> “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.
Apart from the “security concerns” of allowing use of non Apple services it will be interesting to hear the specifics of these. I thought most AI features were being released in American English before other locales in 2025 anyway - this does sound like an excuse to get the public to put pressure on the EU
> Apart from the “security concerns” of allowing use of non Apple services
I would think that if the EU requires Apple to allow third parties to use the new screen sharing APIs with the same privileges, that would be a security concern.
I kind of figure if I'm sharing a constant stream of screenshots of my screen with one company why not share them with every company? Might as well send it to the hackers too, I guess.
I don’t know if you’re joking but this is actually an amazing example of a very real organizational challenge: people get tired of dealing with edge cases, so they give up all together. I absolutely 100% trust Apple to do what it thinks is best for profits, and I don’t see any way that eroding/risking their privacy stance would pay off. Not to say “I don’t have anything to hide”, but I definitely don’t have any profitable to hide!
I'm pretty sure that SharePlay screensharing is encrypted like FaceTime is, so I don't think you're sharing that stream of screenshots with Apple by using it. Their concern would be that if you allow third parties to use that API, they might stream your screen elsewhere.
My jest was aimed at Siri's Apple Intelligence (AI) upcoming Onscreen Awareness. I'd like to also share my screenshots stream to be analyzed Microsoft AI's Copilot+ Recall feature for ultimate AI analysis and any other company that wants to send my screen to AI. Alphabet Intelligence? Sign my screen up!
Apple announced many of the new features are not on-device. There are three categories:
1. On device
2. Private cloud compute (aka Apple’s servers)
3. OpenAI (but only if you approve each time it’s used)
This isn’t really a new thing - you could always tell that some of Apple’s AI features depending on remote servers by disconnecting from the internet, using Siri and seeing how much of it stopped working.
2 I guess you can argue; they say that's all encrypted and they're sharing the OS with security researchers to audit. 3 I don't think is applicable, OpenAI is not getting screenshots for awareness, they're just getting "I asked Siri 'write a limerick about the DMA,' Siri can't do that, can you do that?"
I find (2) to be kind of a BS narrative. It’s not like they are open-sourcing the code. All big tech companies have security audit programs. Does that assuage your security concerns when Google, Meta, etc do it? Basically, what they are saying is they are doing it on the backend and you should give them credit for doing it on the frontend because some security researchers are going to get a Disneyland tour.
Personally, I actually am somewhat encouraged that tech companies are subject to legal process (in the form of lawsuit discovery etc). Tech companies have paid billion-dollar settlements for allegedly breaking the laws in segments of their business that don’t generate billions in profits. Obviously there’s a lot of room for them to push the limits of the law, disagreement about what the law is, and there mays be ways for them to get away with things. But the fact that audits are happening, the code and logs can end up in court acts as some kind of constraint on their behavior.
“We’ll take the extraordinary step of making software images of every production build of PCC publicly available for security research. This promise, too, is an enforceable guarantee: user devices will be willing to send data only to PCC nodes that can cryptographically attest to running publicly listed software” [1].
You’re thinking of the GDPR. Apple’s citing the regulatory requirements imposed by the DMA, which are written down but remain unclear because the EC would apparently prefer Apple to figure out the “spirit” of the law and comply with that instead.
Well, you can either try to comply with the spirit of the law and work with the EU to clarify, or you can maliciously comply with the letter and get fined.
I'm not a lawyer, but I didn't need to be one to see the 0.5 €/user/yr fee and think "yeeeeah that won't fly".
Or maybe Apple's legal team should hire me to advise on the spirit of the law.
Dude, malicious compliance is not a real legal term and if Apple is charged, it's going to be for non-compliance, because even if you comply "maliciously", if you are compliant, then you are compliant. Either the text of the law matters, or it really doesn't, but out of the institutions that form the government of the European Union, the EC is the one with exclusive legislative initiative; the EU Parliament doesn't write the laws it is asked to vote on, nor do they have the power to compel (only ask) the EC to write a law so if anyone within the EU can write what they mean into the text of a law since they're also the ones who will be enforcing it, it is exactly the European Commission. The EC seems convinced that Apple's reading of the text is just wrong, and most likely the dust won't settle on this until they take this to the CJEU.
Well, Apple says it complied, the EU says it didn't. If the letter of the law was the whole law, this would be objective, but apparently it isn't, since they're disagreeing. As you say, there is the "reading of the text", and yes, it probably needs the CJEU.
