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Spoken like someone who has no idea that these exist:

https://www.apple.com/iphone/b...
https://developer.apple.com/pr...

You're misinformed and wrong at the same time, that's a dangerous combination.

Spoken like someone who has no idea that these exist:

https://www.apple.com/iphone/b...
https://developer.apple.com/pr...

You're misinformed and wrong at the same time, that's a dangerous combination.

I don't get the FSF on this

iOS is the epitome of everything we need to avoid to have a free society: a single gatekeeper who claims it is illegal for you to even install software they don't approve on your own device.

The FSF could rectify this easily by running their own enterprise server: https://developer.apple.com/pr... for iOS. Then they let people point at their servers and not Apple's (or in addition to Apple's). It could be as open or as closed as they want it to be. Why year after year after year complain about this problem when you could just fix it?

I've liked the FSF since about 1990 but as a public interest lobby lying doesn't help your cause. I don't get even if they don't want to fix it why they can't accurately describe the situation with iOS.

just 300k lines of code.

Actually, that is wrong. Systemd is well over 550k lines of code, and close to 1500 files.

There are operating systems with lower counts of lines of code. Even the entire Space Shuttle was run on less than that, and Minix is 3 orders of magnitude smaller for the entire operating system. Here is a nice graphic

The other init systems are much more modest. Even upstart is only around 40k lines of code. The source code of launchd for instance is very compact.

Furthermore, systemd is not only huge, it is entirely unportable. All the other init systems have been ported to other unix systems because they actually preserve POSIX. Even Apple, who has a tendancy to do proprietary things, has made their launchd portable to other systems. Systemd doesn't even care about POSIX compatibility in the slightest, and even detests this standard.

All those complaints about Windows being bloated are actually nothing compared to Red Hat Linux now, which has more code in its INIT system than the original WIndows 3.1 release.

In short it is a bloated project that will probably die under its own weight.

Roll your own app on an old iPhone/iPod/iPad. Use iOS's triple home button press (aka Guided Access - http://support.apple.com/en-us...) to lock the iDevice to the one app.

That button press can do anything from sending an e-mail to a tweet to your own custom web service (automatic SMS and phone calls are out if you stick to official iOS APIs).

Maybe start here?

http://www.apple.com/environme...

Apple have been environmentally conscious (as much as a multinational business can be - they obviously have a large impact) for a long time, since before it was fashionable to be - they removed BFRs and PVC and reduced packaging volumes long before it became a big talking point. They just didn't tell anyone about it.

Either way, investing almost a billion dollars in a single PV project seems to not be enough for you. Pray tell, how much of a company's cash reserves should go towards impressing you? I'd say that investing 800 million dollars was doing a little more than just "advocating", or does it not count when the company is very wealthy?

Heck, even reviewing the agreement is difficult.

1. 1. https://developer.apple.com/io... does not render under Firefox.
2. 2. For the individual program, you can't look at the agreement without giving them a credit card.
3. 3. For the corporate program, you have to attest that you can sign agreements for the company before seeing the agreement.
4. 4. Profit! (Sorry, I always wanted to do that)

Does the Mac OS License include the onerous section that is in the IOS developer agreement about making public statements? See the EFF All Your Apps Are Belong to Apple: The iPhone Developer Program License Agreement page.

As I can't review the agreement without either giving them a credit card number or committing fraud, I can't seem to find out.

Certificates do not have much value, especially for smaller firms. Say an app from a smaller vendor or an individual is signed, but turns out to be malicious. What's Apple going to do, other than revoke the cert and try not to give that vendor or individual a cert in the future?

That said, I'm glad it is possible to download Google Earth without enabling automatic updates. I downloaded GE in January and there was no way to run it without automatic updates running. I removed Chrome because it automatically updates. I need a bit more control over my machine than that.

Related: see also apps that detect whether a photo has been photoshopped. https://itunes.apple.com/us/ap...

In an attempt to actually answer the question, try the Mercury browser. Basically Safari + AdBlock. The others are usually crapware/adware. https://itunes.apple.com/us/ap...

