AirPods live translation blocked for EU users with EU Apple accounts | Hacker News Reader

AirPods live translation blocked for EU users with EU Apple accounts

macrumors.com

431 pointsthm563 comments

Google Pixel Buds have a translation feature, and a bunch of other "Gemini AI" gimmicks, available in the EU.

Apple managed to get approvals for medical devices and studies (highly regulated everywhere), custom radios and satellite communication (highly regulated everywhere).

Apple already has machine translation, voice recognition, voice recording, and dictation features shipped in the EU.

But when EU hurt Apple's ego by daring to demand to give users freedom to run software they want on devices they bought (that could break them out of a very lucrative duopoly), Apple suddenly is a helpless baby who cannot find a way to make a new UI available in the EU.

The EU has not declared that Android gatekeeps headphone technology, so the comparison to Pixel Buds is totally irrelevant. There is no interop requirement placed on them.

So Apple is welcome to divest AirPods into a separate company and problem solved. Who knows, "AirPods Inc" may discover there are a great many phone brands out there that could use a nice integration and extra features. Win for consumers.

I agree, the Beats takeover should have never happened. The US is basically allowing everything to be swallowed by big-tech.

> the Beats takeover should have never happened.

I agree from a business perspective, those headphones were all brand and a bad fit for apple from a quality perspective. Do we really need regulators deciding when businesses are wasting their money?

Or you know Linux/Windows PCs that would definitely be a big win.

That's literally the Boeing model

I wish this would happen. I loved my AirPods Pros 2 but the Android/Windows support was so abysmal that I eventually ditched them.

So, the problem is indeed the EU.

On the contrary, the EU is the solution.

The integration works so well because airpods and apple phones use a protocol that isn't bluetooth, their "Magic protocol". You have to own the whole stack to make it work so well.

So all Apple needs to do is stop gatekeeping headphone technology.

What is the definition of gatekeeping technology?

In Apple’s case it mostly means that the API:s Apple use for the AirPods use should be available for others to also use. Apple is not allowed to deny or punish headphones from other manufacturers that want to use those API:s.

This is not quite the problem.

There are multiple issues at play.

The two main issues are:

1 - Sometimes processing is done in private cloud servers for complex translations. Apple is not allowed to do that for EU users. Full Stop. Even if it were not prohibited by EU law, you still have issue 2.

2 - It's unclear whether or not Apple can charge. If another dev uses the APIs, and it triggers a call to the cloud, who pays for the inference? Until Apple gains clarity on that, charging could be considered "punish"-ing a dev for using their APIs.

My own opinion? Issue 2 they will get worked out, but it won't matter because I don't think the EU will move at all on issue 1. I think they see data privacy as serving a twofold purpose. One, protecting their citizens from US surveillance. ie-National Security. And two, part of their long term strategy to decrease the influence of US tech firms in the EU. Both of which I think European policymakers and European common people feel are critical to Europe.

They can design the API in such a way that you can provide your own interference solution, or just disable the cloud interference. This is purely a business decision.

On-device API use is what is relevant here, services such as servers and interference services are out of scope. The DMA clearly allows companies to charge for service use, but they cannot deny API use for any competition who wants for example to use the quick pairing feature or low-latency communication.

It’s some combination of a market companies in the EU care about where Apple sells a product that has some amount of market share, where the threshold and market definition are totally made up and seem to only impact foreign multinationals.

If it's any consolation, Apple is in a league of their own. Any fair, proportional legislation would impact them more than anyone else.

EU isn't forcing Google to let random 3rd parties replace Gemini AI with TotallyHonestAndNotStealingYourData Corp's AI.

You can replace Gemini with Perplexity or whatever you want on your Android phone, that includes the main system-wide assistant.

Google is a designated gatekeeper carrying all the same DMA obligations for:

Google Search, YouTube, Chrome, Shopping, Maps, Ads, the Play Store, and Android.

https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/gatekeepers_en

You already can replace the default assistant app with any app that declares itself as an assistant on Android, and have always been able to.

Half of the new Google Pixel AI features are not enabled in EU. Magic cue, text image editing... These are on-device features too, so really not sure why

I'm a disappointed Pixel 10 owner living in Germany

Instead of these conspiracy theories, the more likely answer is that it takes time to get through these additional regulations, and they didn't want that to hold back their US rollout. Its a pattern that we've seen plenty of times already in the tech industry.

So Samsung could nail the regulation part with their earbuds, but Apple with Airpods can't.

Samsung isn’t a “gatekeeper” under the DMA. The regulations in question here don’t apply to them.

Most probably as you say they can't ship the capability yet, so they're blaming the regulations.

Or really the headphones actively register and send data outside of the EU. There's been some pushback recently on this front (ie. recent MSFT case [1]) since it's a known fact in the field that the approved 2023 EU-US DPF is basically BS, as it doesn't really address the core issues for which US companies were deamed not-compatible with GDPR.

[1] https://www.senat.fr/compte-rendu-commissions/20250609/ce_co...

In my quest to check if deamed was the correct spelling, I stumbled upon an interesting read https://reginajeffers.blog/2024/03/04/damned-or-deemed-or-de...

Indeed. But in my case it’s quite easy as it was a typo. Deemed is the correct one

So many other features, such as iPhone mirroring also don't work. Quite ridiculous.

Vote with your wallet?

Easier said than done, but this relatively small annoyance is not a dealbreaker to change the phone. I had it before this feature was announced :D

It's almost like you can only shakedown your victims so many times before they say no mas.

Did you just describe Apple as a victim?

This is probably due to concern about legal regulations around temporarily recording someone else's voice so it can be processed for translation. After all, there is no mechanism for the person you're talking to to provide "consent", and the EU does have particularly strong laws on this.

Alternatively it might have something to do with the translation being performed in iOS, and the capability not being exposed to competitor audio devices, and therefore Apple needs assurance the EU won't consider it anticompetitive?

Or both.

Also potentially AI Act concerns. Quite a lot of things involving our good friends the magic robots have a delayed launch in the EU, because they need to be compliant, whereas the space is for practical purposes completely unregulated in most other places.

How would this function in two-party consent states like California? My understanding is limited, but from what I've read, this might still violate consent laws unless explicitly disclosed—even in public spaces.

I recently explored building a real-time STT system for sales calls to support cold-calling efforts. However, the consensus from my research was that, even if audio is streamed live without storage, consent laws could still present significant hurdles.

I think it really depends on the legal definition of recording or what it's used for.

Common sense says that a recording that only exists for a few seconds, and is utilized only by the person a speaker is intending to speak to, and is never permanently stored, should be fine. And we can assume Apple has made sure this is legal in its home state of California.

But EU law might not have sufficient legal clarity on this if it was written in a particularly open-ended way.

If you put this in the data processing agreement and make those available ("GDPR" requirement in most countries) it's pretty much fine. You can probably use them for training and improving purposes if destroyed after a short duration as well. Speech is personal information but not medical so no special things apply. The laws in most countries are quite clear about non medical personal information and translation is a good grounds for usage of personal information as far as I can see.

You have to specify usage however. Which is what most companies bark about because they want to store things for later use and unknown purpose. Which is frowned upon. You also need to protect personal data adequately which is deliberately vague. Storing it unencrypted for instance is not considered adequate. This also applies in transit.

At the point where you enable this feature (you wouldn't walk around with it enabled at all times because why?) the phone shows a screen asking you to get consent and the other person touches yes/no and that's it? Or would a signed form with a government seal be required?

IANAL, but from my understanding the user needs to get consent, not Apple. There would be no consent screen, apple would at most give a small dialog warning to the user that this usage is illegal (for the user). unless every participant has given consent

> How would this function in two-party consent states like California?

It won't. Regulations permit sound recording, as long as it's not stored. Speech-to-text and hearing aids for disabled people are an example of permitted uses.

> even in public spaces

Even in a two party state public spaces are fair game. The Constitution supersedes state law.

The Constitution has nothing to do with this. It constrains the Government, not private actors. And there’s no Constitutional right to a translation service.

You’re probably thinking about warrantless recordings of conversations and the reasonable expectation of privacy requirement. This doesn’t apply here.

The Constitution can definitely restrict the ability of the government to pass laws regulating behavior, and two-party consent statutes are definitely laws that regulate behavior. Whether the object level question is true is a different matter, but I would assume so given that you can point a camera that records audio at people in public at all.

Also, the US Constitution does constrain private actors, all the time. It bans slavery for a very simple example.

The Constitution does not forbid laws that require two-party consent to record a conversation. That’s what we’re talking about here.

The constitutional view of the 13th Amendment is that it withdrew from government the power to promulgate or enforce laws that allowed slavery to exist. If a slave escaped after the 13th Amendment passed, the government then lacked the power to assist the former slaveholder in capturing and returning him. Similarly, without the power to enforce property rights, there became effectively no property interest in a slave.

I’m finding a lot of literature from NGOs specializing in US jurisprudence saying the first amendment has been interpreted to protect public, obvious recording[1].

If I tried to draw up an indentured servitude contract, what federal or state laws would explicitly forbid enforcing it myself? If state laws, do all states have equivalent laws?

[1]: https://www.freedomforum.org/recording-in-public/

The First Amendment protects you against prosecution for filming the actions of law enforcement in a public venue. AFAIK it hasn’t been interpreted to void state laws that might forbid someone from recording a conversation between private individuals who don’t consent. The link you provided says as much.

How do you self-enforce an indentured servitude contract? Or any contract, for that matter? Only a court can compel performance or restitution for a breach of contract.

Is this much different than a hearing aid, even in technical detail? A hearing aid will have a small internal buffer containing processed audio. I’m not sure the law will care that the processing is more substantial as long as it’s on-device and ephemeral.

More likely the second than the first. It’s already the case that you technically “record” the audio at one end and then transmit it to the other. I can also forward a caller to voicemail where their message is transcribed in real time, which is fundamentally the same mechanics.

Or even more likely, as others have suggested, it’s Apple being petty and withholding features from EU users to put pressure on the EU.

Pressure on them to do what, if there’s nothing about this proscribed by the EU?

>Or even more likely, as others have suggested, it’s Apple being petty and withholding features from EU users to put pressure on the EU.

The EU has threatened massive fines for creating features not available to competitors. And the EU refuses to vet a feature officially in advance.

Under such conditions, how would you distinguish being petty from complying with the law?

The EU probably imagined the outcome would be: change your business practices entirely for the EU, and make all new features open to all, immediately, perpetually, everywhere.

But that's not the norm for the vast majority of companies, for a variety of sensible reasons. Given that it's actually hard to do that, witholding new features until you're told "yes this is ok" is a rational response to the law.

In terms of feature availability, if the law says they need to make it available to all headsets in the EU, then... that's what they need to do. Waiting for an "ok" to violate the law is not sensible at all. Sure they don't have to allow it worldwide, but they do need to allow it in the EU.

Waiting the way you describe only makes sense if they think the implementation probably follows the law, but they're not sure it will be accepted. We could make that argument for privacy rules, we can't in good faith make that argument for interoperability rules.

That's not what the law says. The law says IF they make a feature available in the EU, THEN it must be available to all competitors.

The law does not say you must make all features available in the EU. Generally speaking business regulations don't force companies to offer services. They instead regulate how the service can be offered if offered.

The hidden downside of regulation is a lot of stuff doesn't get built. It's just normally not so visible, but software is distributed worldwide so we can see the effect.

> That's not what the law says. The law says IF they make a feature available in the EU, THEN it must be available to all competitors.

You misread me.

"it" in the phrase "they need to make it available to all headsets in the EU" was referring to features they release in the EU.

So yes you're interpreting the law right, and so am I.

> The hidden downside of regulation is a lot of stuff doesn't get built. It's just normally not so visible, but software is distributed worldwide so we can see the effect.

If the deciding factor in whether something gets built is whether they can lock it to another product, it's usually okay for that thing to not be built.

In this case, they obviously did build it. So now it's a matter of figuring out what the hold up is.

If it's because they don't want to, even though it would make them money and make people in the EU happy, then that's pettiness.

Ah, I see what you're saying. The thing is if it is a cut and dry violation it ought to be in principle possible to say so. And there have been features that were delayed and released and which function the same in the EU as elsewhere. So presumably the implementation is legal but plausibly wasn't.

Now there's a difference between building a feature and building interoperability. You have to actually work at it. And if you rush to do so on every feature:

1. You may modify features you didn't need to

2. You open yourself up to other countries demanding specific software changes

The simplest thing is just to make one version for the world, and wait for an ok. Big downsides to either rushing to release as is or rushing to make a change you may not need to make.

Well the question as to whether it’s a “cut-and-dried” violation depends on information Apple probably isn’t willing to share: is there a specific technical reason this technology can’t be enabled on third party headphones? If there’s a good reason (e.g. the AirPods have a chip in them that does processing on the signal without which it wouldn’t work), then it’s probably fine. If it’s just `if (headphones !== “AirPods)`, then that’s probably not

As far as I understand, the act can’t control what Apple decides to do outside of the EU. Whether Apple has products or features available outside that market means nothing because it’s scoped to that jurisdiction.

I think that whether or not they built the thing does not matter.

I don’t know anything about jurisprudence, much less EU jurisprudence. Is there anything that would make the EU demanding that Apple not restrict these features from the EU to avoid allowing competitor products illegitimate in the eyes of the court? The law would still be only directly affecting the requirements for selling their productions under the EU’s jurisdiction. However it would consider facts about their behavior outside of the EU as essential to showing their noncompliance.

From what I know, the current rules don't say anything about region locking features like apple is doing. The EU regulations might be slow in reaction time but they are not playing around. You can be sure that they will continually close loopholes and avoidance strategies until Apple (and others) aren't a gatekeeper anymore.

The way Apple and others misuse their market position to get away with anything is ridiculous. At a certain size or influence you shouldn't be both a platform for other companies and products and a participant in that platform while giving yourself all sorts of advantages.

Airpods are decent but they have most of their market share due to the massive integration gap from competitors. So shit it's impossible for anyone to compete.

I’m not sure I’d call this a loophole per se. I don’t think governments should be refusing to let you take your ball and go home if you don’t want to sell things that create more compliance work/risk. I was just curious if this kind of jurisdictional edge case matters.

Do the relevant provider-agnostic Bluetooth audio standards (in USB they’d be class devices, not sure on Bluetooth terminology) have equivalent features that Apple is refusing to just implement? I think it’s reasonable to ask Apple to support interoperability standards once the industry settles on them, but it seems weird to incentivize them to create bespoke standards that they control in an effort to reduce their market power.

You seem to think they’re doing people a favor by selling them their products.

I’m fine with apple looking to exit the market and/or harm their product rather than comply.

This won't harm Apple or its AirPod product much, if at all. The Apple brand and its eco system is strong enough for the vast majority of average EU customers to ignore the missing features and buy the products regardless (at full price).

A missing fringe feature won't drive fans of the eco system away.

Oh, if I were travelling a lot to other countries speaking to non-english speakers and an alternative offers live translation and AirPods don't. Then this is pretty much the _first_ real argument of not buying AirPods. And once you do start switching out of the ecosystem remaining in it is much less attractive

>I’m fine with apple looking to exit the market and/or harm their product rather than comply.

It's not clear to me to what extent you disagreed with what I wrote. But, on this point I should point out that every time Apple holds back a feature citing the DMA there is much complaint in Europe.

So regardless of what you think it seems a lot of people do care. You appear to have a better understanding of the law: Apple can bring in a feature if all can use it or they can withhold the feature.

> I can also forward a caller to voicemail where their message is transcribed in real time, which is fundamentally the same mechanics.

Voicemail greetings typically inform the caller the message will be recorded, and there'a often a beep which is an indicator of recording as well. If you don't consent to recording, you can hang up without leaving a message.

Isn't noise cancelling technically recording people in your environment in this sense then?

Why would it be? Noise cancelling is a DSP over current raw signal, no data storage.

I wonder if that translation is actually powered by OpenAI and Apple doesn’t want to pay them for inferencing on behalf of app developers.

Or is it powered entirely by local models?

My understanding is live translations do not require an active Internet connection.

> Live Translation is integrated into Messages, FaceTime, and Phone to help users communicate across languages, translating text and audio on the fly.1 Live Translation is enabled by Apple-built models that run entirely on device, so users’ personal conversations stay personal.

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/06/apple-elevates-the-ip...

If it works, that is really impressive. I’m looking forward to trying it out. I’ve always wanted a real-life babelfish for eavesdropping on conversations in foreign language :)

I think the explanation is a lot simpler - iOS to date does not correctly support most European languages. Using Siri in anything other than English is a pain and using the Translate feature is available in only a handful of countries.

For anything remotely powerful enough, iOS will have to send voice to some server for processing and that’s a privacy shit show.

What languages is it mean to translate then? Different accents of English?

Mostly Spanish and Chinese. Arabic and Hindi will already be difficult.

That seems ridiculous, this is a translation feature. Do you think it is aimed at translating American to Canadian? Those pesky niche European languages are hardly spoken in the Americas so maybe that is the case.

British to American.

Genuinely useful to me.

I'd prefer American to British, though.

Enables tech bros to speak to their street food vendor

German is on the list of supported languages. That can't be the reason why it's not available in Germany. Although as an Austria I must admit their German is a bit weird.

That same issue would apply in California, which is a two party consent state.

My theory is that it's #2.

EU has defined Apple (but not Google(!)) as a "digital gatekeeper" and thus Apple has to comply to pretty much any part of their system being replaced with a 3rd party alternative.

So if they bring this system in, something which is listening to people real time and using online AI models to translate things, EU might force them to let _any_ 3rd party AI replace it.

And when someone installs TotallyHonest Co. AI to replace it and there's a massive data leak where they just stored every conversation as-is in an open S3 bucket, who gets the PR flak on HN? Apple, EU or TotallyHonest? The headlines will have "Apple" in them to drive clicks and TotallyHonest is maybe mentioned in the 3rd paragraph, which nobody will read or remember.

