“In an ultimatum, Iranian officials asked iPhone manufacturer Apple Inc. to either officially register in Iran or have its products banned, a local news agency reported Monday,” Kyodo News reports.
“‘If Apple will not register an official representative in Iran within the next few days, all iPhones will be collected from the market,’ Tasnim News Agency quoted the director of Iran’s anti-smuggling office as having said on Sunday,” Kyodo News reports. “More than 40 million Iranians are using smart phones, including millions of iPhone users, whose devices are often imported into the country by smugglers.”
“For anti-smuggling purposes Iran has started a project, running under the president’s office, to ban smuggled mobile phones,” Kyodo News reports. “The scheme, which will start later this week, will require all mobile phones to be registered with Iran’s telecommunications user database. Any that are not will not be able to be used.”
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MacDailyNews Take: Good luck confiscating millions upon millions of iPhones, especially those used by smugglers, who are, of course, already criminals by definition and are therefore quite unlikely to willingly volunteer their iPhones for confiscation.