The market is what products people actually move to and from in response to Apple pricw changes; if there's a segment of buyers and price range in which Apple has pricing power—price changes do not cause such movement—Apple is an antitrust monopoly. Popular descriptive “markets” like “smartphones” often include many isolated submarkets and are not single markets in which competition exists.
A major purpose of brnad marketing is to create such pocket markets.
So your point is that there are no high priced smart phones other than Apple, therefore it’s a monopoly?
Aside from being extremely silly, under this formulation Rolls Royce might be a monopoly, it lacks factual backing. There are plenty of android offerings that overlap Apple offerings in price, including the Pixel 3 and most of the Galaxy S10 series. If your point is that someone willing to spend $1k on a smart phone has no other choice other than to buy Apple, the $1k+ Galaxy S10+ would like to have a word with you.
If your point instead is that any brand that builds up a “pocket market” via good products and marketing is an abusive monopoly that just be stopped, then you’re signing up basically every top company in the every market segment for stringent antitrust enforcement, which is so broad a definition as to be useless. You can’t sue Nike as a monopoly because they’ve built up their own fan base and “pocket market”.
> So your point is that there are no high priced smart phones other than Apple, therefore it’s a monopoly?
Nope. My point to is neither “there are no high priced smart phones” (there are) not “it’s a monopoly” (I have no position on that question). You should be able to tell that because I say nothing similar to either of those anywhere in the post you are responding to.
My point is that the existence of other players in a particular popular framing of what the market is has very little to do with the anti-trust definition of “monopoly”, which has to do with empirical competition (what do consumers move to or from in response to, particularly, price changes), not how markets are popularly described.
> If your point instead is that any brand that builds up a “pocket market” via good products and marketing is an abusive monopoly that just be stopped
Again, no. Building a non-competitive market via branding or other means makes you a monopoly, not necessarily an abusive one. You still have to abuse that monopoly to be an abusive monopoly.
That's a lot of words that take literally no stance on the issue. You've slowly shifted back to an incredibly vague definition of a market and an incredibly vague definition of what an abusive monopoly is. At this point it's literally impossible to discuss the issue with you, because the definitions have become uselessly broad.
> You've slowly shifted back to an incredibly vague definition of a market and an incredibly vague definition of what an abusive monopoly is
I've had two posts in this thread, both of which take exactly the same position despite your ridiculous misinterpretation in between them; I haven't shifted, slowly or otherwise.
And the definition of market/monopoly is exactly the one used in antitrust law. That may be inconvenient for your desire to argue, but that doesn't change the facts. And I haven't presented any definition of an abusive monopoly, just corrected your claim that a particular definition of monopoly also meant any company that meant it was also an abusive monopoly, noting that “abusive” actually does have meaning.
A major purpose of brnad marketing is to create such pocket markets.