Why not just ban smartphones for people under 18?
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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.
If you're very quick about it, iOS 26.3.1 is still signed so you could do the update and downgrade using iTunes if it does ask. You would have to factory reset the phone to downgrade again though and Apple could potentially stop signing it at any point leaving you stuck on 26.4
I'd imagine it's location based and not tied to the hardware. Otherwise you could just import an iphone from outside the UK to get around the age check.
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.
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.
They kinda were. Don't get me wrong, still entirely by choice, but more and more countries and states are forcing OS level age verification.
How things change.
Once upon a time, Apple stood up to the FBI's demands. Now they're caving to an implication in an authoritarian foreign country.
Apple pretended to stand up to them a couple times in high-profile cases for optics. They were helping them all along.
There is, AFAIK, zero proof to back up your claim.
Even if true, I think I prefer when Apple was normalizing standing up to surveillance, instead of being the first to endorse it.
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)
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