Yeah, unfortunately when there is a dispute in how the law should be read, it goes to the courts. I will say that Apple is at a massive disadvantage even if it's possible for them to win in court because I don't know exactly how the CJEU does things, but generally here in America, there is some debate in judicial philosophies between whether you follow the text, the text and nothing but the text of the law, if you follow the text and the original intent of Congress at the time that they wrote the text, or if you read into the intent of the text and what the text was trying to accomplish.
As far as original intent goes, the EC wrote it, and very recently. There won't be much of a debate if it comes down to that, but if the CJEU is inclined to go straight to the text and question the parties on that, Apple might actually have a decent shot at beating the EU in court, but then theoretically the EC can just rewrite the law and try again and there really isn't anyone that could stop them so… yeah.
The EU is undergoing something of a regime change right now so it is possible this won’t just be one bad decade for Apple (and Google, Facebook, ByteDance, etc.), but odds are low.
It's pretty easy to see where they're coming from.
Apple's approach to AI integration draws a pretty clear line between the part that Apple controls and takes credit/blame for privacy of (i.e. on-device models and their private cloud system) and third-parties that require specific consent to send data to (ChatGPT).
If the EU decided that Apple has to allow their whole on-device and private cloud stack to be warning-less-ly swapped out for PII_GrabberGPT, NüdLeaker Pro, or ScamBot9000 if the user chooses it from a legally required randomized menu, then I can see why they would have rational concerns about user privacy.
The problem is not just about interoperability. According to DSA, given Apple is one of the designated companies, they are responsible for security and privacy while DMA mandates that they allow for interoperability when they add functionalities. It's a fundamental conflict and requires trade off. Apple is likely waiting for the current term to be over in november and then deal with the new regime. Vestager is called a waning star, and she has been most vocal about it in recent times.
> Apple is likely waiting for the current term to be over
I imagine they need the likes of Mistral to lobby for them. Being locked out of the richest billion people in the world’s phones structurally disadvantages the European AI sector.
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.
I can totally understand why Apple is doing this. And I hate it. Mostly because the regulations are not technical enough to get followed within soft- and hardware. The EU is just preventing any (most, maybe just a few, but „any“ from my perspective) new (consumer) technology now.
I’d rather have to wait a while for shiny new feature, than dive head first into the unknown.
We made that mistake with social media, not taking it seriously enough. I can wait a hot minute for my iPhone to summarise paragraphs whilst we try and avoid rampant, democracy breaking technology 2.0.
> I’d rather have to wait a while for shiny new feature, than dive head first into the unknown.
Is there a possible world where that is your choice and that vision is not imposed on me ? I fully respect your point of view and strongly believe you should have that option at your disposal.
But I also feel like having an AI model running on my (private) device should be an option available to me if I want to.
You might never get it. Essentially Apple is saying they will need to negotiate with the EU to confirm they can add functionality without being found liable later on. That negotiation could end up in an impasse.
The only 'democracy breaking' I see with social media is all of the incumbents not wanting to deal with opposition and tossing around preposterous rhetoric like it was water in the ocean.
My company has been trying to tell my team to be “global” and support the EU for a good 10 years. Every time we even look it’s such a mess that we kick the can down the road and let the people who actually live there deal with it. Their footprint it vastly smaller than what we have in the US, yet seemingly much harder to manage due to all the regulations.
That was the issue, it still felt separate (I'm not sure if this was due to regulations or legacy systems). I was given logins to access their systems, and there were over a dozen, and no one ever did explain what they were all for. When I asked, the best I got was that it depended on the country, but even that wasn't too clear. I never did bother to figure it out. Eventually I transferred out of the team that had to care about that and had them delete my accounts. It's cropping back up in my new team, but so far the team in the EU is handling everything for their region. If they try to have us take if over, I think we'll need to run everything we do past legal, because none of us in the US have any idea what all the laws and rules are, not being around it.
Ah yes, here we go: if a country does not match the GDP of the USA, they will go bankrupt. Anything but America's GDP and military might means they have failed as a country and have failed their citizens
Yeah and we regulate ourself straight into liveable working conditions, public healthcare, paid vacations, parental leaves and all other kinds of really really nasty communist nightmares
How does low pay affect the “liveability” of work conditions? A waitress in the US makes as much or more than a software engineer in most of the EU. While the EU worker may receive more vacation time, and while he certainly has better personal financial skills (poverty will do that to you), he has no path towards a better future. A blue collar American worker, in the (increasingly unlikely) event that he chooses to manage his money well, can end up wealthy. A European who isn’t born wealthy will never become wealthy.
