[JumpCrisscross]

> If you knew the restrictions day one you’d be able to engineer the system to accommodate them

This slows down deploying the system globally. Particularly if the target is moving, it may make sense to build lightly so one can pivot, and then build in the compliance stuff after you know you have a winning configuration.

The EU has its laws. Apple has its strategy. The only thing I fault anyone on is the public bickering.

[dylan604]

If Apple is so pro-privacy like they claim, then they'd look for the most strict international privacy laws and abide by them. Then they could feel safe in knowing they could release the product anywhere. The fact they want to make the product available under the "rules" of the least privacy protecting countries first says a lot to me

[tqwhite]

The EU isn't asking for more privacy. This is about interoperability and competition. They don't like Apple controlling the AI interface and want a portal. They want Apple to put a backdoor into their system to allow third parties to access the data. This is insanely difficult to do while maintaining Apple's super-strict (yay!) privacy policy.

[thaumasiotes]

> If Apple is so pro-privacy like they claim, then they'd look for the most strict international privacy laws and abide by them. Then they could feel safe in knowing they could release the product anywhere.

Those are not equivalent statements. You're assuming that privacy is a one-dimensional quantity, so that anything that complies with "the strictest international privacy laws" automatically also complies with any other privacy laws. But this is not actually true. It can easily be the case that every national law allows some set of behavior (different sets for different legal systems), at the same time that the intersection of all those sets is empty.

[1123581321]

DMA is a not a privacy-oriented law.

[MagnumOpus]

But Apple’s excuse not to comply with it is privacy-related.

[JumpCrisscross]

How does that reflect poorly (or positively) on their privacy chops? The dispute is about a competition law, a law Apple is complying with by withholding this feature.

[mr_toad]

They don’t want third parties to be able the access all data on your phone. Do you?

[1123581321]

Yes. There are two values (privacy and competition) that are directly in conflict here.

[rpdillon]

Its because the standard product development strategy is to get the product into the hands of users to determine value and iterate based on feedback.

The EU has rules that are expensive to implement correctly, so if you want early feedback from users, you release elsewhere first. It's a very rational way to approach it.

[JumpCrisscross]

DMA is about competition, not privacy. Apple weren’t requesting a GDPR waiver.

[overfeed]

Apple's concern is at the intersection of DMA and privacy. Apple is worried that other parties having the same level of data access that Apple has today would create privacy issues. This is because Apple's current privacy posture is "Trust Apple with your data" rather than "Trust no one with your data - including Apple", but that would be less profitable, but would have prevented the request for an exception because Apple would be on an equal footing with everyone else, if all they could see was client-encrypted data indistinguishable from random bytes.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Apple is worried that other parties having the same level of access that Apple has today would create privacy issues

But this is solvable. The problem is the work it takes to solve it isn’t worth the hit to time to market. (And possibly even the cost.)

[overfeed]

> But this is solvable

That's the crux of my point; Apple could have solved this on day zero if they had a consumer-centered threat-model and/or considered user data to be a liability rather than a hook for service subscriptions.

> The problem is the work it takes to solve it isn’t worth the hit to time to market. (And possibly even the cost.)

I don't consider this to be a problem, but the DMA working as intended and preventing gatekeepers from competing unfairly.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Apple could have solved this on day zero if they had a consumer-centered threat-model

Consumer-centered threat model is perfectly well served with on-device models and Private Cloud. What isn’t is interoperability.

> the DMA working as intended and preventing gatekeepers from competing unfairly

I agree. And at the end of the day, Apple is following the law. I am sympathetic to their position, however, that this isn’t something worth building and optimizing for at launch. If we wanted to be rose tinted, EU consumers will get a fully-baked product. (EU developers get somewhat screwed, but I suppose their offshore offices could start.)

[macintux]

> This is because Apple's current privacy posture is "Trust Apple with your data" rather than "Trust no one with your data - including Apple"

I think that's uncharitable. Apple prefers not to have the data either, hence the preference for on-device processing.

[inetknght]

So Apple doesn't want to compete? Cry me a river.

I could almost feel sympathy if it were something to do with some contract that Apple signed with their AI provider. Who's that, Google?

Ahh, a "competitor"? Yeah... cry me a river.

[sandeepkd]

> This slows down deploying the system globally. Particularly if the target is moving, it may make sense to build lightly so one can pivot, and then build in the compliance stuff after you know you have a winning configuration

This kind of approach is how startups justify everything, however for established companies this would be backward.

I get a feeling that Apple never wanted to do it. They already knew the compliance requirements existed and if they would have wanted to test things then the narrative could have that they are rolling out in other markets first and would roll out with compliance in EU later. Asking for exemption was a bet they tried to play here, they lost and now spinning the narrative.

[jefftk]

Laws and strategy are not fixed, and public bickering is part of how they get optimized.

[lxgr]

Nothing usually gets fixed by making belligerent appeals to emotion in the court of public opinion (which, in the EU, isn't nearly rooting for Apple as much as they might imagine, fwiw). If you want to launch something in a market you know to be heavily regulated, you figure it out or you don't launch. Sure, drop a hint here and there when asked in interviews about your product strategy, but you generally don't pick a public fight with the regulator or legislator in question.

