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Lightning is waterproof too, http://www.cultofmac.com/200445/lightning-connector-is-waterproof-but-accessory-makers-have-to-be-as-ethical-as-apple-to-use-it/

Says who? When people tell you that 300 PPI is the most that the human eye can resolve at 12 inches do you just accept it or do you question whether it is based on scientific fact? Some quick research indicates that this oft quoted "fact" is actually incorrect. It's closer to 1000 PPI.

http://www.cultofmac.com/173702/why-retina-isnt-enough-feature/
http://wolfcrow.com/blog/notes-by-dr-optoglass-the-resolution-of-the-human-eye/

Anyhow, ppi relates more to visual acuity which is a function of distance and density - and unless you're holding your phone to your nose, there aren't very many people complaining that a "retina" display has very noticeable pixels. Hell, the most common "retina" display one has is the humble HDTV - most people sit way too far back that 20/20 vision cannot resolve individual pixels, making even the low-dpi 1080p screen "retina" by definition. (Of course there are eagle eyes out there with 20/40+ vision who can benefit from being able to buy a cheaper smaller HDTV and still enjoy the high-resolution image).

Yes, the resolution of our eyes depends on distance. Most people hold their phones about 12 inches away from their faces, which is why Apple uses this measure. The rest of the comment is interesting, but has no bearing on how we look at phones nor does it invalidate any of the conclusions reached by the linked articles that around 1000 PPI is the physical limit of our eyes at, or around, 12 inches.

Says who? When people tell you that 300 PPI is the most that the human eye can resolve at 12 inches do you just accept it or do you question whether it is based on scientific fact? Some quick research indicates that this oft quoted "fact" is actually incorrect. It's closer to 1000 PPI.

http://www.cultofmac.com/173702/why-retina-isnt-enough-feature/
http://wolfcrow.com/blog/notes-by-dr-optoglass-the-resolution-of-the-human-eye/

Only by interpolation.

The resolution of the eye is NOT constant. In fact, the highest resolution part of the eye is the central vision - quite a narrow part of the entire field of vision. Peripheral vision is horrendous, and really only optimized for one use case - motion detection.

It's possible to conduct a simple experiment to show this - simply have a friend show a photo of two people only about 3' apart while you stare at a dot 2' feet away (so the photos are about 1 1/2' away from the dot). Whilst staring at the dot, have your friend mix the order up and have you identify the people without moving your gaze away.

Most people can't tell much beyond color. A more "fun" version involves cheerleaders and people on a field, and half of the "cheerleaders" were dudes in a cheerleading outfit. The test subjects routinely weren't better than random guesses on picking the real cheerleader.

The reason the eye has such "high resolution" is because the eyes are always in motion - they're constantly scanning around and interpolating the image data.

The eye itself is a relatively poor image capture device - but when coupled with a VERY powerful imaging processor and VERY powerful image processing software, it can achieve super-high resolutions and very advanced processing including motion detection, recognition, and other things. Unfortunately, it also means it's easily fooled - see optical illusions and blind spot detection as ways to fool it.

Anyhow, ppi relates more to visual acuity which is a function of distance and density - and unless you're holding your phone to your nose, there aren't very many people complaining that a "retina" display has very noticeable pixels. Hell, the most common "retina" display one has is the humble HDTV - most people sit way too far back that 20/20 vision cannot resolve individual pixels, making even the low-dpi 1080p screen "retina" by definition. (Of course there are eagle eyes out there with 20/40+ vision who can benefit from being able to buy a cheaper smaller HDTV and still enjoy the high-resolution image).

Above 300 PPI, you are just wasting battery life and hurting performance to display pixels the human eye can't even resolve. I wish more android manufactures had the guts to follow Apple's engineering wisdom here.

