Making a stand would be leaving UK (UK is not in the EU) altogether.

This is almost as bad as building a backdoor. This is leaving your customer in the rain.

Fortunately for Apple, most of them won't even know or realize it.

> This is leaving your customer in the rain.

vs. taking their phone away??? Idk if you're trolling or what but I would be incredibly pissed at Apple if they deprecated my phone over something like this.

Yes, imagine the outrage in the rich and influential in the UK if Apple would seriously threaten to leave the country about this. They would cause the law to be fixed which would help everybody.

But instead. They run away.

Selling this as "making a stand" is ridiculous. Nothing more.

Making a stand would be displaying a full-screen notification about why they cannot provide protection for British users' data and which party voted for this.

No. Making a stand would be to threaten to leave and watch all those influential iPhone users scramble to get this law rolled back. Everything else is marketing and cowardice.

No, this tells the customer that backups to iCloud are not secure from the government. Adding the back door would make people think that there was more security than there was. Transparency is always better than deception.

Dropping the feature that the UK was targeting allows their customers to use all the other ways that Apple does things. Leaving the UK altogether is the nuclear option denying their customers of everything. “Apple should just leave the UK/China” never takes into consideration the millions of customers that bought or might want to buy in the future. Nobody would better off if Apple withdraws from a country.

I don't think we both have the same concept of "making a stand".

Yes, it would have been the nuclear option, but this is Apple. Probably most of the most influential people in the UK have an Apple phone. Just saying that you leave would cause an avalanche of influence targeted at this law. Maybe other companies would have joined them.

This, this is just cover dance and I wish they'd pay for this, but they won't and they know it. People locked into the Apple bubble only change if it REALLY hurts. This doesn't hurt the average Apple user, and those who really care moved onto a system they can control themselves.