The Apple press release does say “potentially be forced to stop shipping our products in the EU”.
That's still about withholding specific features, not about abandoning entire product lines in the EU. And it's quite the opposite of a threat from Apple to the EU.
Hasn't Apple been pretty consistent in choosing to ship with fewer features where necessary rather than not ship at all? Given that, the "If we shared them any sooner" bit only makes sense as an explanation for why Apple's choosing their usual course of action, not as a threat to change course and pull out of the EU market.
So far they’ve chosen to go with a simple feature flag but eventually it may require a pullout. Especially if the EU fines them for not releasing features in the EU.
Isn't that entirely your speculation, not supported by anything Apple has actually said or done?
As far as I can recall, the most notable example of an Apple product getting a limited rather than global release was the Vision Pro—and that was just a slow roll-out to new countries, not exclusion from the entire EU. And on the other hand, there's a long list of products where Apple has shipped with regional differences in features, both software and hardware.
> Especially if the EU fines them for not releasing features in the EU.
Has the EU actually made that threat yet? Because it would be quite a stretch to accuse Apple of making a threat to the EU in response to a threat from the EU that hasn't actually been stated.