The very reference quoted for cash reserves paint a much grimmer picture.

Of a company getting its shit together but still being far away from standing back up, not yet breaking even but already looking for ways to cut another billion dollars of expenses on top of that goal, sacking thousands of employees, planning further layoffs and actually quite needing those $150 million to pay off a short term debt ($152 million actually) and other debts.
Also, claiming at the time that they didn't need partners nor that they were approached by anyone.
That was July. Next month they announce they're partnering up with Microsoft.

$150 million wasn't just money. MS agreed not to sell that stock for the next 3 years.
It was a guarantee of solvency and trust.
"MS plans to hold on to Apple stock. They must know something no one else does. Maybe it's not the time to get rid of it yet. Maybe it's time to buy more of it."

That's what $150 million and partnership with MS got them. Not just cash in hand.

https://www.fool.com/Calls/199...

FOOL CONFERENCE CALL SYNOPSIS*
By Debora Tidwell (TMF Debit)

Apple Computer, Inc.
(Nasdaq: AAPL)
One Infinite Loop
Cupertino, CA 95014
(408) 996-1010
http://www.apple.com/

ALEXANDRIA, VA (July 17, 1997)/FOOLWIRE/ --- Apple Computer, Inc. released their third quarter 1997 results after the market close yesterday. Revenues for the quarter were $1.7 billion compared to $1.6 billion last quarter and $2.2 billion in last year's third quarter. International sales accounted for 53% of revenues in the quarter. Gross margins for the quarter were 20% compared to 18.9% last quarter and 18.5% in the year-ago third quarter. The company reported a net loss for the quarter of $56 million or $(0.44) per share compared to a net loss of $708 million or $(5.64) per share last quarter and a net loss of $32 million or $(0.26) in the year-ago quarter.

OPERATING LOSS. The company's loss from operations was $60 million representing a significant sequential improvement from the loss from operations of $186 million exclusive of charges for restructuring and writeoffs of in-process R&D. The company's loss from operations a year ago was $160 million. Operating expenses for the quarter were $408 million, down $81 million from last quarter, exclusive of charges for restructuring and the writeoffs of in-process R&D, and down $111 million compared to the year-ago quarter. One analyst noted that they are ahead of their projected expense reduction targets and asked if there were new targets. Apple responded that consistent with wanting to drive the break-even point below $8 billion, they will want to drive the operating expenses, which had been targeted at $400 million per quarter or $1.6 billion, lower.

UNIT SALES. In terms of sales, revenues increased by 8.5% sequentially. Unit sales were approximately 698,000 and represented a 6-8% sequential increase over last quarter. The sequential growth was driven largely by sales in the US education market, as well as greatly improved sales in Japan. Unit sales of Apple-branded entry level desktop products, which they are now referring to as "value product line" internally grew by approximately 27% during the quarter while sales of the flagship PowerMac products grew by 32%. Sequential growth in these two product lines were offset in part by a 29% reduction of Powerbook unit sales. They attribute the reduction in Powerbook sales to both an easing in the pent-up demand for their high-end 3400 series, which was introduced last quarter, as well as general softness in the entry level segment of the Powerbook space.

OTHER INCOME. Other income breaks down as follows: $18 million in interest income, $18 million in interest expense, a foreign exchange gain of about $6 million, and then a couple of other minor items. Claris was a little lower than last quarter at $55 million in

Alternate option would be that people with issues aren't using official Apple® AirPort® Extreme® wireless stations.

Nope. I can say first hand the issue happens with an Apple® Time Capsule®. Issue started with Yosemite. The wifi randomly (but infrequently) decides to disconnect and just stays idle with a grayed out signal indicator. It reconnects fine if you just click on the network from the list, but at the VERY least, OSX should try to search for, and connect to known wifi networks when the current one becomes disconnected. It doesn't do that, it seems like the whole process for managing the wifi connection just falls asleep.

