tl;dr:
1. Apple Intelligence
2. iPhone mirroring
3. SharePlay screen sharing
Archive link: [https://archive.is/UFDra](https://archive.is/UFDra)
>\[…\]
>
>\[Apple\] announced Friday it would block the release of Apple Intelligence, iPhone Mirroring and SharePlay Screen Sharing from users in the EU this year, because the Digital Markets Act allegedly forces it to downgrade the security of its products and services.
>
>“We are concerned that the interoperability requirements of the DMA could force us to compromise the integrity of our products in ways that risk user privacy and data security,” Apple said in a statement.
>
>\[…\]
The regulation is not just about AI but is what also forced Apple to allow 3rd party App Stores, the EU allegedly wants every major component of iOS to be swappable by a third party alternative.
This could (or maybe not) also apply to Apple Intelligence and since this is too integrated into the system it would be an issue if they get forced to open it up for other players.
It's like asking McDonald's why they don't feature Burger King menu items on their menu, it's anti competition.
Coca Cola vendors better offer Pepsi too.
My god, we are so fucking brainwashed... Imagine a world where technology is built as a framework for humanity, instead of a product. Most of us can't even approve of anything anymore that is not in the interest of product and profit.
Because Samsung and a few other companies are exempt from these EU laws. Why? I have no idea, but Apple is required to follow these regulations and companies like Samsung are not.
That's why the DMA's goals aren't that...
The whole point is for the system to be open enough so other smaller competitors can also get in on the game. Android doesn't have those requirements because it's open enough.
Apple is taking false, unproven guesses about the law to make the public be against DMA, the EU has not made any statements about what's being blocke.
Just think for yourself how much Apple pushed for lighting to still be around, even when it was objectively inferior in every aspect but with (some of) these features that are present in other popular services in the EU, (Zoom, Teams, etc) they just "give up" before even trying.
Regarding the “taking false unproven guesses”. That’s generally how avoiding lawsuits works.
There’s definitely pettiness here but I’m not sure why they’d happily test the waters by cannon balling right in. If they think they’ll be sued why go through the trouble? This way they’re inadvertently adhering to the rules. Download ChatGPT or Gemini and have the cross compatibility without them needing to spend billions.
Again there’s definitely pettiness here at the expense of the user but I’d probably do the same if it meant saving millions if not more
> Apple is taking false, unproven guesses about the law to make the public be against DMA, the EU has not made any statements about what's being blocke.
I’m sure if you have billions of dollars and are willing to personally guarantee to Apple in contractual form that their guess here is “false” and you will cover any fines that arise, they’d gladly oblige and give the EU these features
> Just think for yourself how much Apple pushed for lighting to still be around, even when it was objectively inferior in every aspect
When Apple released lightning, people were mad about needing new cables and Apple promised 10 years of lightning support. It’s not that complicated — they waited 10 years and then switched to USB-C.
Apple developed the iPhone - they own it and they should be allowed to decide how it works. Without the involvement of politicians there is already an easy system that keeps Apple in check: customers are not forced by law to buy iPhones, they choose to do so if they like it. That is all that is needed. iPhone is one of the products with the highest customer satisfaction for a reason - the decisions Apple made make for an amazing product experience. No intervention needed. Just pure totalitarian government overreach to think politicians have a moral right to decide how the app installation system of my phone works. Fuck the EU
Dude Apple was literally an architect of USBC and among the first companies to implement it.
Lightning exists because the industry dragged its ass approving a standard set and still did a laughably bad job at it. (Seriously USB C is a fucking train wreck)
Apple was always moving to C on the iPhone just like they had already done with every single other product they make. The EU regulation was poorly thought out political theater, it accomplished nothing that wasn’t already going to happen and has only created problems for the future.
I’m guessing due to the new EU rules every 3rd party app would have to be provided access to mirror or share anything on your screen, if Apple allowed those features on the iPhone itself.
The big problem is that the DMA is designed to be reactive rather than proactive. Company does something, the DMA then examines if it’s compliant. But they can’t/wont certify that something is compliant before it gets released
So I suspect that Apple is just going to start sitting on features until something changes, rather than release them and then discover if they’re getting fined
>So I suspect that Apple is just going to start sitting on features until something changes, rather than release them and then discover if they’re getting fined
And it's not just getting fined that's the issue. Can you imagine the PR nightmare it'd be if Apple gave everyone Apple Intelligence and then 5 months later the EU says no, so now Apple has to push an update that takes away that feature for customers?
They largely won't care about laws - they'll care that Apple's update took away a cool feature.
Nah it probably just means that apps would have to be able to spy on your full screen even when the app is in the background. Which is obviously a security concern.
That’s not Apple withholding features from other markets, that’s just Apple rolling out a feature gradually to new countries. They literally do this all of the time.
Some of these comments seem to come from people who don't realize Apple isn't making these decisions as an emotional response. The *billions* of dollars involved takes care of any hurt feelings. Apple is doing this because the potential fines, litigation, requirements and confusion in terms of potentially having to withdraw features makes it worth not taking the risk despite knowing that it will result in less direct income.
Thank you. So many takes that say this is spite when it’s really just logical business. Would you sell your product in a market where they could fine you a huge share of your total income worldwide? You’d probably be pretty careful at the very least.
>Would you sell your product in a market where they could fine you a huge share of your total income worldwide? You’d probably be pretty careful at the very least.
And it's not just getting fined that's the issue.
Can you imagine the PR nightmare it'd be if Apple gave everyone Apple Intelligence and then 5 months later the EU says no, so now Apple has to push an update that takes away that feature for customers?
Customers largely won't care about laws made by a distant regulatory body - they *will* care that **Apple's update took away a cool feature.**
I agree with this being a business decision but I don’t think those reasons are it. It’s not the first time Apple uses security as a reason to not play ball, [like what they did with NFC](https://www.politico.eu/article/apple-enters-new-eu-antitrust-war-but-it-may-have-lost-the-first-battle/)
Edit: reworded my comment to make my point clearer
the only thing that the article provides is that Vestager and her gang is obviously having an obsession with Apple. Nowhere in their decision they have stated what steps should the providers/vendor must be required to take in order to make sure about the safety of the NFC payment usage, despite that many Europeans have voiced their opinions on that.
Also if you read the whole DMA and the case with Apple you will understand why Apple chose to not make it available right away.
EU dictated that component of iOS/ipadOS to be able to be replaced by another third party. and although not exactly directly, it is up to you to interpret it how, and if Vestager does not like it then she will land a 2billion fine because you did not interpret it how she thought it should be, although she did not make it clear.
So if Apple were to release the Apple Intelligence features/suite, they would need to allow for it to be replaced by some *other* AI package? Well that effectively defeats the entire purpose. No wonder they’ve decided not to even bother.
the issue at hand is that it is not clear enough from the EU side at what they want from Apple. That became pretty clear with the AppStore case.
Because if you noticed there is nothing happening with Copilot and MS and OpenAI all this time. everything is dandy with those.
This is why I am saying that EU is obsessed with Apple.
most people wont admit it though. Though these are the people that would be happy the neighbor's house burnt because he had a better house, so it is expected
> Apple is doing this because the potential fines, litigation, requirements and confusion in terms
This is the thread that you're replying in. Why are you bait-and-switching this into exclusively "security"? Your comment is a non-sequitur to the comments you're replying to.
Every company in Europe now considers ML governance as an important step to continue to provide ML-based services within Europe, thanks to the upcoming AI Act in Europe which requires full scientific transperancy on the Machine Learning models being used (training and test data, Metrics used; models and their hyper parameters, etc).
Knowing Apple it’ll take them a long time to have this information ready and available to present to European regulators to avoid further fines or an outright embargo. Probably however since they’re collaborating with OpenAI (which many companies in Europe already do), then this might be done quicker than we would hope. They would still need to present how it was fine-tuned for the Apple use cases.
Right, Apple apparently decided that all of that simply isn't worth the trouble. Europeans won't stop buying iPhones just because they can't use the AI features.
And European market isn’t the biggest market for iPhone yet, larger than most maybe but the US is the largest and it is where the regulating bodies are and always have historically let technology run free to then follow up by regulating it instead of putting up development roadblocks for competition and innovation before the sector of technology has really even fully developed…
Well I certainly won’t upgrade this year if the biggest features are missing. And if next year or the year after Android has all the fancy AI and iPhones don’t, I won’t stick around for long.