Just imagine a European bank publishing a press release about how onerous the US credit card consumer protection laws are, or a Japanese car maker publicly whining about European car safety testing protocols delaying the market release of some of their models. Apple really is behaving in a very unusual way here.

And even though I don't like the implication of this (the law should not disadvantage anyone purely for being critical of it), I can't help but wonder how many fewer pages the DMA would be if Apple had engaged with its predecessors in good faith instead.

[JumpCrisscross]

> imagine a European bank publishing a press release about how onerous the US credit card consumer protection laws are, or a Japanese car maker publicly whining about European car safety testing protocols

Both of these happen. European banks complain about American securities law. And all manner of car makers delay releasing vehicles in America and the EU.

[lxgr]

Definitely, but both tone and forum of the complaints are generally pretty different.

[JumpCrisscross]

That’s fair. Apple bickers in the EU and U.S. It doesn’t in China. I have a clear preference for one set of political systems.

[square_usual]

They aren't releasing it in China either.

[seanmcdirmid]

Yet. But they are probably working with Chinese partners (including the government) on releasing something (maybe with Alibaba models instead of Google models, on a Chinese-local cloud rather than google cloud).

[robocat]

A quick check showed it is estimated that Apple gets about 18% of it's profits from China but only maybe 7% from EU countries (ignore Apple's definition of Europe!).

Maybe China is easier to work with - perhaps their rules are made clearer?

[seanmcdirmid]

China has 1.4 billion people and they are rapidly increasing their wealth. The only surprising factor is that Chinese cell phone producers haven't eaten up apple's marketshare yet.

[t-sauer]

And they are framing the completely different in that case.

[catlikesshrimp]

As I understood it, you prefer systems with less freedom of speech.

[baq]

Then don’t deploy it for Pete’s sake if you can’t guarantee basic privacy.

[JumpCrisscross]

> don’t deploy it for Pete’s sake if you can’t guarantee basic privacy

This isn’t about privacy. DMA is about interoperability.

[Forgeties79]

I imagine complying with all kinds of laws and regulations slows releases in some way or another and having none of them would allow people to ship faster, so what makes these EU regulations so distinct? Do what you have to do to comply with the law and release, as always.

[JumpCrisscross]

> complying with all kinds of laws delays release in some way or another and having none of them would allow people to ship faster, so what makes these EU regulations so distinct?

DMA was designed to be a comprehensive regulatory suite. Lawmakers knew it would be onerous; that’s why it only applies to large companies.

Also, the DMA’s interoperability requirement creates external partners. Let’s face it, Apple’s track record with Siri sucks. If they launch a system and it is crap again, they may not now want an entire ecosystem of folks who will cry foul if they dump the API and start over.

> Do what you have to do to comply with the law and release, as always

Just follow the law. If that means not releasing in a jurisdiction, do that and then don’t tweet snotty things about it. (Siri AI isn’t launching in China, either. I don’t see PMs complaining about that in public.)

[Forgeties79]

No one complains (out loud) about US regulations either. Ultimately it’s about the weight you can throw as well as PR. Probably easier for Apple to make the EU look bad and drag their feet on it. I imagine they’re still not thrilled about the Lightening->USB-C change

[JumpCrisscross]

> No one complains (out loud) about US regulations either

Everyone constantly does!

[nkozyra]

> Everyone constantly does!

In the aggregate, I agree, but in tech things are pretty loose outside of California.

[Forgeties79]

The same way they constantly do and don’t about the Chinese government I’d say.

[stouset]

Apple was literally the first major company to go all-in on USB-C. They shipped entire devices that only had USB-C ports.

If anything, I would wager they were happy about it. They were going to have to do it anyway, and it would inevitably cause friction for users who were already invested in Lightning cables and third-party devices. The EU forcing this just meant they could shift the blame for any negative sentiment onto the EU.

[Forgeties79]

They weren’t all-in or first because they refused to add them to their mobile products until years after everyone else. They fought tooth and nail against integrating it into the iPhone until the EU forced them to. It’s well documented. The MFi program - namely the associated accessories - was very important to them.

Putting USB-C on their laptops in 2016 is a different discussion and it wasn’t a tough decision because none of their computers had lightning integrated into it anyways. If anything we should be asking why they did that and then took 7 years to put them on their phones. They could’ve had one port for literally everything since 2016 and yet the EU had to force them to do it.

[stouset]

We know why it took seven years. For the same reason it took ages for them to replace the 30-pin: Lightning was good enough for what users needed (and was better along some axes), and users had prior investment in an ecosystem of Lightning devices, cables, adapters, and accessories. iPad Pro went USB-C in 2018, MacBooks in 2016. Apple was clearly sold on USB-C, they just had a stranded install base problem on the iPhone.

If you want evidence that Apple was going to move to USB-C anyway, consider that at no point after 2012 did they invest in improvements to Lightning. They never upgraded the protocol speeds, never pushed higher wattage charging. That’s not the behavior of a company that wants to extend a platform’s life.

When the EU forced the USB-C switch, Apple notably didn’t fight it as hard as people assumed they would. The EU handed them a smooth exit ramp on a platter.

[BrenBarn]

> This slows down deploying the system globally.

Good. Pretty much everything should roll out way slower.

[JumpCrisscross]

So win-win. EU consumers get a fully-baked, slower-rolled-out product. American consumers and developers get to see it earlier, warts and opportunities and all.