I have to say that my internet on my MacBook pro still drops once in a while. However it's drastically improved. The biggest thing is that I would have to select the network and re logon every time I woke up the computer. it never did it automatically. Now it does!!

As discussed on this forum

1st World Problems ;)

Came to this thread looking for the holding it wrong joke. Was not disappointed.

Alternate option would be that people with issues aren't using official Apple® AirPort® Extreme® wireless stations. Seems like a router problem to me.

I know people that won't leave home without their cellphone, it's crazy. I was thinking I'd just buy them all some ankle bracelets.

May I introduce the modern, metrosexual, socially approved upgrade.

Best of all, they've got you paying for it.

"What's wrong with iTunes?", "you don't need to use iTunes if you don't need/want to" (really?), " MKV is not a popular format "

What the hell you smoked?? What's wrong with you?

For those who still have a functioning brain ... You see here in Dimeglio an obscenely clear example of the reality distortion field in action :-/

Are you really that stupid, or do you just play a moron on the internet? http://investor.apple.com/divi...

Where's the iApp ?

Uh, It's right on the page he linked.
Does this make it easier for you?

Yeah, and don't tell me you're using an Apple one-button mouse and that I'm an insensitive clod.

Where have you been? Apple got rid of that button a while ago.

where are the iPhone, Android, Symbian, etc versions of BBM!

Uh, well for Google Play, it'd be here, and for iDevices it would be here

I still agree that their argument is dumb though. People develop apps for a platform where it will sell, and that has nothing to do with net neutrality. I find it annoying that I can't run [game/software X] on Linux, but that has nothing to do with my ISP or internet service.

Try Minesweeper Deluxe for Mac.

Because the iMac is a laptop, and absolutely doesn't have large internal disks available. And absolutely no high-bandwidth storage expansion opportunities.

Get fucking serious.

Because the iMac is a laptop, and absolutely doesn't have large internal disks available. And absolutely no high-bandwidth storage expansion opportunities.

Get fucking serious.

Also it's not just about bash-completion. Most command line tools that have improved over the years and that we take for granted under Linux still have a version from the 80s in OS X (and Solaris and many other UNIX-like OS). An example of that is the tar program which doesn't support the -J argument (xz compression) https://developer.apple.com/li... http://linux.die.net/man/1/tar Most GNU version of the coreutils are much more usable.

Now you said: "Un-jailbroken iOS not so much, as its strict W^X policy and App Store Review Guidelines make on-device compilers impossible." And, while technically correct for the jailed devices (not counting the stuff, where you need to be online), you ignored the availability of interpreted languages (most of them turing-complete) on iDevices, which, suddenly, are the only ones available.
So, why don't you ask that teacher from TFA to VB your $200 pee-cees a Winblows app that takes them on a trip to somewhere damp and dark together with the toolchain, as they're evidently unnecessary to teach kids programming these days?

Admittedly, I have no idea what to tell you about the kids, who don't own a smartphone, but have a console, apparently they're his target audience. Maybe he should create an account on MS Zone (or however it's called these days) and try to upsell them VB there. I wish him luck! He'll need it. ;)

You have outdated information:
e.g. https://itunes.apple.com/us/ap...
and
http://omz-software.com/pythonista/

1. Most mainstream apps exist on iOS, and often, on Android as well, but rarely on Windows Phone. To make things worse, a lot of the apps in the Windows store are web wrappers - they invoke Internet Explorer, which pulls up the home page of the app in question. Microsoft really needs to rein this in, if they want to escape the perception of being the Linux of phones, as far as app support goes

2. In cases where apps do exist, they sometimes lack features of their Android or iOS equivalents. Also, aside from the web wrappers I mention above, too many apps just suck. While I haven't checked the case in Android, for iOS, Apple screens apps before allowing them into the app store. Both Google & Microsoft would do well to take a page out of Apple's book here, even if they choose not to be as strict as Apple

On the laptop side, Microsoft should give users options of having either the Windows 7 or 8 as the interface. From what I've seen of their desktop interface, yeah, the start button and pull up menu is there, but after that, when you click on an option, it again gives you a whole bunch of big icons, rather than the side menus that were there under Windows 7. My suggestion - have the option of making 10 look exactly like 7, if that's what the user wants. Any new wizards, reserve it for Metro.

