On the other hand, antitrust lawsuits have been extremely effective historically at changing company behaviour. See MSFT.

Microsoft is an american company, which is why a lawsuit by the american government with the threat of breaking it up worked.

The EU can't break up Apple. Apple is calling the bluff here.

> With hardware, the EU can demand adherence to standards like USB-C.

Not picking sides here, just curious; if a better standard comes along, do we all have to wait for the EU to turn it into a law before companies can change to that new standard?

Governments have enforced standards for a long time. There's always that tradeoff. Standardization has benefits, and at some point the government says that a standard is "good enough".

You can install whatever plug you want on your device - as long as it also has a USB-C plug on it too.

So if you come up with a truly revolutionary new plug and the market at large adopts it, then there's no reason the EU won't approve of it being the new standard.

The point of the standards is to ensure consumers aren't being fucked over by proprietary plugs that are incompatible with all the other devices out there, like what Apple was doing, not to enforce some arbitrary limit that says USB-C is the final form factor plug we'll ever be using