Actually it is a good example because it is the example of a free market. Apple can do what they want and if enough customers don't like it, they will change their practices. It's not up to some government to dictate how they must conduct business. Don't get me wrong, I'm fully in the "Apple ecosystem" and it sucked keeping up with cables and the like, but that was my choice because he benefits outweighed the costs.
Can't have it both ways - be a free market person when it comes to tariffs imposed by the US and think they EU rulings against Apple are OK. I've said it before, there are many barriers to entering a market, be it a tariff, a local government subsidy of a company giving them a competitive advantage or any other way to close business out of your market. They should be reciprocal for imports and exports.
This is where we disagree; I am not into unfettered free markets as they are not "efficient" in the economic sense as there is no perfect knowledge, major imbalances of economic power, significant shortfalls in accurate pricing of resources and no recognition and pricing of the degradation of public assets/amenities.
Supply and demand does some things well and some things really badly, leading to disasters like Victorian Britain's dark satanic mills, the USA's rust belt, the dust bowl, industrial diseases like asbestosis, silicosis, Minamata disease and a thousand and one other lousy outcomes like Bhopal, rivers poisoned with chicken shit and polluters bribing their way out of paying for the damage they created. The pursuit of pure profit cuts corners, as people are easily corrupted. (I'm a compliance officer these days; give someone a bonus scheme and the shortcuts are identified and exploited before the ink has dried. Pushing the rules in motor racing has a limited set of outcomes; doing the same with an oil refinery, drilling rig, nuclear power station, financial brokerage house or explosives factory raises the jeopardy many-fold).
Apple were deliberately taking the piss out of their customers for financial gain, not an improved customer experience. Put the customer first and the conflict does not arise; happy customers would have protected the company from the legislators; this was an instance where there was a balance adjustment for an imbalance of economic power.
The US has a mass of old legislation usually framed as "Anti-Trust" laws around the improper use of economic power, where it was recognised that the concentration of money and power with a few industrialists was not a good thing for public good and economic growth. A similar adjustment may be overdue now; the big economic question between capitalism and a planned economy is settled, the argument now is how free can markets be without killing us all by accident.
You cannot eat money, so the pursuit of it without reference to the world around it is stupid.
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