The only winning move is not to play.

I’m still waiting for the shoe to drop on the #1 matter, because as things like always-on listening devices and interior video surveillance spreads, people are not realizing that unless they are informing their visitors every time they enter their home (or you hang signs everywhere), that they will be recorded, in many states with two party consent laws, you are thereby committing a separate felony by recording them, with every recording. Technically even if you have your phone out and someone else’s voice triggered the “digital assistant” in a way where the recording was captures and sent somewhere (on device cases are an separate matter), you’ve committed a felony, regardless of whether you did so unintentionally. It’s how many crimes are committed, unintentionally.

Because unbeknownst to many, e.g., just because someone is in your home does not mean they do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy even in spaces that are common, i.e., not the bathroom, e.g., a house cleaner or maybe a contractor or even a guest talking while you are not in the room.

This generally only applies to the voice recording, not the video itself.

I have been a bit surprised that some enterprising attorneys with a hunger for getting rich have not jumped on this matter already. Because you, the owner may have consented to being recorded by an always-on listening device, but your family members or your guests will likely not have done so. Or, even if some slick corporate attorney got you to agree to take on responsibility for notifying everyone as is necessary in each jurisdiction, that makes you even, legally speaking, knowingly engaging in felonious activity.

Getting rich from a lawsuit about unauthorized recordings requires not only proving many such instances, but also proving the damage they caused.

> EU has defined Apple (but not Google(!)) as a "digital gatekeeper"

Could you explain what you mean? The following article lists Alphabet as a gatekeeper.

https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/gatekeepers_en

> So if they bring this system in, something which is listening to people real time and using online AI models to translate things, EU might force them to let _any_ 3rd party AI replace it.

If you allow the third party to do that, yes.

> And when someone installs TotallyHonest Co. AI to replace it and there's a massive data leak where they just stored every conversation as-is in an open S3 bucket, who gets the PR flak on HN?

I see this argument often, as often as I hear about leaks. Do you have an instance where Apple was blamed for a leak from a third party? I never heard anybody blaming Apple for Tea app leaks for a recent example, and it is still available on App Store.

Also, an alternative translation app does not have to be provided by a totally random third party vendor. Companies that to me are just as trustworthy as Apple surely will provide alternatives too - Google, OpenAI, Meta, Microsoft or Anthropic.

So I really don't see what's your point here. Don't install the alternatives if you don't trust them.

Can't reference a leak or incident specifically, but when Foxconn (a massive company with 3/4 million employees) had workers jumping from their dormitories and installed "suicide nets" the headlines were always "Apple factory..." - and I checked multiple sites at the time.

Even though quite literally every single piece of major western technology is assembled in Foxconn factories.

It's purely because dissing Apple brings clicks and people arguing on comment sections and social media posts.

And about 3rd party translation AI systems. Of course _I_ won't install suspicious ones, but how do you make sure Auntie Liz won't? If you provide an option to do so, grifters will get less tech literate folks to install any kind of crapware.

> Can't reference a leak or incident specifically, but when Foxconn (a massive company with 3/4 million employees) had workers jumping from their dormitories and installed "suicide nets" the headlines were always "Apple factory..." - and I checked multiple sites at the time. Even though quite literally every single piece of major western technology is assembled in Foxconn factories.

Apple chose Foxconn. It won't get to choose the third parties implementing alternative translation apps. That's the point.

I see that I wasn't specific, but I thought it's obvious given the context.

> And about 3rd party translation AI systems. Of course _I_ won't install suspicious ones, but how do you make sure Auntie Liz won't?

I think you are switching topics from allowing other vendors to use Apple-only APIs to "sideloading".

Educate her. (yes, that's not Apple's responsibility, and they don't even try. We need people to understand what applications can do when installed on a smartphone or a computer. It's a national education issue IMO). If she can't take care of herself anymore - parental controls.

I see the point in having some entity verify legitimacy of applications, but it does not need to be only Apple/Google, like with TLS.

A device connected to a non-European Apple account can use this feature while physically located in Europe, so it's probably not consent.

Nonsense. You are allowed to record any conversation you’re part of. It’s just not usable in criminal court (but it is even in civil court).

You are also allowed to record and film in any public space.

If they wanted to have this in the EU, they would've. Not going to blame brussels for the dirt that apple is throwing at my face.

Its just another heartless corporation focused purely on money, run by typical sociopaths, just like literally every other big megacorp. Profits and carefully crafted PR campaigns also here on HN, nothing more.

It never ceases to amaze me in worst way possible how quite a few people here keep treating them as something more, over and over. Or maybe its just that PR campaign.

Don't take me wrong, they have fine devices for specific type of people and good business strategy overall but above applies hard.

> It never ceases to amaze me in worst way possible how quite a few people here keep treating them as something more, over and over

A lot of people are investing in Apple, most likely you are indirectly as well, if not you then your pension. Not surprised some people would defend everything they do. Then you have the die-hard fans and I'm sure there's some PR peeps going around especially how it easy it is nowadays with AI.

It's not that people love Apple necessarily. It's also that not all people love bureaucracy and trust in it implicitly.

It's funny, because Apple was/is HN's darling when it comes to privacy, yet handed over the keys to Chinese government when push came to shove.

Is the idea that they hate you because you're European, or...?

Apple doesn't hate European citizens, per se, just EU/EEA customer protection laws.

That says something about Apple, doesnt it?

s/Apple/USA & BIgtech/g

Sure, i can agree with that.

I'd argue this is true for every corporation that didn't need that regulationas a moat (some have found they could use those regulations to their advantage and block competitors, mostly due to implementation costs)

Quite clearly the EU DMA.

As part of the Digital Markets Act (DMA) evaluation [0], Apple was found to operate a market for headphones connected to its devices, while competing in the same market with own products and giving itself a competitive advantage by creating OS-features exclusive to them.

The EU found this is not a level playing field for competition and ordered that they have to make such OS features available for other accessory manufacturers as well.

I guess they are currently either trying to make a case for the EU on how it is technically impossible to provide the feature to others, prove that this is somehow not an OS-feature (and should be excluded) or delay any action to maximize the benefit of this competitive advantage in other markets.

I wouldn't be surprised if there are also beats headphones in the pipeline for which they want to use this feature as competitive USP...

[0] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_...

Also, Apple cannot name this as reason explicitly, because users may look up the details of that ruling and may find themselves agreeing with the sentiment...

  "[..] The measures will grant device manufacturers and app developers improved access to iPhone features that interact with such devices (e.g. displaying notifications on smartwatches), faster data transfers (e.g. peer-to-peer Wi-Fi connections, and near-field communication) and easier device set-up (e.g. pairing).

  As a result, connected devices of all brands will work better on iPhones. Device manufacturers will have new opportunities to bring innovative products to the market, improving the user experience for consumers based in Europe. The measures ensure that this innovation takes place in full respect of users' privacy and security as well as the integrity of Apple's operating systems."

Expectation vs reality.

I don't think that the translation feature itself can be considered OS functionality. An API providing on-demand background execution time for apps linked to connected Bluetooth devices would surely be sufficient to comply with the DMA?

As an example, when they were compelled to allow competing browser engines, they didn't open source Safari; they added a multiprocessing/JIT API to iOS (tailored and restricted by policy to browsers). Competitors (web browsers) got access to the OS features (multiprocessing/JIT) that they needed to compete with Apple's product (Safari), but they didn't get access to the product itself and still need to build their own.

In this case, competitors (device makers) might request access to the OS feature (background execution) that they need to compete with Apple's product (live translation on AirPods).

It should also be noted that such functionality only has to be provided if explicitly requested by a developer who is working on a competing product, so they don't have to develop it preemptively.

I'm not saying that this is completely fair or whatever, just that I don't think it's quite as extreme as people are making it out to be?

(I’m an EU-based user of Apple products) I see your point. However, Apple already provides a translation API[0], a speech recognition API[1], and a Text2Speech API[2], so not a lot more is needed than the API you describe. Also note that, while I have not looked into that thoroughly, it seems the kind of API you are discussing shares many similarities with the features of the Apple Vision Pro SDK (real time computation introducing new constraints…)

I think this situation also shows a strong divide between two visions of Apple end-game (and I think both exist within the company): exposing those APIs makes the Apple ecosystem better as a whole, with its satellite accessories/app developers; while keeping them private gives them an edge as a hardware selling company. Personally, I prefer when Apple embraces its gatekeeper status.

[0]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/translation/transl... [1]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/speech [2]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/avfoundation/speec...

> such functionality only has to be provided if explicitly requested by a developer who is working on a competing product

So if I'm Samsung, wouldn't I explicitly request every possible bit of functionality I could force Apple to provide, even if the "competing product" might very slow to market?

What I don't understand is how there are now probably a dozen features by Apple that aren't available in the EU, allegedly due to regulations, however every other vendor has no issues providing the same or similar features.

It is not about the features themselves, it's about Apple owning the OS a series of accessories need to connect to and using it as a tool to secure advantages to Apple Headphones/Watches/Payment services/Entertainment.

No. It's a similar situation with certain AI features from Google.

This is mostly false. Most AI features are available in some EU countries. For instance, Pixel Studio and Pixel Screenshots are available in Germany, but not in The Netherlands. I think they are dragging their feet on localization (though much Dutch people would be fine with these AI apps only accepting English input).

How is it "mostly false"? I can't access the new google.com/ai (as a most recent example). Localization is not the issue, the EU is clearly singled out due to regulation.

It is purely out of spite. They like to rant every time how the EU is blocking progress. They are using it to turn sentiment of iDevice-using EU citizens against the EU. It's interesting how Apple rolls over when an autocratic state (e.g. China) asks, but are trying to mobilize their users against regulators, do malicious compliance, etc. when it's democratic states regulating them.

As a Mac user since 2007 and iPhone user since 2009, this behavior of Apple disgusts me. (Yes, I know - vote with your wallet. I switched from Apple Watch Ultra to Garmin Fenix and do have a Pixel with GrapheneOS.)

Note that the way Apple is doing this, you can only talk easily to other Apple earphone customers. This is going to be worse than the blue/green message bubble thing.

From what I have seen that is not the case. The AirPods nor connected iPhones are interacting with the other person’s at all.

How come? If the other person has any other device that translates for them then you can talk to them easily with Airpods.

"The feature becomes more powerful when both conversation participants wear compatible AirPods with Live Translation enabled. Active Noise Cancellation automatically lowers the volume of the other speaker, helping users focus on translated audio while maintaining natural interaction flow."

I don't read there as in there would be any networking involved. If the other user had a competitor device that does the same thing there should be no difference.

I might be wrong of course.

Why should I worry about anti-competitive practice when every third party app is literal spyware mining the everliving crap out of any data source they can get their hands on? We are in a dark age where all apps are borderline malware. Is it anti-competitive to turn my firewall on and to lock my doors too?

In my opinion Apple is the only one acting in the interest of the consumer. These efforts to open up Apple's platform are nothing more than attempts to weaken the security that Apple's customers enjoy by default. How we got here and whether Apple is truly "good" is irrelevant. If you care about your data not being used against you, Apple is your only option.

I doubt I am the only one who feels this level of discomfort with the way other technology companies treat their users (and those who aren't their users).

My understanding is that this works on-device (via the iPhone), so I wonder what the regulatory issue is.

Perhaps the regulations treat is as if you’re “recording” the person you’re speaking with, without their consent?

[flagged]

The EU said that everything that Apple creates for its own devices has to have APIs for third parties. The translation feature only works for AirPods.

Ok so it's not "airpods live translation" really, but "ios live translation" and there's no technical reason to limit it to airpods?

The audio input comes from the AirPods not the iPhone. It’s processed on the iPhone.

The audio is captured by the outward facing microphones used for active noise cancellations. That’s why it only works for AirPods Pro 2, 3 and AirPods 4 with ANC. That wouldn’t just work with any headphones.

Even the AirPods Pro 2 will need a firmware update. They won’t work with just any old headphones and seeing that even the AirPods Pro 2 need a firmware update tells me that it is something they are doing with their H2 chip in their headphones in concert with the iPhone.

I mean, technically, any competitors with noise cancelling headphones able to pick up a voice stream would be able to use the same processing on the iPhone to offer an equivalent feature.

That it only works with AirPods is just Apple discriminating in favour of their own product which is exactly what the EU was going after.

Sure if they also want to train a model that supports their sound profile, build an app that captures the audio, etc.

But their $60 ANC headphones with cheap audio processing hardware in the headphones aren’t going to be sufficient.

They may even be able to use the exposed models on the phone.

> But their $60 ANC headphones with cheap audio processing hardware in the headphones aren’t going to be sufficient.

The equivalent feature on Android tells me it would. I mean it already does technically.

Are we supposed to treat Apple being late to the party as usual as some kind of exceptional thing only them could do?

According to the specs - it only works with Google’s own headphones

https://support.google.com/googlepixelbuds/answer/7573100?hl...

Which are the same price as Apple’s AirPods with ANC.

So Google also didn’t try to support the feature with generic earbuds.

The contrary is literally written in a large yellow box on the page you linked: “Note: Google Translate works with all Assistant-optimized headphones and Android phones.”

But I mean, you are free to buy overpriced Apple headphones which sounds worse than Sony, only properly works paired with an Apple phone or laptop and whose killer feature was available on their competitors buds years ago if that rocks your boat.

You didn’t look at the prices of other “Google assistant” compatible headphones did you?

And those Sony ones aren’t cheap.

The first review I found comparing them..

https://wasteofserver.com/sony-wf-1000xm4-vs-apple/

Why would I want to by a none Apple laptop with horrible battery life, loud, and that produces enough heat to ensure that I don’t have offspring if I actually put it on my lap?

Over the course of this thread your argument went from "It's not technically possible" and "they will have to train their own models" to "I don't want to buy certain devices".

No I said it wasn’t technically possible on any cheap headphones because while the processing was done on the phone, the audio capture was done by the outside microphones on Apple headphones that have ANC and even the older ones of those required Apple to update the firmware on its own AirPods working in concert.

This is no different than Google not supporting just any old headphones.

Then the argument came that Apple’s AirPods are “overpriced” even though the cheapest AirPods that support it - AirPods 4 with ANC are in the same price range as Google’s and cheaper than the worse sounding and more expensive Sony Earbuds.

I prefer the Apple ecosystem myself but the Sony WF-1000XM are frequently available on sale (refurb WF-1000XM5 are $110 right now). I used to have the WH-1000XM3 (over the ear) and those are good too.

The whole argument seems kind of silly. Just buy the platform you want that has the features you want. If the European thinks Apple is overpriced then it's no harm that they aren't bringing features to Europe. He wasn't going to buy them and now is going to not buy them even harder.

As a reminder, the initial argument was that Apple doesn’t bring their feature to Europe because they would have to open it via an API to their competitors. Someone replied that it’s not a refusal but a technical impossibility which is easily countered by Google having done just that for years. The fact that it’s heavily downvoted despite being factually completely correct is actually hilarious to me.

The rest, which is to say that everything Apple sells beside laptops is subpar, their strategy regarding European regulations deprive them of any credibility when they pretend to care about consumers and their prices conversion in Europe is daylight robbery, is just my opinion and accessory to the discussion. I just couldn’t help myself.

No one said it’s a “technical impossibility”. The original statement was that it wouldn’t work on any cheap headphones. It’s assumed that you thought the iPhone was capturing the audio. Even then, there was some work done between the headphones and the phone and the firmware of the AirPods 2 had to be updated.

You aren’t going to save any money by getting a pair of $50 ANC headphones and hoping they work with the system - the Android variant doesn’t.

> It’s assumed that you thought the iPhone was capturing the audio.

Absolutely not. It assumed the AirPods Pro 2 unique processing was required which it clearly isn’t.

Nobody ever talked about saving money.

The whole discussion is about the EU mandating Apple play fair which would mean letting competitors access their phone processing exactly like Google is already doing.

> Nobody ever talked about saving money.

You didn’t say this?

> But I mean, you are free to buy overpriced Apple headphones

> which sounds worse than Sony,

And the Sony headphones sound worse and are more expensive.

> only properly works paired with an Apple phone or laptop

Which also isn’t true.

The fact that I rightfully qualify Apple products as overpriced don’t magically make the discussion about saving money.

Sony headphones sounds noticeably better than AirPods Pro 2 by the way and their EQ is better. AirPods have great noise cancellation but their sound quality is not that great.

> > only properly works paired with an Apple phone or laptop

> Which also isn’t true.

Care to explain to me how I set what presses do on AirPods without an Apple product. How do I disable noise cancellation and pass through? Where do I setup the level of noise cancellation?

Yes, exactly.

So noise cancelling headphones that are worse at noise cancelling are better?

And the headphones are “overpriced” even though they are the same price as comparable devices that have worse ANC?

And a simple Google search tells you how to pair AirPods to none Apple devices

https://support.apple.com/en-sg/guide/airpods/dev499c9718b/w...

I have both a pair of the over ear Sony XM4’s and AirPods Pro 2 and I’m not sure I’d characterize the Sony’s sound as “better”, even when using lossless audio. They sound good but the sound profile is mostly just different, with the Sony’s leaning more bassy and the AirPods more balanced.

The noise cancellation are neck and neck but the AirPods had much less of that “pressure” sensation when using it. AirPods transparency is just plain better. Comfort for long use sessions is better on the Sony’s. Mic is better on the AirPods.

There's no EQ in the Sony iPhone app?

There is, but I haven’t had the patience to tweak that. My phone also isn’t the device that I usually use those headphones with.

> But their $60 ANC headphones with cheap audio processing hardware in the headphones aren’t going to be sufficient.

