Mergers don't make things better for consumers once the pressure of price point competition is removed from the market, which includes any incentive to innovate as well.
The only "consumers" helped by an M&A are investors and execs.
Next and Apple going out of business could have opened up the field for another up and comer. No Google merger has been conscionable. It's all been monopolists monopolizing.
Sprint should have died to free up assets for someone that's not already a huge player in the space to pick up. I don't see corporate immortality through M&A's as a good thing.
If Sprint died, the other carriers or Comcast would have bought the carrier. T-mobile was also an also ran and its spectrum allocation was so bad you could never get a signal inside a building.
If Apple died who was going to make an alternate operating system to Microsoft? Do you think that would have caused “The Year of Linux on the desktop”. Apple was far from a huge player in 1996 when the Next acquisition happened. It was almost bankrupt.
A new company isn’t going to just come along and start a nationwide cell phone network and especially not with what was Sprint’s limited spectrum.
Next + Apple. Without the merger they would have both been out of business
YouTube could not have survived without the Google merger.
Sprint was losing money for over a decade and wouldn’t have survived without merging with T-mobile and T-mobile needed the spectrum to compete with AT&T and Verizon.