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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.

http://www.macrumors.com/2014/... It's a problem for 10s of 1000s of MacBook Pro users who purchased in 2011

Except the class action lawsuit only applies to a small percentage of users who have the problem - those in CA and FL. Representatives from other states were not found.

http://www.macrumors.com/2014/... It's a problem for 10s of 1000s of MacBook Pro users who purchased in 2011

Your previous post which linked information from 2006, this was prior to 2006, it did not work.

Are you having reading comprehension issues?

The first iPod was released on Oct 23 2001, the page you linked in the internet archive was from 2006, so between those times, that page did not exist, and iTunes was forcefully incompatible with all hardware not made by Apple. They sued odioworks for making software that synced to the iPod http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
They got very mad and did something to Palm when their Pre faked being an Apple device, but it must have been short of a lawsuit as I cannot find info about a lawsuit:
http://forums.macrumors.com/sh...

Yes, you could bypass iTunes if you had another device, they even gave you a way to strip their DRM, but it required burning a music CD then reripping the song. Later on, they removed the DRM, but early iTunes had DRM to prevent the use of the music on anything but an Apple device.

Now, Apple iTunes did not allow other hardware prior to 2006, if you can show ANYTHING that says otherwise (from before 2006) than you can say you proved something, but your link quite clearly shows that the page hosted on archive.org is from 2006, not earlier.

That's probably not what he means. It's been hypothesized and rumored that Apple will eventually move all their laptops and desktops away from Intel and use ARM as the CPU. Intel has been behind schedule delivering next-generation chips, which leads to the conclusion that Apple would want to control its own destiny with its own CPUs.

They won't do that until Windows runs full-blown Windows (NOT RT) on ARM (and has some sort of JIT), which it does NOT seem that MS is particularly interested in making happen. RT was designed from the get-go to be a stepchild, at best, of "real Windows", and it looks like that's what it is going to stay.

Apple sells not an insignificant number of desktop and laptop machines because of being able to dual-boot (and do VM) for other OSes (primarily Windows and Linux), and to be frank, that requires Intel (and more importantly, x86) compatibility. And you can bet your bottom-dollar that Apple is VERY aware of that market-segment.

You can be sure that Apple would love to move to ARM, if only for its insanely-good performance/Watt (and to have a tool to pry-down Intel's stupidly-high prices. And people talk about the "Apple Tax"... Sheesh!). But, unless and until Windows either becomes insignificant (which may very well happen in about 10 years) or they develop "RT" into a non-joke OS, don't look for Apple to give up Intel anytime soon.

The long term plan is to run OS X on it.

While I'm not sure I'd welcome that on anything smaller than the iPhone 6 Plus, it WOULD be wonderful to be able to download a version of OS X that was designed with a slightly different UI layer that was targeted for certain classes of iOS devices (e.g. Tablets).

But I understand why that gets to be "a bit much" for a company; because not only do they have to develop it (which is kind of trivial for them, due to the way that iOS and OS X are built); but more importantly, they would have to test and SUPPORT the "chimera" iOS X. And THAT is (understandably) too much of a drain for the amount of return.

But you can bet that, in some Apple engineer's basement, there lives an iPad running OS X. After all, that's how OS X for Intel came to be...

That's probably not what he means. It's been hypothesized and rumored that Apple will eventually move all their laptops and desktops away from Intel and use ARM as the CPU. Intel has been behind schedule delivering next-generation chips, which leads to the conclusion that Apple would want to control its own destiny with its own CPUs.

I bought my 160 GB iPod Classic six years ago, and yes, I'm quite pleased it's still going strong, despite being dropped who-knows-how-many times and spending most of its life in my cars (often in somewhat extreme temperatures for a consumer electronics device).

I much prefer it to an iPod Touch or iPhone for playing music because of the much larger capacity, the simple interface, great battery life (even after all this time), and the physical buttons that are easy to use while driving (I can skip, pause, or replay a song without taking my eyes off the road). I much prefer it to offerings from other manufacturers because it has a cleaner interface, syncs automatically with iTunes (all I have to do is plug it in every few weeks when it needs a charge), and use databases and metadata in an intelligent way. All the other players I've seen have busy, garish interfaces, have controls that may approach but can't match the elegance of the click wheel, and use the file system for both adding music from the computer and playing it from the device, which is far from ideal, even with a well organized collection.

Really, the only substantial ways Apple could have improved it would be to switch to flash memory (say 256 GB, for even better battery life, reliability, thinness, and probably most importantly, parts availability) and switch out the old dock connector for Lightning. It's remarkable that the iPod has fallen so far from prominence since the iPhone that it isn't worth updating it at all anymore.