Maybe, maybe not. Assuming Apple's motivation isn't pure self-dealing, it's very consistent with Apple's behavior to forbid or impede doing things that are absolutely possible but sometimes result in a sub-par experience.

How many $60 headphones work with Google’s version?

All of them.

Not according to the official specs….

It's oddly difficult to find solid answers to this with a web search, but it appears that it just needs protocol support, not a mic that meets specific standards. The (discontinued?) JBL 110GA is $40 on Amazon.

Which I’m not able to find on Amazon…

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B07G2LXMDV

7 year old used headphones with one in stock using Micro USB in 2025?

Or other services, such as translation using Google Translate.

Also the feature doesn't work on Android, so it is not an 'AirPods' feature but a 'iOS'+'AirPods' feature.

Is there any evidence for this at all? The EU has plenty of regulation surrounding audio recording, as other comments have said. Instead of jumping to the assumption of malicious intent, I think those make more sense up front. I don't think this is a real bargaining chip for Apple to use against the EU for the side loading stuff.

I dislike Apple's malicious compliance with the EU too, but it seems unrelated here, at least without any proof.

Do no US states have similar laws regarding recording strangers?

They do, but most states only require one party to consent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_call_recording_laws

Notably California, home to apple, is a two party state.

Google Pixel Buds and Samsung Galaxy Buds basically provide the same feature of realtime translation. Either Apple is withholding the feature without any real cause, or the cause lies in some aspect where Apple doesn’t allow third-party manufacturers to provide the same feature under iOS, while Android does. I don’t know which is the case, but both put Apple in a bad light, along with the fact that they don’t explain the exact reason for the limitation.

It would not remotely surprise me to discover that either Google or Samsung were doing something untoward that Apple is not willing to do. In fact, that would be one of the least surprising things I'd ever heard.

In this case, it's apple doing the untoward thing, by artificially limiting users' devices, seemingly only for anticompetitive reasons.

As this is HackerNews, you should expect to see at least a couple commenters who believe they should have control over devices they own, including interoperability without artificial, anticompetitive limitations.

> In this case, it's apple doing the untoward thing, by artificially limiting users' devices, seemingly only for anticompetitive reasons.

Not really. They are complying by not offering features that would be considered anti-competitive. It’s not untoward, it’s just following their interpretation of the law. We obviously don’t know the discussions between Apple and the EC, but in public it’s American nerds who are complaining that the EU is bad.

The iOS feature is not anti-competitive, it is apple's choice to artificially restrict the feature if you use non-apple earbuds which is anti-competitive.

It is my understanding that this is what apple has chosen to do in areas where this iOS feature is available. Is that not the case?

If the “untoward” thing was unlawful, it would be straightforward for Apple to take Google and Samsung to court for anticompetitive practices. If it isn’t, then Apple can’t really blame the EU, and could at least advertise how they’re doing things less untowardly.

This isn’t the first time that Apple has been withholding features from the EU without ever providing a clear and understandable explanation, so there isn’t much basis for giving them the benefit of the doubt.

Apple is using the conservative approach, which is to misrepresent their starting position by moving the goal posts to an extreme. Then they bargain towards the "middle". It creates the illusion of bargaining.

So Apple is throwing a huge tantrum and withholding features from the EU to act like this is a much bigger deal than it is. This gives Apple a lot more bargaining room after the EU bitch slapped them.

Apple likely already has an API they could enable and be done with this. They won't do that. Apple needs exclusivity with new feature releases because they don't do things all that well anymore(Siri, maps, etc, nobody uses those because there are better alts available on ios).

But yeah Apple is just starting way to the extreme so they have more room to bargain. Hopefully the EU sees through this, again, and doesn't budge.

Essentially irrelevant to your main point, but:

>Apple needs exclusivity with new feature releases because they don't do things all that well anymore(Siri, maps, etc, nobody uses those because there are better alts available on ios).

Siri was okay for a very brief window after release and then dreadful ever since and Apple Maps was never good, but has gotten better. Etc maybe more valid idk

I keep seeing accusations of tantrums. Can a company say no without it being a tantrum?

> Europe are randomly unknowably illegal for no reason

I mean they absolutely are especially as EU regulators categorically refuse to review anything in advance just in-case their get a budget shortfalls and need to go looking for fines.

If it works on device then it should be easy for another headphone maker to integrate it. Except Apple doesn't let them do that.

It’s not that simple - when implementing this one runs into the issue that detecting self speech is a solved problem - BUT detecting the speech of a person talking AT you in a restaurant is not nearly that easy - this is known as diarization. This needs custom models - and I am willing to bet the model for the iPhone is tuned specifically to the AirPods . How would they even provide that? And I’d bet that the customer microphones in the AirPods provide a much better time synced stream to the phone than just a random pair of phones - I’d be willing to bet this is not just Bluetooth, but also out of band clock drift, etc. Which allows for much better phase data - which makes training diarization models simpler- and makes the accurate. So - I’d bet there is a per headset model here - and one that probably requires more than just audio.

The issue the EU has is much simplr than this. They are not requesting Apple to provide a model that works for their competitors headphones, they are requesting they also allow their competitors to run their own models the same way Apple allows the AirPods to.

Quite a burden to provide an ecosystem. I mean doesn't this extend to anything you want it to extend to? From AirDrop to the complete feature set of the AirTag and FindMy ecosystem. Your non Apple airtag has to show up in FindMy or at least be capable of being added? You have ultra-wideband features for AirTag. You need to make that available too?

If I were Apple, I'd say you got what you want EU, it works on ALL earphones in EU. But it will be absolutely terribly shitty because we will use the same model trained for our AirPods on your random headphones.

You're using a third party BLE airtag and clicking on UWB? Enjoy tracking this approximate noisy location that we're basing off of some noise pattern we didn't lock on.

Feature provided, just not well. Goes against Apple's ethos of trying to make things polished but don't let some bureaucrats weaponize that against you.

Nobody is forcing Apple, the gatekeeper to the iPhone and iOS ecosystem, to also make headphones and compete in that totally separate market, but they are of course free to.

The issue arises when Apple leverages their position as gatekeeper to anticompetitively preference their own headphones in the iPhone/iOS ecosystem. Can't do that.

> If I were Apple, I'd say you got what you want EU, it works on ALL earphones in EU. But it will be absolutely terribly shitty because we will use the same model trained for our AirPods on your random headphones.

The problem for Apple is that they have no secret sauce here: absent any ratfuckery, it would probably work just as well with competing headsets, if not better (particularly since many of Apple's competitors' headsets have better sound quality, better microphone quality, and better noise cancellation). That's probably why they aren't taking your suggestion and are instead choosing anticompetitive behavior.

> The problem for Apple is that they have no secret sauce here: absent any ratfuckery, it would probably work just as well with competing headsets.

Yeah, I'd believe it. There is a good chance that is very much the case here.

Let’s just say there is. Scuttlebutt says there was at least a microphone pick up redesign and a timing redesign because the diarization model loss curve was crap - and given what I hear from the rest of the industry on auto0diarization in conference rooms, I believe that easily. Basically, the AI guys tried to get it working with the standard data they had, and the loss curve was crap no matter how much compute they threw at it. So, they had to go to the HW ppl and say ‘no bueno’ - and someone had to redesign time sync and change a microphone capsule out.

For reference, we are seeing it more and more - sensor design changes to improve loss curve performance - there’s even a term being bandied about : “AI-friendly sensor design”. This does have a nasty side effect of basically breaking abstraction - but that’s the price you pay for using the bitter lesson and letting the model come up with features instead of doing it yourself. (Basically - the sensor->computer abstraction eats details the RL could use to infer stuff)

I'm not sure who scuttlebutt is, but in the architecture of,

audio goes into mic => STT engine => translation model => TTS engine => audio comes out of speaker

a change in hardware would be a change in the "audio goes into mic" component of the model, which is not the critical part of the model.

All the parts of the above architecture already exist: we already have mics, STT, translation models, TTS, and speakers, and they all worked on other systems before apple even announced this, much less came up with a redesign. Most likely the redesign is aesthetic or just has slightly better sound transmission or reception – none of those were necessary for the functioning of the above architecture in other, non-apple systems.

I am, of course, assuming apple's architecture is a rough approximation of above. An alternative theoretical architecture might resemble the one below, but I have seen no evidence apple is doing this.

audio goes into mic => direct audio-to-audio translation model => audio comes out of speaker

From what I understand, it is the STT engine that is the issue - and is in fact not a solved problem at all. Specifically, in a conversation where the microphones hear 3 people talking, 1 of them talking _at_ us, we need to pick out _that_ person only to translate.

If we were using Whisper in that pipeline, we could for example generate speaker embeddings for each segment whisper generates, then group by matching the speaker embeddings - and in reality, this doesn't really work all that well.

But we are still left with the question of _WHO_ to feed to the translation model - so, ideally, the person facing us or talking at us - so we'd have to classify the 3 people all talking to each other given their angle in relation to the listener's head, etc.. This is what the diarization model would have to do - and the more sophisticated diarization models certainly could use the precise angle input can only be computed if you have super-close timings.

If Apple did this, and it turns out Apple did tune the model to the extent that it works really well with AirPods and really poorly with any other competitor, would there be any possibility of legal action against Apple (by the competitor or by the EU) on the grounds that the model's training is effectively limiting the functionality?

For example, maybe Apple purposefully trained the model to not only optimizing working with AirPods, but to optimize not working with any other input devices? If Apple could be in trouble if it became known they did such specific training, could it also mean there is the potential for them to have legal issues due the potential for them to have done such?

(I think we can also make a similar argument when it comes to the hardware being made to optimally run one specific model and possible allegations it doesn't run other models as well.)

If the government doesn't crack down on this sort of behavior, a company could use it to try to meet the legal requirements technically while also still hurting competitors. But if the government does crack down on it, then a company could be caught up under an accusation of doing this even if they didn't (they just didn't care to optimize for competitors at all, but never negatively optimized for them either).

Note that Samsung has been offering the same feature for at least a year by now. On device LLM. And also restricted to working only on Samsung branded BT headsets for no reason.

I hope you really do not want a future like this.

I do not, and I wonder why the EU is not coming after Samsung as well if it's the same situation.

Yeah make it work in the US where you can fly 4 hours in any direction and still land somewhere that speaks the same language, and not in Europe where a 1:30h drive takes you through 3 different countries that don't know how to talk to each other...

It also works in the entire Rest of World outside the EU

13-14% of the US population speak Spanish at home.

You can blame the EU for that, not Apple.

No you should absolutely blame apple for that. They fear to lose their monopoly and want to set an example for other countries.

Where do you live? I could easily find people who speak, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Hindu, Telugu, English, Spanish, Thai, and Portuguese and I haven’t even left the parking lot. It would be harder to find a German or French speaker.

Do all these people also speak some English?

(I live in NYC where the mix of languages is thick, but I rarely have to reach even for my Spanish, because English is still commonly understood everywhere, at least to some degree.)

Not all of them, no. Where I am (California) there are a lot of monolingual or barely functional in English speakers of Spanish and Mandarin. Also where I live specifically, Vietnamese and Cambodian. Those are all seniors though.

In Chinatown on Manhattan, there are areas like that (though I suppose the senior citizens mostly speak Cantonese there). Many of the store signboards are in Chinese only, and inside, the labels may also be only in Chinese; then only the fact that I still remember a bunch of kanji allows me to tell a duck from a chicken, when both are wrapped in impenetrable dark plastic.

Yeah I know the area. My wife and I have been through there a few times (she is from Taiwan). Lots of people who barely speak any English at all, but you might not know if you didn’t speak Chinese.

That kindly old man making noodles behind the counter on that restaurant you frequent off Canal St? The one that always has a stoic face and never says a word? He doesn’t speak any English, but try chatting with him in Mandarin and he’ll talk your ear off with his life story.

The area I and in mind the answer is yes. But there are areas where it would be no. I’m in the Deep South.

I have personally been to places in NYC (and surrounding areas like Newark) where the staff does not speak any English at all.

I can easily drive one and half miles in Orlando to my barber shop where half the barbers only speak Spanish. I’m not complaining, it forces me to use my A1-A2 level Spanish fluency.

Whole neighborhoods in Miami where the primary language is Spanish and many of the inhabitants barely speak English

In Texas and other parts of the US, Spanish is a primary language for many. Even when they speak a second language, better communication comes for all by using the language they're most comfortable with.

I am in awe. Their cookie banners were consistently annoying but probably didn’t hurt any individual this much. If I were an EU resident I would probably learn about “you can just do things” from this.

Might be a blessing in disguise, forcing EU members to learn languages, whilst non EU members watch one more hour of TV with that time given…

Or they just become more inefficient… either way, it’s going to be fun to see the results.

This is exactly what Apple want you to feel like

I am an EU resident and I'm about to cancel the APP3 order that I made. If Apple doesn't want to comply with the regulations that protect me(1) I'm not blaming the EU, I'm talking my money somewhere else.

Actually this is the second time I'm frustrated by this, I was surprised to discover that iPhone Mirroring is also blocked. This is strike 2 for me, one more and I won't buy another Apple product.

1) the EU has a lot of stupid regulations but the DMA is not one of them

How are they not complying with the regulation? This is what compliance looks like.

They are complying in the same way that the rich kid who keeps getting called out for using his hands on the football (soccer) field complies with the rules by taking his ball and going home.

Only they know what they are afraid of. But seems obvious that a feature like that should also be available with third-party headphones, the translation happens in the phone, not the AirPods. There is no technical reason other than locking users into their products.

I'm sure Apple would say that the experience would not be the same with other (lesser) headphones, and that damages the user experience, etc. Some people would believe that's the reason, but the EU won't and neither do I.

So it wont work in Europe where its needed most ?

What else is it going to do ? Translating Californian to New York English ? Help with ordering from Taipei-Palace ?

Tourists visiting EU who don't live there will be able to use the feature. Or EU users when outside the EU.

should disneyland also be required to reserve spaces for competing attractions?

That's not going far enough. Disneyland should make its IP available to any competing ride vendor for free (sorry, not free, $99/yr) so that they too can build the same special effects people come to expect from Disneyland.

How dare you assert that Disneyland is working for free in such a scenario?

$99/yr is clearly a fair and reasonable compensation to license all Disney IP for any purpose because Disney has an eleventy bajillion percent margin on ticket sales.

If disney would own 60% of all land, then I would say it would be reasonable.

for the sake of debate: if androland is available across the way, must disneyland provide skybridges so its guests can immediately leave its own attractions and frequent its competitors’ instead?

It's not like Disney World wasn't sanctioned. In the US that is. Freedom is always limited by what others decide it is.

i recognize freedom (especially as it relates to commerce) is a social construct and therefore has limits defined by society. At the same time, it does seem like in this instance at least the EU wants to have it both ways: ie it wants to be seen as operating on high-minded “principles” yet be allowed to justify fairly transparently self-interested industrial policy actions under the guise of “protection from monopolists”.

Which domestic competitors do you see them favoring with this industrial policy? Sennheiser might be the only European headphone manufacturer of consequence and I doubt they have this kind of pull.

i wasn’t intending to say that the regulations favor a specific current competitor but rather that they are intended to force apple to build in a way that favors a certain kind of potential competitor who can only operate in Europe. from a pure engineering perspective i think it’s fairly well-established that if you design, build, and test for a limited set of deployment conditions you end up with a higher quality product. which bit of wisdom apple has used decade after decade to deliver systems that delight end-users who do not relish the idea of mixing and matching and hoping the interpretation of “standards“ worked out well enough in their particular case.

Disney owns the land and their intellectual property, Apple does not and should not own devices and software they already sold. Especially not by imposing artificial software restrictions.

i’m not a fan of apple, but they do build and own their IP and i respect their right to license it on terms they decide. Is it not expropriating them to suddenly say “mighty fine business you made there mister, your competitors who happen to be our citizens would like a piece of that so how about you just hand over some chunks of it so nothing bad should happen to the rest of it?”

Their rights to license stuff they sell should not be unlimited, that's the entire point.

I understand that your second sentence refers to the fact, that the limitation is only in EU. Businesses have to respect local laws. Laws often mentioned in the thread (DMA, GDPR, although we can only suspect that these are the reasons for this lock) apply equally to everyone who wants to do business in Europe. If Apple does not want to respect these laws, they are free to leave. Even better, they can make changes to their devices that work only in EU and leave it as it already is in other countries. Said "competitors" do not necessarily need to be EU citizens, I'm sure many US companies would use that opportunity too.

Local regulations are not foreign to Apple, apparently similar laws are in force in Japan.

As for "some chunks" - interfaces are not protected by copyright, even in the US. Assuming DMA is the problem, nobody is asking for Apple to release details of their implementation, just for them to remove artificial software restrictions that lock apps from other vendors from doing (a small subset!) of stuff only Apple can do.

Smartphones are general computing devices. Apple and Google are a duopoly in the smartphone market, while restricting what users can do with their devices more than Microsoft ever restricted what Windows users can do with Windows. If we continue allowing these companies to go in that direction, we will end up with computers that are as limited as game consoles are, Apple and Google will be the only beneficiaries of that situation.

there are just and unjust laws.

i agree that to operate in a country (or block of countries) a company must be prepared to respect even the unjust laws. which apple has obviously been willing to do all day long in many parts of the world.

in this case, it really seems to me like the EU is harming consumers who benefit from the coherently-designed, safe (as compared to androland) walled garden in favor of some fairly overtly xenophobic power play against incumbents local champions cannot compete with on the merits. IMO this type of action directly invites retaliation against European companies and interests abroad.

in the related cases of airdrop interop and alternate stores, it is certainly being required that apple release its proprietary IP to competitors.

there are plenty of hungry competitors in the smartphone market beyond apple and google including Samsung huawei and scores of others.