Says who? When people tell you that 300 PPI is the most that the human eye can resolve at 12 inches do you just accept it or do you question whether it is based on scientific fact? Some quick research indicates that this oft quoted "fact" is actually incorrect. It's closer to 1000 PPI.

http://www.cultofmac.com/173702/why-retina-isnt-enough-feature/
http://wolfcrow.com/blog/notes-by-dr-optoglass-the-resolution-of-the-human-eye/

At 4K you might be running into the "Uncanny Valley" symptom.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley

I concur 100% that 4K doesn't make ANY sense due to SMALL screen sizes. In order to have ~300 dpi @ 4K (3840 x 2160) your screen size would have to be 14.66 inches.
http://isthisretina.com/

I want 300 dpi at 60 inches.

4K only starts to make sense when you want to scale up the picture to be wall size. Let's take an average (diagonal) 60" plasma at 1080p, and the viewer sits at the recommended THX viewing angle of 36 degrees. (The recommended THX viewing distance is 6.7 feet)

  You would need to sit 6'8" (or 80 inches or 6.7 feet) to have a 36 degree viewing angle; the 36 DPI becomes retina at 94 inches, or 7'10". Most people don't sit that close, usually 8+ feet for something that size -- nowhere anything close to the recommended 6.7 feet.

With a 4K TV, while it has doubled the DPI at 73 dpi, it becomes retina at 47 inches. All 4K means is that you can sit closer and still see the same detail.

So if you sit closer then 7'10" then 4K would be an improvement; if your sit at the recommended THX viewing distance then it would be too; I seriously doubt most people pay THAT much attention to a "proper" visual setup.

References:
http://myhometheater.homestead.com/viewingdistancecalculator.html
http://www.cultofmac.com/173702/why-retina-isnt-enough-feature/

That's iTunes.

But then again, unless it's powered by a nuclear reactor, it's not a "nuclear, missile, or chemical or biological weapon". Score!

And the OS X EULA only says that it's "not intended for use in" a list of things which doesn't specifically include naval navigation! (Except when failure of the Apple software could lead to death, personal injury, or severe physical or environmental damage. So that depends on if getting stuck on a reef counts.)

http://www.cultofmac.com/246236/ios-7-killed-off-unlicensed-lightning-cables-but-heres-a-fix-that-might-work-for-you/

While I'm concerned about privacy, there are tradeoffs as with any technology. Facebook, obviously, the transaction of your data for social networking is worth it to many people.

The fingerprinting thing too, may be worth it. Muggers target apple device users. Making sure they can't sell stolen phones isn't without benefit to the user. I think it's a lot more likely that some meth head would stab me for my phone than the government trying to do something similar. Fingerprinting could make the first less likely, and that might make it worth it even if it makes the second slightly more likely. At the very least, I'd like the meth head to not get anything, while the government likely already has my fingerprints, and doesn't really need them anyway to ruin my life.

Not that I'm going to get an iPhone ever again. I'd almost rather be stabbed by a meth head than have to use itunes again.

I would say that it is bad when you unjustly harm someone.

Such as selling exploits that affect a broad range of users for a hefty profit with the sole purpose of making them available to the highest bidder(s)? Or denying them use of their property after you've sold it to them?

You claim that your hacking is ethical because you only hack your own property...Many products these days (e.g. game consoles) are still owned by their manufacturer and you are only buying the license to use them if you read the fine print.

A good point, which I raised specifically because you implied that all hacking is "bad" and I illustrated my point with several examples, one of which was the console. By your own logic I am not harming anyone and unlike a remote system owned by a 3rd party, everything was in my possession and obtained via legal means. I think it's a dubious claim to suggest that a console manufacturer owns the device that they sold after the customer purchases it. Otherwise one would need their permission to sell (transfer the license, according to you) it, which isn't the case with the device itself. Modifying something in an unauthorized manner (typically) results in a voided warranty, and things only get hairy when you sell and/or distribute the modifications, and as with most legal issues intent matters. Let's take a look at the First Sale Doctrine which applies to physical things (the console in this case) and the DMCA for the modifications. If it were a phone, I'd be completely in the clear. Since it's a console, it's illegal. Wat.