>public healthcare
Which everyone avoids, if they can afford it. The private system is really good though.
>parental leave
Because of the cost and risk of employing someone in the EU, when an employee takes maternity leave it’s the other employees who end up having to do the missing employee’s work. This is especially true with small businesses.
>communist nightmare
Over-socialized neo-feudal peasants who embrace their own impoverishment because they’ve been convinced that they’re superior to everyone else is pretty dystopian.
Over the years, overregulation will continue to lock the EU out of bleeding-edge technologies. Every feature, every website, every innovation that doesn’t launch in the EU further plunges the bloc into technological irrelevance.
It also often impacts more than the EU, we still have cookie banners on websites globally because EU came up with a good-intentions idea when 3rd party tracking ad cookies were a major privacy concern. But like a lot of regulations they stick after the world changes/adapts. Now 3rd party cookies are officially dying out at the browser level and browser fingerprinting has long ago eliminated any privacy gain of cookie banners (unless you care about some first party cookie on a site that can already track you across pages server side, or use URL identifiers and other JS/AJAX). Yet annoying non-standardized, sometimes mandatory, modals before you can read a news article or blog post persist for non EU internet users...
This is definitely a bit off-topic compared to the article, but it's worth noting that those modals are there to obtain consent to store and use your personal data, and aren't specifically related to cookies (anymore), but the GDPR. If the news website didn't store personally identifying information about you (anywhere! not just in cookies), it wouldn't have to obtain consent, and wouldn't need any modals.
I think the most annoying part of the regulation has been its lack of enforcement, because it has led to a weird sort of complacency where there's no clear knowledge of what is and isn't required, and then websites half-ass the banner (for example, they should be making it as easy to click Reject as it is to click Accept, not sending you down a dark pattern of checkboxes and stuff), or throw up a banner just to say they have one, even if they don't need it (I've seen that!).
So we get the worst of both worlds: bad modals that don't even do what they're supposed to, and no enforcement to correct any of it.
The European Union official website has a cookie banner (https://european-union.europa.eu/index_en), does that mean it is spying on me ? Should I be worried ? Or is the definition of "tracking cookies" so wide that even extremely innocuous websites still have to display that banner because the law is stupid ?
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity" (Hanlon's razor)
I would much prefer that to living in a state where Apple holds the power to simply kill any law or regulation they dislike by threatening not to launch their products in the EU.
EU productivity is already lagging its peers. Being locked out of having the most cutting edge technologies will further plunge the block into a productivity decay. Less productivity means everyone in Europe will get poorer, with declining living standards. This is not an outcome Europe can afford, especially considering its aging workforce.
There is no silver lining to this. The EU has to stop strangling its most productive industries with onerous regulations, and allow markets the freedom to innovate and increase productivity.
Productivity is not a goal in itself. It is a means to a healthy and happy populace. Europe doesn’t have record breaking GDP but features many of the happiest people in the world. Different values result in different measures of success, I guess
Productivity is ultimately the measure of the efficiency of human labor. The more productive workers are, the more free time they’ll have to do whatever it is they want to do to make themselves happy.
In the short term, lagging productivity can be masked by debt spending and other measures, but in the long run, the only thing that increases human wealth and material abundance is labor productivity. Everything else is illusionary.
All human societies have sought to increase labor productivity. The first stone tools, agriculture, and nuclear reactors are all productivity-enhancing inventions. Any society that opts out of seeking labor productivity will eventually see their wealth, living standards, and ultimately happiness decline. There is no way out of that trap.
And to be clear, there’s absolutely nothing good about low productivity for workers. All that means is that you’re spending more time working for lower wages, to produce things of lower value.
You're conflating productivity and wealth, and wealth and happiness. These are, you'll forgive me for saying - very American fallacies. The productivity of a country says little to nothing about it's levels of relative and absolute poverty, social inequality, and capacity for social reproduction. Compare say Berlin - an historically 'depressed' city with a smaller economy than most German cities, with any first tier US cities. Free public kitas (similar to kindergarten), decent holiday leave, a significant amount of paid maternity / paternity leave, a large number of parks, excellent public transport, subsidised health care and (until very recently) affordable housing, make raising a family on a moderate wage possible. The overall potential for happiness and observable comfort and stress levels of the population are measurably different from a comparably sized American city where raising a family or living a normal adult life are compromised for a large percentage of the population by the absence of all or most of these things.
