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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

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There are smartphones designed in europe. Isn't Fairphone a dutch company? The greenphone was from Norway. Gigaset is German. The Shift smartphones too. Wiko is french and chinese.

Nokia - Finnish

Ericsson - Swedish

They are no longer relevant I guess, but modern smartphones build on their original success, especially Ericssons infrastructure dominance.

None of Apples Apple Silicon products would exist without Netherlands ASML.

Going off some website [0]; unless I've been badly mislead, effectively nobody in Europe wants them. Looks like Nokia is leading the pack of desirable phones with nearly 1 person in 100 (not really that good, but close enough) thinking it is the phone for them.

Or it would be if Nokia's mobile phone division hadn't been bought out by the Americans. So technically even that is a US brand these days. Seems fair to count that as European though, presumably they still have offices in the EU.

> Wiko is french and chinese.

Well they've solved half the problems that EU companies face.

[0] https://www.counterpointresearch.com/insights/europe-smartph...

Perhaps because Google and Apple have been acting as monopolies and made all other products undesirable? The US benefits from the EU greatly, but whenever the EU enforces laws to protect it's citizens you always hear people from the US complain about "socialist" whiners who can't compete with the US.

If the US had domestic laws that actually helped and protected it's citizenry, they'd probably look like the EU's laws.

Then the US wouldn't be involved in the smartphone market either, the EU and the US would both be trying to counter the overwhelming dominance of Asian smartphones.

If the US adopted the same regulations, they'd get the same outcome.

There are smaller companies but that is not really relevant to the original comment.

> it says on the box "designed in California".

And on the next line, "Assembled in China".

> If they put this sort of effort into inquiring how they mucked up their own companies then they might make some actual progress.

Here's the thing though, the point of an anti-trust investigation is that the market dominance might, possibly, be due to something other than people liking it.

I don't have a problem with the specific things Apple's getting criticised for in the Epic cases[0], but it's really unavoidably obvious that a lot of people do.

[0] And that's not as a fanboi: I do have a problem plenty of other things they do and fail to do, just not these specific things. E.g. Safari as the only browser engine was obviously going to bite them, even though the browser wars are much less important today than in the 90s.

> And on the next line, "Assembled in China".

Are you suggesting that Apple aren't the people in charge of iPhones? You might like to pass that on to the EU, they're worried about iPhones and they appear to have accidentally decided that probing Apple will help!

I'm sure the EU is trying to regulate how China manufactures iPhones too, if that is some sort of consolation prize to you. And my response is the same - there is a reason it is happening in China. The reason is EU regulations.

> ...market dominance might, possibly, be due to something other than people liking it.

Case in point; the market dominanace of Apple in Europe is primarily because EU regulators are technophobic. North America can manage to design a smartphone. Asia can design smartphones in plural. Europe can manage the Nokia 1100 which is not nothing. Well done Europe. But not enough to compete with serious players.

> Are you suggesting that Apple aren't the people in charge of iPhones?

Yes

https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/1/22361762/iphone-russia-sta...

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/apple-admits-to-...

https://support.apple.com/en-us/111754

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM#/media/File:Prism_slide_...

https://www.reuters.com/world/india/indias-govt-demanded-app...

https://www.reuters.com/legal/brazil-court-fines-apple-order...

https://www.reuters.com/technology/apple-pay-c144-mln-settle...

> And on the next line, "Assembled in China".

My iPhone says assembled in India.

Regardless. The EU cannot design a smartphone let alone get it built/assembled in Asia and become a fraction of what apples smartphone business is.

They can however design an instruction set integral to the development of the iPhone and garner Apple's continued investment in their success as a result.

What, you didn't forget about ARM did you?

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