Laws do not dictate morality. I'm fully aware of the legalese and just because something is law doesn't make it right, see slavery for an example. It's a strange world where it's someone else's business what you do with your possessions in private. Could you imagine this being the case with cars? We have laws that allow this behavior for certain classes of devices but not others. Ultimately they're all computers, owned my someone.

I am a utilitarian of sorts. I believe the ends justify the means.

Results are hard to argue with, especially when you end up with something beautiful like a pyramid ;) but that didn't stop us from finding better methods to achieve greater things.

Apple used to do that all the time back in the day, before they started doing well. They used to sell shares of ARM to keep themselves afloat. In fact, there's an article about it, so I don't have to rely on my faulty memory.

http://www.cultofmac.com/97055/this-is-how-arm-saved-apple-from-going-bust-1990s/

Guided Access goes a long way to providing this. Settings->Accessibility

http://www.cultofmac.com/225138/safely-hand-your-iphone-or-ipad-over-to-anyone-with-guided-access-ios-tips/

Couple of observations:

- Apple reset the number of views in that thread about 6 months ago. Plenty of discussion about this in the thread itself. So 367k views really only means, '367k views since whenever it was reset'

- The atrocious customer service many of the complainants on the thread received coincided with the arrival and brief stay of John Browett, a British national and former head of Dixons, a particularly terrible UK computer / consumer electronics chain. Browett on arrival at Apple immediately started implementing a number of changes that reduced morale and positively fucked the chain's plummeting reputation for customer service. He sucked so badly, that he was summarily fired at the end of October along with Scott Forstall: http://www.cultofmac.com/198726/why-scott-forstall-and-john-browett-got-fired-from-apple-today/

- Apple quietly took out the LG screen (part number 661-6529) from their supplies of replacement displays sometime in late summer / early fall. The only replacements you can get from Apple now are Samsung parts (661-7171). I confirmed this myself with an Apple authorised 3rd-party supplier as I did not trust Apple to be honest about their supply situation after they fobbed me off initially with a 2nd LG display that developed IR.

- However, their plants in Shanghai are still assembling retinas with the LG screen (see thread for confirmation of this) - why, I don't know; maybe they have supplies to use up.

Also no problems with 4S and 6.1.

I wonder if some of these 'problems' are from the same people who refuse to believe that iTunes shuffle is random.

It's not that it isn't random, it's that it doesn't work like most people would expect. Even Apple will tell you that shuffle doesn't pick the next song at random. When you first turn on shuffle, it creates a shuffled playlist and uses that forever unless you turn off shuffle and turn it back on. So every time you play song X, it's always followed by song Y. In some ways it makes sense, but after listening though a few times, it's easy to notice that its not really picking the next song at random.

http://www.cultofmac.com/181517/why-itunes-shuffling-order-isnt-really-random/

At least I'm not posting on /. that "Hey my phones works okay, must not your the anti-apple trolls making this up.".

There are lists of rendered obsolete apps for Lion, Mountain Lion, and IOS6 in a few minutes of searching. I'm most amused by how Instapaper started on the iPhone, became a widely lauded app, moved to Android, and then the core idea was integrated into IOS6 as Safari's Offline Reading feature. I suspect it's only the Android users who are keeping the company viable now.

Available Feb 5, according to Apple's press release. http://www.cultofmac.com/212986/apple-will-start-selling-128gb-ipad-next-week/

Look at things this way: Americans are sleeping; the few that feel concerned about privacy are losing the war.

Inflight of that, I'd argue that anything that may shock people into reacting is fine.

I have one of these TVs, and one major problem is that each manufacturer is trying to create a captive audience for their own variety of apps.

As a result, the number of apps available is pathetic, and almost all boil down to TV stations vanity apps

Walled gardens can work - just look at Apple's app store for iOS. And I have no doubt that an app store for Apple TV would be a large success.

