And that's one that got big enough to remember them. Wikipedia lists 188 mobile phone manufacturers [1]. A lot of them very local (e.g. EvertekTunisie making phones for Tunisia and Morocco) or defunct; But even my local (German) retailer offers 35 brands. Big ones like Apple, Samsung and Xiaomi, budget brands like Oppo or ZTE, niche brands like CAT or Beafon. It's a crowded market that doesn't seem particularly hard to enter.
And judging by the spotty compatibility of LineageOS they don't all use the same hardware either.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Mobile_phone_manufact...
Europe has an unhealthy culture of naturalistic hippiedom, so this is just the same thing that causes Germany to shut down nuclear power.
(If you think this one's good, try combining it with their six other giant laws you haven't heard of some of which conflict with this.)
And every country regulates cell phones in particular, since they use shared airwaves, have rare earth metals in them, sometimes have exploding batteries etc.
Really? Are you claiming that capitalists are so much of a fool that instead of making, say, half the profit they were making before in an unregulated market, they would readily prefer to make 0 profits? The reality is that if American BigTech exit the EU market, then some local or non-American competitor will step in to fill the vacuum. Or have you already forgotten that the European Nokia once dominated the mobile phone industry?
As a legislative body it certainly isn't perfect but you are ascribing motivations and making statements about it that have zero connection with reality.
Please do link the other "six giant laws that conflict".
The people on here saying phone OSes should be open source and unlocked to make them last longer will find the ecodesign and security regulations actually encourage locking them down so you can't break them.
could you specify the actual GDPR regulations in question which clearly conflict with these battery regulations (without any creative contrivance required on our part)?
or are you saying there isn't a conflict in that case (in which case, which ones do?) that part wasn't clear
it seems like a creative but unlikely contrivance that there is an actual legal conflict there as you describe
you quoting yourself when it doesn't answer the question, without adding more context, leads me to believe that you don't think there is any actual legal conflict there, either
Yes, I firmly believe every every manufacturer would ignore an economic block full of developed countries and 450M people.
This is the sort of bad take that keeps me returning to HN. Some people here are incredibly dense.
On a side note, I wouldn't mind if Apple decided to not sell their toys around here anymore.
Regulations can be adapted to affect only the companies that reach X percentage in sales or in market share. The EU's Digital Markets Act does precisely this, for instance.
The regulators can let smaller players grow and thrive, and regulate them once they've exceeded a certain threshold.
Look at that GDPR popup. I and everyone I know just clicks “Accept All Cookies” now.
Sometimes regulators make something amazing, but sometimes it’s a load of turd. It’s hard to tell what’s going to turn out sometimes.
No one is building a product from complete scratch.
It’s the smaller products and businesses that cease to exist because it’s too expensive to meet regulations. Bad regulation raises the cost of entry into the market and strengthens the big players like Apple.