Apple Plans iPhone-to-Windows Copy and Paste in EU After Microsoft Request

[mlayer]

Probably you never heard of it, but the very superior video standard of that time was Video 2000 by Philips, which was also mangled by VHS, because it was a little too late to the market. Still, feature and quality wise, it was the best...

I vaguely read about it years ago in a magazine maybe 30 years ago. Since it was a PAL standard, no wonder.

 

[eifelbube]

The EU regulators don’t understand “safety”. If someone gets malicious code this way, they can thank the EU regulators🙂

It’s Apple’s job to make it safe.

 

[eifelbube]

This is ridiculous. This is an incredibly difficult feat to pull off securely and privately. Why should Apple and its users have to pay for this when it’s MS who wants it so badly?

Everyone wants to be in the Apple ecosystem without having to pay for it. EU has lost the damned plot.

People who work on both platforms benefit from this. If you do not want to have to pay for it, there is always the Android option.

 

[eifelbube]

It’s the case of the EU demanding Apple do something that’s technically impossible to do safely to Apple’s standards (or maybe more likely; impossible to do safely at a price that makes the ROI of the engineering effort worth it).

Apple is not a World Tech Standards organization. While most everyone would agree that Apple’s safety standards safety are high and marketed accordingly, they are nonethelss subjective. Is there a worldwide certification protocol for digital safety and privacy? Just because Apple argues that something is technically impossible does not necessarily mean that it is. Apple is a ~$5 trillion enterprise — surely do they have the financial resources to invest into extraordinary engineering efforts.

 

[surferfb]

Apple is not a World Tech Standards organization. While most everyone would agree that Apple’s safety standards safety are high and marketed accordingly, they are nonethelss subjective. Is there a worldwide certification protocol for digital safety and privacy? Just because Apple argues that something is technically impossible does not necessarily mean that it is. Apple is a ~$5 trillion enterprise — surely do they have the financial resources to invest into extraordinary engineering efforts.

Apple didn't become a $5 trillion enterprise by spending gobs of engineering resources on features they don't think are good ideas that aren't going to have a ROI. If the two options before Apple are "not offer a feature" or "spend a lot of money to implement something they don't think is a good idea and is unlikely to have a ROI" then don't be surprised if Apple chooses to not implement the feature.

And this feature isn't going to have a ROI anywhere close to justifying the cost to do it securely. So everyone in the EU loses it. If you want to take credit for the positives of the regulation, you also have to accept the negatives that come with it. I know the EU likes to claim all the good parts of the regulation are because of them and any negative consequences aren't the fault of the regulation, but because of malicious compliance, but that's laughable. They should own all of it.

 

[I7guy]

[…]Phones are not only a neccessity for everyday life in the 21st Century but both OS platforms are tightly controlled by two companies who exchange that much cash with each other it may as well be a duopoly.[…]

I agree. Smartphones are a great modern convenience. Cell phones are ALMOST a necessity.

 

[Abazigal]

Apple is not a World Tech Standards organization. While most everyone would agree that Apple’s safety standards safety are high and marketed accordingly, they are nonethelss subjective. Is there a worldwide certification protocol for digital safety and privacy? Just because Apple argues that something is technically impossible does not necessarily mean that it is. Apple is a ~$5 trillion enterprise — surely do they have the financial resources to invest into extraordinary engineering efforts.

Microsoft too is a trillion dollar company. And yet Crowdstrike happened, because the EU legislation prevented Microsoft from implementing a shift in security that it knew was necessary two decades ago.

And more specifically, the entire world suffered because a ruling intended solely for the EU market ended up being implemented for the entire world, because Microsoft decided it was simply more convenient to extend this implementation for everybody, rather than fork a version of Windows just for the EU that met its regulatory requirements.

At the end of the day, regulators need to understand that everything is a trade-off. I am fairly satisfied with the approach taken by Apple right now. A feature gets released for the EU if Apple decides it meets the demands of the DMA, it gets withheld if it doesn't (and Apple feels it's not worth the engineering resources to make said feature compliant), while the rest of the world gets full functionality as we should. Maybe one day, Siri AI will get green-lighted for the EU, and this is for Apple and the EU to settle amongst themselves. But whatever drama happens, it gets contained within the EU.

But of course, the tradeoff here is that some degree of engineering resources will still be utilised in the process. It is what it is.