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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

> I'm still missing how this could be enforced ?

Basically by saying that if they don't comply, they can't do business in the UK.

There are lots of different ways to do business. UK is unlikely to be able to ban the iphone, and I doubt Apple has much business in the UK. As such they can lay off all workers in the UK "because of legal issues" and the workers feel the pain. They can still sell in the UK through third parties, and go to the EU if you need warranty work

The phone itself is only a piece. Apple sells multiple services, without them the phone is useless. If you can't access the appstore, the backups, etc. what good is an iPhone? Now, the UK can say that UK citizens' data can't travel outside of the UK without the UK government permission.

So it's still a problem. This seems like a looming PR battle.

> Now, the UK can say that UK citizens' data can't travel outside of the UK without the UK government permission.

How so?

Same as GDPR forbids the same thing from EU.

Except perhaps for people living near the border in Northern Ireland, "going to the EU" for warranty work is a completely unfeasible suggestion. It's not exactly a short or cheap journey for most of us!

You don't have to go in person. Put it in the mail. In person can get same day service though. Next day mail is expensive, but you can get it (and if Apple is serious they can partner with the next day mail and do overnight repairs.). It isn't uncommon for someone to ship you are replacement device and then you ship your broken one back after the new arrives (if the old is only partially broke this can be useful). Apple has a lot of options to make this not too inconvenient.

Though will Apple blink is still unknown. Just because they can doesn't mean they will.

The UK public would never accept this. There's basically almost no interest in E2EE at all, but the idea of not being able to take your iPhone to the Apple Store would be riot-inducing. And I think the average Brit would be more comfortable posting their phone to the US than to France.

If Apple really has the guts to stare this one down, then I would expect it's the government who blinks.

That got me curious. Google maps says that from London to the Apple store in Lille, France is about 4 hours by car, and the same for the return trip. Googling suggests that it would be about £120 for round trip transport through the tunnel.

It says that by train it is about 90 minutes each way and would cost about the same as the car trip.

Ireland doesn't have a single apple store in it. The closest thing that exists are stores in their authorised reseller program.

If the reseller is also an Apple authorized service provider that should find. They have genuine Apple parts and can do warrant and AppleCare work.

Not sure it would be worth it though, unless you are in Northern Ireland. If you are someplace more like London it would be a lot faster to go to the nearest Apple Store in France and a lot cheaper.

That's really odd -- Belfast but not Dublin? Why?

"Europeans think 100 miles is a long distance. Americans think 100 years is a long time."

It's ~40 miles round trip to go to a grocery store. And that's a crappy store, better ones are an additional 5-10 miles.

In the US.

It is a relatively small market, and if Apple decides to shut down while flooding the streets of London with posters saying “We are forced by your government to shut down in order to uphold your privacy”, the UK Government would take a massive blow.

Imagine Russian Oligarchs on android devices! Polonium will roll, I tell you!

So if British voters get to chose between having access to iPhones or voting for a government that wants to spy on them at whatever the cost surely the choice must be clear?

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