I’m more surprised that it’s taken this long for a big bad tech company (or companies) to exclude software or hardware releases to the EU. No matter how much of a hit to their (very large) bottom line, Apple or any company should be welcome to skip the EU if they se fit to go that route. I'm not sure Apple’s really out of line to do this either [1] … aybe they’ll never completely pull out of the EU, but if they do maybe that’s also the goal of the EU: to get EU based companies a chance? All it takes now is for Apple to see pulling out as a win-win.
> No matter how much of a hit to their (very large) bottom line, Apple or any company should be welcome to skip the EU if they se fit to go that route
It is a massive hit, though. Not just in Financials over missing millions of users, but in many other indirect ways regarding taxes, overseas relations, resources, and competition. You don't want to just give all that to some competitor who will take the time to bend over backwards for the EU.
SKUs is also a huge manufacturing cost as well. If you've worked in GPU programming you know the sheer hit in performance that branching can cause (without a lot of smart planning). It's the exact same with factories, but on a scale of months instead of seconds.
China, India and Russia were already protective of their space and EU was the only large open market where the American tech giants were able to operate freely. Then EU went protective too but not by banning but making set of rules. An American company disregarding the European rules wouldn't be received nicely, Europe is keeping its market open just says follow the rules that we put in place so we don't have to ban foreign tech like China and the USA did.
I don't see Europeans siding with the American companies on this, if it becomes a conflict it may easily end the same way it ends in China and the USA: Banning foreign owned companies operating in certain industries due to national security reasons.
Have you heard about the rise of far-right in the EU? These right wingers are not the same as the American ones, they don't intent to make America Great again but to make Europe great again. They don't obsess with abortion and stuff but with foreign influence and the only reason some of these are sympathetic to Russia is because they see it as "enemy of their enemy, America". Even in UK there's non-negligible anti-Americanism and the lefties(among which anti-Americanism is more widespread) are about to take power.
If Trump wins the elections and the USA insulates itself as he promises, you can reasonably expect to see the market of Apple and all other tech companies dropping to US-only.
The EU smartphone market will be filled with Korean/Chinese brands who will be willing to cooperate, likely even partnering with local capital to come up with European brands in this.
But who knows, a lot can change with the wars and political realignment going on. It's also possible for Europe to completely give up in exchange of protection but that seems less likely as the US is pushing in the other direction.
[1}: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/03/eff-tells-eu-commissio...