Don't confuse the drawbacks with "can't work". Some (not all) examples of drawbacks

• The "gardener" gets to enforce policies that might be in conflict what customers wants. E.g. crazy American moral standards: Nipples are really, really, really bad, violence is for everyone
• Open source is harder
• The lead time for software to reach the user is increased

Even so, there are advantages to users as well. A single location to find, buy and update apps is easy - far easier than the mess that I had e.g. on my Nokia N95 in the pre-iPhone days. Finding apps was hard, and there was no update mechanism. You also decrease the chance of malware significantly, and at least in theory apps shouldn't misbehave as much.

On a more important note, the judge is smokin hot:
http://www.cultofmac.com/185127/u-s-district-judge-lucy-koh-apples-lawyers-are-smoking-crack-in-samsung-case/

You need to get out more.

Agreed, but pro se temp can be unfair to all parties involved.

On a more important note, the judge is smokin hot:
http://www.cultofmac.com/185127/u-s-district-judge-lucy-koh-apples-lawyers-are-smoking-crack-in-samsung-case/

That's a great phone and an amazing price. But the Nexus 4 isn't quite comparable to the top of the line phones: iPhone 5, HTC 8X, Lumia 920, Siii,

This chart is a few months out of date but you can see the difference in specs between the phones listed and the Nexus 4: http://www.cultofmac.com/189929/the-iphone-5-how-it-stacks-up-against-the-competition-chart/

Apparently, not anymore.

Say what you like about market share, but it doesn’t appear there’s any dimming in demand for Apple's [AAPL] brand-new iPhone 5, with manufacturer Foxconn admitting it’s having a tough time meeting global demand for the world’s best smartphone.

Fuck that guy. Here's a much shorter and far less douchey summary.

Okay I can agree with you on that however there's been very few places that I've worked where the boss or his boss or somebody in the echelon is hated by his staff. It's a sad fact today that management doesn't appreciate the contributions of their employees but in reality. If you go back 100 years would you find it better or worse with the likes of Carnegie or Rockefeller? IMO, it would be much worse and despite the modern labor movement and workers rights along with laws enforcing guarantees of protection, such as the Employee Medical Leave Act, companies will still be dicks to their workers. You'd be surprised at some of the worst places I've seen for this, including non-profit organizations who have mission to serve people; most treat their workers like doormats. Trust me on this, I've been a consultant in a couple of these organizations and you'd really be surprised.

Even Steve Jobs was loathed by a lot of people who worked for him even though people put him on a pedestal as a true technological leader, yeah my ass. But such is the way of things with business leaders, most of them were pricks who on any given day would be beaten mercilessly by their employees if given a chance. About the only business leader I can think of who doesn't fit that mold would be Herb Kelleher who was a very competitive, sometimes ruthless, businessman yet if you asked any of his employees you'd find that close to 100% of them loved working for or with him.

I think for Detroit and Michigan in general, this is good news. Detroit hasn't really recovered since the riots of the 60s and it's time that it at least gets back to being a destination that people want to go to or work in rather than flee from it.

Its not exactly unheard of for some geek looking for startup capital to build devices and sell them:

http://www.cultofmac.com/82875/before-there-was-apple-we-made-blue-boxes-rare-video/

It may be of limited usefulness, but, I wouldn't want to bet on it. You never know what someone is going to come up with, and it wouldn't be hard or even conspicuous to drive through and collect data on whole neighorhoods. I Would bet you can see who is running a lot of electronic equipment and who is growing pot in their basement....

Just mining that data for leads could be very lucrative for a criminal.

Android's been out for four or five years and hasn't generated anywhere close to comparable revenues to Apple. I wouldn't hold my breath.

Dates! Released june 2007 the iphone fits that date description.
Android, OTOH turned *exactly* 4 years a few days ago on Oct 22nd Unsubsidized prices are only starting to make it affordable for entry level prepaid markets, a death blow against nokia because of the feature / price ratios sought by the masses. Just you wait. People don't like phones without touchscreens and with horrible feature-phone GUIs anymore because Android can be had for $90 without contract. In first world lands, Android is the death by 1000 paper cuts to feature phones and iPhones.