The irony of the EU's campaign against Apple is that the EU could very well end up being dominated by Android and therefore being entirely at Google's will. Go ahead and try to regulate the only company providing your continent with a smartphone OS.
Android will likely have to implement the same restrictions, unless they just allow their phones to be huge security risks (I guess it wouldn’t be the first time).
This is the correct answer. Apple don’t care about a small fine. What they care about is getting regulated. Of course there are no feelings. But the business strategy is to use withholding features as leverage, because it will cause its users to develop hate towards EU regulations. That’s the goal here.
Childish reddotors think everyone is as childish as they are, up to and including CEOs of giant companies. It would be funny if it wasn’t so sad. These commenters have no future in information work.
Reddit tends to skew young, and it's summer, so the kids have nothing but free time to browse.
The older I get, the more often I spot the insane, childish takes that make me think "that's probably what I would have said as a dumb 14 year old."
Apple would also be forced to do what EU says including new laws.
It's not to say big tech shouldn't be kept on a leash but how EU does it, many countries have warned it could have lasting consequences so this isn't just an Apple thing that's happening and the EU market is absolutely important but clearly it's not the end-all. There are many many emerging markets around the world where people can and do buy iPhones.
This is correct. My team works with AI in the med device space, and these new laws have forced us to pause EU rollout for most of our ongoing data science/AI projects.
And for the record, I'm fully in support of AI governance/regulations. But when your law states specific requirements for what data can be used, then in the same law prohibits use of that same specified data, then what are we supposed to do? They clearly haven't thought this through. (At least on the healthcare side of things).
I got my new one recently and they look awful. It’s such a dark blue it’s basically black. I have no idea why they thought this particular blue was in any way more British than the old colour (I know they used to be dark blue before the EU, the point is this dark blue that’s basically black doesn’t have any real connection with the UK or our flag).
That's so interesting because I'm like 99% sure the iphone 16s whole marketing gimmick will also be ai, I didn't expect this at all and I wonder if this is going to cause a dip in their market share over there as samsung and soon google seemingly have no problem in the eu.
People in this subreddit legitimately think that Google will let anyone look at your data and purchase it. Don't bother; you can't reason with braindead fan boys
Feel like people have a misunderstanding about Google's business model and how they sell data, they aren't selling your raw data on the market
Google's business model works by putting you behind a paywall to advertisers, if they shared your information at all it would literally hurt them since they would no longer need to be paid for that same data again.
Advertisers tell Google "hey I want my ad to go to people interested in snowboarding" Google knows you like/have an interest in snowboarding so it will serve the ad to you, but at no point will Google let your information go to advertisers because then they wouldn't have to pay Google again the next time, so it's behind lock and key so every snowboard manufacturer would have to pay Google for access to you
Can someone explain to me why extremely invasive things like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok keep existing in EU, but something like this is suddenly too much?
They exist but with limitations and differences compared to other regions. For instance, Meta offers an ad-free paid subscription service in the EU that is not offered elsewhere. For many years, many advanced features in FB Messenger and IG DMs were not available in the EU despite the rest of the world enjoying them. The ability to opt out of Meta using your data for AI training is also only available in the EU but not elsewhere.
Most people aren’t aware of the differences from region to region because they don’t know what they don’t know. They use the product as it’s offered to them and are blissfully unaware of what others experience.
Exactly why Apple is confident that withholding these AI features from Europe will not result in an appreciable loss of sales – most Europeans won't even be aware, and they'll be quite happy with all of the other great features that had already made the iPhone attractive to them.
Those are legacy products existing prior to EU regulations and they are arguably still in breach. EU just hasn’t slapped down on them, yet.
For new products, like Meta’s Threads, the companies will be using closer scrutiny.
The issue is not the AI tech breaking the regulations, it’s the regulations causing security vulnerabilities that Apple does not want to expose certain features to.
You’re not going to actually get good answers here. Everyone will answer in a way that fits their own preconceptions. We are not lawyers. We are consumers, and most of us are Apple enthusiasts.
0% reason to upgrade then for the time being. Didn’t expect this to be available right away due to using non-English language. But for sure ain’t paying full price for something that maybe will never come.
Will make the balance up on what to do when I really need a new phone, if a lot of key features are region locked there’s no point in staying with Apple and paying the premium price.
Apple Intelligence I can potentially understand, although ChatGPT does operate there.
Don't understand why they would block iPhone mirroring though. Android phones have been mirrored on computers for years.
Well, that’s unfortunate. I was planning to buy a 16 Pro Max this year, specifically Apple Intelligence, and now I probably won’t.
Though I do wonder how much of this is Apple desperately wanting to limit the strain on the AI services at least temporarily. A phased rollout would make a whole lot of sense and a probably temporary delay blamed on the EU would be a good way to do that without getting users all too mad.
I’m certainly disappointed. iOS 18 basically isn’t anything except Apple intelligence that is of interest to me personally.
> Apple desperately wanting to limit the strain on the AI services…
Isn’t their whole point being on-device AI, not requiring services beyond specific occasions where they rely on OpenAI’s ChatGPT services?
I’m sure I’m missing something.
No. There are basically three different contexts.
1. The first is simple on device processing no problems there.
2. The second is secure cloud compute. I’ll get back to this one at the end.
3. ChatGPT and eventually other third-party services for world knowledge topics so instead of switching the web with Siri like we can do right now you’ll ask Siri to use ChatGPT to “search the web” for something. Searching the web can be outright searching the web via ChatGPT or its accessing its world knowledge that’s already in its knowledge base or training data.
Secure cloud compute is Apple’s own silicon in their own servers with a very high level of security for a server based system. Those servers are expected to only be in the US for now at least. Which is why you can find prompts about responses taking a longer time if you are outside of the US in some of the iOS 18 text strings.
These are valid concerns from Apple. If the EU regulations would require them to give third parties the same access as Apple Intelligence, Screen Sharing and iPhone Mirroring then there is all kinds of nefarious things they could do with it, like sending all your photos, emails, calender entries, messages to a third party server, or allow third parties to mirror and remotely control your iPhone.
iOS doesn’t have an api for screen sharing. I believe they think they’d need to make screen sharing publicly available to everyone to add it to FaceTime - or they’d be favouring their own apps
Rather that they'd have to make screen sharing available to e.g. Teams, Zoom, Signal, etc. which they absolutely should...
Regarding the screen mirroring I think they'd need to make the APIs available for someone to implement the feature from Windows, which, again, is totally reasonable, but they clearly don't want to allow that to happen.
As for Apple Intelligence I guess they're waiting on guidance regarding what the DMA requires of them already in regards to replacing Siri. Likely the data available to Apple Intelligence would also have to be available to other virtual assistants, again, that would be the users choice to give, so I don't see why that's such a problem.
All in all Apple are acting like babies here IMO, but it's their right to do so if they wish. Good for me, I have no reason to replace my iPhone 14 Pro then 🙂
If I’m correct, it isn’t exactly screen mirroring right? You can control your phone from the Mac, transfer files to and from just by drag/drop, and the iPhone’s screen can be off or on standby mode to save battery. Plus notifications and probably some more.
Most people don’t. The reason I get my parents iPhones is that I don’t have to worry about them as much as I do Androids. Saved me so much headache over the years
Except there is no reasonable expectation that is going to happen. But it pays off to inoculate that fear to the customer so they turn against similar legislation
just on a logical level, if you’re apple, what is the point of releasing new features in a zone in which you’re required by law to immediately commoditize them? especially if it means extra work on your own part in order to do it? new features are now 2x as hard to build in the eu because they have to generalize all the apis and functionality such that any apple integration (such as the integration with apple intelligence) can be replaced by third parties. it disincentivizes building new stuff, so as a result, the eu will get less new stuff.
Let me tinfoil hat this as honestly, not an Apple fan boy per se. also not an Apple hater. I enjoy my Apple products that I own, but if there was something better suited for my needs I would switch.
Now that that’s over with, week ago or so when I read Apple Intelligence was being delayed past official release of IOS 18. It made me second guess my excited upgrade decision to iPhone 16 XXX.. Early adopters usually get the crap end of stick anyway because the second iteration of a new product is usually substantially better.
