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Comment by deafpolygon | Hacker News Reader

Or they may pull out of the EU area temporarily.

And lose access to some of the countries with the highest iPhone market share per capita? (Source: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/iphone-ma...)

I don't doubt that Apple sells a lot of iPhones to rich western European countries. But, uh, I gotta call the quality of data from that website into question when it shows North Korea as having 99% iPhone share ;)

It sort of makes sense. They're getting market share by using geo-ip and browser agent strings.

Either a bunch of hackers in NK are pretending to be iPhones, or some small lab of iPhones was marked as NK in the geo-ip database. But since the numbers are probably tiny 99% probably isn't too hard to achieve.

I really wonder if Apple could force the EU's hand by not selling iPhones under these rules.

I'm not saying they would, but I do wonder if EU citizens would pressure lawmakers to rollback these rules in that case.

That decision would be an insanely huge monetary blow to Apple that is absolutely not in line with the few percent drop they might get from a slightly fewer installs on the AppStore. Even if the EU law is instantly reversed, that would still make a lot of people angry at Apple, or they might have already bought Android and won’t turn back for years.

The Brussels effect is very effective!

Seeing as it's their third biggest market - are they and their shareholders ok with losing 20-30% of all revenue over this?

The stock price alone would plummet.

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