Broadly speaking, Android hardware and features is to iPhones what Linux Wintels are to Sun Unix Boxes.
Matter of fact, try and find true bluetooth support on an iPad and see where the Apple mentality is failing. I found you can't share files via BT with an iPad owner without jailbreaking. In the android world, BT allows small phone shops to cheaply do the magic address book transfers when you upgrade to a newer Android phone from an older one. It seems pro equipment / software and sync cables cost them money and training.

Apple may be profitable, but at some point wallets win out. Android

Steve Jobs Vowed To Patent Everything Apple Invented After Being Stung By $100m iPod Fine

Apple’s overactive approach to defending its patents may sometimes make it look like one of the industry’s biggest bullies, but you may be surprised to hear that the Cupertino used to patent hardly anything. In fact, it only began patenting its inventions after years of patent suit losses, one of which saw the company fined $100 million for creating the iPod.
In 2006, Apple was sued by Creative Technology when its iPod infringed a patent for a “portable music playback device.” After that, co-founder and former CEO Steve Jobs vowed to patent everything Apple invented, according to a New York Times report, and when it came to the iPhone, he declared “we’re going to patent it all.”

90% of what you know as a "computer" was invented by apple in the 80s and 90s. If anyone deserves to hold these patents, it's apple.

Right. This can never happen in the app store.

Nonsense. There were other phones with >300ppi prior to the iPhone 4 such as the Samsung S8000 (2009) and the Sharp SX862 (2008).

They just didn't give it marketable name like "retina display", probably because the term is virtually meaningless.

(Quoting Steve Jobs on what "retina" means: "It turns out that there is a magic number right around 300 pixels per inch that, when you hold something around 10 or 12 inches away from your eyes, is the limit of the human retina['s ability] to differentiate the pixels" Ref)

Linux desktop share is growing faster than Mac OS X is, neither is growing at any impressive rate though, but it is almost 5 years ago now that Mac OS X overtook Linux on the desktop, and more than a few years since it was growing faster.

Source please?

PC sales trend suggest a different trend, btw:

http://www.cultofmac.com/139839/mac-market-share-continues-to-rise-while-pc-shipments-decline-report/

Here.

Regardless of whether Apple gave Xerox stock, Xerox has a different idea of exactly what they authorized Apple to do:

http://www.cultofmac.com/602/apple-sued-for-ripping-off-xerox-alto-gui/

Please educate yourself why Apple uses a 30 pin connector. The gist is when Apple came up with the connector almost a decade ago, they needed enough pins for future uses. The second reason is that using USB requires some sort of computing and drivers. If you are a manufacturer of car radios, do you want the signals to go through a computer or direct (left analog channel, right analog). Apple appears to be dropping 30 pins because they are dropping FireWire and older connections like S-Video which won't be needed for the future. In the 10 years since, if Apple had kept changing the connector to accommodate HDMI, DVI, etc, people would have complained.

Now perhaps us iPhone users like our phones and actually use them more than android folks, but I don't think that's really the case.

Yet, it appears to be true

Don't show me Dems, show me single Dem girls of roughly my age!

Seriously, in the age of Girls Around Me plotting an obfuscated version of a public data set (the last name is edited out) should not look creepy any longer. The app could have opted to edit nothing out, and then link the data to plethoras of other data sets and social network accounts.

As a society, the US has been persistently trading privacy for shopping coupons, transparency and security for the past century or so. As individuals, it's your responsibility to share what little information you've still control of on a per need basis. Most evidently don't care that much. (How many cash-only people do you know? What about non-Googlers?)

If it ever is illegal to aggregate data on anyone unless they opt-in in no uncertain terms, and illegal to bundle such an opt-in clause in terms and services, I'll shed a real tear. But we're not heading there.

