Apple does have a very anti-cooperative business practices that which goes against the spirit of cooperation of communism. Would a company like Apple event exist in a post-capitalist world?
By “a company like Apple”, I mean a company that it is extremely secretive, doesnt open source anything and doesnt cooperate with any other companies, and tries to make everything proprietary and have closed ecosystems.
I spend a lot of time reading about old technology, because I am a giant nerd. One thing that occurs to me after seeing so many different approaches to essentially the same problem, is that certain things are kinda inevitable. Especially in the communications space, because most humans inherently crave connection. A lot of actual innovation in this space comes from places fairly divorced from capitalism like academia and hobbyists; people who will build a thing either for the technical challenge, or simply because they believe a thing should exist.
If we didn’t have the internet as it is today, we’d probably have something similar. FidoNet was huge, and it basically just a bunch of people who decided to hook up all their BBSes together. Linux was just a guy who decided to put his college project up on usenet. The whole computer scene for a long time was a hobbyist thing. Some of the most influential computer systems were just guys building shit in their garage.
Now I’m going to speculate a bit. If telecomms infrastructure hadn’t played out the way it did, with massive carriers having central control of the network and selling you the device you use to access it, maybe we’d have some evolution of packet radio. A decentralised, volunteer-run mesh network based on the old HAM or CB systems. Your device probably wouldn’t look the same, but it’d fulfill the same basic functions of calls, messaging in realtime and non-realtime with groups and individuals, and maybe some light gaming.
So no, probably no iPhone, but definitely something functionally similar.