Pretty easy solution honestly. Just close all presence in the UK. Just walk out. It’s a tiny market anyways. Pathetic delusional former empire constantly imagining itself more important than it is.
Bad take. The UK is still a “rich country” and still generates a lot of profit. The solution Apple has of disabling Advanced Data Protection (iCloud e2ee) in the UK makes more sense.
Except they can’t just do that. The UK because they think they’re special has legal powers to exercise against Apple GLOBALLY. They can legally under their laws force Apple to backdoor encryption for US users, for Russian users, for French users, for Chinese users, etc, etc and give the UK access to all of their data. That’s what this order is and it will allow them to share that data with the US NSA and FBI, with French police, with other eyes agreement partners effectively making such ADP useless for anyone who’s an enemy of the west located in the west or anywhere else.
And as long as Apple has a legal presence in the UK they don’t have a real way to resist this. The only sure-fire way is closing up shop, moving all engineering staff, shut down the shop or move it off-shore, never letting CEOs or top level technical people visit due to risk of being detained for non-compliance and just basically giving them the finger.