The EU is home to 447 million rich people who buy lots of smartphones. It's easily the biggest market for high-end smartphones in the world.
Also as a tangent GDP is pretty useless when talking about how much money individuals have to spend on smartphones.
Apple and Samsung each sold 16M devices in 2020 in the EU, and apparently even 40%-50% more in 2022. That's well over $5B. They're not going to walk away from such a market.
Plus, if I understood it properly, India is contemplating a similar law.
Apple is 45% of the US smartphone market, and something like 20% of Europe's. So Apple's sales will not be the best indicator of anything generalizable to all smartphones.
Apple is 33% of Europe's smartphone market, almost the exact same size as Samsung, the #1 player.
Knowing that almost all of Apple's phones are >$800, the fact that 41% of all sales in the EU were >$800 implies that Android isn't some hidden variable here.
I'd also like to point out that unit shipments have been in decline (on a y/y basis) for 10 the last 13 quarters. [0]