Now, Apple Intelligence also was/is only initially offered in US English. PERHAPS not only does it struggle with the language itself, but also the accents for other nationalities.
Third, As much as I agree Apple isn’t doing this just out of “spite” or pettiness, Apple has done petty stuff in the past.
So now you have a perfect storm; Apple Intelligence was always going to be in “beta” long in to release of iPhone 16/IOS18. It struggles with other languages as is. So let’s use this opportunity where it wouldn’t work well in these regions to also attempt to stir up some hate for the UE regulations. Apple gets to shift blame, while not getting review bombed on a product feature that was never ready to work properly in the EU anyways. Let the US/CAD market test and refine it first. Once it’s done I guarantee Apple will push it out to the EU and say they are going to attempt to release and and see if the regulators have a problem with it.
It’s just a massive win as it want ready, and PR win for Apple.
But what do I know..
No no. You’re ok here. If you’re only travelling to the EU you don’t have to live by the likes over the DMA etc. If you move to Europe full time, then you’d be stuck without AI etc
Everyone shitting on the EU but I saw your little boners when Apple was forced to ditch the shitty lightning port in favor of USB-C, all thanks to the ones you like to shit on today.
This is getting crazy. If I want to use Apple Intelligence, I have to use my US account with a US VPN. If I want to sideload an app, change to my EU account and a EU VPN...
There's nowhere where you get _all_ the stuff.
So, in a quagmire of regulations that, if they're like most regulations (and I suspect they are), are poorly defined (probably deliberately) and often contradictory, with the threat of massive fines that look a lot like a money grab by the EU, Apple has chosen not to implement technology that could easily violate one or more regulations depending on how the regulators decide to interpret them. For example, what does this mean, exactly: "They’re barred from combining personal data across their different services.."?
I'm sure this comment will get downvoted because people will interpret Apple's decision as merely capricious and retaliatory. How dare it take action to protect itself (and its shareholders) from the capricious and retaliatory actions of the EU? Apple and its shareholders have no rights, only "the consumer" has them. Apple exists to serve consumers, according to how the EU decides is best for them. That's the baseline perspective in Reddit (and elsewhere).
In reality, this is Apple saying, "Sorry, EU customers, but your governments have made it impossible for us to do business with you the way that you and we would like to do it. They are forcing us to do things we don't think are in the best interests of either of us, and because of that, we can't provide certain features. We would like to offer products that you can voluntarily purchase or not, but your governments don't believe you are capable of making these decisions for yourselves. The result is that we are unable to provide certain features because we cannot do so according to the regulations and under the threat of interpretations that we can't possibly anticipate."
If you want to blame Apple, knock yourself out. But I can't blame them.
Edit: I'm pleasantly surprised to see how many upvotes I'm getting.
These thread's sentiment is pretty much "I don't care what the EU demands apple does with our info" while at the same time this very EU wants unrestricted access to citizen's private messaging.
I posted that very connection in another thread and was downvoted. Some people don't want to get it: *it's the same EU*. The objective is the same: control and money. But as long as the EU is giving them something they want, everything's awesome, even though the EU is acting just as much the thug as when it's doing something they don't want.
Exactly, why should Apple open themselves up to possibly billions in fines? There is no upper limit on how much the EU can confiscate or how many times they can confiscate. It's totally opaque and arbitrary. I'm not an Apple fan by any means but it's obvious why they're holding back.
Funny how the EU started as the savior and nowadays looks like they want to enforce surveillance. I appreciate their approach to a fair market, but if they really think they can enforce companies giving away the in house tech with the excuse of fairness, that's taking it a bit too far.
Why spend billions on R&D if you're gonna give your tech away and open it for everyone to copy your homework for free?
What’s the European analogue to Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Google, or Amazon? Sure, there absolutely are great European tech firms, and big ones. Many that even work in similar fields to those I listed. But there’s nothing remotely on the same tier of the big US ones (and that’s without looking at Asia at all).
Why though? I'm Australian so it makes sense we don't have any (Atlassian and Carva are our biggest) because we have a small market to get something going. But the EU is massive, third biggest market in the world.
Because we're a continent with dozens of different languages, and even more different cultures.
Up until some 30 years ago, half of the continent was under harsh communist rule. The fall of the USSR was followed by a decade of economic failures across many countries. Many generations of Europeans have been working their asses off for literally no reward. We don't give a fuck about working more, because we know we gain nothing from it.
Maybe because here in EU we are separate countries with different languages and US is a one country with one language and complately different way of monetizing everything in their life since it's inception.
What could be a way to possibly circumvent this as a EU citizen? Buying your phone abroad and using a non-eu apple id? Or do they check your current location as well. Not sure how they’re checking it with the 3rd party app stores now.
its probably a mix of them; same as 3rd party appstores.
- the phone has to be physically located in the european union
- the device has to be registered in a european union country
- the appleid has to be registered to a european union country.
Add it to the long list. There’s a lot of hoops you have to jump through to get modern tech into Europe. If anyone knows how to publish an app for France please let me know.
And quite famously, Apple not only refuses to play ball with that, it has previously sparked a lot of angry shouting about their privacy approach being far too strict... and they still leaned even harder into it.
And in the end, it paid off.
Germany literally sold it's citizens data to the NSA in exchange for better software to do even more spying...
[https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/german-intelligence-sends-massive-amounts-of-data-to-the-nsa-a-914821.html](https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/german-intelligence-sends-massive-amounts-of-data-to-the-nsa-a-914821.html)
There's a difference between them trying to break in and actually making it law. It's incredible when it comes to the EU how insanely different the standards and very core of logic shifts.
I can kinda understand why the ai thing can be against the DMA but why iPhone mirroring and share play screen sharing. Doesn’t the DMA only requires that other apps should be able to provide similar features too and apps like zoom do provide screen sharing and control so there is competition available. I don’t really see a problem there.
They use much lower level private APIs. The screen doesnt even have to be on and you can drag & drop files between devices. It would be an absolute privacy & security nightmare if these APIs were open to public, which the DMA enforces.
Well, you get what you ask for. If the EU doesn’t get all the iPhone features or other services due to the regulations imposed by the DMA, it’s a consequence of over-regulation making certain (delicate) business operations difficult. Don’t be surprised if one day some mainstream company releases a service or product and the EU doesn’t get it. Sometimes you have to regulate, not try to run the company. It may be an unpopular opinion here, but it seems ridiculous that the EU fines Apple based on its worldwide profits just because it doesn’t comply with some rules within the EU
Like I posted in a comment reply to someone on here, don’t blame Apple, blame the EU. They are creating a regulatory storm that fewer and fewer companies want to navigate through. It’s no surprise Apple doesn’t want to launch a feature like this with all the headaches that come with it.
A bunch of people have pointed out this isn't an emotional response, but a business one. It takes time and money to deal with these regulations and if the EU is intent on making it a hostile place to release new products or features, then why would Apple put that time and money and effort into releasing something there?
Someone even said that the "EU is going to have a field day" as if suddenly we want to extend the overreach of the EU and allow them to legislate and force Apple and other companies to develop, research, and release products. At that point what kind of autonomy does Apple/other companies have?
100% EU has been kneecapping tech sector here for a long time. There was a great video i watched on a subject before that talked about the sheer amount of red tape in EU and how that means the tech sector is a small fraction of what it could be. I think Spotify is the only big tech company from here and even then, I don't think they ever turned a profit. EU wants to completely level the playing field and make sure no one does better. They forced Apple to add USB-C but even a broken clock is right twice a day.
The EU thinks any reg they make will be adopted by the rest of the world due to their size. They’ve said this publicly, they’re trying to bully these companies, now they’re going to start learning the downside of that over the next several years.
Android will be gimped too - they have to follow the same rules as Apple. Google Gemini launched 6 months later or so in the EU than everywhere else, and that is just a web service. For features baked into Android it might take much longer. It seems the EU has made it illegal to integrate features in the OS, that are not interchangeable by your competitors, which is absurd
Android will just have some shitty, insecure, likely ad-ridden, third party solution that barely ticks some box for "feature parity". Just like everything else.