I don't find the laws unjust in any way. Apple did everything they could to take half of the smartphone market, and to me it's totally understandable that the EU government may want to limit their power over this market.

> in this case, it really seems to me like the EU is harming consumers who benefit from the coherently-designed, safe (as compared to androland) walled garden in favor of some fairly overtly xenophobic power play against incumbents local champions cannot compete with on the merits. IMO this type of action directly invites retaliation against European companies and interests abroad.

Apple consumers will still be able to benefit from this amazing walled garden by choosing not to buy non-Apple devices. Other consumers will be able to choose other vendors that will be able to fully interoperate with Apple devices. I don't see any loses for current Apple consumers.

As for the retaliation. Maybe. Remains to be seen. Introducing any regulations brings risk.

> in the related cases of airdrop interop and alternate stores, it is certainly being required that apple release its proprietary IP to competitors

What proprietary IPs?

> there are plenty of hungry competitors in the smartphone market beyond apple and google including Samsung huawei and scores of others.

In terms of operating systems you have these two. I don't think Huawei counts, aren't they sanctioned still? Harmony OS has a very small share in EU either way.

consumers are harmed because Apple is forced to build in a way that expands its qa surface to include hypothetical tbd third-party integrations thus worsening their products, and surely opening up to more fines by the same EU who set them up like this in the first place.

those who stand to benefit from unjust laws are rarely the ones who acknowledge their nature.

in your previous response you seem to claim that samsung is an insignificant player in the smartphone market, and that integrating third-party app stores doesn’t require divulging security-related IP so i’m going to drop the mic right here.

Unfortunate. Europe, it seems to me, would be one of the more useful places on Earth to have this technology since there are so many languages in use. It could even strengthen European cultural heritage by allowing everyone to speak in their native language day-to-day instead of converging everything to English.

I wish technology is not blocked that easily. I doubt people want this feature to be banned. Apple's live translation is probably the greatest feature of the last 30 years. I wanted it so bad, I lived in India and South-East Asia for 3 years, it would definitely make my experience SO much better.

I’d rather not have my conversations recorded and sent to a third party, without my knowledge, so that your experience could be SO much better.

Translation happens on-device.

You can create an American account and login with that on your phone. App Store account can be separate.

> I wish technology is not blocked that easily.

It's not technology that's being blocked here, it's uncompetitive commercialisation that is (at least in the EU)

I don't think it will be that ground-breaking in practice. There have been similar apps in the past, it's just an improvement in convenience.

if I have a US account and I travel to the EU, that should work?

Yes.

Maybe by apple. No when GDPR is the real reason. The GDPR grants also visitors of the EU the rights of the act. So if you are traveling as an American to Europe and want to talk to the Italian waitress you/Apple are breaching her rights but also yours (of eg not being permanently recorded). As a device owner you might consent for the usage but for example data limitation or right to delete might still apply as long as you are on EU soil as an US citizen.

But honestly, I do not believe GDPR is the reason here. Apple is also very privacy focused.

GDPR does grant it rights to EU citizens everywhere in the world but also other nation citizens in EU. I personally like GDPR a lot but I understand that people are complaining about this part

most likely the reason is apple not providing the same access for 3rd party developers. Last year had similar idea to implement and there is not way to enable programmatically to have airpods mic as input and iphone speaker as output. Audio input/output routing on iOS overall is very limited comparing MacOS - similar if you want to use headset mic and phone speaker or vice versa.

What about UK now that we’re not part of the EU anymore

I tried looking this up and it sounds like it will be supported. But then again, we don’t have the ability to install Fortnite as that’s blocked in the EU.

Over time, the value proposition of Apple devices in the EU will be less, and less differentiated vs competition, which will make them either lose their premium appeal or market share (or both). In the long run, Apple will likely reconsider.

if that means less green/blue bubbles segregation then I welcome

Apple will more likely pull out of Europe incrementally (and eventually completely) as the cost of doing business continues to skyrocket. Other American targets of EU regulators will do this as well. Apple isn't a charity, it's a company. If parts of its business are no longer profitable, those parts will cease to be.

This is delusional. The EU is Apple’s second largest market behind the US.

As an EU resident I strongly get the feeling Apple is using this slow release of new features to try and sway the public opinion in the direction that “EU law is blocking innovation”.

I’m an Apple user since mac OS8 and I’m fully immersed in the apple ecosystem system. But my next phone will be an android.

As someone who has worked at and run a company and dealt with lawyers regarding these regulations directly, I can tell you this is 100% not the case.

I’m sorry, but it turns out regulation with punitively high fines attached to it creates massive regulatory risk for public companies that have a duty to shareholders to take them extremely seriously, and document everything along the way. Otherwise they don’t just get in trouble with regulators, but end up in endless litigation with shareholders.

How you can believe creating an extremely nuanced set of holes, that if stepped in, results in billions of fines won’t delay new launches (and innovation ultimately) in the EU is just astonishing to me. The fun part is all the traps that open due to the combination of different regs interacting and new interpretations due to actual court cases.

Please don’t turn this into another “malicious compliance evil-corporate conspiracy” meme like GDPR is on this site. It doesn’t cultivate intellectual curiosity, just flame wars, and is making me want to not hang out here anymore.

Compliance overhead is real, but it doesn't rule out strategy.

Two things can be true: big fines risk slow launches, and companies also use that friction to shape narratives and sequence rollouts.

> regulation with punitively high fines attached to it creates massive regulatory risk for public companies that have a duty to shareholders to take them extremely seriously

There were multiple cases where this didn't stop Apple from keeping anti-steering rules long enough to get a €1.8B fine (music streaming), eating €50M in Dutch penalties over dating-app payments, delaying Apple Intelligence/Phone Mirroring in the EU citing the DMA, and then getting fined again under the DMA for App Store steering.

There are strict rules in China as well. Apple just plays a different game there. In China it's rapid, quiet compliance with content/data controls. In the EU, the DMA forces structural changes that touch Apple's model, you see legal fights, staged rollouts, and public messaging (e.g., delaying Apple Intelligence/Phone Mirroring).

The biggest difference is China only applies their laws when operating inside of China.

They don’t care about Apple’s global business, only Apple inside of China.

Neither does the EU. The DMA only concerns itself with the products and services they offer on the EU market.

> and companies also use that friction to shape narratives

If Apple were doing that, it would be telling us why it wasn't supporting this feature in the EU, putting anti-DMA ads out, open letters, etc. But it's not. It's clearly doing the opposite and trying to stay out of the narrative.

And all of the fines you point to are exactly why Apple is now exceedingly cautious. The fines are working. They've changed Apple's behavior because they're an established proven risk now.

You contrast China with the EU and claim Apple is playing a different game, but it's not. The types of regulations are what's different. Chinese regulations have mainly been about requiring Apple to block certain features or content, which is easy, and Apple complies. The EU is demanding Apple build a lot of extra stuff to enable third-party interop or else not release a feature at all... and Apple is complying by not releasing features because the interop is hard and takes much longer and delays features for the rest of the world and might not be worth the effort at all.

> It's clearly doing the opposite and trying to stay out of the narrative.

Apple itself publicly tied EU delays to the DMA ("regulatory uncertainties") when it postponed Apple Intelligence/Phone Mirroring/SharePlay in the EU.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/a...

> And all of the fines you point to are exactly why Apple is now exceedingly cautious. The fines are working. They've changed Apple's behavior because they're an established proven risk now.

After the €1.8B music-streaming fine, the Commission still found Apple in breach of DMA anti-steering in 2025 (additional penalties), and Dutch courts upheld ACM's earlier finding in the dating-apps case. That looks like an ongoing contest, not just "we complied and moved on.". So no, not really.

https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...

https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_...

> Chinese regulations have mainly been about requiring Apple to block certain features or content, which is easy, and Apple complies.

Apple doesn't only "block stuff" in China. It made major engineering/process changes (moved Chinese iCloud keys to a state-affiliated host) and shipped region-specific feature behaviour quickly (AirDrop "Everyone for 10 minutes").

https://www.reuters.com/article/technology/apple-moves-to-st...

https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/09/apple-limits-airdrop-every...

Apple has not publicly tied the AirPods translation feature rollout to the DMA, or many other delays. I didn't say it never has said anything. But the grand narrative you're claiming, Apple's silence on these other features directly contradicts that.

I never said Apple "complied and moved on". I said they're being cautious. Nothing is black and white. I honestly don't know what you're arguing. That because they've been fined in the past... they ought to release the translation feature and get fined again?

And I said Chinese regulations have been mainly about blocking features. I didn't say exclusively. But the overall asks from the EU and China have been very different qualitatively. Adding a timer to a feature is orders of magnitude easier than designing and building a performant third-party real-time API that needs to be supported for presumably decades to come.

You are trying to shift from facts to meta, "I never said this", "I did not say that”.

You are accusing me of a grand narrative, so let's quote it: "Two things can be true: big fines risk slow launches, and companies also use that friction to shape narratives and sequence rollouts."

That was the "grand narrative": that both things can be true. That nothing is black and white...

Before replying, please first read, and if you still insist on writing something, talk about facts, not vibes.

So far I'm the one who has provided sources.

> Please don’t turn this into another “malicious compliance evil-corporate conspiracy” meme like GDPR is on this site. It doesn’t cultivate intellectual curiosity, just flame wars, and is making me want to not hang out here anymore.

This is the company that is trying to subvert the DMA with Core technology fees that they're not entitled to, and notarization which allows them to retain the gatekeeping power that they're not entitled to. That's the same company that attempted to maliciously comply with a US court order which forced them to allow developers to provide external payment options by instituting a new imaginary 27% fee on external payments, making alternative non-viable.

This is the same company whose internal memos filed in court document their malicious compliance strategies.

> In Slack communications dated November 16, 2021, the Apple employees crafting the warning screen for Project Michigan discussed how best to frame its language. Mr. Onak suggested the warning screen should include the language: “By continuing on the web, you will leave the app and be taken to an external website” because “‘external website’ sounds scary, so execs will love it.” From Mr. Onak’s perspective, of the “execs” on the project, Mr. Schiller was at the top. One employee further wrote, “to make your version even worse you could add the developer name rather than the app name.” To that, another responded “ooh - keep going.”

> [...] The designers’ discussions contextualize their use of the word “scary” to indicate its ordinary meaning and, most applicable here, indicate the goal of deterring users as much as possible from completing a linked-out transaction. Apple repeatedly acted to maintain its revenues and stifle competition. This was no exception. His attempts to reframe the obvious meaning of these communications do not persuade. All of this was hidden from the Court and not revealed in the May 2024 evidentiary hearing.

Apple are grand masters of malicious compliance. Attempting to portray this fact as a "meme conspiracy" is intellectually dishonest bordering on gaslighting, and weaponizing your paper thin veil of "intellectual curiosity" to attack this criticism makes me not want to participate. But I will continue, precisely because of people like you who try to use an aura of intellectually superior and rational "intellectual curiosity" to push false narratives.

Some of my other favorite bits from where that came from [1]

> In its notice of compliance and at the May 2024 hearing, Apple claimed that restrictions on link placement protect against “security risks.” Again, Apple attempted to mislead. Mr. Schiller asserted that having an external link appear on the same page as IAP can increase the risk of a user’s exposure to fraudulent conduct. [...] Given the lack of any document identifying this alleged concern, the Court finds these justifications pretextual; said differently, the proffered rationales are nothing more than after-the-fact litigation posturing or outright misrepresentations to the Court.

> At the end of the day, Apple’s internal documents reflect the underlying motivation to stifle competition by cabining developers’ ability to attract users to alternate payment methods: “How much can we limit what devs do with the text and links?

> In other words, to stifle competition, Apple was modeling the tipping point where external links would cease to be advantageous for developers due to friction in the purchase flow

> Apple willfully chose not to comply with this Court’s Injunction. It did so with the express intent to create new anticompetitive barriers which would, by design and in effect, maintain a valued revenue stream; a revenue stream previously found to be anticompetitive. That it thought this Court would tolerate such insubordination was a gross miscalculation. As always, the cover- up made it worse. For this Court, there is no second bite at the apple.

[1] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.36...

> and is making me want to not hang out here anymore.

Agreed. No matter which side of the issue one is on, the fact you and everyone else who explains the incentive structure is getting downvoted to hell and receiving eloquent responses like "Bull fucking shit dude" is really pathetic.

Is HN really just another emotionalist monoculture echo chamber now? We're downvoting everything we disagree with whether it's true or not? Count me out.

The EU only exports regulations these days.

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

And trouble. That’s another EU export.

Although the US has the lead on that.

What about Switzerland? Although not in the EU, it often inherits such regulation

Apple is as petty as a little girl. They are "punishing" their users for the EU regulations in an attempt to get leverage by getting their users to complain at their representative against the regulations.

Not only is this disingenuous but also incredibly stupid. They are using their users just like parents would in a divorce to get leverage. As if the kids had anything to do with the parents' issues and had enough power to make a difference.

Even if their customers were to loudly complain, the regulations do not apply to just Apple, so they are asking for preferential treatment in return. Other companies have been able to offer similar features to their customers while complying with the regulations just fine, why can't Apple do it?

The good thing is that they make it easy to not buy and not recommend their devices to anyone in the EU, no matter how good their technology gets. Their features were already often requiring a new device purchase (even when there was no technological need) but now they are also locking stuff because of politics.

EU privacy laws are no joke. Maybe after paying a few billion dollars Apple has learned that by now. If Apple is being too cautious in their roll out to the EU, a competitor will undercut them and get something out first.

This decision triggers me because in the EU we sell cars that can go twice as fast as the speed limits, which could be very dangerous if used improperly, yet we ban technologies that are harmless and facilitate everyday life

>cars that can go twice as fast as the speed limits

Which speed limits? is 60kph too much?

This is one of the most asinine takes and comparisons I've seen.

And technology is most certainly not harmless, as I'm sure every reader of this website knows.

More likely 130kph, in most countries this is the upper limit on the highways and you effectively have no public areas in the country with higher limit. So the OP is kinda right with their take.

Exactly, in all EU are sold cars that can go way more than 130kph but yet we ban technologies because it “could” be dangerous in specific limited cases.

Which speed limits do you mean? (I'm German)

No speed limit in Germany. You’re welcome do drive 300kph on the Autobahn.

I'd be surprised if this isn't about data residency and gdpr. As someone using the headphones you may end up becoming a "data processor" in gdpr-legal terms.

You've not given the person being recorded any way to exercise their legal rights around collecting, inspecting and deleting their data.

GDPR is about collection and processing of personally identifiable information. These are specific legal terms that depend on the context in which the data is collected and used, not just broadly any data anywhere that might have something to do with a person.

GDPR is aimed at companies building user databases, not allowing them to completely ignore security, accuracy, user complaints, and sell anything to anybody while lying about it. It doesn't limit individual people's personal use of data.

GDPR doesn’t mention “personally identifiable information” once; it’s concerned with personal data, which is “any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’)”.

The rest is correct: the restrictions are aimed at organisations, not individuals.

[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2016/679/oj/eng#art_4.tit_...

The restrictions are not aimed at organisations, but to protect individuals.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/domestic-cctv-usi...

"If your CCTV system captures images of people outside the boundary of your private domestic property – for example, from neighbours’ homes or gardens, shared spaces, or from public areas – then the GDPR and the DPA will apply to you. You will need to ensure your use of CCTV complies with these laws. If you do not comply with your data protection obligations you may be subject to appropriate regulatory action by the ICO, as well as potential legal action by affected individuals."

You, as an individual, have data protection obligations, if your ring doorbell captures audio/video about someone outside your property boundaries. The apple translation service seems analogous.

The ICO is pretty zealous though in this regard. To quote recital 18:[1]

This Regulation does not apply to the processing of personal data by a natural person in the course of a purely personal or household activity and thus with no connection to a professional or commercial activity.

[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2016/679/oj/eng#rct_18

It's likely taken the view that "purely personal or household activity" only covers the recording of audio/video in a domestic setting.

GDPR does covers individual's use of eg Ring doorbells insofar as recording video and audio outside of your own property. This would seem to be analogous.

GDPR is aimed at protecting _individual's_ personal information, irrespective of what or who is collecting or processing it.

It applies to Ring and not other doorbell cameras, because Amazon is collecting and selling access Ring video feeds.

Given that Android phones and earbuds have been providing similar features in the EU for a while, that seems unlikely.

I did not know that, and I agree.

Another issue with Apple and I’m a fully invested die hard. 25 years now. But this is taking too far, I might start looking somewhere else. Fuck this.

What are the alternatives?

both Samsung and Google offerings have live translation for a while now. Samsung being on-device using LLM. Not sure about Google's

Meta glasses also: https://www.meta.com/help/ai-glasses/955732293123641

LOL, I'm sorry but this is a perfect example of the difference in approaches between the US and Europe

And, many of us - here in the eu - are very happy with this perfect example.

GDPR is solid. But main reason is that it's just hard to make it work with the AI act, various languages could also be the reason (product not adding enough value to customers?)

> Apple doesn't give a reason for the restriction

If there were real issues with GDPR or the AI Act Apple would have nothing to lose and everything to gain by mentioning at least the generalities of _why_. But they did no such thing so we can only assume it is not any of those things which are the real issues.

> Apple would have nothing to lose and everything to gain by mentioning at least the generalities of _why_

Really? You can't imagine any reasons Apple wouldn't want to have a public PR battle about its disagreements with its primary regulator in the market? Have you ever worked with the government?

Apple regularly have PR battles with governments, this week they openly sponsored a study on the App Store in Brazil to defend their ability to be the only store on iOS. Recently they fought UK publicly regarding encryption. And they have fought FBI publicly with press releases and interviews regarding similar things. Apple executives have also publicly spoken about their disagreements with DMA in 2024 and 2025.

