To comply with the EU legislation, Apple pushes changes to its software, allowing for example side-loading of applicatons in iOS 17.4 and later. But, this change is only applied to iPhones resided in EU.
To comply with another legislation from the same EU, Apple has changed iPhone 15’s charger port to USB-C. But this one, they do on global scale. EVERY iPhone 15 has USB-C, EVERY iPhone from now on will have USB-C port.
Why does it worth the hassle to ship different software in different parts of the world, but not worth it to do the same with hardware?
In: Technology
As far as I am aware Apple has wanted to switch to USB-C for a while. They already started doing it on MacBooks and iPads well before the EU legislation went into effect.
However, last time they changed the phone connector (from the old 30-pin dock connector to Lightning) everyone complained about how they needed to buy all new cables in response to the change. Apple committed to keeping Lightning for a minimum of 10 years and not change frequently. Guess when those 10-ish years were up? The EU rules just happened to go into effect at the same time Apple would have been looking to change anyway.
On the other side, they have no interest in opening the App Store, so they are going to comply, but only to the absolute minimum extent they can get away with.
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