> Any society that opts out of seeking labor productivity will eventually see their wealth, living standards, and ultimately happiness decline. There is no way out of that trap.
I'd argue the reverse - any society that privileges productivity over social reproduction and liveable cities will never be able to tame violent crime, achieve real social mobility or provide a safe and enriching environment for a majority of its citizenry.
It’s real easy to say this right now, because the EU has only lagged its peers in productivity for only the last decade —- thus the compounding effects of lagging productivity are not yet evident. However several more decades of lagging productivity will eventually result in European living standards being several decades behind their peers.
If the EU thinks that low labor productivity is the path to happiness, going down that path is their prerogative, but long term that path will only lead to ruin. Lagging productivity has never in human history lead to civilizational success. Europe will be outcompeted and eventually dominated by its more productive peers.
Genuinely, look at the US in the same time period. The quality of life for most people across a a range of measures is enormously worse. Hours worked, health outcomes, housing security etc. Productivity - like GDP, is enormously more relevant to capitalist investment classes than normal people. A teacher, working in a US city any time between say 1900 and 1980 could save and buy a house, get married, have children - likely on a single salary. Towards the latter half of that period, they could also afford a car, pay for their children's university education, take annual holidays etc. Is that true today? Is it true in most cities of a nurse, a factory worker, a service economy worker? You're confusing the metric with the outcome. The metric is designed to measure only what is relevant to the most wealth, privileged people in society.
> The more productive workers are, the more free time they’ll have to do whatever it is they want to do to make themselves happy.
Just patently untrue. The more productive you are the more work your boss will send your way, while walking away with fatter margins. If he can. Which is where EU regulation comes in.
Europe’s rules govern the balance between capital owners and labor. It’s far from perfect but it has resulted in fairly stable and happy societies. (At least apart from certain external factors)
Now there is of course nothing wrong with productivity. It is, as you say, very good in many ways. But you cannot look only at a society’s productivity metrics to judge success-and my by success I mean happiness, because that is my goal. Look at happiness in the US vs Europe for example. I know where I’d rather live.
> Productivity is ultimately the measure of the efficiency of human labor. The more productive workers are, the more free time they’ll have to do whatever it is they want to do to make themselves happy.
Due to the demands for constant economic growth increased productivity does not actually result in more free time, just more economic output.
The average human throughout human has existed at subsistence level. That means that nearly all of their time was spent producing/collecting the food to feed themselves.
The average American now spends just 10% of their wages on food. That effectively means, just 10% of Americans’s working life dedicated to food cultivation. That’s the result of economic productivity.
If an American is happy existing at a subsistence level, they’re free to slash their working hours to a tiny fraction of the average person. However, humans have unlimited material desires, which tends to keep us working.
> The more productive workers are, the more free time they’ll have to do whatever it is they want to do to make themselves happy.
In a profit-driven business, the more productive the workers are, the more work you can throw at them. Free time doesn't enter into the equation unless business owners need to manage a compliance issue regarding labor regulations.
> The more productive workers are, the more free time they’ll have to do whatever it is they want to do to make themselves happy
Right, there are so many countries in the world where increased productivity led to 4-day work week. In fact, I could count these countries on the fingers of one hand.
I don't suppose you've heard of the Paul Krugman quote? "Productivity isn’t everything, but in the long run, it’s almost everything." Without productivity improvements you are in peril of replaying the ant and the grasshopper as the grasshopper.
> Less productivity means everyone in Europe will get poorer, with declining living standards
We have some of the highest living standards in the world. In caparison to the U.S.A. in particular, it's like a utopia.
> There is no silver lining to this. The EU has to stop strangling its most productive industries with onerous regulations, and allow markets the freedom to innovate and increase productivity.
The silver lining is American cultural imperialism is ended in Europe, and we live how we want to over here. There are different ways of living, with different values.
> We have some of the highest living standards in the world. In caparison to the U.S.A. in particular, it's like a utopia.
Give it a few more decades of compounding lagging productivity, and that will no longer be true.