Wow seems like they really pick these battles to only be the most important issues.

Not necessarily. Just now for example Apple is facing a regulatory problem with the eSIM, so they mention that they have an actual regulatory issue. [1]

But for this translation feature they have not even mentioned any regulatory issues, so we should from conclude, from previous and current behaviour, that Apple is delaying for something else. Probably engineering or political reasons.

[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2025/09/12/apple-delays-iphone-air...

Delayed approval and disagreements about the fundamental nature of what's allowed are two totally different things. Not sure why this example is relevant at all.

> disagreements about the fundamental nature of what's allowed

You have no source for this claim.

Since it’s on device - it probably sucks anyway

I made an account just to jump in here because this debate infuriates me every time I see it. So basically all the stuff that makes apple devices actually measurably better has to be opened up so that some rando can make a half hacked together attempt at compatibility? For what? So that people have even more rubbish e-waste to choose from?

Apple's main strength is their flawless ecosystem, everything made by apple works perfectly with everything else made by apple.

My airpods switch seamlessly between my apple devices, my watch unlocks all my stuff, my phone can be used as a camera and mic for my macbook, all of my devices besides my earbuds can be used to pay for things. All of it works completely seamlessly, no annoying popups, no dialog boxes, no asking for permission ten million times, no random disconnects. Literally no friction at all, once a new device is set up it's done. This frictionless-ness needs Apple's proprietary modifications to standards to function and it needs Apple's devices to be individually secure and all of these seamless connections need to also be secure.

If users want that then they buy apple.

If users want the spam ridden garbage hole that is Google's Play Store, or the terrible jamming of Android into poor quality cheap devices or the rubbish quality of most consumer tech in general then they can buy whatever they want but I don't want $10 aliexpress smartwatches to be able to seamlessly connect to my phone. I don't want random bluetooth earbuds from the petrol station to be able to access an API that lets them send transcripts of my calls anywhere they like and I definitely don't want a low barrier to entry for devices that can airdrop me stuff or paste to my macbook if I'm out and about.

Mybe Apple should just lock it's devices down so that they only work with other Apple devices full stop. Then there wouldn't be a market for compatible devices to compete in. I'd be happy because I have never once bought a non-apple device that I care about connecting to my phone. I'd have to buy a new monitor but that's ok.

All consumer tech right now is literally rebadges or mild modificatioins of stuff from AliExpress and I don't want that in my nice clean ecosystem. If these competitors want to actually compete then how about they make something that's actually better in some way instead of just hamfistedly copying whatever Apple comes up with? Live translation exists on google devices, if you want non-apple accessories and live translation then just buy a pixel and pixel buds? Nobody forces anyone to buy into apple's ecosystem.

I have switched between ecosystems multiple times and every single time I ended up back with Apple since I bought my first iPhone 5 back when they were new. The issues that android and windows devices have far outweigh the cost of Apple lockin. Especially for someone who just wants their devices to work as what they are and doesn't care about tinkering with them.

As the saying goes: Looks like you're not EU's target audience. You're free to move elsewhere. /s

On a serious note, why would apple-apple integration stop working just because apple stops blocking competition?

If this competition is only competing on price then it's not really competition, it's a race to the bottom. If you genuinely think that because two pairs of earbuds make noise and connect via bluetooth that makes them the same thing then you are welcome to buy slop and have it work rubbishly with your other slop.

There's more to competition than price.

After all apple hardware isn't even the most expensive. There are pricier phones and laptops being sold daily due to different features. So your race to the bottom point is moot.

If anything, competition could fix apple's sloppiness which it manages to leverage over the gullible due to artificial anti-competitive measures.

If Apple was so good, it wouldn't need to abuse their customers intellect.

I don't feel like Apple abuses my intellect. It's well known that Apple doesn't really care about people who want things that they don't offer, they market their devices to owners of their other devices. There are more expensive devices out there but none of them deliver the same value that Apple's devices do. They use standard methods and they have standard functionality and that's fine but if you want Apple then you buy Apple. Everyone is talking as if users are forced to buy and use Apple devices. The fact is that if you want a pebble or a garmin watch then you can just buy an Android phone and use that as the center of your tech and be happy with your non-apple devices. Why would someone want a Garmin watch that's compatible with their iphone? What possible real, non theoretical, reason is there to have one over an Apple watch? My wife had one and it's features were fairly pedestrian. There is nothing it did better than an Apple watch and that wouldn't have changed if it was able to work with Apple's proprietary technology. The existence of a comfortable walled garden alongside an open forest is not impossible by any stretch.

Your post has some fair points. But it also makes statements that seem illogical to me. For example:

> I don't want $10 aliexpress smartwatches to be able to seamlessly connect to my phone

Why? What is an objective reason for something like that?

You are the gatekeeper of your devices. You choose which accessories to pair. If you only want Apple-made devices to connect to your phone, fine. You do that. No one is suggesting or even implying that customers should be forced to use non-Apple devices.

The main point is to give the customers a choice. And let them decide what they want.

What I don't want is for the protocols that allow for apple's seamlesness to be opened to cheap trash. If Apple is forced to make it open to manufacturers of cheap trash and support it for manfacturers of cheap trash then it won't be economical for them to make cool stuff anymore and we won't have cool stuff anymore. I also dont want it to be easier to make devices that could maliciously take advantage of the friction removal capabilities that Apple builds into their devices. Customers already have a choice, e-waste slop garbage or apple products. The idea that they should be able to have both is quite ridiculous.

There are many misleading claims based on wrong assumptions and plain falsehoods in your post.

> What I don't want is for the protocols that allow for apple's seamlesness to be opened to cheap trash.

Why not? Is there any objective reason for that?

> If Apple is forced to make it open to manufacturers of cheap trash and support it for manfacturers of cheap trash

What are you even talking about? No one is suggesting that Apple should be supporting other manufacturers' products in a sense that it should be Apple's responsibility to make sure that they work.

This discussion is about interoperability. The only ask is to do things in a standardized way. So that other manufacturers can develop interoperable products, if they so like.

Right, but they have to do R&D for their cool stuff because the standardized way doesn't allow for their features. Then other manufacturers get salty because they didn't do any of their own expensive R&D to make things work properly and the EU makes laws to force Apple to open up their R&D and support iit so that other companies don't have to do their own. The EU is definitely saying that it should be Apple's responsibility to maintain support of it's proprietary features for 3rd party products. If you don't want Apple products then don't buy them? In fact, what is the objective reason that other manufacturers should be able to make interoperable products?

> What I don't want is for the protocols that allow for apple's seamlesness to be opened to cheap trash.

You either allow "cheap trash" that no one forces you to buy, or you exclude everyone. Here's Pebble on how they can't make their otherwise capable watch compatible with Apple products for absolutely arbitrary decisions on Apple's part: https://ericmigi.com/blog/apple-restricts-pebble-from-being-...

> Customers already have a choice, e-waste slop garbage or apple products.

Ah yes. As we all know, there are exactly two categories of products: Apple's flawless products and cheap trash. Nothing in between.

I used to have a pebble time, it worked fine for me with my iphone that I had at the time. It died when I swam with it the first time. I loved that thing, was really bummed when it died. My Apple Watch SE2 blows literally everything it could do out of the water. Even not including the apple proprietary walkie talkie feature which I use more than anything else on my watch because me and my wife love it. Except the battery life but I can't sleep with a watch on so it doesn't really matter. It still gives me 2-3 solid days. It's a shame that they had/have difficulty making it work but the reality is that I never ever used it to do any of the things that they couldn't get it to do. And I don't use my current apple watch for any of that either. I never cared about sending texts with it, I didn't do much with the watchfaces and I'd never have paid for one. I used it to control music, count steps and see notifications without going in my pocket. If it lived up to it's waterproofing claims I'd probably still be using it today. It certainly wasn't trash and I want to see them succeed but if they had these features then [URL for first google result for aliexpress smartwatch removed] would also have these features and that would not be what anyone wants. Least of all the repebble team who wouldn't have any edge over the dollar or so price new user welcome deal on that particular piece of ewaste. IMO pebble should focus more on the things that people actually care about like the cool e-ink screen, distraction-lowered functionality, battery life and making sure it doesn't die the first time you swim with it like in the ads than bashing Apple for making their stuff more secure than everyone else and raising the barrier to entry for manufacturers of slop. Pebbles worked great on Android but 40% of their current customer base uses an iphone and they still want the pebble. Maybe the 'less developed' functionality wasn't so bad? Maybe, like me, they wanted a smart-lite watch as opposed to a smartwatch? If I had known that they were actually making watches again then I'd have actually bought one instead of my apple watch and I'd live happily never knowing about walkietalkie. I do marketing, if by some chance Eric Migicovsky reads this then I'd be honored to quit my current job and go sell pebbles for him.

This huge meandering text completely avoids addressing the issues described at the link.

> Pebbles worked great on Android but 40% of their current customer base uses an iphone and they still want the pebble. Maybe the 'less developed' functionality wasn't so bad?

Yes, because the watch isn't "cheap garbage" as you pretend that everything non-Apple is.

The question is: why can't they have the dame functionality on iOS?

It wasn't that long and it didn't meander much. It's clear that you didn't realy understand what I was saying. Sure, Pebbles weren't cheap garbage but mine literally died the second that I tried to use it the way that it was used in their ads. I didn't care about the less developed functionality at all. You still don't address the fact that the vast majority of tech out there right now is e-waste.

The point which I was making is that Eric and the pebble team complained about Apple instead of competing in the space that they themselves had created. They were first to market with a smart watch and instead of just finding the consumer base which exists for what they had built and catering to them they tried to appeal to literally everyone and lost. They lost to literally better devices, better screens, better hardware, better software and better capabilities across all ecosystems. Cheap devices using Google's watch OS wiped the floor with Pebble. They had a loyal fanbase who liked the watch for what it was. I was part of that fanbase.

I suggest that if they had just did what they could for apple users and moved on to focus on the nerdy, first adopter types who actually liked their product and are somehow still coming back for it now then they'd have succeeded. It's hard to understand why they spent so much time and money focusing on ios notifications when Android also has a much higher market share and the majority of their customers were/are there anyway. They could have continued to develop their device in that direction and probably still been around today. they could have made better e-ink screens, better colour, better battery life, better charging hardware, better build quality, better waterproofing, built-in GPS, a real attempt at fostering a developer ecosystem for their OS or any number of other great features but they spent gorillions on ios notifications?

I'd also like to take a second to point out that they sold out to fitbit at the behest of their VC overlords because they were insolvent and ditched their userbase hard. Fitbit absolutely bought them out in order to take their IP and kill them as competitors for good. Complaining about Apple on the relaunch and relying on a community of enthusiasts to maintain an opensource codebase for their OS after Google bought out fitbit isn't really very customer focused of them.

Myreply to your question is why should they be able to have that functionality? Why should Apple allow other companies to compete with them within it's walled garden whch they made effort building and have the features that they designed and spent money developing? Why can't other companies develp their own cool features and their own ecosystems? It may benefit some people who want to use non-Apple stuff with Apple stuff but how does this actually benefit Apple and it's customers?

You're naively assuming that Apple will always act in your best interests,which they don't:

In 2017, Apple secretly throttled the performance of older iPhones to prevent shutdowns, without informing users.

In the butterfly keyboard years (2015-2019) Apple denied that their tech was crap and blamed users.

The 30% fee in the app store is outrageous.

The right-to-repair restrictions are clearly anti-consumer. Preventing users from using 3rd party parts for repairs, voiding warranties. $500 display repairs.

Agressive planned obsolescence. Non-upgradable components. Software updates that slow older devices down.

Sideloading restrictions, reducing user choice and security options.

So the throttling was because they found that the old hardware and batteries weren't keeping up and so, instead of letting the devices become completely useless they throttled them.

Butterfly keyboard isn't great but it works better without being crammed full of cheeto dust.

Play store has no barrier to entry and it's a slop filled garbage shithole. There's garbage slop on Apple's Appstore too but nowhere near as much.

The flipside to the 3rd party parts that nobody talks about is that if there was a sudden flood of apple devices repaired poorly with sheapo shit parts then buying used apple devices would be a terrible experience. I bought a lot of my Apple stuff 2nd hand and it all works great. Nobody said that anything had to be cheap, you want cheap go buy something else. Price is what you pay but value is what you get.

The planned obsolescence is not even a thing, they have by far the best record for supporting their old devices. I have an '09 Macbook Pro that is able to run El Capitan and the last security update for that was 2018. Iphone 6s is STILL receiving security updates. If you want to easily upgrade your components then don't buy apple devices, if you don't want to maintain winblows but still want serious applications to be able to run natively then buy apple. Older devices slow down because literally nobody cares about writing software that's lightweight and only uses actually necessary system resources.

Again with the Appstore and the 'user choice' you have choices, dont buy Apple products if you want the freedom to bloat your stuff with crap software. There's a massive market of winblows and android devices with all the pointless unsupported-open-source-with-the-last-update-to-the-project-made-in-1234BCE software your heart desires out there for your slop and e-waste buying pleasure. What security do you gain from installing random shit beyond the security that Apple builds in by default?

ALL tech currently sucks massive donkey cock but at least if you buy an iphone then you know that it'll reliably perform the duties of a small pocket based social media based computer/car audio brain until such a time as you choose to replace it. If you buy a macbook then you know that it'll do the job of portable computing for you as long as your needs don't esceed what 99% of people actually use a computer for besides playing videogames (just get a console for those, seriously how the fuck is a weird RGB chair in an RGB room better than a couch with your cat/dog/friends/family) for over a decade of your life. At least when you buy Apple products you know that you're paying out your ass for something that will 100% deliver on all the promises it makes.

> So the throttling was because they found that the old hardware and batteries weren't keeping up and so, instead of letting the devices become completely useless they throttled them.

There's no credible excuse to justify Apple's planned obsolescence of only a couple generation older products, except to increase the sales of newer models.

Also it's not like this company doesn't make big mistakes either. Remember the GSM iPhone 4 Antenna fiasco?

I just provided the credible excuse, these same obsoleted devices continued to receive software support from Apple for a long time after other devices that came out in the same year stopped receiving software updates. That's not really what i would call obsolescence. Every company makes mistakes including apple., my point is that in terms of consumer devices Apple makes fewer mistakes than anyone else.

To add, this would disincentivize companies from pursuing novel Research and Development. Why would a company invest a lot of money to develop hardware if they will be eventually forced to open it up to some random competitor? If I was a competitor to Apple I would lobby hard to obtain access and not do any R&D of my own.

Right? Why spend money and effort to R&D actually interesting devices if you can just make cheapo compatible slop instead?

Oh no. How did we ever live without companies spending money and effort between the invention of computers and now.

We didn't. There has been constant innovation from then up until now.

Indeed. Yet you claim that opening platforms somehow prevents companies from investing in R&D

It does when a company has spent R&D to create a closed platform specifically for their customers. The closed platform is Apple's USP, their features are better because they only have to develop and support them for their devices.

> So basically all the stuff that makes apple devices actually measurably better has to be opened up so that some rando can make a half hacked together attempt at compatibility?

Only the interfaces and protocols. This is not the interesting or expensive part, unlike the implementation. Apple can still have the best implementation of the protocol, and a lot of people will believe that this is the case.

> For what?

So that people are not locked into the ecosystem when they buy the device. The price for the phone is what they pay, not what they will be forced to pay later, for example by only being able to choose airpods or apple watch for full experience later. For example.

> I don't want random bluetooth earbuds from the petrol station to be able to access an API that lets them send transcripts of my calls anywhere they like

First, don't buy them, you don't have to. Second, technically, the API exposed by the device will first need to allow them to connect somewhere online and send any data. That's a separate issue. Not to mention that, hypothetically, if bluetooth airbuds were able to send data somewhere by themselves, a malicious airbud manufacturer could still use the protocols by reverse engineering them. Not necessarily the case with legit manufacturers. Such lockin only stops legitimate, non-malicious actors.

> and I definitely don't want a low barrier to entry for devices that can airdrop me stuff or paste to my macbook if I'm out and about.

Allowing everyone and anyone to airdrop you stuff is a bad idea anyway. The protocol was reverse engineered too.

> I'd be happy because I have never once bought a non-apple device that I care about connecting to my phone. I'd have to buy a new monitor but that's ok.

And a lot of other Apple users wouldn't be happy.

> All consumer tech right now is literally rebadges or mild modificatioins of stuff from AliExpress and I don't want that in my nice clean ecosystem.

A lot is not. Again, just don't buy it, you have to choose to let such devices to connect to your device.

> If these competitors want to actually compete then how about they make something that's actually better in some way instead of just hamfistedly copying whatever Apple comes up with?

A lot of the time they legitimately want to, but Apple locks them out of certain features. For example, AFAIK, Garmin watches (legitimate company! with an original take on a smartwatch, definitely not copying Apple) are locked from accessing certain iOS features Apple Watch can access.

I replied to someone else in the same vein but having had a garmin watch in the home there was nothing that it would have done better if it was able to work with Apple's proprietary stuff. If random devices of unknown provenance were able to freely connect with Apple devices then the security of Apple's ecosystem would take a hit. This would be bad.

> I replied to someone else in the same vein but having had a garmin watch in the home there was nothing that it would have done better if it was able to work with Apple's proprietary stuff

Maybe to you. Garmin watches cannot respond to notifications on Apple devices, for example. Detailed article about restrictions on iOS from Pebble: https://ericmigi.com/blog/apple-restricts-pebble-from-being-...

> If random devices of unknown provenance were able to freely connect with Apple devices then the security of Apple's ecosystem would take a hit. This would be bad.

Random devices are not able to connect over bluetooth to your device without your consent. Then, the bluetooth device can only get as much information as the companion app will allow it to get.

Besides, we have that on Android (and PCs) and the security of these "ecosystems" is not worse because of it.

