Why would they be angry at Brussels? If Apple decides to pull out of the EU market that's on them. EU citizens will be a lot less angry at Brussels than Apple's shareholders will be.
In the end the EU consumer gains nothing from all of this but loses their beloved Apple devices.
> In the end the EU consumer gains nothing from all of this but loses their beloved Apple devices.
I don't think I have an emotional connection with my phone, it serves to call people, message them and to perform other useful functions and if it does not it gets replaced. I'm happy with it, it's a solid piece of gear and it has served me well. But emotional connections with brands or pieces of easily replaceable hardware are unhealthy.
Not particularly happy with Google for other reasons either. There are some days I want to go back to the days of Windows Mobile ROM kitchens and PalmOS. At least it wasn't such a monoculture back then.
This informs a lot of my choices. It's the reason my car is old, it's the reason my computer is running Linux, it is the reason why I don't wear branded apparel and it helped me decide where to bank. But I fear that it is a losing battle.
The monoculture that you refer to creates choke points and legislators love those. It gives an illusion of control, but actually it is just a massive security risk.
Will they? They were never willing to talk it out to begin with. And now they completely walked out:
--- start quote ---
“Apple has simply contested every little bit of the DMA [Digital Markets Act] since its entry into application,” said Commission spokesperson Thomas Regnier. “This undermines the company’s narrative of wanting to be fully cooperative with the Commission.”
...
“Results of this positive engagement? After two months, Apple came back and asked us to scrap everything,” he said
https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-commission-apple-digital-...
--- end quote ---
'Beloved' lol. You can just tell American hands typed this.
"What if the Europeans can't consoom anymore? Won't they riot in the street when they have to use SMS over iMessage?"
> their beloved Apple devices.
lmao the most American comment. Feeling love for a brand. Just pure ideology.
I don't think so... EU is only 7% of their revenue globally according to their CFO, and DMA can fine them up to 10% of global revenue, so it may actually be cheaper to just leave the market.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/01/apple-says-eu-represents-7...
> Apple says EU represents 7% of global App Store revenue
Europe (not EU, but close enough) represents about a quarter of the total Apple revenue. (https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charted-how-apple-makes-its...)
https://daringfireball.net/2024/03/eu_share_of_apples_revenu...
> But the EU represents only 7 percent of Apple’s revenue
He is very uncaring when it comes to defending Apple and to smearing EU.
Even when shown that his reading is incorrect, he wrote a long article basically saying "so what I was still right" https://daringfireball.net/2024/03/more_on_the_eus_market_mi...
I hardly believe that a wealthy continent with a population of 450 million is just 7% of their revenue.
Given the threat of securities fraud lawsuits, I'm liable to believe them over some random commenter casting doubt with zero evidence.
It was taken out of context by some random blogger, whereas the gp was implying company executives were lying. My point that we should trust company executives over random internet commenters still holds.
No you. You're well aware that wasn't my point and are trying to put words in my mouth in a pathetic attempt to save face.
> After all, you chose to believe the random blogger before.
I made no such implication. In fact I specifically quoted the part that I was responding to.
> "Given the threat of securities fraud lawsuits, I'm liable to believe them over some random commenter casting doubt with zero evidence."
That was your statement, but - surprise - no exec made the claim that you chose to believe. And if you had thought for 10 seconds you'd have realized that no such claim could have been made because the figure is clearly non-sensical. Oh, and US execs fairly routinely lie, both in court and outside of it. The fact that they get away with it is not proof that they're not doing it.
I suggest you read over the comment chain more carefully and note the authors. I jumped in at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45405359 and was specifically objecting to the part of the comment that was claiming the executive was lying with no evidence. I made no such claims or arguments based on the 7% figure.
--- start quote ---
Apple willfully violated a 2021 injunction that came out of the Epic Games case, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers said in a court filing on Wednesday.
She wrote that Apple Vice President of Finance Alex Roman “outright lied” to the court about when Apple had decided to levy a 27% fee on some purchases linked to its App Store.
“Neither Apple, nor its counsel, corrected the, now obvious, lies,” Rogers wrote, saying that she considers Apple to “to have adopted the lies and misrepresentations to this Court.”
Rogers added that she referred the matter to U.S. attorneys to investigate whether to pursue criminal contempt proceedings on both Roman and Apple.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/30/court-finds-apple-executive-...
--- end quote ---
Apple's execs literally lie under oath in a court of law. I trust them about as far as I can throw them. They are the same people claiming they don't know if AppStore is profitable or not.
Leaning on GDP as this all-encompassing metric is rather absurd, GDP was adopted because it's an easy metric to calculate, not because it provides the most insights on how life is at some place on Earth.
As opposed to comparing a country of 340M with countries with populations anywhere between 33k to 143M?
You could compare the USA to Switzerland or the Netherlands on a per-capita basis or you could pick Romania or Bulgaria and come away with a completely different impression. The main difference is that countries that have been living under the Russian boot for 50 odd years are still recovering and the remainder is far wealthier than the USA and has a smaller wealth gap between rich and poor. This goes in particular for Germany which is still to this day spending large amounts of money to fund the recovery of the eastern part of Germany, but fortunately, unlike Poland, Bulgaria, Romania and the Baltics they have a large enough industrial base to be able to do so. To lump that all together makes zero sense and shows a lack of appreciation of both history and statistics.