> The silver lining is American cultural imperialism is ended in Europe, and we live how we want to over here. There are different ways of living, with different values.
Productivity has nothing to do with cultural imperialism. China has dramatically increased their productivity, and that story has nothing to do with American imperialism
To each their own I guess. Every human-centric development in tech over the past decade which puts people before the interests of corporations seems to have been pushed by the EU. I applaud it all. And it’s making the whole world a more private, less exploited place
Except the only ones building products and services actually used every day by humans are corporations - not “the EU”. Hardware, software, stuff I use for fun, work and live, comes from corporations of all sizes - not politicians.
Yes, europe suffered a hard decade once denied access to the technological utopia that some of the most mathematical minds in all of the san fransisco bay area had created, gpt 4 voice mode WHEN you push SIRI BUTTON technology.
I think the EU’s regulations are boneheaded, but I appreciate that there are multiple ways we’re seeing societies deal with the ambiguities of technology, and we can see how it plays out. Different strokes.
This take seems a bit overwrought to me, given that the AI technologies that Apple is launching look more like fun toys that are integrated into the OS.
Maybe less integration will turn out better. Do we need native apps? You can use a website and then cut and paste.
> Over the years, overregulation will continue to lock the EU out of bleeding-edge technologies
Agreed, and; hooray!
Rather than plunging us "into technological irrelevance", it saves us from nonsense nobody asked for, mostly existing to sell more hardware that nobody needs.
Europeans will continue to buy the hardware, except rather than being able to afford the Apple devices they’ll buy some very low quality knockoffs from Shein.
It's not a tantrum; it's Apple saying to EU regulators we can't provide these features securely and privately while also while also making them DMA-compliant.
Many Apple Intelligence won't fully rollout until sometime in 2025, so there's time for the EU to decide what they want to do.
> it's Apple saying to EU regulators we can't provide these features securely and privately
They can't, or they won't?
Just because they say they can't do something doesn't mean it's true, especially when that something can negatively affect their profits and market share, so then they weaponize it as "think of your security!".
Considering Apple's insane wealth and technical expertise, it's definitely possible, they just don't want to do it because they want things their way not the government's way, unless that government is China, then everything is suddenly technically possible. Using Chinese cloud providers for iCloud? You got it. CCP backdoors for everything? Consider it done.
The EU accounted for more than $24 billion in revenue last quarter, the most revenue outside of North America. Obviously this isn't something Apple takes lightly.
Take a look at Apple's Private Cloud Compute white paper [1] and explain how Apple's supposed to make it DMA-compliant without sacrificing its security and privacy guarantees. Short answer: they can't without essentially starting over.
EU residents will get all of the other iOS 18 features but not Apple Intelligence and a couple of others. The average EU citizen won't even know anything is missing.
Even for those who are paying attention, they're used to getting tech features long after they're available to the rest of the world.
>Take a look at Apple's Private Cloud Compute white paper [1] and explain how Apple's supposed to make it DMA-compliant without sacrificing its security and privacy guarantees.
Why should I figure it out for them? That's why they have so many highly skilled well paid engineers on their payroll, to solve stuff like this.
It's not my job to solve their cloud architecture design issues. Why don't they use some of that 24 Billion in EU revenue to engineer it to be EU privacy compliant?
And excuse me for not trusting their own biased interpretation of the reasoning why their clod architecture is incompatible with EU regulations. I have as much trust in that explanation as in a school kid explaining how he can't do his homework because his dog is eating it.
Until I get an unbiased opinion form a independent third party, I'm not buying Apples sob story tantrum.
> The EU accounted for more than $24 billion in revenue last quarter, the most revenue outside of North America. Obviously this isn't something Apple takes lightly.
"Europe", not the EU.
And Apple's "Europe" segment isn't even just Europe. It also includes India, the Middle East and Africa.
>It’s a giant finger for devs and consumers in Europe.
If EU would have a VC sector anywhere near the US or even Chinese ones, this is actually the perfect time and market opportunity for a local EU competitor to come out and launch a privacy focused smartphone that's compliant with local market regulations and also includes the AI features that Apple refuses to release out of spite.
Apple only does shit like this because they know that the alternatives EU has in the consumer facing smartphone tech space is weak AF and poses no significant competition and no threat to them, unlike in China where Huawei and Xiaomi are ready to pounce if Apple were to slip.