One last thing - since Microsoft owns the product, now instead of Windows Phone, name the platform either Metro or Lumia.

On the Mac, free ram is wasted ram. If it's not otherwise assigned, it usually gets used as cache.

Apple keeps changing the activity monitor around, but in the latest-- Yosemite, there's a little plot that shows "Memory Pressure". If it's green, don't worry about it. If it's yellow, you are actually running out of memory, and might want to quit some processes. If it's red, the machine is swapping to disk, and if you are still using spinning rust, this can mean a massive slowdown.
Seriously, that's how it works

Logic is an Apple product as well.

Totally not like Apple's iAd?

http://advertising.apple.com/

I know, because it has "i" in front makes it "trendy and OK"?

One of the last footholds of Flash is the ability to write a Native App for iOS and Android with Adobe AIR.

That is by definition not a native app. It can behave like one but it's not the same thing.

What Steve Jobs was talking about was the Flash Browser plug-in -- which was unviable as a mobile browser experience.

Here is what Jobs said about Flash. Note the bit where he said:

"We know from painful experience that letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform. If developers grow dependent on third party development libraries and tools, they can only take advantage of platform enhancements if and when the third party chooses to adopt the new features. We cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers"

It was VERY much about maintaining control over how applications were developed for iOS.

Hell, Google bent over backwards to give Adobe everything they claimed Apple denied them and couldn't get it to run in a stable or usable manner on Android.

Yes they did and there were a lot of people loudly crowing about how having Flash somehow made Android better than iOS. There were/are plenty of reasons to prefer Android but Flash has never been one of them.

It's called "Swift."*

*Not to be confused with The Swift Parallel Scripting Language.

I'm not particularly happy with all of Spotlight's newly introduced web search components, either -- I wonder if there's a way to turn that off.

Apple says

If you do not want your Spotlight search queries and Spotlight Suggestions usage data sent to Apple, you can turn off Spotlight Suggestions. Simply deselect the checkboxes for both Spotlight Suggestions and Bing Web Searches in the Search Results pane of Spotlight preferences in System Preferences on your Mac. If you turn off Spotlight Suggestions and Bing Web Searches, Spotlight will search the contents of only your Mac.

Further to the point, the March 1, 2010 Registered Apple Developer Agreement is available publicly online and indexed by Google. Most of the points the EFF took issue with were removed due to public outcry years ago. Why is the EFF still referring to an earlier agreement that is no longer applicable?

Either that, or they just realized they could use it as a publicity stunt.

This.

There are TWO "app stores" that every iOS device has access to. The walled garden is the obvious one, but there's one where there is NO DRM, no approvals, nothing. And it was around since the original iPhone and since iPhoneOS 1.0

It was Apple's original SDK strategy, too.

It's called a web application and it uses HTML and JavaScript to do everything. You "install" it via Safari and it shows up as a icon in the home screen. No approvals from Apple are required (it's just a very specially formulated link), it can do a lot of things already (thanks to HTML5 integration) and is completely DRM-free. Do it right and it's practically native.

Oh yeah, you can program it in any OS, no Mac required :). As a bonus, it'll be usable on other OSes, too. (I think Android has the same ability too).

No they don't, they ship with AHCI drives. There is no support for NVME in OS X. You do understand that NVME is not the form factor right? Just because they have PCIe drives (basically a Samsung XP941 with a proprietary connector, which is an AHCI drive) does not mean they use NVME

https://discussions.apple.com/...

and just so you can learn the difference

http://www.anandtech.com/show/...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N...

Maybe. In that case, just buy it from the Apple store:
http://store.apple.com/us/prod...

