I came to the realization that I couldn’t think of an example of when vertical integration isn’t just an older name for enshittification. Apple owning an app store, Amazon being a marketplace and seller, etc. What examples of vertical integration aren’t bad? Are there any?
It’s interesting you mention Apple because their products benefit tremendously from vertical integration in ways that directly benefit the consumer.
We can argue all day about price, but as far as features, the interconnectedness of Apple stuff is way better than anyone else. The ability to seamlessly jump from your laptop to your phone to your TV and smart speaker and have it all routed to your account means that you only have to manage that one account.
Again, there are more consumer-friendly ways of doing this and Apple isn’t a saint, but there are recognizable benefits that come along with it.
Not disagreeing with the benefits, but my gripe with Apple is that they lock out everyone else from even competing with them, which is anticompetitive and ultimately anti-consumer. All of those cool features only with with THEIR phone, THEIR laptop, THEIR smart speaker, THEIR earphones, THEIR smartwatch, THEIR cloud storage, THEIR keyboard, THEIR mouse, THEIR location-tracking tag, THEIR VR headset, THEIR TV box… If you replace any one of those things with a competitor’s product – which might have been better than Apple’s – then you’re locked out of many great features for no good reason.
You’re not wrong, hence my mention about them being no saint. But you can’t argue the fact the with all of the open standards available, none of them work nearly as well as Apple’s implementations. I say this using both Mac and Linux interchangeably on a daily basis. They each have their strengths and weaknesses. When I need a space for creative work, I use my Mac. When I need a space for gaming or experimental software or programming, I use Linux. When I’m feeling masochistic, I save a VM of Windows Me for late nights when the roommate’s not around.
That’s not really vertical integration, though. That’s more horizontal than anything.
Vertical integration would be, for example, Tyson chicken owning the company that makes the feed for the company they also own that raises the chickens that go to their own processing plants.
It’s a supply chain structure, not a product offering ecosystem.
Their horizontal integration is made more seamless by the vertical integration.
On an Apple laptop, they’re the OEM of the hardware product itself, while also being the manufacturer of the CPU and GPU and the operating system. For most other laptops that’s 3 or 4 distinct companies.