The move, believed to be a first for a European market, comes amid pressure on tech companies from the government to do more to protect children online.

Nobody was forced to do this, yet Apple just decided to go first.

Why not just ban smartphones for people under 18?

The real question is I have a UK originating iPhone that i use just for photographing. I do not live in UK, but the phone is not registered to use gsm in my country since it costs 3 times the price of said iPhone to do so.

If I update, will it show the ID prompt to me? Because I sure as hell do not have UK ID, so the phone will literally become a brick.

Some of my friends don't understand why this is an overreach, "i am over 18 what do i care"...

Seems like if you’re already using Apple Pay you’re fine. It’s still an egregious overreach and pointless but at least it’s not demanding a full face scan.

Just get a Pixel and install GrapheneOS on it.

Don't worry they'll never sell your data for ads like Google.

Meanwhile people literally can’t pay their electricity bills. Kier zero-privacy Starmer really prioritising the important things here. Time to look at graphene OS

Whilst I would prefer this hadn’t happened, this is by far the best implementation I’ve seen so far. I appreciate not everybody has a credit card, but it’s much, much better to use a form of checking like that which has both an expiry date and a cancellation procedure, unlike a government ID which contains multiple pieces of information which you can’t really change (like your date of birth and a photo)