[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?

[rickdeckard]

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.

[nostrebored]

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.

[rickdeckard]

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.