Unfortunately, my iPod won't last forever; the hard drive or the battery will eventually give out. I'll do my best to find parts and keep it going, but it would be nice if there were something on the market I would consider for a replacement. From my perspective, there isn't; everything else falls short.

It will be interesting to see if Apple becomes more charitable under Cook. Jobs was pretty stingy that way (very stingy in his perosnal life, but I think Apple unde rhim did do a few charitable contributions)

Apple has become more charitable under Cook. An employee perk is that Apple will match donations up to $10,000 or so per year to an employee's charity.

Now, Jobs himself we don't know the extent of his charity - his records of public philanthropy are generally scant, though it's possible that Jobs himself requested the donations be kept anonymous (probably for marketing reasons to keep charities from trying to raise funds under his name or to promote the fact that "famous Steve Jobs donates here" in their records).

Angelbird SSDs have native Mac TRIM support, I upgraded my MacBook Pro with an Angelbird SSD wrk for Mac, I've updated to Yosemite and it confirmed in the System Settings that TRIM is enabled, which is very important for conserving the life of the SSD. http://www.macrumors.com/2014/...

And it was introduced at 10:58, by the way:
http://www.macrumors.com/2014/...

I'm normally one that rolls his eyes when I hear this term, but I think in the case of Yosemite, there's definitely an instance of planned obsolescence. Handoff requires Bluetooth-4.0 (BLE). This is fine. Any Mac that has BLE should work with the feature. And they do...except for the mid-2011 Macbook Air. Luckily, there's a hack you can do with a hex editor and mucking about with kexts. Do so, and the feature works flawlessly. It's ridiculous that Apple would do this.

http://forums.macrumors.com/sh...

God forbid we progress with the latest technologies.

Moron.

BTW the new Mac Mini comes with fixed onboard RAM. I wish I could see a more detailed teardown soon, would like to see how hard it is to replace the HDD.

If you want to replace the HDD, then you are not the market the Mac Mini is intended for. Besides, apple is going the route of external peripherals with the Thunderbolt interface.

BTW the new Mac Mini comes with fixed onboard RAM. I wish I could see a more detailed teardown soon, would like to see how hard it is to replace the HDD.

I'm normally one that rolls his eyes when I hear this term, but I think in the case of Yosemite, there's definitely an instance of planned obsolescence. Handoff requires Bluetooth-4.0 (BLE). This is fine. Any Mac that has BLE should work with the feature. And they do...except for the mid-2011 Macbook Air. Luckily, there's a hack you can do with a hex editor and mucking about with kexts. Do so, and the feature works flawlessly. It's ridiculous that Apple would do this.

http://forums.macrumors.com/sh...

Do you have a cite for this? I'm pretty familiar with how Google Wallet (with and without a hardware Secure Element) works, and I *know* that CC info is presented to the POS in order to make the transaction.

Any of the hundreds of articles about how Apple Pay works. Here's one that explains that the device gives the credit card terminal a 16-digit randomized token and a unique one-time-use CCV. Payment processors use the pair to identify the credit account to bill.

In short, your actual credit card numbers never leave your device. Google for "apple pay token" if you'd like to dive into further detail.

That kind of thing doesn't instill a lot of confidence.

Never mind that iOS 8.1, 8.2 and 8.3 were in testing after iOS 8 got released. So many new products, so many updates.

It's cashflow. I guess it halted after this: http://www.macrumors.com/2014/...

You have to be able to pay your staff, overheads and other costs etc. The new iPhone is at least a year away, I guess they couldn't secure a loan.

Apple will continue licensing siri technology. Yes, they'll probably look for alternatives (the same way they are looking for an alternative to the Samsung chip fabrication).

I would be amazed if they weren't already working on this.

They are. Rumors have been circulating for months that Apple has been busy poaching the top talent from Nuance (everyone from VPs to postdoc researchers) to form their own in-house voice recognition group. The efforts apparently started way back last year, in fact.

Yes... because modern smartphones are much faster than single core 1Ghz desktop CPUs. They're roughly as fast as 3Ghz dual cores

Actually, lets take a look...

Single core 1GHz (we'll give it the benefit of the doubt, and make it a CoreSolo, the fastest 1GHz chip ever made): http://browser.primatelabs.com...
That scores 443/440 for multithreaded/single threaded respectively on geek bench.

A modern mobile phone: http://cdn.macrumors.com/artic...
That scores 2920/1633 respectively.

So yes, a current mobile phone is much more powerful than a 1Ghz single core machine. In fact, it's roughly as powerful as a 3Ghz Dual core: http://browser.primatelabs.com...

