[trimbo]

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.

[rickdeckard]

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...

[a2dam]

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

[trimbo]

> 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?

[idle_zealot]

> 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.

[jacobjjacob]

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.

[NewsaHackO]

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

[const_cast]

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.

[pjmlp]

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