It's basically the business model. Do whatever garbage thing you have to with the loss leader of an operating system, just get the platform into as many hands as possible, and then hoover up all their data for ad sales.
Cookie banners are annoying for sure, but as you say, they don't have to be as obtuse and confusing as they are in 99% of cases.
Also, the cookie banners immediately show you how "seriously" a site takes your privacy if they let hundreds of "partners" use your data. I think the highest number of "partners" I saw was 650 or so. Insane.
It’s kind of funny the caution they took for compliance with these features, but are quite happy to risk breaking compliance by adding their core technology fee. There probably are a few hurdles, especially for the SharePlay screen sharing. I’d suspect these will eventually arrive, and they’re making it very public it’s being delayed by the EU in the hopes it makes people look negatively on the DMA
The EU is really gonna suffer long term by not being business friendly…regulation is good but over regulation isn’t. The EU should have stopped at USB C and GDPR, after which the DMA was honestly kinda useless 🤷🏻♂️. It stifles any innovation as companies like Apple can no longer defend their software API’s which they work on since the DMA means giving it away for free to start ups and why would any sane company do that lol and the DMA kinda destroys privacy in a weird way too with them giving user data to third party without explicit consent from the user 💀 (can be wrong on this one but I read it on some website)
I can (stretching my goodwill) believe that Apple Intelligence needs some touching up for the European market — Meta is having some issues with their integration of LLMs in their apps, and OpenAI had to get compliant with GDPR.
Cutting iPhone mirroring and screen sharing seems completely retaliatory to me, though. All the previous Continuity features are available in Europe, as is Messages screen sharing on macOS. I don't get how these new features differ materially on a policy level from what we already have.
I'm sure there's a retaliatory aspect to it, but I can also imagine an EU regulator telling Apple that it's anti-competitive that you can only mirror an iPhone on a MacBook and not an Android device, or something like that.
Because EU is now enforcing against apple in large sums. Expect every new feature from the big players to be put through the lawyer test before being released in EU.
What exists already is a liability now, and so they need to look at ROI of every features incremental value in EU vs. potential litigation and fine costs of it might fall under the vague regulations as written. When fines are in billions it becomes very hard to release anything lawyers might think will face scrutiny, it is doubtful something like mirroring would have added billions to EU sales or the lack of it will cost billions.
I get your reasoning, but let’s please remember that the European Commission is a straight-up centrist, pro-business political body: they will threaten big fines, but the actual written–text regulation is nothing particularly radical or hard to comply with, and they would be extremely flexible if Apple showed good intentions. It’s Apple that has been kicking and screaming about the DMA, the Commission is not going down particularly hard on them and would love for the company to work towards respecting the law.
I’m amazed that Apple would be willing to launch the next iPhone without its marquee feature, after months of TV ads for Galaxy AI and Circle to Search, in a market where they are neck and neck with Samsung.
> please remember that the European Commission is a straight-up centrist, pro-business political body
> they would be extremely flexible if Apple showed good intentions
You say they are pro-business and flexible at the same time. That's not possible. Flexibility is the hallmark of corrupt third-world countries and other shitholes. If you have friends, you can do business, and if you don't, you're screwed. That's what a flexible law means. Legitimate businesses usually don't appreciate this kind of environment. It's the "businesses" that profit from administrative capture that thrive under such conditions.
That's a fucking yikes dude... I was finding a reason to upgrade my 12 pro soon-ish :( Despite me being from Europe I do not like the over regulating like EU likes to do, eventually it will come to this where companies would skip Europe entirely with features. This also seems like the beggining of this kind of stuff, who knows, maybe in the future apple will entirely skip Europe for a new product release. I might be exageratting but now it seems more possible than ever for such things
This shit is getting terrible… Everytime I think of a crazy idea of thinkinh startup, doing it in EU seems like a huge nightmare due to all these freaking laws.
My guess is that they think someone would argue that it should be a feature available with any platform be it Windows, Linux, etc or that it introduces more lock in
Yeah, technically in the EU Apple has to let any app mirror the screen if the platform can do it. They also have to let any app collect data for AI the same way Apple can collect it via app intents and have no oversight.
The iPhone mirroring feature is not actually mirroring. The iPhone can be locked and charging/tucked away somewhere. I’m pretty sure this involves more low level access than competing screen mirroring apps have.
Same thing for AI. Apple has their own models in the system that other developers cannot access. And they pull information together from different apps and system services. And the feature is available on any text field (for the writing stuff). Other services do not have this level of integration with the system.
They also don’t have what it takes to handle private data in the cloud. How many companies operate their cloud in this way?
https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/
Allowing any PC or computer in the world (not only your Apple device, signed into your iCloud) to mirror your iPhone in the background opens up a whole can of worms. Imagine the abuse from hackers and criminals. “Hi, Martha, 81yo, we are calling from Apple to help you with your phone email. Press “approve” to give us access to your phone, files and all your apps, thank you”.
I know, right? It's like they live in 1999 and scam call centers in India do not exist.
The EU might have thought a bit too good of themselves after the third party stores and started to push a little bit too far.
EI plans on rolling out new AI laws. Apple waiting knowing the laws are changing but not knowing what the laws will be either. Hasn’t been voted on. It’s not just Apple; it’s anything AI related.
tl;dr: 1. Apple Intelligence 2. iPhone mirroring 3. SharePlay screen sharing Archive link: [https://archive.is/UFDra](https://archive.is/UFDra) >\[…\] > >\[Apple\] announced Friday it would block the release of Apple Intelligence, iPhone Mirroring and SharePlay Screen Sharing from users in the EU this year, because the Digital Markets Act allegedly forces it to downgrade the security of its products and services. > >“We are concerned that the interoperability requirements of the DMA could force us to compromise the integrity of our products in ways that risk user privacy and data security,” Apple said in a statement. > >\[…\]
> iPhone mirroring > SharePlay screen sharing What do these features have to do with AI and regulatory concerns?
The regulation is not just about AI but is what also forced Apple to allow 3rd party App Stores, the EU allegedly wants every major component of iOS to be swappable by a third party alternative. This could (or maybe not) also apply to Apple Intelligence and since this is too integrated into the system it would be an issue if they get forced to open it up for other players.
Exactly. This idea that every piece of an OS should be swappable with a competitor is absurd.
Are you saying that politicians don't know what they are doing when they opinionate on technology?
>Are you saying that politicians don't know what they are doing when they opinionate on ~~technology~~ most topics? FTFY
It's like asking McDonald's why they don't feature Burger King menu items on their menu, it's anti competition. Coca Cola vendors better offer Pepsi too.
My god, we are so fucking brainwashed... Imagine a world where technology is built as a framework for humanity, instead of a product. Most of us can't even approve of anything anymore that is not in the interest of product and profit.
Why do you think this is not an issue for Android with these features?
Android doesn’t have anywhere close to this level of integration.
Because Samsung and a few other companies are exempt from these EU laws. Why? I have no idea, but Apple is required to follow these regulations and companies like Samsung are not.
That's why the DMA's goals aren't that... The whole point is for the system to be open enough so other smaller competitors can also get in on the game. Android doesn't have those requirements because it's open enough. Apple is taking false, unproven guesses about the law to make the public be against DMA, the EU has not made any statements about what's being blocke. Just think for yourself how much Apple pushed for lighting to still be around, even when it was objectively inferior in every aspect but with (some of) these features that are present in other popular services in the EU, (Zoom, Teams, etc) they just "give up" before even trying.
Regarding the “taking false unproven guesses”. That’s generally how avoiding lawsuits works. There’s definitely pettiness here but I’m not sure why they’d happily test the waters by cannon balling right in. If they think they’ll be sued why go through the trouble? This way they’re inadvertently adhering to the rules. Download ChatGPT or Gemini and have the cross compatibility without them needing to spend billions. Again there’s definitely pettiness here at the expense of the user but I’d probably do the same if it meant saving millions if not more
> Apple is taking false, unproven guesses about the law to make the public be against DMA, the EU has not made any statements about what's being blocke. I’m sure if you have billions of dollars and are willing to personally guarantee to Apple in contractual form that their guess here is “false” and you will cover any fines that arise, they’d gladly oblige and give the EU these features > Just think for yourself how much Apple pushed for lighting to still be around, even when it was objectively inferior in every aspect When Apple released lightning, people were mad about needing new cables and Apple promised 10 years of lightning support. It’s not that complicated — they waited 10 years and then switched to USB-C.