Regulations are good, but having domestic alternative competitors is even better, and the EU is lacking here and Apple knows this hence it can play chicken.
I will be more than happy to get additional alternatives. Apple is big here, but not as dominant as it is in the US. It won’t be a big deal for folks to skip an upgrade cycle or turn to Samsung, Fairphone and others.
Apple users in the EU aren't going to abandon their iPhones, ecosystem ties and AppStore purchases en masse, and move to Android or some boutique maker like Fairphone just because Apple disabled AI feature for them. A handful might but not enough to scare Apple.
Once people are tied to an ecosystem for many years, they're not just gonna abandon it without a major life inconvenience.
I think it's not that they have to make it able to screen share with Windows, but allow the same APIs they use to screen share to Mac open to anyone that want's to make a iPhone to Windows/Linux/Android screen sharing app.
I know right? The DMA resonates closely with what Apple supposedly highlights as their values. It seems they’re not so good after all. For one, I’m happy about Apple Intelligence, like Microsoft Recall it felt kind of creepy.
Their new slate of ai products will be able to have screen reading capabilities. There are legitimate concerns for user privacy here. Their agreement with OpenAI is likely very strict.
Given that all three of those things are documented and present threats to Windows and MacOS (as well as iOS and Android), I guess so. Those users seem to "surivive" fine.
I've never heard of ransomware, botnets, or keyloggers on iPhones. I know less about Android, and how much it depends on whether you only install apps from within the Play store or not.
But no, I wouldn't call it "surviving" if you get hit by ransomwhere and have to pay hundreds/thousands of dollars to restore your data, or lose your data.
OK great, but getting hacked by ransomware still isn't what I'd call "surviving".
It's a matter of tradeoffs. In exchange for making more security decisions for yourself, you wind up with a much higher risk of losing your data and privacy. So it's important to acknowledge what you're giving up as well.
And Apple isn't exactly a "random tech company". It's currently literally the third largest company in the world [1]. That's about as opposite of being a "random" company as a company can possibly be.
In contrast, it's precisely the software that people do install from seeming "random tech companies" that can conceal secret keyloggers, etc.
They dealt with this for third-party keyboards by barring them from connecting to the internet, they could do something similar to replacement on-device models. Even if that meant the "ask chatgpt" option wouldn't be available in the EU.
I think they're more motivated by trying to scaremonger about the DMA, in much the same way they and others did about GDPR.
There are legitimate concerns for user privacy with any third-party integration, including OpenAI which is why Apple asks you before sending a request to ChatGPT. They solved this problem already, and I guess they want to try and hold EU users over a barrel by claiming interoperability is impossible or something.
Seriously, what kind of fearmongering can Apple push that doesn't make you side-eye the OpenAI integration even more?
> There are legitimate concerns for user privacy with any third-party integration, including OpenAI which is why Apple asks you before sending a request to ChatGPT
Right - which is why the ChatGPT integration is such a small part of the total Ai/LLM capabilities they announced, and they've loudly and publicly announced that it will support other 3rd parties in the future.
Buuuuut - what happens if/when the EU decides the DMA requires Apple to open up their Private Cloud and on-device models to 3rd party replacement?
Some of them might be worse for privacy, but if they offer better (or cheaper, which can be a quality) features, that's up to people.
If this was "the olden days", it would be a legitimate concern. But mobile OSs have long forced Apps to request permission to use various features explicitely and fall back graciously when some aren't provided. So outside security concerns that exist either way, they really can only claim to care about misinformed users.
It's literally a spyware API in the hands of a 3rd party - the options here for misinformed users are critically dangerous.
Recall was seen as 1st party spyware, Apple has more privacy trust and their implementation is very secure. Allowing Bob's AI screen reader to access the same total file/device access is very scary.
Then maybe don't build a spyware API? It's the same problem as screen-recording; you can design it to respect user privacy and prompt the user before turning on. You don't have to make it a matter of implicit trust if you design it well, and we should expect these sorts of private data APIs to be designed well and respect our agency.
If you don't look at Recall and Apple Intelligence with the same suspicion, you're stupid. Currently they are literally the same product, rebranded and marketed to different users. Two data pipes leading to one company's pool. But Apple's pipe is safer because... they have more "privacy trust" and Twitter says their whitepaper looks secure. You're being robbed in plain daylight and defending the robber; the implications of both features are disastrous.
