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
Because it makes them more money.
They looked at how much extra it would cost them to manufacture and support double the number of iphone versions and how much they would earn from lightning accessories.
Given the fact that USB-C is also better than lightning port they saw it wasn’t worth it. Economies of scale mean that manufacturing higher volume of fewer products with mostly the same components is way cheaper.
For side loading that’s a different thing altogether. Not having competing app stores is very profitable. And allowing side loading doesn’t benefit Apple at all, so there is no potential upside from their point of view.
Maintaining different software versions is not that expensive as they are not that different.
The cost of developing iOS does not depend on the number of devices it will run on. Once you make it the scaling is basically free.
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