Apple developed the iPhone - they own it and they should be allowed to decide how it works. Without the involvement of politicians there is already an easy system that keeps Apple in check: customers are not forced by law to buy iPhones, they choose to do so if they like it. That is all that is needed. iPhone is one of the products with the highest customer satisfaction for a reason - the decisions Apple made make for an amazing product experience. No intervention needed. Just pure totalitarian government overreach to think politicians have a moral right to decide how the app installation system of my phone works. Fuck the EU
Dude Apple was literally an architect of USBC and among the first companies to implement it. Lightning exists because the industry dragged its ass approving a standard set and still did a laughably bad job at it. (Seriously USB C is a fucking train wreck) Apple was always moving to C on the iPhone just like they had already done with every single other product they make. The EU regulation was poorly thought out political theater, it accomplished nothing that wasn’t already going to happen and has only created problems for the future.
I’m guessing due to the new EU rules every 3rd party app would have to be provided access to mirror or share anything on your screen, if Apple allowed those features on the iPhone itself.
The big problem is that the DMA is designed to be reactive rather than proactive. Company does something, the DMA then examines if it’s compliant. But they can’t/wont certify that something is compliant before it gets released So I suspect that Apple is just going to start sitting on features until something changes, rather than release them and then discover if they’re getting fined
>So I suspect that Apple is just going to start sitting on features until something changes, rather than release them and then discover if they’re getting fined And it's not just getting fined that's the issue. Can you imagine the PR nightmare it'd be if Apple gave everyone Apple Intelligence and then 5 months later the EU says no, so now Apple has to push an update that takes away that feature for customers? They largely won't care about laws - they'll care that Apple's update took away a cool feature.
[удалено]
Nah it probably just means that apps would have to be able to spy on your full screen even when the app is in the background. Which is obviously a security concern.
Nope.
S.H.I.T.
Bet they will do everything in their power to make sure it passes regulators in China. This excuse is weak af.
Wow, that's pretty huge news. Feels kind of unprecedented that a core OS feature isn't going to release in certain markets.
tvOS users: First Time?
What didn’t get released on tvOS?
Siri on tvOS used to be available in only 8 countries https://9to5mac.com/2015/11/04/siri-apple-tv-countries-movies-tv-shows/
That’s not Apple withholding features from other markets, that’s just Apple rolling out a feature gradually to new countries. They literally do this all of the time.
Satellite SOS is still only available in like 7 countries.
Some of these comments seem to come from people who don't realize Apple isn't making these decisions as an emotional response. The *billions* of dollars involved takes care of any hurt feelings. Apple is doing this because the potential fines, litigation, requirements and confusion in terms of potentially having to withdraw features makes it worth not taking the risk despite knowing that it will result in less direct income.
Thank you. So many takes that say this is spite when it’s really just logical business. Would you sell your product in a market where they could fine you a huge share of your total income worldwide? You’d probably be pretty careful at the very least.
>Would you sell your product in a market where they could fine you a huge share of your total income worldwide? You’d probably be pretty careful at the very least. And it's not just getting fined that's the issue. Can you imagine the PR nightmare it'd be if Apple gave everyone Apple Intelligence and then 5 months later the EU says no, so now Apple has to push an update that takes away that feature for customers? Customers largely won't care about laws made by a distant regulatory body - they *will* care that **Apple's update took away a cool feature.**
I agree with this being a business decision but I don’t think those reasons are it. It’s not the first time Apple uses security as a reason to not play ball, [like what they did with NFC](https://www.politico.eu/article/apple-enters-new-eu-antitrust-war-but-it-may-have-lost-the-first-battle/) Edit: reworded my comment to make my point clearer
the only thing that the article provides is that Vestager and her gang is obviously having an obsession with Apple. Nowhere in their decision they have stated what steps should the providers/vendor must be required to take in order to make sure about the safety of the NFC payment usage, despite that many Europeans have voiced their opinions on that. Also if you read the whole DMA and the case with Apple you will understand why Apple chose to not make it available right away. EU dictated that component of iOS/ipadOS to be able to be replaced by another third party. and although not exactly directly, it is up to you to interpret it how, and if Vestager does not like it then she will land a 2billion fine because you did not interpret it how she thought it should be, although she did not make it clear.
So if Apple were to release the Apple Intelligence features/suite, they would need to allow for it to be replaced by some *other* AI package? Well that effectively defeats the entire purpose. No wonder they’ve decided not to even bother.
the issue at hand is that it is not clear enough from the EU side at what they want from Apple. That became pretty clear with the AppStore case. Because if you noticed there is nothing happening with Copilot and MS and OpenAI all this time. everything is dandy with those. This is why I am saying that EU is obsessed with Apple.
>EU is obsessed with Apple I think there is some truth to that.
most people wont admit it though. Though these are the people that would be happy the neighbor's house burnt because he had a better house, so it is expected
> Apple is doing this because the potential fines, litigation, requirements and confusion in terms This is the thread that you're replying in. Why are you bait-and-switching this into exclusively "security"? Your comment is a non-sequitur to the comments you're replying to.
Every company in Europe now considers ML governance as an important step to continue to provide ML-based services within Europe, thanks to the upcoming AI Act in Europe which requires full scientific transperancy on the Machine Learning models being used (training and test data, Metrics used; models and their hyper parameters, etc). Knowing Apple it’ll take them a long time to have this information ready and available to present to European regulators to avoid further fines or an outright embargo. Probably however since they’re collaborating with OpenAI (which many companies in Europe already do), then this might be done quicker than we would hope. They would still need to present how it was fine-tuned for the Apple use cases.
Right, Apple apparently decided that all of that simply isn't worth the trouble. Europeans won't stop buying iPhones just because they can't use the AI features.
And European market isn’t the biggest market for iPhone yet, larger than most maybe but the US is the largest and it is where the regulating bodies are and always have historically let technology run free to then follow up by regulating it instead of putting up development roadblocks for competition and innovation before the sector of technology has really even fully developed…
Well I certainly won’t upgrade this year if the biggest features are missing. And if next year or the year after Android has all the fancy AI and iPhones don’t, I won’t stick around for long.
The irony of the EU's campaign against Apple is that the EU could very well end up being dominated by Android and therefore being entirely at Google's will. Go ahead and try to regulate the only company providing your continent with a smartphone OS.
That company would still be beholden to the data privacy laws/etc of the EU. Which is the entire point of the laws.
Android will likely have to implement the same restrictions, unless they just allow their phones to be huge security risks (I guess it wouldn’t be the first time).
This is also an attempt to put pressure on EU regulators to loosen rules.
This is the correct answer. Apple don’t care about a small fine. What they care about is getting regulated. Of course there are no feelings. But the business strategy is to use withholding features as leverage, because it will cause its users to develop hate towards EU regulations. That’s the goal here.
Small fine? Are you familiar with the EU?
The EU is threatening them with fines that exceed the total revenue Apple makes in the EU.
Childish reddotors think everyone is as childish as they are, up to and including CEOs of giant companies. It would be funny if it wasn’t so sad. These commenters have no future in information work.
Reddit tends to skew young, and it's summer, so the kids have nothing but free time to browse. The older I get, the more often I spot the insane, childish takes that make me think "that's probably what I would have said as a dumb 14 year old."
Genuinely insane to see this type of childish behaviours. They’re acting like companies are sports teams.
Probably won't be long before they start betting on them like sports teams as well.
> glances at $AAPL, $MSFT, and $NVDA
Also important point is that most, if not all AI features work only in English.
Apple would also be forced to do what EU says including new laws. It's not to say big tech shouldn't be kept on a leash but how EU does it, many countries have warned it could have lasting consequences so this isn't just an Apple thing that's happening and the EU market is absolutely important but clearly it's not the end-all. There are many many emerging markets around the world where people can and do buy iPhones.
Apple is a corporation; they don’t have emotions
This is correct. My team works with AI in the med device space, and these new laws have forced us to pause EU rollout for most of our ongoing data science/AI projects. And for the record, I'm fully in support of AI governance/regulations. But when your law states specific requirements for what data can be used, then in the same law prohibits use of that same specified data, then what are we supposed to do? They clearly haven't thought this through. (At least on the healthcare side of things).