Who the hell would use mac minis as servers? They have never been servers, and are not designed to be used like servers.

http://store.apple.com/us/product/MD389LL/A/mac-mini-23ghz-quad-core-intel-core-i7-with-os-x-server

I've been a Mac user for 20+ years now and an iPhone user since 2007. Quite frankly, the hardware and software has never been better from my own experience. Go do a Google search and you'll quickly find that every new software release Apple has put out is "the worst ever." Same goes for hardware. Every time Apple has had a keynote, there have been torrents of negative reactions about how they're losing their way and going downhill. "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame." Remember that?

• MobileMe (2008): outages for days at a time, push services not working, and a formal apology. Keep in mind, people were paying for this service.
• iPhone 4 and "antenna-gate"
• Mac OS X 10.2.8, which killed networking entirely for a lot of users and was quickly pulled (this was 10 years before iOS 8.0.1)
• The Snow Leopard bug that wiped all your user data.
• iPhone power adapter prongs breaking off (2008)
• The hockey puck mouse

Those are just a few. The point is, over all Apple's QA is improved dramatically. The problem is that the iPhone is far more popular than anything else Apple has ever made. It's not that the software has gone downhill; it's that there is far more scrutiny on it -- particularly in the media. "It just works" is truer today than it ever has been.

Then they came out with Final Cut Pro X and when their users complained about the rampant bugs, overly simplified iMovie style interface and defeaturization, Apple told their user base to go fuck themselves -- as Apple is want to do and Premier went back to being on top again.

http://fortune.com/2011/06/22/...
https://discussions.apple.com/...

Anyway, far from being a learning moment for Apple -- this has been wholly adopted as their corporate ideology when it comes to their user apps. A lot of it is a focus on iOS and trying to make everything fall in line with iOS -- this was clear as early as 2007 when a trip to the Apple store had their laptop and desktop add-ons shunted to dusty corners while iPhone cases and accessories dominated the store. So this has beed a mentality years in the making based solely on spreadsheets of product sales and not user needs regarding user experience.

Even Woz wrote a rant (now pulled it seems) about ditching OS X in favor of Linux over the frustration of the mounting shit-pile of bugs and anoyances with OS X You can read comments about Woz' post here: https://news.ycombinator.com/i...

There is a indeed a heated response to it. Not sure if I can be called "rabid Apple cult", but I can definitely be called long-term user (1990 onwards).

The guy is right. The quality at the moment is noticeably poor, and rather than being pleased at new updates I now regard them with suspicion. Concrete examples exist both on the Mac and on iOS - wiping out a phone's ability to make phone calls, for instance (8.0.1, iPhone 6), is somewhat of a faux pas. On the Mac side I get daft things such as this, which slowed my 2011 iMac to a crawl until I invoked an obscure command to sort it. I get silly synchronising problems with iTunes, both the dreaded "waiting for changes to be applied" hangs and also things like "there was a problem copying these items, see iTunes for details". iTunes, of course, never has any details about it.

Then there's functional quality. The whole OS is increasingly feeling like a Zelda game, memorising which magic multitouch incantation to invoke next to do something wonderful. They also trash things - Expose now looks neater, but is far less functional as it no longer exposes ever window but does this pretty-yet-useless grouping thing. They confuse things - I have no idea what my workflow for photos is anymore, is my photo just on the phone, shared in iCloud, just on iPhoto, where does it go if I edit it, how do I delete a shared photo from just one device without taking it all out of the others - that kind of thing.

Then there's online - the Apple ID situation is farcical. Users: "give us a way to merge Apple IDs please". Apple: "here's Home Sharing! A totally new way of sharing things that's not at all confusing". Users: "err...no. Give us a way to merge Apple IDs please". Apple: "here's Family Sharing! A brilliant new way of letting multiple ids get access to the same content, possibly, but only allowing one credit card to pay for it! Give your 13 year old access to the family credit card today!". Users: "Sigh. Give us a way to merge Apple IDs please". I await with wonder what other non-solution is going to be offered to me in the coming years.

I agree with the premise entirely. I think Apple's software quality has dropped, and dropped significantly. Bugs, functionality, usability...it's all there, and it's all worse than it used to be.

