alt Hacker NewsAt a hardware level it seemed to work. Looking at USB-C on iPhones for example.
Software wise? Fail. EEA gets to disable start search in Windows 11. RoW does not. Interestingly EEA membership is decided at install time based on your selection, and is not changeable afterwards.
iPhones on the other hand have a daemon running that checks your location. It's not based on where you set up the phone. So traveling from Europe to somewhere else can actually prevent you from updating apps that you got via an alt-store:
https://www.macrumors.com/2024/03/06/alternative-ios-app-sto...
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1) Apple loves USB-C, they helped invent it and were one of the first to ship a USB-C only laptop
2) Apple committed to 10 years of lightning support to weather the backlash from dropping 30-pin
USB-C on iPhone was going to happen regardless of the EU.
iPhone getting USB-C was inevitable. I mean, their iPads were USB-C for years before any EU law.
The best the EU can say is that the law moved up the inevitable a year or two.
Yea, unfortunately with software, using enough granular feature flags, they can make their software "maximally bad" for each given region. They lose a battle in the EU and are forced to make the software better? They will make it better only in the EU. Lose another one in Japan over a different issue? Just make a "japan" flag and only make it narrowly better for that use case in that region. Lose further battles in other regions, just add more flags.
They will never deploy the "better" feature worldwide if they have the opportunity to limit the better code to a particular region.
1: And of course, by "better" I am always referring to "better for the user" not "better for Apple."