Hopefully this doesn’t impact UK & Switzerland as they’re not in the EU.
Is this the first time I’ve actually been happy about Brexit?
Finally, a Brexit Benefit.
Don’t forget those lovely blue passports!!!!
BLOO
I got my new one recently and they look awful. It’s such a dark blue it’s basically black. I have no idea why they thought this particular blue was in any way more British than the old colour (I know they used to be dark blue before the EU, the point is this dark blue that’s basically black doesn’t have any real connection with the UK or our flag).
A Brenefit.
It shouldn’t, afaik we don’t have the alternate app stores if the EU so hopefully we will get the AI features.
> Switzerland They have bilateral agreements with EU so it kinda gets a bit fucky there. Now Brexiteers on the other hand...
Switzerland is has the DMA so will be excluded.
Can someone please update this when it’s confirmed either way?
That's so interesting because I'm like 99% sure the iphone 16s whole marketing gimmick will also be ai, I didn't expect this at all and I wonder if this is going to cause a dip in their market share over there as samsung and soon google seemingly have no problem in the eu.
Samsung and Google have no problem sharing user data with eu, unlike Apple
What are you talking about? Share what data with what body of the EU?
People in this subreddit legitimately think that Google will let anyone look at your data and purchase it. Don't bother; you can't reason with braindead fan boys
And this shit got upvoted. Lmao
Samsung and Google do that?
With whom does Samsung and Google not share information? That’s the real question
No it isn’t, let’s see the proof of the claim.
Feel like people have a misunderstanding about Google's business model and how they sell data, they aren't selling your raw data on the market Google's business model works by putting you behind a paywall to advertisers, if they shared your information at all it would literally hurt them since they would no longer need to be paid for that same data again. Advertisers tell Google "hey I want my ad to go to people interested in snowboarding" Google knows you like/have an interest in snowboarding so it will serve the ad to you, but at no point will Google let your information go to advertisers because then they wouldn't have to pay Google again the next time, so it's behind lock and key so every snowboard manufacturer would have to pay Google for access to you
If this were about user data, Apple wouldn't be selling in China yet they clearly are. Stop making stuff up.
Can someone explain to me why extremely invasive things like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok keep existing in EU, but something like this is suddenly too much?
They exist but with limitations and differences compared to other regions. For instance, Meta offers an ad-free paid subscription service in the EU that is not offered elsewhere. For many years, many advanced features in FB Messenger and IG DMs were not available in the EU despite the rest of the world enjoying them. The ability to opt out of Meta using your data for AI training is also only available in the EU but not elsewhere. Most people aren’t aware of the differences from region to region because they don’t know what they don’t know. They use the product as it’s offered to them and are blissfully unaware of what others experience.
Exactly why Apple is confident that withholding these AI features from Europe will not result in an appreciable loss of sales – most Europeans won't even be aware, and they'll be quite happy with all of the other great features that had already made the iPhone attractive to them.
Those are legacy products existing prior to EU regulations and they are arguably still in breach. EU just hasn’t slapped down on them, yet. For new products, like Meta’s Threads, the companies will be using closer scrutiny.
Yep, Threads was completely unusable in the EU for quite a few months after it launched, due to Meta having to navigate these regulatory hurdles.
The issue is not the AI tech breaking the regulations, it’s the regulations causing security vulnerabilities that Apple does not want to expose certain features to.
You’re not going to actually get good answers here. Everyone will answer in a way that fits their own preconceptions. We are not lawyers. We are consumers, and most of us are Apple enthusiasts.
This hurts bad, I was really happy about my iPhone 15 Pro sudden new relevance.
0% reason to upgrade then for the time being. Didn’t expect this to be available right away due to using non-English language. But for sure ain’t paying full price for something that maybe will never come. Will make the balance up on what to do when I really need a new phone, if a lot of key features are region locked there’s no point in staying with Apple and paying the premium price.
Well I just saved 1000€
Apple Intelligence I can potentially understand, although ChatGPT does operate there. Don't understand why they would block iPhone mirroring though. Android phones have been mirrored on computers for years.
Probably because of private APIs at the system level
So basically everything they showed at wwdc. Great.
Well, that’s unfortunate. I was planning to buy a 16 Pro Max this year, specifically Apple Intelligence, and now I probably won’t. Though I do wonder how much of this is Apple desperately wanting to limit the strain on the AI services at least temporarily. A phased rollout would make a whole lot of sense and a probably temporary delay blamed on the EU would be a good way to do that without getting users all too mad. I’m certainly disappointed. iOS 18 basically isn’t anything except Apple intelligence that is of interest to me personally.
most of apple intelligence's features run on device, hence the device limitations. So, no need for control any strain.
> Apple desperately wanting to limit the strain on the AI services… Isn’t their whole point being on-device AI, not requiring services beyond specific occasions where they rely on OpenAI’s ChatGPT services? I’m sure I’m missing something.
No. There are basically three different contexts. 1. The first is simple on device processing no problems there. 2. The second is secure cloud compute. I’ll get back to this one at the end. 3. ChatGPT and eventually other third-party services for world knowledge topics so instead of switching the web with Siri like we can do right now you’ll ask Siri to use ChatGPT to “search the web” for something. Searching the web can be outright searching the web via ChatGPT or its accessing its world knowledge that’s already in its knowledge base or training data. Secure cloud compute is Apple’s own silicon in their own servers with a very high level of security for a server based system. Those servers are expected to only be in the US for now at least. Which is why you can find prompts about responses taking a longer time if you are outside of the US in some of the iOS 18 text strings.
Well, guess I’m not upgrading from my 14 pro max this year.
These are valid concerns from Apple. If the EU regulations would require them to give third parties the same access as Apple Intelligence, Screen Sharing and iPhone Mirroring then there is all kinds of nefarious things they could do with it, like sending all your photos, emails, calender entries, messages to a third party server, or allow third parties to mirror and remotely control your iPhone.
You can do screen sharing and mirroring on Android, Windows and Mac devices without an issue in the EU.
iOS doesn’t have an api for screen sharing. I believe they think they’d need to make screen sharing publicly available to everyone to add it to FaceTime - or they’d be favouring their own apps
Rather that they'd have to make screen sharing available to e.g. Teams, Zoom, Signal, etc. which they absolutely should... Regarding the screen mirroring I think they'd need to make the APIs available for someone to implement the feature from Windows, which, again, is totally reasonable, but they clearly don't want to allow that to happen. As for Apple Intelligence I guess they're waiting on guidance regarding what the DMA requires of them already in regards to replacing Siri. Likely the data available to Apple Intelligence would also have to be available to other virtual assistants, again, that would be the users choice to give, so I don't see why that's such a problem. All in all Apple are acting like babies here IMO, but it's their right to do so if they wish. Good for me, I have no reason to replace my iPhone 14 Pro then 🙂
If I’m correct, it isn’t exactly screen mirroring right? You can control your phone from the Mac, transfer files to and from just by drag/drop, and the iPhone’s screen can be off or on standby mode to save battery. Plus notifications and probably some more.
Phone Link does pretty much all of that between Windows and Android.
You can do all those on Android too.
You can do all of this for years on Android with Phone Link or KDE Connect.
Aren't a lot of applications the same way, and that's why you carefully choose the permissions that third party apps receive?
Most people: *Allow... Allow... Allow...*
Most people don’t. The reason I get my parents iPhones is that I don’t have to worry about them as much as I do Androids. Saved me so much headache over the years
Except there is no reasonable expectation that is going to happen. But it pays off to inoculate that fear to the customer so they turn against similar legislation
Oh shit, Japan passed the same law this month 🤦🏻♂️
just on a logical level, if you’re apple, what is the point of releasing new features in a zone in which you’re required by law to immediately commoditize them? especially if it means extra work on your own part in order to do it? new features are now 2x as hard to build in the eu because they have to generalize all the apis and functionality such that any apple integration (such as the integration with apple intelligence) can be replaced by third parties. it disincentivizes building new stuff, so as a result, the eu will get less new stuff.