Your argument seems a little bad faith. Sure, random devices aren't able to connect to my phone without my consent but Apple devices only need that consent once. After they're on my apple account they can connect with my other apple devices seamlessly, no companion apps at any stage.

My AirPods move from my phone to my macbook all by themselves based on which device needs audio and my macbook can ask for my iphone's camera and mic at will. My Apple devices can do this because they have hardware level security to allow for this. The EU wants the same capabilities to be extended to non-apple devices.

This would mean that Apple would have to let devices connect without a companion app and possibly make a backdoor in their hardware security layer or worse allow anyone to incorporate their hardware security into any device.

If some aliexpress buds were able to do that then this would definitely pose a problem. Bad actors should not get access to Apple's proprietary security tech and that tech is one of the reasons that Apple devices have capabilities which non-apple devices do not.

edit: Your original comment makes a couple of good points re: the cost of lockin for consumers. However, I would like to point out that this cost isn't a problem when the locked in devices are as good as they are. Apple's devices routinely either come near to the top or sit at the top of the list of best X devices from many different review sources. If their locked in devices were worse this would make sense but often they are much better than all of their competition. I wouldn't buy any AirPod competitors because they genuinely don't actually represent better value even when they are cheaper than AirPods. Similarly with other devices, I've tried almost everything at one point or another. The first time I used Android I installed it myself on an HTC HD2. When I ditched windows I went with linux before I went with Apple. I've had powerful self built windows machines and Asus gaming laptops and a google pixel and a pebble and tried many more devices without actually owning them myself. Nothing has ever come close to my apple silicon macbook, my old iphone which I'm still using, my 2nd hand cheap ipad mini or my apple watch. I don't buy apple devices because I'm locked in and have no other choice, I buy them because they actually represent good value for me and my use case.

So consumers will just buy from another brand and use that instead?

I get the Apple is trying to spread propaganda that anti-competitive laws are bad for consumers, but in this case, consumers will just buy from another brand and it's a simple net loss for Apple.

Except many users are already locked into Apple's ecosystem, so they will be very angry.

The relevant question for Apple is here:

Will those users buy OTHER headphones than Apple then, or still buy Airpods...?

From my observation the "properly locked-in" Apple user buys Airpods and mostly replaces them with newer Airpods when needed, because of Apple's artificial advantage in ecosystem interoperability (the exact reason of the dispute with the EU)

Yeah but disputes like Apples with the EU can take 10 years to litigate and settle by the time Apple has raked in more billions and crushed more competitors. So they know they can keep stalling and appealing as time works in their favor.

Maybe, but currently it seems that Apple prefers to not "litigate while crushing the competition", but instead "retreat and rally up the userbase". So at least in this aspect the DMA seems to work surprisingly well...

I also think there is little for them to litigate at this point, they were exchanging extensively for more than a year on how to reach compliance, then the decision [0] was made.

There are also separate procedures for the specification of compliance and investigating (non)compliance. Apple might continue to have a hard time litigating on non-compliance if they co-worked with the EU on the exact expectation of compliance beforehand.

https://ec.europa.eu/competition/digital_markets_act/cases/2...

What does it mean to be locked in, exactly? I just bought a pair of Shokz headphones and they work perfectly well with my iPhone. I didn't feel like I was forced to buy AirPods.

The position of the EU (correctly) is that they would work even better if Apple gave them the same level of access to your phone that they award to their own headphones.

Yes, I definitely want "Shockz" to be able to run background daemons on my phone for proximity pairing and god knows what else a fly by night OEM might want to do. That would make my phone work much, much better.

But then simply don't install or buy "Shockz" if that's your concern.

Apple might be doing the same thing, but you wouldn’t necessarily know it, since their ecosystem is a closed gate.

I have enough software on my phone that I was forced to install that I know this is argument rests on a false premise of agency.

That concept is entirely foreign to me, as an Android user. Closest I've come to being "forced" to install anything is when I need a boarding pass, and even then I'll often use a screenshot from my desktop. I can't think of any other mandatory apps on my phone right now.

You haven’t needed to install an app to manage a smart device? Or use a local public service? Or for work?

Damn, if only we had some form of technology that would let a user allow or reject access to system APIs. Sadly this is impossible and cannot be implemented.

This would not give any meaningful control or consent to the average user.

Out of curiosity, why quote Shokz and then spell it incorrectly, as well? I gather you're not a runner, so you have never heard of them, but I'm confused as to what you were trying to convey.

Locked into iPhone.

I want to switch to Android, but I have all the following problems:

1. iMessage, unlike whatsapp etc, does not have an android app, and some of my family uses iMessage, so I would be kicked from various group chats

2. My grandma only knows how to use facetime, so I can't talk to her unless I have an iPhone

3. My apple books I purchased can't be read on android

4. Lose access to all my apps (android shares this one)

5. I have a friend who uses airdrop to share maps and files when we go hiking without signal, and apple refuses to open up the airdrop protocol so that I can receive those from android, or an airdrop app on android

6. ... I don't have a macbook, but if I did the sreen sharing, copy+paste sharing, and iMessage-on-macos would all not work with android.

It's obvious that apple has locked in a ton of stuff. Like, all other messages and file-sharing protocols except iMessage and airdrop work on android+iOS. Books I buy from google or amazon work on iOS or android.

Apple is unique here.

Legitimately not trying to be coy, but would you consider a game like Fortnite to be an instance of "lock-in" for teenagers? For instance, a teenager might say:

1. Fortnite doesn't have an iPhone app, so if I switch to iOS I can't play with my friends

2. My friends only play Fortnite, so I can't play with them unless I play Fortnite.

3. My skins can't be used on Roblox.

4. I lose access to all my custom worlds

5. Other game engines don't work for building Fortnite custom worlds, I have to use Unreal.

It feels like a certain amount of lock-in is expected just from network effects of products, no?

There is a certain amount of expected "lock-in" for social media and network effects, as you say.

I think there are classes of product that have an outsized amount of power and should be subject to more strict judgement on this however.

ISPs, payment processors, web browsers, general purpose operating systems, etc... all of these should not discriminate and give partners an unfair leg up.

Chrome should not block bing.com from loading, and should publish everything needed for anyone to write a webpage Chrome can render. Windows should not block iTunes from running, and should publish specs on how to write software for win32 APIs. iOS should publish airdrop specs to allow alternative implementations.

The rest of my complaints amount more to norms for certain things. It has become the norm that someone who sells digital books, music, or movies allows people to access them on the platforms they're on (spotify works on iOS and android, ditto for youtube music, etc etc). Apple is the only company I know of that abuses an OS+Media monopoly for basically all media, like Amazon has the Kindle, but they still let you read books on normal Android too. Apple is violating the norm in a way that feels intended to create an anti-competitive moat.

Similarly, every other messaging app is cross-platform, and iMessage not being cross platform, banning users who use it on android (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39156308), and refusing to publish their own android app, that also feels like it violates the norms of messaging apps in a way that is either gross incompetence, or anti-competitive.

I think Fortnite doesn't qualify as an "operating system" because it can't gatekeep how someone interacts with competitors. If, in some weird future, Epic started selling "Fortnight Decks" (like the steam deck), included the "Deck Apps" app store, and it became a general way of computing for some appreciable fraction of kids, then yes, I think that hypothetical "Deck Apps" store and the device could have such lock-in and I'd have the same complaints.

I also think if fortnight became the default way the next generation communicates (akin to iMessage), it would indeed be wildly anti-competitive if they partnered with Google, and made it so the chat app was only available on ChromeOS.

However, as it is now, Fortnite isn't violating norms, nor is it going out of its way to gatekeep access to the community, nor is it anyone's gateway to general computing, so it doesn't feel comparable to iMessage, nor to the app store.

Also, what do you mean by "coy" there? I don't understand the meaning in that context.

And still people hate Microsoft, which never went to these lengths in protecting its turf, and love Apple.

What dividends this propaganda would bring? Apple is making their product less compelling in a market where they have lower share than in the other markets where this feature will be available.

They are simply weighting potential fines / loss of revenues due to being forced to share technology with competition against monetary losses due to fewer sales. So far fewer sales win.

This is the central point that is always missed on this forum.

These are features that apple are dedicating a huge amount of resources to. Tim Cook frequently talks up the importance of artificial intelligence as the future. Apple Intelligence is a tentpole feature of new iPhones, it has heavily influenced their advertising, and takes prime position in their marketing materials.

Withholding these features, even for just 6 months, is harmful to Apple. Especially when Apple appear weaker in the category, and competitors are frequently releasing AI products.

However here you'll read a byzantine concoction on how this is acshually a 4D anticompetitive chess move.

But if they allowed it, more people would buy the Apple feature because it would work better when both software and hardware are integrated.

Have you ever tried bluetooth audio devices on an iPhone/ iPad?

Apple does this very clever, it works, but it has so many annoyances and bugs. By making 3th party products “annoying” to use, Apple nudges people to just buy Apple products/the ecosystem…

> Have you ever tried bluetooth audio devices on an iPhone/ iPad?

Every day. But I never ran into what you suggest. My iPad is not more annoying than my Dell laptop when it comes to Bluetooth (and both are light years away from my Linux box).

Just add another cookie banner before each session and you'll be fine, Apple.

I mean studying a technology with this scale to assess its impact before allowing it freely is… not terrible?

Yes, it is terrible. We should have and support proactionary policies, not regressive precautionary restrictions.

spitting-drink-out-laughing.gif

but how would these airpods really be able to know you're in the EU? this should be easily hackable

It's just for registrations that are associated with EU based iCloud accounts.

Live translation requires a connected iPhone. It’s the regional settings on the phone, plus the region of the Apple account.

The feature requires both the airpods and a connected iPhone to work. The phone has GPS.

No consideration for trade-offs involved here, it’s naive at best

It’s enormously difficult to ship any interesting feature that integrates hardware and software. The EU wants Apple to happily accept a burden that makes it harder to produce the products that made it popular in the first place.

I’m disappointed the EU won’t be getting these features (at least not quickly) but I’m hoping the citizenry realizes who’s to blame here

What are the tradeoffs? For their own devices nothing changes, and for other devices they need to spend some extra integration work to make sure there's a standard they follow but that work should pale in comparison to the main engineering.

Apple loses the forced bundling but they'll do fine without it and it's a good thing for everyone else.

Why would Apple have to endure this burden. If a 3rd party maker cannot make their device work the same way with the proper access, it is their own issue and not something Apple should help them figure out. The proper access is the key part, but once that access is open it is up to the devs to figure it out. If their product still has a subpar user experience, that'll be something the market figures out for them

I'm not asking for anything beyond proper access.

Your "they" is ambiguous so that I interpreted it as Apple needing to spend extra time.

You interpreted that word correctly. But I would say that part of "proper access" is that it needs to meet basic interoperability levels. That much is Apple's job, and it's not a very big job.

I'm not asking for them to do any work beyond that level for non-Apple devices. If those devices need to run fancy code to make the feature work, that fancy code isn't Apple's job.

(But if the feature just needs to listen to the microphone feed, then I do expect it to work out of the box with any headset. (The firmware updates they're doing to older airpods are not clear evidence one way or the other whether it actually needs on-headset support.))

> If a 3rd party maker cannot make their device work the same way with the proper access, it is their own issue and not something Apple should help them figure out.

This is NOT expected from Apple and explicitly noted in the ruling.

They are simply not allowed to restrict OS features from competitors in order to frame them as Apple accessory features, because this distorts the competition in this accessory market

A third-party maker literally CAN NOT make their devices work the same way.

"Can not" as in "unable because Apple doesn't allow that". All Apple needs to do is whitelist access to certain APIs and provide minimal documentation.

No, that's not so. One of the relevant rulings (https://ec.europa.eu/competition/digital_markets_act/cases/2...) dictates that merely providing any API isn't enough. Among other requirements, the API must "properly consider the needs of third parties that will make use of the solution", it must be "properly tested for bugs or other shortcomings", and Apple must "provide adequate and timely assistance to third parties that report issues". A barely hacked-together API that's hard to use without constantly pinging the team who implemented it - entirely normal for the first release of a big new feature - wouldn't be enough.

Yes, and?

> A barely hacked-together API that's hard to use without constantly pinging the team who implemented it - entirely normal for the first release of a big new feature - wouldn't be enough.

Oh, so Apple can't be bothered to be held to the same standard as, say, automotive developers?

Ahh, I see the problem. This may come as a shock to you: a phone is not a car.

Yes, a phone is vastly more important than a personal car right now. You can easily live (especially in Europe) without a car, but a phone is indispensable.

I would have more sympathy for Apple if they behaved ethically, respecting developers and users. They absolutely do not behave ethically, preferring to exploit everything they can.

Turnaround is a fair play, so I'm going to shed zero tears if Apple is forced to spend a couple hundred million dollars (at most) adapting their internal documentation for their APIs.

I don't understand the analogy. Are auto manufacturers in the EU required to publish a detailed spec and robust API for third party backup camera developers?

They are required to provide detailed repair manuals, spare parts, and diagnostic software to independent repair shops.

> Why would Apple have to endure this burden.

The same reason they endure the burden of safety certification and employment requirements: it’s the law. It’s not exactly a new concept.

Saying something is the law is never a valid argument in discussions like this. There has been multiple historic examples of things being the law until everyone realized how unethical the original law really was.

It's not an argument, it's a factual answer. Apple has to comply with the law.

And yes, it also happens to be a good law that promotes competition and curbs anti-competitive abuses.

Yes, but for now that's the law. So, the pragmatic answer is: they have to do it because otherwise their stuff will be pulled from the shelves and they will be fined. This does not prevent them from discussing with the Commission, which they are already doing, or lobbying for changes in the regulations, which their are also already doing within the limits of the political system.

> for other devices they need to spend some extra integration work to make sure there's a standard they follow

Have you ever built a software product with an API? Would you say it was trivial upfront and ongoing to build and support this API?

It’s Apple who is to blame. The rules are clear. I’m fine not having funny toys if it means holding corporations accountable.

And yes yes plenty of things go wrong in the EU, I know. Still prefer this over Americas lack of laws and ease of bribing a president.

> I’m hoping the citizenry realizes who’s to blame here

So... Apple?

My headphones certainly don't have trouble connecting to a device of any manufacturer without loss of functionality, but some of the "citizenry" seems to fall for marketing materials saying only apple can do things securely and in an integrated manner

You can connect airpods to a non-apple device and use them for audio.

This is more of an iPhone / iOS feature which uses the airpods as the microphone and audio output.

Um, yes I can do that with headphones and earphones too on non-iPhone/iOS. Not understanding the thing that is a special iPhone feature that no other vendor should be allowed to interoperate with

>Not understanding the thing that is a special iPhone feature that no other vendor should be allowed to interoperate with

Exactly. And Apple intends to keep it that way ;)

It's a purely software limitation. That is, it's a purely arbitrary limitation.

Is it? Apple does weird Bluetooth and WiFi stuff in the H2 chip.

They should stop doing that then and use standards like everyone else. If their protocol is really the bees knees, then just open it.

But, they won't, because they rely on that moat to keep competitors out. It's exactly the same at the lightning cable.

> They should stop doing that then and use standards like everyone else.

Many of those standards are objectively poor. I don’t want to live in the world where what we are allowed to use is defined by the lowest common denominator of mediocre engineers.

Mediocrity über alles is what you are tacitly advocating for. I’ve been part of many standards processes where the majority democratic outcome was low-quality low-effort standards that were extraordinarily wasteful and inefficient because the people making the standards didn’t care, it was all about what was expedient for them. This is the default state of humanity. No one should be forced to comply with that garbage by regulatory fiat if they don’t want to.

> Many of those standards are objectively poor.

Okay, fine, I already covered for this. If your new protocol is really the bees knees, then open it, problem solved.

> No one should be forced to comply with that garbage by regulatory fiat if they don’t want to.

They're not.

The standards are really bad and it’s not just about protocols but hardware. Should they give away every hardware design needed too?

Lighting was an incredible boon in an era of micro usb, people just seem to forget how shit everyone else was. Now we have usb-c where companies are required to supply the port but doesn’t have to follow any actual specification, yay for standards.

> The standards are really bad and it’s not just about protocols but hardware.

Okay, if their hardware is esoteric, open the protocols for interacting with hardware.

> Should they give away every hardware design needed too?

Yeah probably. It would be a lot better, more like x86. We would actually get repairable phones instead of landfill fodder. But that's a different issue.

> Lighting was an incredible boon in an era of micro usb, people just seem to forget how shit everyone else was. Now we have usb-c where companies are required to supply the port but doesn’t have to follow any actual specification, yay for standards.

And then it became a cheap scam, whereby Apple made a few dollars off of every single lightning cable produced by anyone on Earth due to licensing.

Also, as for USB-C - doesnt matter, still better. My chargers work across multiple devices. Yes, there's some standards noncompliance, this is still a huge improvement over ZERO cross compatibility.

Last time I checked x86 is not open, it’s licensed just like the lightning cable, och and USB-C.

Its comparatively much more open, with interface and protocols specified and open source firmware implementations widely used in the wild. I'm also including BIOs/UEFI in this.

ARM and phone manufacturing is a hot mess in comparison. We're still trying to reverse engineer M series MacBooks and iPhones are off limits. Android is also not open source, no AOSP does not count.

There would be a lot more competition in the space if the hardware had proper specs, like x86 does.

What competition has x86 seen? I’m old enough to remember when there was more than Intel and AMD. When did they last license x86 to a competitor, 30+ years ago?

It’s great that documentation exists, but it doesn’t make for competition. ARM is at least licensing out to more than two manufacturers.

> This is more of an iPhone / iOS feature which uses the airpods as the microphone and audio output.

Right, so why can’t I connect my non-apple Bluetooth mic + audio output and get the same functionality?

