With the reveal of the iPhone 15 and the jokes about apple finally adopting USB-C and rumors about apple slow walking new European regulations on batteries, I have to ask where are the European phone companies? Is it not possible that rising Chinese brands just ignore these policies and focus on Asia/Africa/LATAM and ignore Europe/North America if these regulations become too annoying and cumbersome?<p>If Europe had their own brands to compete with, it would make sense but Chinese/Korean brands are already more influential in the developing world than North American/European ones. Is it possible that European regulation, while forward thinking, can lead to a decreasing ROI of compliance and risk intellectual and moral leadership on these issues in Europe?
Regarding your title question, the last major one got torpedoed by Microsoft, then sold to Taiwan.<p>Regarding your point about regulations, I can't quickly Google up anything on this, but I was under the impression that China was supporting the USB-C convergence in their internal market, and was going further to encourage the vendors to converge their various "fast-charge" standards.<p>Generally, regulations like this help everyone but powerful incumbents, so they're not really that political in most places.
One thing I’d note is that Apple sells less than half the phones but makes almost all the profit, it’s somewhat hard to see why any company would be selling Android phones at all if they were rational and the answer is <i>they are not</i>, that many individuals and corporations are involved with phones out of prestige. (You buy a $1000+ Android phone because other people see TV ads for it and know they should be impressed, not because the CPU is any faster than a 2018 phone or because it will ever get software updates or because the experience isn’t ruined by endless crapplets.)<p>What you see is that the Sonys and Phillips of the world are under a lot of shareholder discipline and are sticking to businesses where they can win, whereas the Huaweis and Samsungs are in countries at lesser stages of development that have something to prove and have less accountable governance.