3 min read
There is a certain grim comedy to Apple’s relationship with the European Union at this point. Apple picks a fight, Apple loses the fight, Apple gets up, dusts itself off, and picks another one. It is the corporate-legal equivalent of Randy Marsh refusing to accept he has been knocked out, and the latest round went exactly the way the previous ones did.
On July 8, the EU’s General Court dismissed all three of Apple’s challenges to its designation as a “gatekeeper” under the Digital Markets Act, upholding the European Commission’s 2023 decision to classify both the App Store and the iOS operating system as core platform services subject to the DMA’s rules. In plain English: Apple must keep prying open its famously sealed ecosystem, whether it likes it or not, and it very much does not.
Why this one stings more than usual
The ruling did not just swat down Apple. As Engadget and others noted, it also established that none of the six DMA gatekeepers can pre-emptively challenge their interoperability obligations in the abstract before a specific enforcement decision lands. Translation: Apple’s favourite tactic, tying things up in court before the rules actually bite, has just been taken off the table for the entire industry. Apple can still appeal to the Court of Justice of the European Union on points of law, which it almost certainly will, because getting back up is the one thing this company is reliably excellent at.
In fairness to Apple, and this matters
Here is where honesty requires a word of genuine praise, because it would be lazy to just dunk. Of the tech giants, Apple is one of the very few that actually bothers its arse to protect its users’ privacy: on-device processing, App Tracking Transparency that gutted the ad-surveillance industry’s free lunch, a business model that does not depend on strip-mining your personal data to sell ads. The walled garden is a cage, yes, but it is a cage that keeps a lot of predators out, and that is not nothing in an industry that mostly treats you as the product. So when Apple argues that opening everything up carries real security and privacy risks, it is not purely self-serving nonsense.
It is, however, also about the money. The same walls that protect your data also protect Apple’s roughly 30% App Store cut, and Brussels is not blind to which of those Apple is really fighting for. You can respect a company’s privacy record and still enjoy watching it get repeatedly, deservedly spanked for confusing “protecting our customers” with “protecting our margins.” Both things can be true, and here they very much are.
The AI tool stack actually worth paying for
One email a week. The models, tools and moves that matter, stripped of hype and filtered so you don’t have to drink from the firehose. Free, and you can bail anytime.
Did you know: Apple’s hardware is having a much better week than its lawyers
While the legal team was losing in Luxembourg, Apple’s product side was quietly outrunning the entire industry. Per IDC figures, the global PC market shrank about 4.9% in the second quarter of 2026, its first decline after nine straight quarters of growth, squeezed as AI data centres hoover up the memory and storage that laptops also need. And yet Apple grew Mac shipments 10.1% to roughly 6.7 million units, lifting its market share to about 9.9%, the only top-five vendor to post double-digit growth, largely on the back of the $599 MacBook Neo. So: a bad day in court, a rather good quarter in the shops. Apple contains multitudes.