The Apple Tax Is Rotten
Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, is unflappability personified. When facing tough questions from investors, journalists or lawmakers, Cook tends to speak with the sparkling precision of an iPhone’s diamond-cut edges — slowly, commandingly, in an elegant Southern drawl that conveys exactly the sort of finality you’d expect from the head of a $2 trillion tech titan.
Last week, though, Cook might have felt a bit like a spinning pinwheel under the polite yet relentless interrogation of a Federal District Court judge charged with deciding whether Apple is a ruthless monopolist. In the process, the judge, Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in Oakland, Calif., highlighted a scourge affecting just about every Apple customer and the software developers who want to build apps for them.
Call this scourge what it plainly is, the Apple tax — the billions of dollars a year that Apple collects from large swaths of the technology industry for the privilege of offering paid apps and in-app purchases to iPhone and iPad users. Once, in the early days of the iPhone, Apple’s 30 percent fee on app purchases, and its restrictive rules, could be defended on the grounds of its great innovation in the mobile market. Apple, after all, was the first to market the modern touch-screen smartphone and the simple, one-tap way of adding apps to it, and it seemed reasonable for the company to collect tremendous winnings from its creation.
