> Government bodies also move slowly, and they usually telegraph their moves years in advance.
There's no evidence of that in the pre-2019 period. See https://fasos-research.nl/vista-jmn/files/2022/10/VISTA-Poli... "For much of the 2014-2019 period, European Commission leaders, most notably those linked to DG Competition, articulated a commitment to the use of traditional competition instruments to meet the needs of the new digital economy."
> It's not improbable that Apple could have predicted that separating the ecosystems would be legally beneficial
I disagree. It's improbable. Show me any evidence that anyone in the world was talking about splitting out iPadOS for legal reasons.
In any case, it's really more of a minor annoyance than anything, relatively speaking, because iPhone has a vastly larger user base than iPad. iPhone is Apple's bread and butter, and iPhone is what the DMA is regulating. Apple wasn't able to spare the iPhone by separating iPadOS.
> There's no evidence of that in the pre-2019 period.
GDPR was proposed in 2012 and implemented in 2016. Any reasonably intelligent observer would look at the contents of the GDPR and predict that the EU was interested in sweeping regulation of large American tech companies, and it would have been foolish to think they'd stop at data use. Apple's legal experts and lobbyists are more than just reasonably intelligent observers, they were interacting regularly with EU regulators and knew that change was on the wind, even if they didn't know the details before 2019.
> they were interacting regularly with EU regulators and knew that change was on the wind, even if they didn't know the details before 2019.
One wonders, then, why Apple didn't do more to open up the iPhone and protect it from regulation before the EU had to force something worse down Apple's throat. (The tone of Apple's PR yesterday was startlingly bitter and combative.) Moreover, it's not clear that the iPadOS ploy is even going to work in the end: "the Commission has opened a market investigation to further assess whether Apple's iPadOS should be designated as gatekeeper, despite not meeting the thresholds." https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_23_...
In fact, Apple has made a series of anticompetitive moves with the App Store in recent years, enraging third-party developers and practically daring regulators to bring down the hammer.
Besides, iPad is already kind of a neglected software platform. Some developers still don't bother to specifically support it with their apps. Lack of iPad support isn't going to stop anyone from going outside the App Store if they can; indeed, this move may backfire on Apple by causing even fewer apps to support iPad.
There's no evidence of that in the pre-2019 period. See https://fasos-research.nl/vista-jmn/files/2022/10/VISTA-Poli... "For much of the 2014-2019 period, European Commission leaders, most notably those linked to DG Competition, articulated a commitment to the use of traditional competition instruments to meet the needs of the new digital economy."
> It's not improbable that Apple could have predicted that separating the ecosystems would be legally beneficial
I disagree. It's improbable. Show me any evidence that anyone in the world was talking about splitting out iPadOS for legal reasons.
In any case, it's really more of a minor annoyance than anything, relatively speaking, because iPhone has a vastly larger user base than iPad. iPhone is Apple's bread and butter, and iPhone is what the DMA is regulating. Apple wasn't able to spare the iPhone by separating iPadOS.