"the company has been directing its support staff to replace affected phones under warranty following a visual inspection.", source: http://www.macrumors.com/2014/...

The iPad 2 is 29% of the iPad market share. I expect IOS 8.1 to fix any lingering issues just as IOS 7.1 did.

At this point I think it's safe to write off TSMC's 20nm fab process. It's not gonna happen [...]

Except that it already is shipping. Apple's A8 chip used in the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus is manufactured using TSMC's 20nm process. And given Apple's proclivity for consuming entire manufacturing lines for their products, it's entirely possible that TSMC had to turn away other customers if they wanted to keep Apple, simply because they lacked the capacity to do otherwise. It also makes sense why they haven't been able to talk about the fact that they had a major customer lined up, given how religiously Apple likes to control their product announcements and the fact that they didn't even announce the devices until a week or two ago.

The iPhone is popular here but I wouldn't say as popular as it used to be, or is in other countries.

Actually quite the opposite - iOS marketshare is huge here, and doesn't show much sign of slowing down. Here is a handy table.

I am hanging out for a new Mac Mini model (and have been for 12 months)

Good news everyone, the new Mac mini is almost certainly coming (and has been since december 7th, 2013).

Why aren't CCs issuing one time tokens per a transaction - this rendering subsequent transactions useless? (Or tying the token to a retailer for subscriptions / etc)

Hopefully someone brings out a system like that soon.

Supporting gay rights.

Almost everyone does that and it does not cost them a single cent.

They spent money commissioning a video celebrating gay pride.

They spent money on lawyers to petition the Californian government on Prop 8.

They donated $100K to the No to 8 campaign.

Their supplier responsibility reports have been auditing their suppliers for discrimination for years.

It is just public relations.

Again, like the other guy I responded to, you're setting up a no win situation. They don't support gay rights? They are unethical. They do support gay rights? It's just marketing.

Their CEO is widely believed to be gay and I'm sure a hell of a lot of their employees are gay as well. You're asking me to believe they aren't doing this out of principle at all? That's not the most plausible explanation here.

Enforcing worker rights in their contracts abroad.

Again, this is mainly a PR thing. People got upset (for the wrong reasons -- Apple's contract manufacturers may be bad employers by European or even American standards, but people in China appear to be happy to work for them) and Apple had to repair damage.

Nope, they actually started internal audits of their supply chain and generating public reports several years before all that happened. You can go and download them on their website and see for yourself.

Making their products environmentally friendly.

When will they be doing that?

They've been doing that for many years. Here's the info, specifically the products. Even Greenpeace are singing their praises, specifically, saying: Apple has put its money where its mouth is: Greenpeace's report, "Clicking Clean," found that the company's embrace of renewable energy is genuine, and is leading the technology sector.

Their entire product portfolio is based on planned obsolescence. They may be very proud of how much material they are saving by making critical parts as flimsy as possible, but in reality the reduced lifespan hurts the environment more than the minor savings help it.

This is just FUD. Apple hardware lasts a lot longer than the equivalent from their competitors. I've lost count of the number of laptops, PCs, and non-Apple smartphones I've seen people around me churn through while Apple users with the same needs just buy once or twice in the same time period.

Improving the privacy of their users

By storing all their personal data in a country that has effectively declared war on privacy? By secretly tracking their customers? Apple is doing the exact opposite of what you claim.

By forbidding abusive behaviour in the App Store. By removing application access to identifying information several times. By providing an alternative to third party analytics like Google Analytics that isn't driven by a market need to sell that data. By encrypting a whole bunch of things they aren't compelled to.

Looks like Apple hired him. http://www.macrumors.com/2014/...

Or Xbox 360 USB ports.

Only if it's as high tech as they've promised.

GP's "soft drink" reference explained: http://www.macrumors.com/2014/...

Selling your eyeballs and your habits are pretty strictly in Google's and Microsoft's purview.

Yeah, not so much. Though based on news reports they're not not very good at it yet.

Actually, I am amazed that nobody had that idea yet. Install a (free) game and install a, say, bitcoin miner (or whatever you can use to make money using computer cycles) as well, which runs whenever the game doesn't use 100% of the computing speed (which is most of the time, actually).

Wanna bet that 90% of gamers don't even notice that their computer is calculating for someone else, another 9% don't care as long as the game is free and the rest at best bitches about it (while still playing the game)?

Actually, there is a Bitcoin miner for Unity mobile games. Yes, mobile games. As in the ones you play on your smartphone and tablet.

It's $80. Right now it's on iOS, and presumably coming soon to Android, if it's not already there.