> and they've loudly and publicly announced that it will support other 3rd parties in the future.
Then I don't see why people are defending the opposite statement, preemptively.
> Buuuuut - what happens if/when the EU decides the DMA requires Apple to open up their Private Cloud and on-device models to 3rd party replacement?
Literally nothing bad? If Apple implements all of these third-party models the same as their first-party ones, I think that would be awesome. People could replace Siri with Mistral and start getting useful results back instead of the same canned responses.
They have both. In the demos they were sending select complex tasks out to chatgpt with a large UI alert confirming the data was leaving Apple's walled garden.
There is nothing spiteful here, Apple's team has done an analysis and came to the conclusion that they can't reliably rollout this feature and be compliant with the EU regulations, which is the intended purpose of the regulation in the first place.
I'm not being snarky but you should be celebrating this since it's working as intended. I think it's a healthy sign when big tech companies are forced to a take pause before releasing a feature to masses.
There are consequences to regulations/legislation. You can't have it both ways. News at 11...
The privacy concerns are real, and EU regulations have teeth. No matter how iron-clad Apple's agreement is with OpenAI, it's still a significant liability since data protection and the rest that comes with this tech is outside of Apple's control. So now EU citizens don't get to play with this new feature. It's pretty simple.
As someone who has been involved in this journey from the beginning, essentially starting from a point akin to "fuck the EU, they're laughably ignorable" it's really interesting to read this sentence. We can work with that.
> essentially starting from a point akin to "fuck the EU, they're laughably ignorable" it's really interesting to read this sentence
If you don't have a physical presence within the EU, you can and probably should ignore their laws/regulations. There's very little if anything they can do to you. This includes GDPR and other "viral" laws. EU citizens seem to believe their laws apply around the world - they do not.
If you have a physical presence within the EU, like Apple does, then you cannot afford to be flippant with EU laws and regulations. They have real teeth, as you would expect for any country you have a physical presence in. Just as Apple cannot ignore US law since they are based here, they cannot ignore EU law since they are also based there.
EU regulations have consequences - both good and bad. If Apple cannot guarantee compliance with EU regulations/laws, then they will have to remove or limit features that might get them into trouble.
If EU citizens want this feature, then the regulations would need to change. It cannot be more simple than this.
A lot of people enjoy eating the cake these days...
Not arguing against that. The first thing is to be able to steer. And then you can steer in the right direction. So I'm glad it seems we'll finally be able to steer. Now we can figure out where exactly we want to end up.
> Due to the regulatory uncertainties brought about by the Digital Markets Act, we do not believe that we will be able to roll out three of these [new] features -- iPhone Mirroring, SharePlay Screen Sharing enhancements, and Apple Intelligence -- to our EU users this year.
Clearly Apple is worried that DMA will force them to open an API to do those things with a random 3rd party phone.
And Apple doesn’t want to compromise on security to achieve it - nor do the work needed to create an open API for all that.
I get the debate over AI, since that is a central repository of everything, but what is the problem of treating screen sharing with the same permission as -for example- the cameras?
an app could give permission to be shared, and it definitely should receive user permission to get the stream
The EU is already falling behind in the AI revolution, and now this. I love the EU, but is there any EU tech regulation that actually had the intended effect?
This was expected, multinationals have always offered a china specific product. Now there are 3 primary markets/product groupings. China, The US and the EU.
Out of curiosity, what about the Chinese market? It’s Apple’s third biggest market, and my assumption is since ChatGPT is banned there, they’ll need to work with some local AI companies to deliver the announced features.
Nice. Indeed I don't want any AI integrated in my computer/phone OS. I like AI but it should be a separate app, preferably open-source, cloud-independent and well-configurable.
It's always entertaining to watch Americans getting confused why the whole world doesn't want what they create. It's honestly pointless trying to explain another country's point of view as it's like talking to a brick wall
but that's the thing - the whole point of AI for Apple is to try to improve the stagnating iPhone sales. I wonder if it will lead to iPhone losing some marketshare in EU due to that.
>The company announced Friday it would block the release of [...] iPhone Mirroring [...] from users in the EU this year, because the Digital Markets Act allegedly forces it to downgrade the security of its products and services.
Because the DMA could force it to interoperate with third-party software that could also mirror it for users, which would allow third parties to spy on your screen.
The logic here is pretty straightforward, really. You might disagree, but the legal concern here is not confusing.