Either it’s an airpods thing and it should work airpods + any host device; or it’s an iPhone thing and should work with any iphone + audio device

Apple?

> No consideration for trade-offs involved here, it’s naive at best

I recommend you to read the ruling [0] and form your own opinion.

> The EU wants Apple to happily accept a burden that makes it harder to produce the products that made it popular in the first place.

No, the EU mandates that Apple cannot implement OS features for the sole benefit of its own hardware-offering in a different market, because this is not fair competition. They are not required to foster new HW ecosystems for each feature, they just have to provide access to such OS features under equal conditions:

  "By mandating an equally effective interoperability solution, the legislator acknowledged that the implementation of interoperability does not always need to (and potentially cannot always) be the same for the gatekeeper and third parties, but interoperability must be granted to the same feature under equal conditions."

[0] https://ec.europa.eu/competition/digital_markets_act/cases/2...

And Apple is now saying "That's fine, we'll instead adhere to the law by having our product do less. Don't buy it if you don't like the reduced featureset."

Someone at Apple did math on this and it's not worth their time to make this feature interoperable just for the EU market. That's because of this law. They wouldn't have even considered it without the law.

Which is fine as well if that's really the case (which I don't think it is, Europe apparently makes up ~1/3 of Apple's total Airpods revenue).

If they refrain from distorting the market in their favor (and instead "retreat and rally up the userbase") the DMA seems to work surprisingly well so far...

The procedures with the EU are quite interesting here, Apple was exchanging extensively for more than a year on how to reach compliance, then the decision [0] was made.

There are also separate procedures for the specification of compliance and investigating (non)compliance.

This gives Apple little room to argue on violation of the DMA later-on, because they were actively involved in defining the criteria beforehand.

So it's possible that they currently just need to find a mode to achieve launch-parity for EU on such features, and they're not there yet.

[0] https://ec.europa.eu/competition/digital_markets_act/cases/2...

Saying that the DMA is working well by reducing the features available to users with no apparent upside is a tough sell.

The upside is that the market for headphones is more competitive because apple cannot use its control over the iphone to muscle competitors in the headphone market.

The goal is to make consumers better off, not just to have a competitive market. There's a lot of ways to make markets more competitive that don't result in better value for consumers, and I'd argue that this is one of them.

In the short term, specifically because of Apple's malicious compliance. In the long term, a more competitive market results in better off consumers.

But no, the goal is not to make consumers better off, but citizens and nations better off. And their interests do not stop at $PRODUCT. Namely, they probably don't want a slow slide into serfdom to foreign corporations that abused their market power.

This is a play of Apple here, trying to spin the narrative in its favor.

The upside for the user is to have a larger variety of devices to choose from, each with similar interoperability with his Apple device.

The upside for the market is that all vendors are technically able to compete on the same terms. Apple is not allowed to operate a market, invite others to compete but also participate as a player with preferential treatment.

This is already decided for the existing features of Airpods, Apple Watch, etc. Apple is trying to rally its userbase against the EU by withholding new features now, in hopes that they can secure their skewed playing-field

> The upside for the user is to have a larger variety of devices to choose from, each with similar interoperability with his Apple device.

That is the dream of the dma. It has not been proven to be the reality.

The reality could very well be that EU users just don’t get features. Apple doesn’t have to play ball.

And that’s fine. If they don’t want to follow the rules they can’t release the thingy.

Quite a few upsides.

There are a few clear precedents where Apple held a feature back in the EU, then shipped later and/or exposed a path others could plug into:

Apple Intelligence: Announced as “not at launch” in the EU in 2024, then rolled out to EU users with iOS 18.4 in spring 2025 (most features). One carve-out remains: Live Translation with AirPods

NFC access for third-party wallets (HCE): After an EU antitrust case, Apple committed to open iPhone NFC (“tap-to-pay”) via Host Card Emulation, let users set a default non-Apple wallet, support Field Detect/Double-click flows, etc., so a genuine “build a platform others can plug into.” The Commission made these commitments legally binding for 10 years.

With iOS 17.4 Apple created EU-only entitlements for non-WebKit engines (e.g., full Chromium/Gecko), so browser makers can ship their own engines on iPhone/iPad in the EU.

Home-screen web apps (PWAs) reversal: Apple initially said PWAs would go away in the EU for 17.4, then reversed and kept them—implemented on WebKit with the usual security model.

Alternative app distribution (marketplaces + web distribution): In response to the DMA, Apple shipped EU-only APIs/entitlements for third-party app marketplaces and later web distribution (direct from developer sites) with notarization, installation, backup/restore hooks, etc.

Tap to Pay on iPhone (SoftPOS): Apple’s merchant “no extra hardware” payments feature expanded across EU countries and is designed for platforms like Adyen/Stripe/Mollie to integrate via SDKs

The fact is adapting a service to provide and support a generic API for the long term that others can hook into is extra work, compared to a private API tailored to their own hardware and that they can change whenever they like. It may be they could provide this as an open service in future.

On the other hand, what is to prevent another ear bud manufacturer writing an iPhone app their ear buds connects to that provides translation? Is this really a hardware feature in the phone? If it’s just software at the phone end, as long as other manufacturers have the feature access to implement this themselves, surely that’s their problem? Why should apple offer translation software as a service to other companies for free? I can see the argument for hardware but not software that others could implement themselves on iPhones.

None of those are new features out since the DMA.

The only one clearly DMA related with EU specific unlocks are:

* app store

* browser engines

The DMA could have been just an app store regulation. It seems to have had its intended effect there. Very very unproven outside of it. At best you've shown no harm other than delay in some areas.

I'm assuming NFC lawsuits are separate from the DMA but could be mistaken. But in any event NFC payments already existed and aren't a new feature apple decided to release under the DMA.

> Which is fine as well if that's really the case (which I don't think it is, Europe apparently makes up ~1/3 of Apple's total Airpods revenue).

So your belief is that, if DMA didn't exist, Apple still would not ship this feature in the EU?

I don't know how you reached that conclusion, sorry.

It's fine if Apple decided to refrain from its anti-competitive behavior in the headphone market because it's not economically viable to have this feature as a generic OS feature.

They know best and are free to do that.

I find your views alien and strange (and vaguely upsetting, because they negatively impact the entire world)

There are huge hosts of software and hardware that work better because of an ecosystem of interoperable components. That’s not anticompetitive, it’s the benefit of good design with compounding returns.

As the manufacturing process and software becomes less complicated, there is a natural trend towards budget competitors (see: SaaS in 2025) that can replicate functionality they know has a market.

The idea that making it unappealing to make an integrated product is good for consumers — or anticompetitive — seems so wrong that it’s farcical. There are definitely cases where verticalization can harm consumers, but this opens the space for good competition. Perplexity wouldn’t exist if Google actually cared about search customers. Internet Explorer didn’t have to be regulated out of existence — by virtue of sucking, there is opportunity.

Apple is free to do as many interoperable components or integrated products as they please. The DMA doesn't define ANY such restriction.

What they CAN'T do is maintain an environment where their products cannot be met with fair competition by other players, by intentionally giving advantages in the ecosystem only to their own brands.

Apple might not dominate the market for fitness trackers above 150USD today if they wouldn't have prevented others to achieve the same interoperability with their iOS ecosystem.

Apples featureset for wellness tracking was not competitive, neither in function nor in price. Fitbit and Garmin were better in doing that task, but they were not able to display message notifications, apps, etc. because the required interfaces in iOS were only available to Apple's Watch.

Maybe Apple would have beaten them in 2nd Gen, maybe competitors would have followed with equally tight iOS-interoperability in 2nd Gen.

Maybe Apple Watch would nonetheless be the leading Smartwatch in the market today. Or maybe it would be e.g. the Moto360 (google it) just due to Apple's "virtue of sucking" and insistence of doing rectangular watches.

We don't know, because none of the other players are able to compete on fair terms with Apple in this segment until today. And today Apple has such a leap-start that it's questionable whether this can still be rectified.

> Someone at Apple did math on this and it's not worth their time to make this feature interoperable just for the EU market. That's because of this law

Let's not pretend like Apple isn't doing everything it can to turn its EU users against their government by complying with the DMA in the most obtuse, disruptive, and useless ways possible. They're risking fines and further punishments betting that they can ultimately subvert the democratic process that put in place laws that would require more developer and user freedom. To Apple, the threat of users owning their computers is an existential one.

If the consumers in EU don’t like the legal and predictable effects of the DMA in this case, how is Apple subverting the democratic process? If the act isn’t having the intended effect, then either voters will change their minds or it will need to be reformed. But this sounds like a successful outcome of the law insofar as preventing anticompetitive behavior.

Subverting democracy, to me, would involve things like dark money campaigns and lobbying.

> If the consumers in EU don’t like the legal and predictable effects of the DMA in this case, how is Apple subverting the democratic process

The issue is that Apple isn't following the law. It's breaking it and then miming to its customers that its actions are on account of the law. That misrepresentation is meant to convince citizens of the EU that DMA is a bad law with consequences they don't support so that they pressure their representatives to get it removed.

It's Apple making a big show of directly harming consumers as part of a misinformation campaign to get policy that limits their power repealed. To me that reaches the bar for subverting democracy.

How is it breaking the law?

Proponents of EU competition law seem to be the most egregious version of “America isn’t the center of the world.” Why should international companies build products to align with regulation that has put the nail in the coffin of European innovation?

They don't have to, Apple is free to leave the market if they really don't think it's worth it.

That reminds me of Zukerberg's bluff saying he's going to leave the EU which lasted exactly one day.

The DMA is barely past the toddler stage. I think it’s a bit premature to claim lids on coffins here.

It’s not just the DMA. The EU has been regulating innovation to death for decades.

Typical meme comment with zero substance. The DMA is a competition-promoting regulation which will breed innovation as long as it's properly enforced.

Inventing a substandard product and using your market dominance in one area to ensure that nobody can compete with your substandard product is as far detached from innovation as you can possibly be. One size fits all solution with centrally planned development where one person knows best and competition isn't considered a driver of progress, isn't that a very communism-shaped approach to "innovation"?

I'm not even joking here and it's bizarre that I'm having to promote the good parts of free market capitalism to someone who claims to care about innovation.

It’s not breaking the law in this case as far as I know.

The law requires Apple to provide equal access to the iPhone hardware and software in marketplaces that it competes in.

That can be done in a manner that is either additive, by providing access to third parties (which is potentially a significant expense and liability) or subtractive, by choosing not to engage in the regulated activities at all, in that jurisdiction.

You're right that they're not breaking the law in this specific instance. I was referring to the many instances they've lost or are disputing in court, mainly around browser engines/JIT, their handling of default app screens, third party app distribution, extra fees, and mandatory app bundle signing.

In this case they're merely being obtuse by refusing to provide an API to other device manufacturers. Unless you genuinely believe that the cost/benefit analysis of adding a new feature to their OS dictates that they basically freeze development unless they're able to recoup costs by tying it to their accessories, then you must conclude that they made the live transcription API Apple-only, and therefore not DMA-compatible, only to make EU citizens feel like their laws were depriving them of new features.

An organization interested in good-faith compliance would expose their internal API surface with some vetting process for access by interested parties. Then as the API becomes stable they would open it up more broadly. If accused of being anti-competitive by restricting access they could easily and correctly argue that they were working with potential competitors on that stable and secure API, and that their actions balanced the interests of market competition and security.

Of course, Apple is not interested in good-faith compliance. It's my belief that they should be made an example of so that they and other companies running the math in the future decide that proactive and good-faith compliance with regulations is more cost-effective than attempting to fight them.

They risk getting fines for not releasing a feature? The EU is insane

No, they're not risking fines that way. They are free to not bring such features to the EU-market which prevent a level playing ground for competition.

But they were found to have already skewed the market with several Apple-accessory-exclusive iOS-features in the past (Proximity pairing, Watch-integration, etc.) and for those they have to provide interoperability now.

They worked with the EU for a year now on how exactly they should reach compliance, then the ruling was made, ordering them to make such interoperability features also available to other brands than Apple.

Now it seems that they try to rally their userbase against that ruling, in hopes to create a political climate that gets the ruling revoked again...

It's more complicated then this. Apple is a big company with a lot of money - they're absolutely willing to burn millions in the pursuit of principle.

The reality is that, if Apple conforms non-maliciously, they're proving that the law is reasonable and they can do it while remaining profit. Um, that's a huge problem.

They require the plausible deniability of "oh we can't do this, it's too expensive!" Otherwise, other governments (US) might look to implementing similar laws. So, it's a long con. They're burning lots of money, now, with the hope it allows them to continue their anti-competitive behavior for longer. If they're REALLY lucky, they might even stall out the EU and get the EU to backtrack on their laws. That's the golden scenario.

We are anyway an Android market, so they only get to loose by behaving like a child.

There is a world of difference between shipping a feature, and shipping an api that anyone can use to ship a feature. It is such a normal progression to make an api and dogfood it internally, iterate until you have something you feel comfortable supporting indefinitely, and then expose that api publicly. It is not reasonable, IMO, to require that every feature you ship has an API that is ready for public consumption.

Granted, Apple generally doesn't do that last part unless forced. I think some kind of timeline on the DMA requirements would be more reasonable. e.g. you have two years to make a feature publicly accessible before fines start accruing.

> It is such a normal progression to make an api and dogfood it internally, iterate until you have something you feel comfortable supporting indefinitely, and then expose that api publicly

For a hobbyist? Sure! For a company with half the smartphone market and a trillion dollar market cap? EU doesn't mandate that they define a new standard and support it indefinitely.

You can see the headlines though “Apple skirts interoperability law by deprecating API after only one year”. Maintaining a public API is a cost usually only taken in because it has a benefit to the company.

They are free to do that but they need to deprecate the feature for their own devices as well.

Apple is not required to develop or maintain any feature against their will. The DMA is not written like that, it is much more objective and industry-agnostic.

The EU demands that features implemented in the OS to be used by Apple accessories must be made equally available to competing accessory vendors.

Does DMA allows Apple to do certification? Like Certifies devices for Apple Translation compatible ? Or is that straightly forbidden?

I think it will depend on if it seems like it's anti-competitive gatekeeping or has a legitimate use. The DMA specifically prohibits measure that are meant to gatekeep, but iirc it has allowances for things that have real technical justification.

Certifying devices to make sure they're safe for users, like "this cable is certified as compatible, it won't set your iphone on fire", seems fine.

Requiring your app to be "certified by apple to sell ebooks", and then only granting that certificate to Apple Books, not the Kindle app, that seems anti-competitive.

correct. An example of this is building a WhatsApp client, you need certification from Meta and that seems to legitimate.

Then why not deprecate the API every month? Also do a firmware update every month across their ecosystem.

Why? Because Apple is in the money making business and no one will buy a device where their (expensive) accessories cease working randomly.

Especially when the user finds out the reason.

But you just described the existing Apple ecosystem!

Or, just not block access.

If it’s deprecated then it’s still there, it might just go away someday. Releasing an API and then deprecating it immediately seems sneaky.

A public proprietary API.

If the industry wants better open standards, they the participants should develop those standards and build devices that implement those standards.

What Apple does outside of such standards is nobody else's business - as long as they correctly implement and support the industry standards.

The best part is: the EU demands Apple do all the necessary R&D, including an indefinite liability of API maintenance, at no cost to developers.

Ah, so Apple is not selling iPhones but it just gives them out for free?

Garmin pays apple already for a developer license to have an app to pair garmin watches.... and yet 90% of the features of the apple watch simply cannot be implemented for a garmin watch, no matter how much they pay, because those APIs are private to apple watch.

Yes, apple did the R&D to figure out how to let their watch filter notifications by app, and it must have cost them so much to be able to filter notifications that it has to be locked into their watch. That's not them being intentionally anti-competitive, it's just R&D costs, sure, I'm sure it cost a ton to make that private API.

Yes, the $99/yr Garmin pays covers the 40 minutes of labor it would take annually for an Apple engineer to support this I'm sure.

You said "no cost to developers", that part's not true. you're of course right that it's not really enough money to be relevant though.

The more cogent argument is that if apple doesn't want to spend money making their phone work with smartwatches, they do not have to make it work with smartwatches.

They want it to work with watches so users buy the phone.

If they want it to work with _only_ their watch, then sure, they make more money, but they also harm the user and market in the long-term by making it so competitors aren't on an even playing field.

Do you just kinda believe anti-competitiveness doesn't exist?

Should apple be allowed to make it so you can't communicate with android users at all to increase sales (which they already more-or-less did)? Should they intentionally make it so you can't play the music you purchased on non-apple devices by breaking "iTunes for windows"?

I mean, even if you assumed that it would actually take 40 minutes (it likely doesn’t), I suspect Apple engineers working on this cost the company more than $249k a year

Wow sounds like the $99/yr the commenter was saying developers "pay" Apple is a trivial amount and cannot be used to justify the development of an entire SDK that maybe a dozen companies will use.

But Apple already justified building a secure, private, on-device SDK that exactly one (1) company will be guaranteed to use.

I see no reason it cannot be a private entitlement similar to the other sensitive entitlements on iOS.

Internal API is not an SDK. It regularly astounds me how many commenters on a so-called hacker forum seem to think it is. Is everyone else publishing their tightly coupled business logic code as API these days? Is that what GraphQL is?

Apple can revoke the entitlement if it's abused, as they've done many times in the past with signed apps. Nobody (including the EU) is demanding that it be an zero-auth free-for-all API, only that competitors can use it. It's not an absurd demand and there is absolutely precedent for Apple individually trusting competitors in this regard.

If you're astounded by hackers asking practical questions, maybe you should stop carrying water for corps and see how your back feels. Let's talk shop, what are the roadblocks Apple faces here?