I suppose the only real benefit is it will try to keep you in the game - if you run of zonks 2 minutes in (a common ploy in most freemium games to get you to ante up), it doesn't serve their interests if you just quit the app and run something else,

I guess today is expired certificate day.

Way to go, Apple. /sigh

> Apple's not that big - they don't have huge marketshare and all that.

Forget market share. In a growing market, it doesn't mean much. Look at market cap instead... Apple IS big. They grew by not just entering new markets, but creating new markets.

Apple sells a lot of computers and devices. The number of units shipped has consistently increased until recently. They haven't sold as many phones as Samsung, but they held their own pretty well against Samsung's juggernaut.

Apple is the private sector equivalent to the NSA.

any support for this argument? goog and fb are the ones sucking up and sorting through everybody's info. how is apple the bad guy here? they've gone to great lengths to limit govt intrusion and even notify people when the govt serves a warrant on their accounts.

there's no back door. Apple's iCloud syncs some information across all devices. For ex if I take a photo with my iphone it automatically syncs with my ipad and my macbook. obv the photo must be uploaded from the phone and live on an apple server somewhere, so it's vulnerable to supoena.

in other news, apple will begin notifying users of supoena requests LINK

If they are only asking for 20$ per "pirated" CD, then it makes the Samsung tactic* viable.

* steal all you can until you get caught, the fines will never be as high as the value of what you've stolen.

Not to mention that in Canada, we're supposed to have the right to copy for individual use. That includes downloads. Just set your upload speed to zero, become a P2P leech and you're legal.

Why is it everything apple embraces early ends up being a constantly changing connector

Because they can sell new ones at 60$ a piece and pocket the 55+$ in profit every year or so, putting in code that tells if it is "genuine Apple" or not?

Samsung are truly creative and innovative, really?

When all you do is try to one-up the leader, you end up following him forever because you have no idea where he's going.

"Skate to where the puck will be" is the only sane option.

if you're going to sell an app, IMO, you should look at platform marketshare by country, among other things.

They have gone further than just putting a keyboard on the iphone, see pic:

http://www.macrumors.com/2014/...

They've copied the shape of the keys, the horizontal bars between the keys etc.

The Surface Pro 2 has a battery life of around 7.5 hours in mixed use.

The iPad has a battery life of around 11 hours for "internet use"

The Surface has very good battery life for a laptop, but it's still not nearly where the iPad is - which you'd expect with it having a desktop processor and OS.

Is Apple waiting for these new CPUs to release an updated Mac mini? It's been quite 513 days since the last update.

Because microusb has an absolutely atrocious, finnicky connector. I hope they use practically anything but microusb.

MicroUSB was designed to put the wear on the plug (the cable), not the device. Or so they say. One year with Samsung Galaxy charging everyday - no problems so far.

Apples Lightning connector would be great, actually, or something very similar. Near unbreakably solid, easy to plug in our out, can be plugged in either way...

I thought the same until I read on forums about lightning connector corrosion.

Note, I'm not arguing that MicroUSB is a good standard for charging. But IMO it is better than no standard at all.

Sort of. The details with iOS are a bit more complex than that.

Originally, entering your password in iOS for a purchase created a 15 minute window in which additional purchases of any sort could be made. At the time, however, in-app purchases didn't yet exist. After they were added, there were a series of complaints from parents back in 2010 or so. iOS 4.3 (March 2011) modified it in response to complaints so that the password needed to be entered again before in-app purchases could be made. iOS 5 (June 2011) added a setting to require the password for every single purchase, effectively closing the window for users who selected that option. iOS 7.1 (a few days ago) prompts the user the first time they make a purchase to let them know that there's an option to close the 15 minute window.

More or less, yes, iOS allows purchases for X minutes, but it also notifies the user that it is doing so and has for a couple of years provided them an option to disable that ability.

Sort of. The details with iOS are a bit more complex than that.

Originally, entering your password in iOS for a purchase created a 15 minute window in which additional purchases of any sort could be made. At the time, however, in-app purchases didn't yet exist. After they were added, there were a series of complaints from parents back in 2010 or so. iOS 4.3 (March 2011) modified it in response to complaints so that the password needed to be entered again before in-app purchases could be made. iOS 5 (June 2011) added a setting to require the password for every single purchase, effectively closing the window for users who selected that option. iOS 7.1 (a few days ago) prompts the user the first time they make a purchase to let them know that there's an option to close the 15 minute window.

More or less, yes, iOS allows purchases for X minutes, but it also notifies the user that it is doing so and has for a couple of years provided them an option to disable that ability.

Japan Display manufactures the iPhone screens.

Apple has already thought of that: Apple's A8 Chip Production for iPhone 6 Underway at TSMC.