The iPhone and Android phones run a CPU designed in Europe (well the UK was in EU at the time)

I think it’s more an anti-EU bias. Capitalists can’t stand consumers having choices.

It is both fruit factory fanboyism as well as anti-EU sentiment and it has nothing to do with 'capitalists' not liking 'consumers' having choices. Without capitalism the problem would not exist, so much is true. It would not exist because there wouldn't be anything to choose from: no browser market, no mobile devices, no choice. This tired anti-capitalism rhetoric needs to be shelved with the other books from the 60's and 70's.

It most certainly does. What company (capital) willingly gives consumer the choice to stop paying for their product? The only time that actually happens is when they are forced to, either via competition, or regulation. Any time they can lock consumers in to their solution, they do so.

And yet, exactly zero major handheld smartphone manufacturers are European. America innovates, China replicates, Europe regulates in action.

This is Nokia erasure .. although admittedly they died. Europe was the innovator and market leader for a while there.

There's a deeper market argument about the relatively open GSM versus the US CDMA which was more of a Qualcomm monopoly.

I think it's more the US did the whole embrace-extend-extinguish to all their EU competition. There were EU-developed smartphones up until Google/Apple ate the world.

I remember a time when everyone wanted a Sony Ericsson phone.

America innovates by using Korean screens, British CPU architecture, Japanese cameras, Chinese manufacturing, Australian invented Wi-Fi, ...

God the US superiority complex can be insufferable.

We use our Civilization Ability "Globalism" to tie all of those disparate components into trillion-dollar consumer devices. It gives us a massive advantage and lets us run up the scoreboard.