I would hope that security critical parts of the OS that can't be exposed as an API aren't being used to communicate with the apple watch. Why would the apple watch need access to these APIs that can't be publicly exposed? Is there any reason beyond apple wanting to make sure other smartwatches are second class citizens in their ecosystem?

This isn't exposing business logic, this is an operating system vendor deciding what it exposes to vendors. There is clearly an API that the apple watch is using to communicate with the OS, why shouldn't other vendors be allowed to access this?

The API already exists, they just don't let other people use it because they're greedy. There's no additional maintenance burden.

Technically cost is not zero.

1. Api designed for internal use could take shortcuts and let’s say use secrets that are and should be internal, or run things as root or something.

2. Proper API maintenance includes at least documentation and some kind of update path/schedule. Internally it’s simpler. (E.g. you must be sure not to leak secret stuff in docs)

But in the end I agree with the notion that these changes for Apple are not a huge burden. (Existing behaviour is anticompetitive)

I agree, but IMO they should already have this done if the API is properly designed. It might not be, but if so they should change it anyway.

No, the EU demands that features implemented in the OS to be used by Apple accessories must be made equally available to competing accessory vendors.

This prevents Apple the platform provider and gatekeeper from giving preferential treatment to Apple the Smartwatch/Headphones/Payment/Entertainment provider

Given that Apple already maintains a comprehensive entitlement system[0] they charge EU developers[1] to use, I don't see how that's an issue. Apple's work amounts to swapping out a .plist file, they could be compliant in 10 minutes with an OTA update. If they wanted.

[0] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/bundleresources/en...

[1] https://developer.apple.com/support/compare-memberships/

Which is what companies like Intel had done for ATX, USB, Thunderbolt, ... They were never required to, but they've done it, and they made money on it.

What Apple do slightly differently is that they half-ass the standardization, and then chuck it in the trash. Amounts of efforts spent is within the ballpark.

> It is not reasonable, IMO, to require that every feature you ship has an API that is ready for public consumption.

It is, if we're talking about features designed to boost sales of your other products while preventing competitors from offering those features.

Look, even if they're able to compete fairly, those competitors might remain inferior options for other reasons. But Apple having to compete will make their products better. All of their best achievements came from fierce competition as the underdog. Apple's current situation is not good for it.

What if it relies on non-standard changes to Bluetooth and WiFi?

Must they get these passed in the standards committees first?

With Bluetooth they do ruse non standard changes, heavily influenced the development of LE Audio and there is no statement about when if ever they will support LE Audio, possibly never. Apple simply doesn't care

The DMA does not define such details, it is much more simple and agnostic. It identifies if a company creates a market within its own ecosystem, invites others to participate but doesn't offer a fair competitive field.

--> If iOS introduces non-standard changes to Bluetooth and Wi-Fi to compete against Android, this does not concern the DMA.

--> If iOS introduces non-standard changes to Bluetooth and Wi-Fi to create a product of ANOTHER market-segment (Headphones, Watches, Routers,...) they are required to provide interoperability for other brands than Apple as well.

The reason is simple: iOS has such a critical size that it is anti-competitive behavior for Apple to modify iOS in order to beat the competition on e.g. headphones.

> Granted, Apple generally doesn't do that last part unless forced

which is the point here.

If they made a new feature, something AR based, they are totally allowed to build that and keep it relatively private for a few years. What they can't do is when competition appears, actively keep them off their platform. For example if a device manufacturer manages to make an AR device that works well with android, but its impossible with apple and apple have significant market share, then that would be illegal.

The point of this is to stop thiefdoms and to keep innovation. You're allowed to have a competitive advantage, you're not allowed to build a monopoly.

(if we look at defence, budgets are still very high, but the rate of innovation has plummeted compared to other industries. Its only now with the spur of VC cash into non-traditional backgrounds are we seeing innovation again)

>No, the EU mandates that Apple cannot implement OS features for the sole benefit of its own hardware-offering in a different market, because this is not fair competition.

Why don't the other players make their own smartphones and smartphone OS and then "implement OS features for the sole benefit of its own hardware-offering"?

Is it fair to force another player to let you hijack their ecosystem?

The answer is right in the text you quoted. Because it's a different market than the smartphone itself and *unfair competition. It's Apple using its dominant position in the smartphone market to prevent others from competing on equal grounds in a different market.

With iOS Apple owns the playing field where all accessory vendors compete, and Apple competes on the same field. There is no healthy competition possible if Apple puts the finger on the scale to ensure it always wins.

>The answer is right in the text you quoted. Because it's a different market than the smartphone itself and unfair competition.*

That's not an answer, it's a decree.

Others can make their own phones and headphones just for their own devices, did Apple stop them?

It's not a monopoly because if this other theoretical company which does not exist existed then there would be more than one option and it wouldn't be a monopoly.

Not very convincing.

There's Android which has even more market share, and several behemoths like Google, Samsung, Xiaomi making similar sets of devices, so not theoritical.

But that's not even close to the argument you made.

Also, you're confusing markets here. We're not talking about the smartphone market. We're talking about the market of apple accessories.

Apple solely controls that market and also participates in it. Its a true monopoly.

Well yes, that’s what laws are?

That (a kind of decree) is what any law is, including unfair laws or Jim Crow.

Doesn't mean it's an answer to the issue why that should be the case.

>The answer is right in the text you quoted. Because it's a different market than the smartphone itself and unfair competition. It's Apple using its dominant position in the smartphone market to prevent others from competing on equal grounds in a different market.*

Was that an unearned position due to regulatory capture or something, or did people buy their stuff, even if it's more expensive?

Is it even a dominant position with no recourse? (last I heard Android has more share in the EU and the world). Did they collude with Google and other smartphone vendors to not allow them to build and allow similar features themselves?

>With iOS Apple owns the playing field where all accessory vendors compete, and Apple competes on the same field

Isn't that playing field their own OS and device ecosystem, they build?

Again, this is not about the OS, it is about Apple USING the OS to secure a dominant position in ANOTHER market-segment (headphones, watches, payment, entertainment,...).

> Isn't that playing field their own OS and device ecosystem, they build?

That playing field is their own OS, and the entire ecosystem of all accessory brands.

> No, the EU mandates that Apple cannot implement OS features for the sole benefit of its own hardware-offering in a different market, because this is not fair competition.

Thats would involve exposing public api ie “a burden”

No, forget APIs. Apple was found to have created a burden in the OS for all their competitors in the Accessory-market, by introducing elements only available to their own brand, and are now required to remove those again.

A duelist was found to arrive with a gun to a knife-fight and is asked to either allow everyone a gun or use a knife.

Now we're arguing that it's a burden to him because bringing a gun is his innovative approach to win knife-fights, and making it a gunfight or keeping it a knife-fight is hindering the innovation he brings.

Apple OWNS the terms for this fight. If they believe that their fights should evolve to be gun-fights then all players should have guns.

It was decided that they can't continue restricting guns while shooting all knife-duelists, at least not in the EU.

If you chose to show up with just a knife to an actual armed conflict that's on you buddy. Apple doesn't own european market their share is below 35%, just another case of classic european bureaucracy

Read the metaphor you're trying to dismantle. Apple owns the terms of this fight, they dictate that everyone else is only allowed knives.

The EU stepped in and said that they can't distort duels like that any longer

It's popularity was not rooted in its closeness. Actually that was an annoying side effect of taking the easy way for the organization, not in the interest of the user.

What made it popular were the nice new features. Regardless of how difficult it was for the organization, that is no concern for the user. Taking this easy way allowed them to be faster than others. Sacrificing usability - also making more expensive by lock in - for users of the future!

> It’s enormously difficult to ship any interesting feature that integrates hardware and software. The EU wants Apple to happily accept a burden that makes it harder to produce the products that made it popular in the first place.

Well... yeah? I mean, that's the point. Once you are so big you act as a gatekeeper to a platform, the standards change.

Also let's be clear here: there's minimal actual technology inside those pods. The translation is happening on the phone and the stuff going over the air is audio. Yes, it would be harder to specify an interface for third party headset devices to interact with. It certainly wouldn't be impossible, and I think making that a cost of being a platform gatekeeper seems very reasonable.

> The EU wants Apple to happily accept a burden that makes it harder to produce the products that made it popular in the first place.

Hard disagree.

The time and resources it takes to lock down an ecosystem are far greater than not locking it down.

I live in the EU and can see value in live translation for me personally.

However, I'm happy with the decision. Sure, they are not available right now. But it's worth it for the long term picture. Imagine if this would be yet another Apple/Google-only market.

The tradeoff is right IMO.

And the users here on HN saying "it's expensive/difficult to give the same access to competitors" are beyond naive if they think this isn't about protecting the margins on the airpods by giving their own products access to the system competitors don't have.

And the people on the other side are beyond naive if they think it makes sense financially to develop a feature like this if the company developing it has to give it away for free.

One consequence of the DMA is that you can't build certain products because there is no way to recoup the development cost.

Who is “you”? Are you really conflating everyone in this thread with a handful of mega corporations?

Apple made $23B in profits on hardware last quarter. If that's not enough to recoup costs, there is nothing stopping them from charging for their software as well

> One consequence of the DMA is that you can't build certain products because there is no way to recoup the development cost.

Poor, poor Apple…

It's true that monopolies can invest on R&D like no one else can because they don't have to compete on price. Waymo probably wouldn't exist if it weren't for Google's absurd profit margin.

However:

1/ There are obvious downsides to the lack of competition.

2/ In this case, the proprietary protocol that AirPods use is not revolutionary R&D, to say the least! Any competent software engineer can create a new protocol superior to bluetooth if they can drop compatibility with bluetooth.

> One consequence of the DMA is that you can't build certain products because there is no way to recoup the development cost.

No, but that's how Apple continuously tries to frame it.

By the ruling of the DMA, Apple is not allowed to develop a free feature in iOS (!!!) in order to recoup the cost by restricting it to their own brands and crushing the competition with it in ANOTHER product-segment.

They could easily make this live translation feature a separate app using publicly available iOS-APIs. Every competitor would be able to develop and provide the same feature.

Ah, not integrated enough for them? Fair enough, then their integration needs to provide interoperability for competitors.

Instead they are trying to rally their userbase against the DMA in hopes to create a political climate in their favor.

Also, is the user you're replying to oblivious to the fact that Apple is competing with Android globally?

Features like that can sell the phone, that's where you recoup the costs obviously, yet it seems like the only focus is keeping airpod margins lol.

> there is no way to recoup the development cost

You recoup the costs by *selling more iphones* because they have functionality the competition does not have.

Investing in your platform is not "giving it away for free", it's making sure consumers have reasons to buy your products and not competitors.

If tomorrow Samsung phones offer this out of the box, and any earbuds maker can access it Samsung will gain sales and users that would've looked at iPhones for this feature won't.

The lengths people will go to justify nonsensical margin-protecting walled garden business choices is insane.

Seems easy enough to me, all they have to do is expose and document an api.

> It’s enormously difficult to ship any interesting feature that integrates hardware and software.

Don't see how it relates to competition but it doesn't matter: Apple competitors should have the same access to the system as Apple does.

Also, don't be naive: this is about money and being able to sell airpods at insane margins by giving them unfair advantages that aren't given to com[etitors.

in some ways, are they not able to run their own apps on the iOS ecosystem to support extra features?

My sony headphones claim they do all kinds of magic stuff through the app, but I guess that's not a realtime feature, more like a regularly scheduled calibration

I believe they could offer the feature and not face the ire of the EU by "simply" documenting the software interface used by the hardware so that third parties can also try and implement it.

Of course then they wouldn't get the ecosystem lock-in they want. In theory. But I know plenty of people who buy Airpods "because" they're "the best", without ecosystem integration considerations.

A big part of why they're considered the best is features like moving seamlessly between iPhone and mac within seconds of starting audio playback.

It's not as simple as documentation. If you document the interface, you need to keep it somewhat stable and backwards compatible.

But if it is internal, then you control both ends of the API, and can change them in tandem.

> who's to blame here

It's ok to wait longer for a product to make sure it's safe instead of the ol' "move fast and break things". Having ever new "interesting" stuff to play with to feed our endless boredom is not the only thing worth caring about.

Funnily their advertisement video show 2 EU residents talking to each other via translation.

This is a trade war. This is the EU taxing US corps. Problem is, the US figured it out.

It makes sense that increased regulation will delay feature release. This is a trade off that Europeans seem fine with. Seems fine to me.

In Canada we have roughly equivalent regulation for many (most?) things and still get delayed feature releases half the time, so at least the EU is getting something out of it.

Generally regulations should be enacted as a response to something major going wrong in the market. But the EU regulates before there’s even a single product on the market. How do you want to regulate AI if the technology completely changes every six months and nobody knows for sure where it’s going?

This is very likely not about AI but the EU DMA Ruling, which identified that Apple was implementing features in iOS which are restricted to Headphones of Apple-Brands [0]

As no other Headphone vendor is able to do this, this gives Apple the Accessory vendor a competitive advantage in the market of iPhone Accessories. So forces cannot flow freely in this market and the EU requires this to be rectified.

[0] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_...

Were there any breakthrough for this feature anyway? Or is it more likely that Apple just did what was readily possible?

You could always put environmental audio through Whisper, attain audio trance crypt at 51010 per cent Word error rate, put that transcript through machine translation, and finally TTS. Or you can put audio directly through multimodal LLM for marginal improvements, I guess, but ASR error rate as well as automatic cleanup performance don't seem to have improved significantly after OpenAI Whisper was released.

> attain audio trance crypt at 51010 per cent Word error rate

Was this post the output of such a pipeline, by chance?

I know, I can't tell if it's intentionally sarcastic or unintentionally Olympics-level irony... but it made me laugh!

Apple has clearly made very significant investment in creating a LLM small and efficient enough to do inference locally on an iPhone. This is excellent work and should be applauded.

For the EU, the issue is that Apple intends to recoup this investment through premium-pricing a different product in another category - one that has many low-cost competitors.

Wouldn't this best be resolved by productising the Apple LLM? Earphone API becomes open, as required by EU. However, use of the Apple LLM would be controlled by license. Earbud competitors could either license Apple's LLM, perhaps on a FRAND basis, or they could install their own LLM on an iOS device. Apple may bundle its LLM but must allow users to uninstall Apple's LLM, to free up space for alternatives.

In short, this isn't and shouldn't be about access to IOS for earbuds. EU is right in this. It's about monetising access to the Apple LLM, for which Apple deserves a revenue stream.

maybe the top car brands can only accept gas from one overpriced gas station, and open the car gas DRM as a license to other stations for a fee.

i know some people like to jump at solving technical problems, but sometimes yall need to chill and read the problem twice to be sure the problem is technical to begin with.

Gasoline is the very definition of a commodity. For now, at least, LLM is very from that.

As far as I know, Apple is unique in delivering inference on such a tiny device. For this they deserve a reward. The question is how. Like the EU, I don't believe Apple-only premium-priced locked-down earbuds is the right way.

the point is about limiting it to a secondary product. didn't you already bought the phone to run the model?

do you even remember the topic you're commenting about? :)

You seem to be claiming that LLM is necessarily integral to iPhone. I am suggesting that need not be the case.

Remember, half of the consideration here is to find a way for Apple to recoup it's investment in LLM. Without creating anti-competitive forces in another market. If you have a different suggestion, or if you think Apple doesn't deserve compensation, make your case.

If an LLM, apple or otherwise, runs on a phone, with audio input and output, then airpods and AliExpress five dollar earbuds should both be able to perform the I/O. I don't see a technical reason the latter is impossible. Indeed, it seems like it should work with the phone mic and speaker and no headset, too.

This isn't rocket science: audio goes into mic => STT engine => translation model => TTS engine => audio comes out of speaker. As a fellow hacker here, you could piece together something like this in a weekend on your computer for fun.

As for your question though: they can charge a subscription for using their LLM if they want, or charge for this specific app/feature of iOS. Or just be like me: whenever I'm about to execute on a business plan, I ask myself: "Is this business plan economically feasible without breaking the law?" And if it is not, then I do not do that plan. So far I haven't been cited for illegal conduct by any unions of dozens of countries, so it appears this tactic works.

By EU DMA, Apple is not allowed to develop a free feature in iOS (!) in order to recoup the cost by restricting it to their own brands and crushing the competition with it in ANOTHER product-segment (in this case, Headphones).

They could easily make this live translation feature a separate app using publicly available iOS-APIs. Every competitor would be able to develop and provide the same feature.

Ah, not integrated enough for them? Fair enough, then whatever further integration they see fit needs to provide interoperability for competitors.

That's exactly the stance of the EU DMA.

you completely lost me. the issue is the eu forbids "feature X on product A only workd if you buy product B, which already have market alternatives"

your post doesn't even get close to the subject

I don't know what to say. I have tried to point it out more than once. I agree with EU's approach to earbud access, but am also sympathetic to Apple wrt to ROI on its LLM.

Perhaps the issue you seem to be having is that there's nuance in a position which tries to see an issue from both sides. Whatever is the problem with your comprehension, I advise you to reflect on the fact that others in this thread seem to get it and some have raised valid counterpoints or added relevant information.

> Wouldn't this best be resolved by productising the Apple LLM? Earphone API becomes open, as required by EU. However, use of the Apple LLM would be controlled by license. Earbud competitors could either license Apple's LLM, perhaps on a FRAND basis, or they could install their own LLM on an iOS device. Apple may bundle its LLM but must allow users to uninstall Apple's LLM, to free up space for alternatives.

They already tried that with the "Core Technology" fee, and the EU smacked them for it. So doing what you propose is probably a non-starter.

I didn't know this. Then I agree with you.

> For the EU, the issue is that Apple intends to recoup this investment through premium-pricing a different product in another category - one that has many low-cost competitors.

Let’s be serious for a moment. They sell iPhones with enough margin to recoup that investment.

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