in the first place as basically every App you care about is shipped to both platforms anyway.