There are plenty of things that demonstrate that Steve Jobs was human and didn't have perfect taste. Approving the fake wooden iBooks bookcase. Bringing in swatches of Corinthian leather to meeting and insisting that the "Find My Friends" UI replicate the look. And this: http://www.cultofmac.com/163265/steve-jobs-wanted-to-dress-up-as-willy-wonka-provide-tour-of-apple-campus-for-millionth-imac-purchase/ In one article, Jolie O'Dell opined that Apple's use of a multicolored logo was an aesthetic gaffe marking the post-Jobs decline of Apple. Sounds good, except that Apple also used a flashy, multicolored logo at the original iPad unveiling. Misguided predictions like this are easy but usually short on research.

You can't send HD resolution video across WiFi (or even Gigabit Ethernet) uncompressed, so AirPlay mirroring requires compression. AppleTV hardware only supports the H.264 codec, so the format has to be H.264. While it's very efficient in terms of compression ratio, it's also very difficult to implement in software -- as in, it probably takes almost all of a quadcore CPU's cycles to encode 1080p in realtime. Since that would be pointless (you want to use your computer normally while mirroring, not have its fans howling just to send its display to the TV), Apple requires hardware H.264 encoding to implement AirPlay mirroring.

This would be a decent reason if the source material was uncompressed HD video.

However, it almost certainly is not. It's ridiculous (for multiple reasons) that if you have an existing H.264 encoded file, you need a Mac capable of realtime H.264 encoding to stream it to an AppleTV.

If it is a H.264 encoded file, you can stream it directly from iTunes already. The new feature does full screen mirroring - perfect for streaming those services who are desktop only (Hulu and other flash players). There is a non-apple solution with some some technical trade offs if you have an older Mac or a Windows system.

Apple going through the trouble of abandoning their old proprietary connector and MAKING A NEW PROPRIETARY ONE instead of going to a standard one like every other phone has had for years sounds at least a bit nefarious to me.

Is it possible that a standard micro or mini USB cable didn't do everything they wanted?

Also, hardware developers sign an NDA and an agreement with Apple to be able to use Apple's logos and "Made for iPod/iPhone" marketing phrases. As part of that agreement you agree to acquire the hardware (connectors, shells, and authentication chips) only through Apple's authorized channels and that you will submit to certification tests. By doing this, they can accurately know how many products you are shipping to be sure you're not stiffing them on royalties and guarantee that your products meet a certain level of quality.

Hypothetically it also allows Apple to see your products before they ship so they can deny you certification and then quash it as it might duplicate functionality with hardware they are interested in licensing themselves or to steal your product idea to later ship as their own. Hypothetically, of course. I've never seen this happen at a previous employer where I designed hardware to interface with iPods, as far as you know.

Apple going through the trouble of abandoning their old proprietary connector and MAKING A NEW PROPRIETARY ONE instead of going to a standard one like every other phone has had for years sounds at least a bit nefarious to me.

Is it possible that a standard micro or mini USB cable didn't do everything they wanted?

Even if you imagine that it's remotely plausible that everybody was poised to take the "obvious" (by today's 20/20 hindsight) next step in phone design (down to the design and arrangement of the icons), but that Apple by it's superior (but nonetheless somehow non-patent worthy) engineering (compared to experienced phone designers like Samsung and HTC) was somehow able to beat everybody to market, the evidence from court filings shows that it is not true. Here is Google's original concept design for an android phone. Here is Samsung's design for a touch-based phone before the saw the iPhone. Moreover, if you read the reviews and comments from other phone manufacturers at the time of iPhone announcement, nobody was saying, "Apple managed to be the first to market with the kind of phone we are all working on." Rather, the nearly-universal wisdom was, "There will be at most a small market for a phone of this design."

A design patent does not claim ownership of the individual elements of the design, but rather rights over the specific combination of those multiple elements. So it is more accurate to say that Apple has claimed rights over devices that resemble an iPad in multiple ways, overall shape and proportions being only one of those.

It is quite clear that Apple created something. It is instructive to look at tablet design before and after iPad. Prior to the iPad, the overwhelming industry opinion was that pad devices were niche products with no large consumer market, and that consumers far preferred netbooks. That opinion was not without basis. Multiple attempts by multiple companies to develop a pad device had failed.

