verne arase

xRAHx said:

My conclusion:

Apple's management is perfectly free to leave the EU market or ship more or less worthless "light" versions of Apple technology into the EU, but Apple would not only lose access to a huge market, it would also lose access to the knowledge and support of a highly skilled workforce in the EU that not only uses Apple technologies, but also develops highly innovative technologies that Apple buys and puts an Apple label on.

Vestager is not a lone wolf, but is acting in line with the wishes of the 27 national governments in the EU, including Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Poland, Romania, Netherlands, Belgium, Greece, Czech Republic, Austria, etc. 

The de facto influence of the EU goes far beyond this, because many non EU-member states in Europe cooperate closely with the EU for economic reasons or because they want to become members of the EU.

It is clear that China is now the world's economic leader, which is currently mainly due to the fact that it has the largest population. China is currently developing into the new sole (?) superpower. But in China, the government is not democratically elected. And all people and company managers in both the America and Europe need to think carefully about whether they want to be dominated by China and its vassals in Russia, North Korea and Iran in the near future.

Demographically speaking, China will be disappearing in the next ten years - probably sooner.

When you're a primarily agrarian society, you have lots of kids because you need the free labor to work the land and they're your retirement program.

When you industrialize and move into cities, kids are an expense - and if you're China and had a mandatory one child policy - you're waaayyy below the 2.1 children per family needed to sustain the population. China has overcounted their population by at least 100 million and their demographic pyramid shows they've got a rapidly aging workforce going into retirement with a very small number of children to support them all.

Russia's not far behind because no one wants to have kids in Russia, and the European powerhouses are following close on their heels behind Russia.

Germany's industries were all based on cheap Russian gas and a lot of that industry is trying to relocate to the United States where cheap gas still exists.

The saving demographic grace in the United States is the suburbs where US citizens continued to have kids, and the transition from agrarian to urban took place over a longer span of time.

Y'all ought to watch some Peter Zeihan on geopolitics - it can be quite illuminating.

BTW, Peter thinks that Apple is going away because they constantly made the wrong choice by staying in China, but being that Apple is one of the richest companies in the world I'm betting that they can bribe enough officials to keep the door open long enough for them and much of their supply chain to make their escape.

gatorguy said:

chasm said:

The problem here appears to be less about the DMA and more about a spokesperson for it who is more than happy to go off half-cocked based on incomplete information.

A **professional** would have said simply that the EU maintains its communications with Apple and will be discussing any changes with them, at least until both entities have, in fact, had a chance to get together and discuss recent announcements and what Apple’s concerns are regarding the EU’s rules.

Vestager seems to be the main problem here. Maybe replace her with someone more diplomatic and less dictatorial.

Her term ends later this year. 

The one thing that Europe seems to produce in quantity is meddling Bureaucrats.

That's not exclusive to Europe - we have an equal number of them in the United States Department of Justice who seem to want to sue Apple because iOS is not Android, and macOS isn't Windows.

anonymouse said:

Well, Apple has already said it will sell the EU the dumbed down products and the EU (Vestager) has said publicly that that is unacceptable, so I think we've already moved well past that point. (Apparently, Microsoft is in trouble for not selling the dumbed down product, so with the EU it's damned if you do, damned if you don't.)

To be fair, she didn't say Apple had to introduce Apple Intelligence in Europe - she said Apple knew Apple Intelligence was anti-competitive which is why they weren't introducing it in Europe.

I don't think she implied that Apple had to introduce Apple Intelligence in Europe.

As a minority stockholder, I'm fine with Apple withholding problematic features in Europe, especially if there's a good change it will run into difficulties with the DMA.

kiltedgreen said:

9secondkox2 said:

The EU is an extortion racket. Change my mind. 

The US is a violent force destabilising peace across the world to suit its own ends. Change my mind.

You mean by paying billions of dollars to defend Europe from an invading Russian Federation?

It ain't our back yard that's on the other side of Ukraine.

blitz1 said:

Point taken. Nice to see that the EC stays sharp as a knife against companies taking competition laws lightly.

if Apple won’t make Apple Intelligence aka OpenAI with an Apple layer, then users can still do without the layer

Not sure what you're saying here.

Apple Intelligence runs using an Apple Small Language Model on device. I that fails, the request is forwarded to Apple's Private Cloud Compute running on Apple Silicon servers running an Apple Large Language Model in Apple's data center which feature stronger SoCs and more memory on custom operating systems which have been stripped of even the ability to write data to disk (so there's no logging). Once the request has been satisfied it is scrubbed from the server.

If PCC fails and believes that a 3rd party LMM can solve the problem - currently only OpenAI's ChatGPT - and if the user has enabled ChatGPT, the user is prompted to see if he/she wants the request passed to the 3rd party AI provider. If so, the 3rd party provider is sent the minimal amount of data along with the request on an encrypted anonymized link and the result is returned to user. OpenAI has agreed not to log the request.

Apple Intelligence is not AKA OpenAI - OpenAI is just a 3rd party AI provider, the same way Google search is a 3rd party search provider.