⚠ Forced InteroperabilityModerate threat

The lock-in works because everything Apple sells talks fluently to everything else Apple sells, and pointedly less well to everything else. That asymmetry — seamless inside the walls, clumsy at the border — is exactly what regulators in Europe and beyond have decided to attack. The Digital Markets Act already forces Apple to open pieces it once kept shut¹: to let rival smartwatches and headphones tap into iPhone notifications and pairing², to permit alternative app stores, to adopt RCS so that green bubbles behave more like blue³. Each mandate chips at the border that made the ecosystem feel like a country of its own.

The danger is not that any single mandate is fatal — it is that they accumulate. This moat was never one wall but a hundred small conveniences that worked only because Apple controlled both ends of every hand-off. If a regulator forces Apple to let a third-party watch pair as smoothly as its own, or a rival earbud connect as instantly, the 'everything just works, but only if it's ours' promise loses one seam at a time, and the walled garden edges toward being merely a pleasant one.

Apple's play is to comply grudgingly and by inches, to argue — not wholly without merit — that its integration protects security and privacy, and to rely on the sheer number of conveniences, so that opening a few doors does not empty the house. Interoperability of the plumbing, moreover, does not easily erase years of accumulated habit or the settled expectation that Apple things simply fit together.

The worry, then, is moderate and slow-moving. The lock-in is deep enough to survive any individual mandate, but the trajectory of the pressure runs one way, across many jurisdictions at once, and a decade of forced openness⁴ could gradually turn a genuinely walled garden into a garden with a great many gates propped open.