You can make the same granularity arguments at the country level as well, for instance Germany vs California or Missouri. Does that mean cross country comparisons are bunk as well? What makes "country" the level of subdivision that's acceptable compared to neighborhood, city, county, state, country, or continent?
But EU countries are closer to US states, except that any two US states are still far more homogeneous than any two EU countries are.
One good basic principle for arguing about stuff is to agree on the meaning of certain words. If you want to compare countries then do so. If you want to compare states with countries, you're welcome to do so too, but you have to take into account the whole range then. But you can't just lump 27 countries on a pile, compute an average and draw a conclusion when comparing it to a single continent sized country.
Besides that, if you take out California the US picture skews downwards considerably, so on that scale other US states have their work cut out for them. No need to compete with Switzerland or the Netherlands for GDP, compete with California first. And that whole discussion still ignores massive wealth generated in China, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore and other places.
The whole idea that you can just collapse a very complex comparison to a single number and call it a day is fatally flawed.
>...
>The whole idea that you can just collapse a very complex comparison to a single number and call it a day is fatally flawed.
So you reject being able to compare EU member countries to either US (as a whole) or US states?
France? Their debt is killing their country and causing escalating political crises.
Germany? Energy costs are killing their competitiveness. Hard to compete with energy costs of $0.44 per kWh on average; before labor costs.
Italy? Need I say more? Their economy is notoriously stagnant.
The remaining 24 EU countries make up less than 50% of the EU's GDP. Meanwhile, US and EU GDP went from almost 1:1 in 2008, to 1:0.65 and still declining.
To give you a sense of how severe Germany's problems are, the US state of Mississippi is almost ready to pass Germany's GDP per capita.
I've actually lived on both sides of the Atlantic. And there is wealth on both sides and there is poverty on both sides. But the gap between rich and poor is much more pronounced on the US side than in the EU. Energy costs are a small fraction of the total expenses. Mississippi is not a good comparison to Germany (last I checked half of Mississippi was not living under the russian boot for 50 years) and if you just stare at the GDP you will miss a lot of quality-of-life indicators that would make me choose to live in Germany long before I would want to live in a backwater state in the USA. And that's assuming the USA will survive the current onslaught on its institutions.
So stop bullshitting and start thinking about what the real world differences are between countries and then strive to improve the one you can have an effect on rather than just seeing this as a numerical game of put-downs that make absolutely no sense at all.
2. None of that says that the EU isn't rich
3. None of that proves that the bullshit about revenue
Do you know how I know that? Because that "7%" comes from this quote: "Just to keep it in context, the changes apply to the EU market, which represents roughly 7% of our global App Store revenue."
App Store revenue is not all of Apple's revenue. Oh, and those same execs claim they don't even know if App Store makes money or loses it, so how would they know.
As for what people are buying and not buying, according to statcounter [0], the smartphone market in the EU is a third Apple, a third Samsung, and then the final third is a scattershot of other Android devices, primarily Xiaomi.
This is in contrast with a 57.27% foothold in the US. It's a different world.
To put it into perhaps an even more grappling perspective, that whole green bubble vs blue bubble thing? I've first heard of it only just a few years ago from Marques Brownlee on YouTube. Never encountered it in real life prior or since.
[0] https://gs.statcounter.com/vendor-market-share/mobile/europe
Funny you're invoking that when the fact that someone chose to buy apple at all means they thought it was the best option, according to their opinion. By banning apple you're necessarily making those people buy a crappier phone.
You do realize by the way that this would mean the majority of people here then consider iphones the crappier option by your logic?
And that's fine. Most people don't but Porches or Subarus. That doesn't mean they're "crappier"
What is driving your motivated reasoning? Why are you so invested in the ability for Apple to continue to have the ability to keep their app store locked down? How do you benefit from this decision?
I'm nowhere near a 2 year upgrade cycle but the fact that you think a 18 year old phone serves you "very well", and therefore Nokia phones aren't crappy shows how out of touch you are. There's zero chance the average person would think the same.
Enlighten me:
Do us a solid and just ignore each other for today?
MS would later re-sell Nokia to HMD in 2016, who still release some feature-phones, including ones running an "S30+" OS that has nothing to do with Symbian.
Honestly even if Google somehow decided to stop selling Android to Europe, something which seems extremely unlikely, it would swiftly be replaced by Chinese alternatives with no obvious loss of functionality.
Apple has zero leverage with the "we will stop selling" strategy. It’s just there so they look less pathetic when it comes to what they are actually doing: bribing Trump so he intervenes for them. We really have come a long way from the "Think different" company.
Exactly, it would be a brutal self own of Apple and Google and losing control over whole European market due to refusing to implement mild regulations. Pure bluff on Apple's and Google's side.
They are calling the EU's bluff, and it's possibly a smart business decision to do so.
Or built by Nokia, a European firm that was bought by Microsoft?
And he's still Finish as well as far as I know.
I mean, realistically, most of the loud words are just that.
Part of this is China being a far more dynamic, high risk, Wild West-style capitalist system that’s communist only in very specific areas.
The other part being, you don’t really have to write stuff down as much when you can just manipulate subjects of your authoritarian regime at will.
That creates a web of implicit rules that need to be complied with just as much as if they were written down, while having the downside of unclear boundaries and exceptions. An environment with more rules, but with them written in ink and with lawyers that can be consulted to interpret them is preferable.