So... the difference was Microsoft was winning those fights because their enemy was other products in the market. They'd tell Dell not to ship Netscape, and Dell would yank the product. They'd clone java, and websites would code to that to get IE compliance. They'd push ActiveX and bribe web properties to implement it, and they would. This wasn't fair, but it was at least in some sense "competition". (I mean, eventually MS would go on to lose control of all those levers, but over decades of timescale and generally due to market motion.)

Apple here is just flailing. It's a regulatory action, not a competitor. There's no feasible path to beating or evading EU law. Surely they know that, right?