... which makes up a small fraction of Apple's profits. About 7% [1].

Losing 7% would be "A big deal", although they'd also lose a lot of the operational costs so the overall loss may be less than that. There are several costs of doing business in the EU.

I can also see them selling more to the UK and a black-market opening up in the EU for UK phones. Again, not a huge thing but a little +ve offset.

Overall, I could see it happening, maybe, emphasis on the maybe part. I think the EU thinks it's inconceivable for Apple to exit their market. I also think Apple are very hard-headed. Make the cost/benefit balance skew too heavily in the -ve direction, and the potential of future profits stop outweighing the costs.

Personally I really hope they just do as they're told by the EU because I think it'd hit the stock, and I could do with the stock staying reasonably high in the short term, but they'd recover. Hell, they could run on cash/savings with no sales for several years at the current rate...

[1]: https://daringfireball.net/2024/03/more_on_the_eus_market_mi...

Is it a joke? Apple is 27% of Apple revenue, profit is irrelevant as this is just finance engineering and you can put the value you want for tax reason.

>It’s unclear whether Maestri was saying that the EU accounts for 7 percent of Apple’s worldwide App Store revenue, or 7 percent of all revenue, but I suspect it doesn’t matter, and that both are around 7 percent

Eh.

Of Apple were to give up on the second largest market (GDP) in the world, I think that would make their platforms a lot less attractive as a target for software makers. More of them might decide to target other platforms first.