Cheers,
Ian

3) A video player that can reliably stream any video file that's on my Mac to my phone if I'm in wifi range.

This this one, you mean?

It's not really free by the way, the network capability is an in-app purchase, but it seems to work fine (for me at least). Now, there is another app that does the same thing and actually is free, but I can't remember the name of it right now.

Here is the tech spec page for Microsoft Surface: http://www.microsoftstore.com/...

Note that it clearly states how much storage is actually available for use, accounting for the OS and other software.

Here is the tech spec page for Apple's iPad Air 2: http://www.apple.com/uk/ipad-a...

Note that it doesn't mention how much usable space you have after the OS and all their bundled apps have taken their share.

REally? where? apologies if I am wrong but I see nothing about user available space for any of the iPhone models on their purchasing site http://www.apple.com/iphone/co...

Apple already does report base-10 capacities:

http://support.apple.com/en-us...

Well, kinda? sorta? sometimes? tl;dr for me.

I don't think the physical screen will go away, neither will keyboard and mouse. But the box is not necessary unless you're a gamer or power user, laptops and AIOs are plenty for most people. With a Bluetooth keyboard/mouse and Miracast/AirPlay/WiDi or a docking station for wired equivalents you can get the same interfaces with a tablet or smart phone in the center. I think the grandparent is right that within the next 10 years either Apple or Google or both will take a real stab at delivering PC functionality without the traditional PC. You know that Apple's Continuity for example is prep work for a "morphing" computer, you are in tablet mode and flip it to laptop mode and all your applications get handed off to the new interface but on the same physical device.

The base iPad Mini 2 lists at $299 and was as low as $229 during recent sales; the N1 is launching at $249.

That's probably why the author of the article talked about the base iPad Mini 3, not the iPad Mini 2.

The new Nokia N1 tablet, apparently. At just $250 with 32GB of storage — as opposed to the iPad Mini 3’s base price of $400 for the 16GB model — the Nokia N1 is definitely priced to sell.

And yes, from Apple's own comparison page, there doesn't seem to be any difference between the iPad Mini 2 and the iPad Mini 3. But to be fair to Nokia, its specs are superior to the iPad Mini 2 and 3.

And also, the Android tablets are the ones that initially embraced the 7 inch to 8 inch sizes, so one could say that Apple is the one that cloned those tablets from Asus, Samsung, HTC, and LG. But then again, a specs side-by-side comparison of Nokia's new tablet wouldn't look as good against the newer Android tablets made other manufacturers. Not to mention, the word "iPad" still has the most mind share, where it comes to people talking about tablets in general.

Pretty sure OS-X is based on BSD.... Does that imply that you are better off with BSD then?

Maybe you should check the source and find out there have been a number of security updates available released.

http://support.apple.com/en-us...

How many times have we seen people who set their updates to Automatic in a Windows environment get in trouble when an update mangles their system? I know people who say, "I always get every update as soon as they come out" then bitch when an update did something to their system.

Can this auto-update be turned off or changed to manual?

Yes, but the system is opt-in, not opt-out. I always wait for a few days before updating, just to see if there are any problems reported. This helped me to miss out on some doozies. Thankfully, I saw the report on the latest Microsoft update before running it on my work machine.

but what about contract workers in similar factories who make phones for Samsung, Huawei, Microsoft (that still feels weird to write) and newcomers like OnePlus? I suspect that conditions are worse, simply because there is less external oversight.

It's irrelevant what the conditions on those other products are because the companies haven't shouted from the roof tops how much they are doing to prevent the situation and don't have a wanky, shiny, HTML5 advertisement page linked prominently on their corporate homepage talking about how much awesome their supplier responsibility is than everyone else.

Apple isn't being held to a higher generic standard. They are being held to their own standard.

No, a simple disc check is least hated.

Since when? I thought Mac computers were shipping without an optical drive now, as were many Windows laptops. Or is a USB SuperDrive optical drive something every Mac owner is supposed to buy?