Let's see how they will handle the japan market since they are doing the same about appstore than EU
Let me tinfoil hat this as honestly, not an Apple fan boy per se. also not an Apple hater. I enjoy my Apple products that I own, but if there was something better suited for my needs I would switch. Now that that’s over with, week ago or so when I read Apple Intelligence was being delayed past official release of IOS 18. It made me second guess my excited upgrade decision to iPhone 16 XXX.. Early adopters usually get the crap end of stick anyway because the second iteration of a new product is usually substantially better. Now, Apple Intelligence also was/is only initially offered in US English. PERHAPS not only does it struggle with the language itself, but also the accents for other nationalities. Third, As much as I agree Apple isn’t doing this just out of “spite” or pettiness, Apple has done petty stuff in the past. So now you have a perfect storm; Apple Intelligence was always going to be in “beta” long in to release of iPhone 16/IOS18. It struggles with other languages as is. So let’s use this opportunity where it wouldn’t work well in these regions to also attempt to stir up some hate for the UE regulations. Apple gets to shift blame, while not getting review bombed on a product feature that was never ready to work properly in the EU anyways. Let the US/CAD market test and refine it first. Once it’s done I guarantee Apple will push it out to the EU and say they are going to attempt to release and and see if the regulators have a problem with it. It’s just a massive win as it want ready, and PR win for Apple. But what do I know..
Does this mean if someone living in the UK travels to somewhere in the EU their AI services will stop working?
No no. You’re ok here. If you’re only travelling to the EU you don’t have to live by the likes over the DMA etc. If you move to Europe full time, then you’d be stuck without AI etc
The Empire Struck Back
Policy makers who don't understand tech, as usual, simple as.
Everyone shitting on the EU but I saw your little boners when Apple was forced to ditch the shitty lightning port in favor of USB-C, all thanks to the ones you like to shit on today.
This is getting crazy. If I want to use Apple Intelligence, I have to use my US account with a US VPN. If I want to sideload an app, change to my EU account and a EU VPN... There's nowhere where you get _all_ the stuff.
So, in a quagmire of regulations that, if they're like most regulations (and I suspect they are), are poorly defined (probably deliberately) and often contradictory, with the threat of massive fines that look a lot like a money grab by the EU, Apple has chosen not to implement technology that could easily violate one or more regulations depending on how the regulators decide to interpret them. For example, what does this mean, exactly: "They’re barred from combining personal data across their different services.."? I'm sure this comment will get downvoted because people will interpret Apple's decision as merely capricious and retaliatory. How dare it take action to protect itself (and its shareholders) from the capricious and retaliatory actions of the EU? Apple and its shareholders have no rights, only "the consumer" has them. Apple exists to serve consumers, according to how the EU decides is best for them. That's the baseline perspective in Reddit (and elsewhere). In reality, this is Apple saying, "Sorry, EU customers, but your governments have made it impossible for us to do business with you the way that you and we would like to do it. They are forcing us to do things we don't think are in the best interests of either of us, and because of that, we can't provide certain features. We would like to offer products that you can voluntarily purchase or not, but your governments don't believe you are capable of making these decisions for yourselves. The result is that we are unable to provide certain features because we cannot do so according to the regulations and under the threat of interpretations that we can't possibly anticipate." If you want to blame Apple, knock yourself out. But I can't blame them. Edit: I'm pleasantly surprised to see how many upvotes I'm getting.
These thread's sentiment is pretty much "I don't care what the EU demands apple does with our info" while at the same time this very EU wants unrestricted access to citizen's private messaging.
I posted that very connection in another thread and was downvoted. Some people don't want to get it: *it's the same EU*. The objective is the same: control and money. But as long as the EU is giving them something they want, everything's awesome, even though the EU is acting just as much the thug as when it's doing something they don't want.
Thank you, it’s refreshing to see that people still get what’s really going on. You put it perfectly.
Exactly, why should Apple open themselves up to possibly billions in fines? There is no upper limit on how much the EU can confiscate or how many times they can confiscate. It's totally opaque and arbitrary. I'm not an Apple fan by any means but it's obvious why they're holding back.
Funny how the EU started as the savior and nowadays looks like they want to enforce surveillance. I appreciate their approach to a fair market, but if they really think they can enforce companies giving away the in house tech with the excuse of fairness, that's taking it a bit too far. Why spend billions on R&D if you're gonna give your tech away and open it for everyone to copy your homework for free?
I’m sure a successful European consumer tech company will release a competing product. Oh, wait…
0 of the 40 largest European companies were started in the last 50 years
To be fair, Mistral AI is French
Sort of. Except every investor and majority equity is American. The founders just happen to be French.
Ex American FAANG. Goes to show the important of US big tech in EU, hmmmmm wonder what the EU Commission has to say about that
It’s almost as if they have an axe to grind because they don’t have a single domestic massive tech company.
There's tons of tech companies in Europe of all sizes, just not as much venture capitalist consumer-facing unicorn startups.
What’s the European analogue to Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Google, or Amazon? Sure, there absolutely are great European tech firms, and big ones. Many that even work in similar fields to those I listed. But there’s nothing remotely on the same tier of the big US ones (and that’s without looking at Asia at all).
There’s none. There’s no EU equivalent to Wall Street, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, etc., despite having a ~200M more citizens than the US.
Why though? I'm Australian so it makes sense we don't have any (Atlassian and Carva are our biggest) because we have a small market to get something going. But the EU is massive, third biggest market in the world.
2 world wars, then half the continent was ruled by communist regimes, different languages etc.
Because we're a continent with dozens of different languages, and even more different cultures. Up until some 30 years ago, half of the continent was under harsh communist rule. The fall of the USSR was followed by a decade of economic failures across many countries. Many generations of Europeans have been working their asses off for literally no reward. We don't give a fuck about working more, because we know we gain nothing from it.
Maybe because here in EU we are separate countries with different languages and US is a one country with one language and complately different way of monetizing everything in their life since it's inception.
There are more native Spanish speakers in the US than there are in Spain.
Sounds like a skill issue.
hey hey, they got Shopify lmao
Shopify is Canadian.
DMA is a very badly written regulation and this is just the beginning. Probably a lot new features will skip EU in the next couple of years.
What could be a way to possibly circumvent this as a EU citizen? Buying your phone abroad and using a non-eu apple id? Or do they check your current location as well. Not sure how they’re checking it with the 3rd party app stores now.
[удалено]
So would Apple Intelligence just suddenly stop working when an American tourist travels to the EU on holiday?
Yes, probably. Or it would not be sudden, but would deactivate after the device has been in Europe for some period of time.
its probably a mix of them; same as 3rd party appstores. - the phone has to be physically located in the european union - the device has to be registered in a european union country - the appleid has to be registered to a european union country.
Add it to the long list. There’s a lot of hoops you have to jump through to get modern tech into Europe. If anyone knows how to publish an app for France please let me know.
I’m in the EU, I hate this so much.
Lets just all acknowledge that the EU is overreaching and wants to break encryption and secure messaging.
The US has certainly not been spying on its citizens for the last two decades...
And quite famously, Apple not only refuses to play ball with that, it has previously sparked a lot of angry shouting about their privacy approach being far too strict... and they still leaned even harder into it. And in the end, it paid off.
Germany literally sold it's citizens data to the NSA in exchange for better software to do even more spying... [https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/german-intelligence-sends-massive-amounts-of-data-to-the-nsa-a-914821.html](https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/german-intelligence-sends-massive-amounts-of-data-to-the-nsa-a-914821.html) There's a difference between them trying to break in and actually making it law. It's incredible when it comes to the EU how insanely different the standards and very core of logic shifts.
AI regulations are about copyright issues, not about encryption.
I literally just went out and bought a new iPad for this… WHAT? 💀
I can kinda understand why the ai thing can be against the DMA but why iPhone mirroring and share play screen sharing. Doesn’t the DMA only requires that other apps should be able to provide similar features too and apps like zoom do provide screen sharing and control so there is competition available. I don’t really see a problem there.
They use much lower level private APIs. The screen doesnt even have to be on and you can drag & drop files between devices. It would be an absolute privacy & security nightmare if these APIs were open to public, which the DMA enforces.
This is literately bullshit.
