A pair of Apple AirPods Pro wireless headphones and charging case, taken on November 5, 2019. (Photo by Phil Barker/Future Publishing via Getty Images)
Future Publishing via Getty Images
Imports always and everywhere improve us. The crucial basics of exchange come to mind with news that one of the best features of Apple’s new AirPods Pro 3 won’t be available to European users. Specifically, the translation of incoming audio in real time that AirPod users outside of Europe will have access to won’t be available to European buyers.
Early reports indicate that Europeans will be deprived of quick translation thanks to the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA). The latter demands Apple achieve interoperability with European products without regard to Apple’s desire to open its suite of products to the millions of producers who’d covet the opportunity. Apple has every right to protect its world-leading brand from would-be partners who might compromise same. More on this in a bit.
For now, stop and think about the European people and producers. Real-time translation is a big, big deal. Consider the soaring ability of business owners to communicate with all manner of potential customers with whom they formerly could not. From there, consider what this crucial new addition to AirPods would mean for European exporters, but equally important, European importers? It’s no insight to say that communication looms large in business expansion.
After which, consider the European people. All those different countries and all those different languages. What formerly was a barrier to interpersonal communication and business is now being erased by Apple. What an advance, one that’s not just great for business and socializing, but one that also arguably fosters peace itself.
Which requires a return to the DMA. It yet again demands interoperability for European technology, but seriously, what’s the point? Some will reply that Apple’s ubiquity in Europe threatens European producers if they can’t piggbyback on Apple’s success, but the reply misses the point.
That’s because the beauty of open markets is that if they’re open, it’s as though every good and service in the world is being manufactured right next door. Forget about a product’s origin or which producers can tesselate their products with it, and instead concentrate on what matters: if markets are open and free, product origin quite simply doesn’t matter. All that matters is that the product or service improves us. Which is a simpler way to contemplate the DMA.
Precisely because open markets make it as though everything is being produced next door, what matters is product quality, nothing else. The only thing that matters if we’re improved by it, which the word “import” implies.
Consider all of this with the DMA top of mind. If European producers are worthy of interoperability with Apple products, then the DMA itself is rendered superfluous. If not, as in if forced interoperability renders products and services less than they might otherwise be, then European buyers are hurt by the law every bit as much as Apple itself.
It cannot be said enough that work divided is the greatest, most pro-growth, most pro-peace concept that mankind ever happened upon. When people are doing what they do best for others, those done for get to subsequently do what they do best.
Applied to Apple, its ubiquity is an effect of the usefulness of its products. Translated, Apple can only grow insofar as the people in the rest of the world prosper through usage of what it creates.
At present, Europeans can’t benefit from the totality of Apple’s diligent work for them. No doubt Apple suffers in this scenario, but the biggest sufferers are the European people who will produce and prosper less precisely because Apple isn’t being allowed to produce for them.