As an American, my perception is that Europeans work to live while those of us in the States live to work; the highest crime in America is hurting the rich, and the highest crime in Europe is hurting the working class.
> As a European, it’s incredibly sad to see this trend: the “right to forget” (HTTP status 451), GDPR, cookie prompts, losing the UK, DMA and DSA, Chat Control, immigration issues, Germany’s anti-nuclear stance, the war in Ukraine, high gas and oil prices, COVID-19 deaths, even the storming of Tesla’s factory.
With the way how you mentioned these things side-by-side maybe you just need pause from social-media.
Yeah, most of those things in that list I think a fair argument can be made the EU is in the right, is doing better, or is not to blame. However, that requires ignoring the rampant falsehoods on social media and researching authoritative sources.
sentimental slop -- the USA has a teen mental health epidemic, plastics trash in the waterways, tire residue in the fresh water, and many other avoidable woes.. 100x for China. In a longer time frame, pushback is healthy for stability
The regulations around AI in the European Union are not well formed. The EU has shown that they will regulate things years later and impose massive fines and business costs. The EU also happens to be Apple’s least profitable market, and one that isn’t going to be growing over the next two decades. There’s just no reason to get involved over there. It’s not worth the risk.
The most onerous parts of the AI Act, such as the provision that says "Member States shall confer on their market surveillance authorities the powers of... carrying out unannounced remote or on-site inspections", are not yet in force yet.
I wouldn't blame them for having security/IP concerns with allowing unannounced remote or on-site inspections to their facilities.
this have nothing to do with ai regulations. that's not how politics work.
if they are holding on ai (what can move the government) they are likely wanting leverage on something else (paired sale, charger standardization, who knows). it's definitely things that are costing them profits already.
It has nothing to do with the US. EU regulations are simultaneously unclear and very aggressive. There is significant business risk to operating there as a multi-national. It’s becoming a region that is profitable enough to exist in but not to invest in and Apple is declining the regulatory risk of introducing AI there. Some companies will go for it. Apple is too risk averse. Simple as that.
Worked at a company where certifications were reciprocal (USA certified could be sold in the EU, EU certified could be sold in the USA). Our product was prevented from sale in the EU because they disagreed on one part of the design, nevermind the reciprocity agreement. Add in the way that the EU is friendly to companies the do bribes and kickbacks versus in the USA you go to jail if you use bribes/kickbacks overseas, and we ended up at a huge disadvantage outside the USA. We had the best product, so we still won a lot of deals, but there were huge sales that the EU competitors either won or soured with their bribe/kickbacks schemes for government officials. They then tried to do the same to undermine our service center capabilities. After that I don't see EU regulations as being in anyone's interests, just in someone's pocket.
> It’s becoming a region that is profitable enough to exist in but not to invest in
Then so be it. If Europe's market collapses under the weight of it's own regulation, it's not Apple's fault. Except, Europe's market isn't collapsing and in fact leading multiple nations in drafting similar legislation. If forcing Apple to compete makes their risk forecast worse, reciprocally, that's not the EU's concern or problem. It might just reward the innovation and smart consumer-first design Apple has been avoiding recently.
If you think these laws are "unclear" then you must be in abject denial of what it's purpose is. It's called the "Digital Markets Act". There is a single company that these crosshairs are aimed at, and Apple wants to whine and say it's not fair that a municipal government caught their profiteering racket. Poor thing! What if trillion-dollar Apple decides they can't invest in Europe's future!
Scaremongering. The EU isn't inherently righteous, but their lack of connection to Apple's tax dollars made it very easy to call out Apple's hypocrisy. All Apple can do is whine, and pretend like they weren't illegally abusing Europe's market. I say pretend, because Apple knew full-well that what they were doing was wrong, and now invests inordinate amounts of money marketing, lawyering and lobbying their way out of it.
Corrupt, that is how US regulators look, and everyone knows it. But this is the website that is spawning far right fascists who are advocating for political violence in the bay area, so I don't think you will get a lot of reasonable takes here.
Umm... where exactly? Politically I've mostly seen a growing infestation of very lost communists who forget they are at a venture capital backed website.
Apart from the “security concerns” of allowing use of non Apple services it will be interesting to hear the specifics of these. I thought most AI features were being released in American English before other locales in 2025 anyway - this does sound like an excuse to get the public to put pressure on the EU