The iPhone similarly challenged conventional wisdom and completely transformed cell phone design. Yet now, multiple manufacturers are simply insisting that it is impossible to think of a phone design that would appeal to consumers that did not look pretty much like Apple's design. Of course, before the iPhone, they thought exactly the same thing about Blackberry's design.

Apple's history of transforming consumer electronics extends back to their introduction of window-based GUIs for consumer computers. Any one device could be luck, but Apple has done it repeatedly. No single feature of any of those devices--the Mac, the Macbook Air, the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad, can be reasonably said to be responsible for their success; rather, it is the particular combination. So the objections to Apple's design patents are much like insisting that a famous chef should not be renowned for his signature dish because he didn't invent beef, or garlic, or pepper.

Does patent or copyright law protect Apple's particular brand of creativity, which has repeatedly transformed the user experience of consumer electronics? Perhaps the law offers no real protection for this kind of creativity; I don't know. But there is certainly a reasonable argument that the law should encourage companies like Apple that genuinely innovate in the area of design, and that are willing to take huge financial risks in introducing designs that challenge the conventional wisdom.

yeah i gave you that link in haste - then read later on what they had done. shame shame.

Apple Guideline 8.3: "Apps which appear confusingly similar to an existing Apple product or advertising theme will be rejected."

Now lets get down to business. Will Apple pull a competing app?

Restricting it to AT&T frequencies seems counter-productive.

No, that's not the problem. Even if they had the same AT&T bands in Australia, they'd still be skating on thin ice.

The real problem is our US consumer watchdog agencies. They simply don't care anymore. If they did care, there would be a minimum font size for disclaimers shown on television (that I currently can't even read on my huge television), and the carriers wouldn't call their services "unlimited" (and Sprint, which calls all the other major carriers liars, wouldn't have a bs "data premium" fee itself tacked on top of its existing advertised rates for its so-called "unlimited data plans").

Personally, I am not a Apple fanboy, not in the least, but I wouldn't blame Apple for this. If you want to blame someone, blame the US advertising environment the Apple executives are coming from. Advertising in the US has become a race to the bottom. Since almost every large US company is lying in their ads to consumers, and most of those companies are getting away with those lies, the only companies that are getting hurt in the marketplace are the ones that are not lying enough (or that don't have a large enough advertising budget compared to their competitors).

the average person doesn't give a rats ass about privacy

... until you show her Girls Around Me or some similarly intrusive or creepy app.

And he also did this. Previous poster definitely enjoying the reality distortion field.

of Google's first phone:

Google's phone concepts before and after seeing the iPhone.

Free corporations of any government oversight and you have Cyberpunk 2020 - corporations become independent states with their own military and law enforcement agencies. Unlikely? Well, the SFPD has already been used as a private police force but that was at least questionable and a few people had some explaining to do. If corporations are accountable to no one you can be sure that they are going to take full advantage of that. Yes, the current system is broken and governments sit in deep pockets of their corporate sponsors but they have to do something from time to time to please the masses if they want to keep up the appearances of a democratic election process.

Right.
http://www.cultofmac.com/56302/apple-mac-os-x-security-update-patches-pdf-exploit/

A) Vulnerability has been patched.
B) It's not that difficult to detect and remove.

This is strictly about helping non technical users that might be infected in an easy way. It's these users that were specifically targetted by the way since the malware targets old versions of Java and even checks for the existence of "power user" tools installed and doesn't install if they are :

"4. You do not have certain security tools installed on your Mac that Flashback checks for, including Little Snitch, Xcode, and a few anti-malware tools.'

Yes it is possible, in fact:
http://www.cultofmac.com/154873/tim-cook-forces-att-to-unlock-customers-phone/
Notice the phone involved.

See this story:
http://www.cultofmac.com/154873/tim-cook-forces-att-to-unlock-customers-phone/