Well, you get what you ask for. If the EU doesn’t get all the iPhone features or other services due to the regulations imposed by the DMA, it’s a consequence of over-regulation making certain (delicate) business operations difficult. Don’t be surprised if one day some mainstream company releases a service or product and the EU doesn’t get it. Sometimes you have to regulate, not try to run the company. It may be an unpopular opinion here, but it seems ridiculous that the EU fines Apple based on its worldwide profits just because it doesn’t comply with some rules within the EU
Man god f’in damn it! Is Norway part of this bS? We ain’t in the EU, but guess we agree to everything EU so yeah. Was looking forward to this.
Like I posted in a comment reply to someone on here, don’t blame Apple, blame the EU. They are creating a regulatory storm that fewer and fewer companies want to navigate through. It’s no surprise Apple doesn’t want to launch a feature like this with all the headaches that come with it. A bunch of people have pointed out this isn't an emotional response, but a business one. It takes time and money to deal with these regulations and if the EU is intent on making it a hostile place to release new products or features, then why would Apple put that time and money and effort into releasing something there? Someone even said that the "EU is going to have a field day" as if suddenly we want to extend the overreach of the EU and allow them to legislate and force Apple and other companies to develop, research, and release products. At that point what kind of autonomy does Apple/other companies have?
100% EU has been kneecapping tech sector here for a long time. There was a great video i watched on a subject before that talked about the sheer amount of red tape in EU and how that means the tech sector is a small fraction of what it could be. I think Spotify is the only big tech company from here and even then, I don't think they ever turned a profit. EU wants to completely level the playing field and make sure no one does better. They forced Apple to add USB-C but even a broken clock is right twice a day.
The EU thinks any reg they make will be adopted by the rest of the world due to their size. They’ve said this publicly, they’re trying to bully these companies, now they’re going to start learning the downside of that over the next several years.
This sucks and if this kind of gimping continues I might just consider going back to Android instead
Android will be gimped too - they have to follow the same rules as Apple. Google Gemini launched 6 months later or so in the EU than everywhere else, and that is just a web service. For features baked into Android it might take much longer. It seems the EU has made it illegal to integrate features in the OS, that are not interchangeable by your competitors, which is absurd
Android will just have some shitty, insecure, likely ad-ridden, third party solution that barely ticks some box for "feature parity". Just like everything else. It's basically the business model. Do whatever garbage thing you have to with the loss leader of an operating system, just get the platform into as many hands as possible, and then hoover up all their data for ad sales.
So Siri will stay shit for EU users? Sigh, was looking forward for the AI. Really shitty
They need more time to develop things according to regulations. That's it. Europe cookies consent is worse than ads, by thr way
those banners you get are because they WANT you to accept the cookies, there's no reason for them to be so complicated except privacy invasion lol
Cookie banners are annoying for sure, but as you say, they don't have to be as obtuse and confusing as they are in 99% of cases. Also, the cookie banners immediately show you how "seriously" a site takes your privacy if they let hundreds of "partners" use your data. I think the highest number of "partners" I saw was 650 or so. Insane.
It’s kind of funny the caution they took for compliance with these features, but are quite happy to risk breaking compliance by adding their core technology fee. There probably are a few hurdles, especially for the SharePlay screen sharing. I’d suspect these will eventually arrive, and they’re making it very public it’s being delayed by the EU in the hopes it makes people look negatively on the DMA
CTF is fine. You are using Apple technology and you have to pay one way or another. No law can ask a company to give you stuff for free.
That’s not true. Laws do that all the time. Doesn’t make good policy though.
The eu are currently investigating, and I will place money that they find apple breached the dma
The EU is really gonna suffer long term by not being business friendly…regulation is good but over regulation isn’t. The EU should have stopped at USB C and GDPR, after which the DMA was honestly kinda useless 🤷🏻♂️. It stifles any innovation as companies like Apple can no longer defend their software API’s which they work on since the DMA means giving it away for free to start ups and why would any sane company do that lol and the DMA kinda destroys privacy in a weird way too with them giving user data to third party without explicit consent from the user 💀 (can be wrong on this one but I read it on some website)
Europe desperately wants cheap Chinese android phones lol
I can (stretching my goodwill) believe that Apple Intelligence needs some touching up for the European market — Meta is having some issues with their integration of LLMs in their apps, and OpenAI had to get compliant with GDPR. Cutting iPhone mirroring and screen sharing seems completely retaliatory to me, though. All the previous Continuity features are available in Europe, as is Messages screen sharing on macOS. I don't get how these new features differ materially on a policy level from what we already have.
I'm sure there's a retaliatory aspect to it, but I can also imagine an EU regulator telling Apple that it's anti-competitive that you can only mirror an iPhone on a MacBook and not an Android device, or something like that.
Because EU is now enforcing against apple in large sums. Expect every new feature from the big players to be put through the lawyer test before being released in EU. What exists already is a liability now, and so they need to look at ROI of every features incremental value in EU vs. potential litigation and fine costs of it might fall under the vague regulations as written. When fines are in billions it becomes very hard to release anything lawyers might think will face scrutiny, it is doubtful something like mirroring would have added billions to EU sales or the lack of it will cost billions.
I get your reasoning, but let’s please remember that the European Commission is a straight-up centrist, pro-business political body: they will threaten big fines, but the actual written–text regulation is nothing particularly radical or hard to comply with, and they would be extremely flexible if Apple showed good intentions. It’s Apple that has been kicking and screaming about the DMA, the Commission is not going down particularly hard on them and would love for the company to work towards respecting the law. I’m amazed that Apple would be willing to launch the next iPhone without its marquee feature, after months of TV ads for Galaxy AI and Circle to Search, in a market where they are neck and neck with Samsung.
> please remember that the European Commission is a straight-up centrist, pro-business political body > they would be extremely flexible if Apple showed good intentions You say they are pro-business and flexible at the same time. That's not possible. Flexibility is the hallmark of corrupt third-world countries and other shitholes. If you have friends, you can do business, and if you don't, you're screwed. That's what a flexible law means. Legitimate businesses usually don't appreciate this kind of environment. It's the "businesses" that profit from administrative capture that thrive under such conditions.
“European Commission is a straight-up centrist, pro-business political body” Hahahahaha
The commission is pro *European* businesses, if that.
That's a fucking yikes dude... I was finding a reason to upgrade my 12 pro soon-ish :( Despite me being from Europe I do not like the over regulating like EU likes to do, eventually it will come to this where companies would skip Europe entirely with features. This also seems like the beggining of this kind of stuff, who knows, maybe in the future apple will entirely skip Europe for a new product release. I might be exageratting but now it seems more possible than ever for such things
This shit is getting terrible… Everytime I think of a crazy idea of thinkinh startup, doing it in EU seems like a huge nightmare due to all these freaking laws.
Switching to android I guess? AI later sure but iPhone mirroring why???
My guess is that they think someone would argue that it should be a feature available with any platform be it Windows, Linux, etc or that it introduces more lock in
iPhone mirroring probably uses private APIs at the system level, which the DMA forbids
Yeah, technically in the EU Apple has to let any app mirror the screen if the platform can do it. They also have to let any app collect data for AI the same way Apple can collect it via app intents and have no oversight.
The iPhone mirroring feature is not actually mirroring. The iPhone can be locked and charging/tucked away somewhere. I’m pretty sure this involves more low level access than competing screen mirroring apps have. Same thing for AI. Apple has their own models in the system that other developers cannot access. And they pull information together from different apps and system services. And the feature is available on any text field (for the writing stuff). Other services do not have this level of integration with the system.
They also don’t have what it takes to handle private data in the cloud. How many companies operate their cloud in this way? https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/
Allowing any PC or computer in the world (not only your Apple device, signed into your iCloud) to mirror your iPhone in the background opens up a whole can of worms. Imagine the abuse from hackers and criminals. “Hi, Martha, 81yo, we are calling from Apple to help you with your phone email. Press “approve” to give us access to your phone, files and all your apps, thank you”.
I know, right? It's like they live in 1999 and scam call centers in India do not exist. The EU might have thought a bit too good of themselves after the third party stores and started to push a little bit too far.
Thanks EU, saves me a lot of money for not upgrading from my 13p :)
EI plans on rolling out new AI laws. Apple waiting knowing the laws are changing but not knowing what the laws will be either. Hasn’t been voted on. It’s not just Apple; it’s anything AI related.