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Where is my Thunderbolt high speed LAN network connection? 10G Ethernet is prohibitively expensive, this has 40GB built in. Why can't I use 10G or so of that to network?!

It's been a thing for a while, just connect two compatible systems with any old Thunderbolt cable.

Macs got it with 10.9 in October '13: http://www.macworld.com/articl...
Windows apparently got a driver from Intel to support it in April '14: http://www.engadget.com/2014/0...
I can find a bunch of questions about it on Linux but haven't found anything conclusive about support. It doesn't look like there's been much work at the moment, likely because Thunderbolt systems are few and far between aside from Macs.

And before anyone says you can't; you most certainly can delete every App, even the "Apple" ones, from an iPhone. I know, because I accidently deleted iTunes from my iPhone, but I was able to get it back from the App Store, too.

How did you do that? When you long-press (in iOS8.3 anyway) the Apple apps (including iTunes) don't get the little 'X' to delete them like all the others. I have no real interest in deleting them (ones like the Apple Watch app just end up in my 'Junk' folder), just curious.

I think it was an earlier version of iOS, and as I said, I don't know how I did it, because it was an accident. HOWEVER, you can still do it through iTunes. A little more work; but it isn't like you do this every single day, and it should be a little difficult to remove stuff like Safari, Photos, Passbook, etc. by accident; so I think the "iTunes" method is a good compromise, overall.

And in mobile it isn't just Google and Android OEMs that are guilty of it, either. On the Apple front you get new bloatware delivered with every iOS update

While it is not possible to Delete certain Apps from an iPhone/iPad directly, you can evidently do it quite easily from iTunes. And as a bonus, you can also use that method to keep discarded, unwanted Apps from trying to "Update", too.

Not the most elegant solution; but it keeps the unwashed from accidently deleting "base apps" by accident, while still allowing a PowerUser to "Delete the Un-Delete-able".

I remember the first model of iMac had an undocumented card slot. People speculated that Apple used the card slot for factory diagnostics on the iMacs; third-party companies took advantage of the slot to add 3D accelerators; and then Apple revised the iMac design and left that port out.

http://www.macworld.com/article/1014902/imacboards.html

If Apple hasn't announced the port, the port may be gone from the next iWatch release.

Likely the problem is that there aren't enough patents on the port. Perhaps Apple will add a documented expansion port once they find some patents to encumber it.

Do you trust that VPS? :P http://www.macworld.com/articl...

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.

Probably something to so with the fact it's called "QuickOffice Pro", which is a legit Office application and therefore they are charging 2.99 to unsuspecting public.

They obviously aren't intentionally buying an app called " tap to exit pro" at 2.99 and then calling it a scam.

Actually, it was that legit software, and it still was until Google bought it and then after dumping it for Docs, Sheets, and Slides replaced it with the scamware update.

I think they're doing this precisely because they want to head off government regulation, most likely because they fear government regulation would be much stricter than what they are imposing on themselves via this document. It's probably the same reason why industries like movies and videogames set up their own rating systems. If they waited for the government to do it, it might be worse than than what they came up with themselves - at least from their perspective.

Obviously, those companies are not doing this out of the goodness of their hearts, but likely because they see privacy as a potential hot-button consumer issue in the future, and would like to preempt the discussion if at all possible with this document. If they can self-regulate themselves reasonably well, fine. If not, we can go the legislation and regulation route.

All I'm saying here is that it would be foolish of them to thumb their noses at their customers and piss them off, because they're more likely to either lose sales or get burdened with more regulation via the government that way, as has happened so often before. One would like to think they could eventually learn from decades of mistakes and stay ahead of the curve for once. Maybe some people think of me as naive for thinking a company would use privacy as a selling point, but I'd say there's at least one example to point to recently.

Far too few people are going to be interested in it.

Until, of course, paying with CurrentC gets you a 2% discount, 10% on select items during an introductory offer*.

( * with regular prices actually gradually going up )

I think you'll find that even for regular discounts, there are a LOT of people who will simply not be willing to give up their bank account and SSN details to retailers. I certainly won't. Not to mention it would still have the problem of being a horrendously clunky system to use.

And finally, don't forget that CurrentC isn't even ready for full deployment yet (various things have been quoting dates in 2015), while Apple Pay is live now, and over a million people signed up with it in the first 3 days. By the time CurrentC can get started, Apple Pay will have a very strong—and, I bet you, loyal, given how easy it is—installed base of users who are just not going to put up with their crap.

Dan Aris

A $30 cable, expensive Thunderbolt chipset, expensive peripherals, and you won't be getting actual 10 Gbps full duplex Ethernet through Thunderbolt, nor will it work a damn without an actual 10 Gbps Ethernet controller somewhere in the system. Keep on keepin' on, though.

Does being stupid come with being an Apple-Hater, or did you pay extra? http://www.macworld.com/articl...

Having a NO fucking brain necessitates being a Mac hater. If you think you're getting anything near the capabilities for full duplex 10 Gbps Ethernet over Thunderbolt without a true 10 Gbps Ethernet controller in the system, you're a damned fool. If you do have a 10 Gbps Ethernet controller in the system, just use it directly.

FTFY, and you just proved it. And you will never be able to tell, because you are so fucking stupid.

A $30 cable, expensive Thunderbolt chipset, expensive peripherals, and you won't be getting actual 10 Gbps full duplex Ethernet through Thunderbolt, nor will it work a damn without an actual 10 Gbps Ethernet controller somewhere in the system.
Keep on keepin' on, though.

Does being stupid come with being an Apple-Hater, or did you pay extra? http://www.macworld.com/articl...

Having a fucking brain necessitates being a Mac hater. If you think you're getting anything near the capabilities for full duplex 10 Gbps Ethernet over Thunderbolt without a true 10 Gbps Ethernet controller in the system, you're a damned fool. If you do have a 10 Gbps Ethernet controller in the system, just use it directly.

A $30 cable, expensive Thunderbolt chipset, expensive peripherals, and you won't be getting actual 10 Gbps full duplex Ethernet through Thunderbolt, nor will it work a damn without an actual 10 Gbps Ethernet controller somewhere in the system. Keep on keepin' on, though.

Does being stupid come with being an Apple-Hater, or did you pay extra? http://www.macworld.com/articl...

You could lose everything in your iCloud backups:

http://www.macworld.com/articl...

If you make such claims, please back them up with statements. The latest iOS upgrade has been a great improvement to both speed and usability for my iPhone 4 and my iPad 1 is no slower today through all the upgrades than when I started using it 3 years ago, it still runs all the games and whatnots.

http://www.macworld.com/articl...

You're looking at the Early 2014 Haswell 11" Macbook Air. The S200E has been out for over a year now; you're not even comparing apples to apples. I'm going to roll with the mid-2013 Air even though that's still newer than the S200E and thus is still not quite fair.

How is my S200E better than a mid-2013 Macbook Air?
Price: $510 ($430 for the S200E + $80 for a 120GB SSD) vs. $899 = I paid $389 less. I can buy another S200E base unit for that price today.
Physical attributes: S200E is thicker and heavier than the Air but is still a solid aluminum chassis (other than the rubberized bottom) that doesn't tweak, crack, and break as easily as the Air; the rubberized bottom also makes the unit much less slippery overall. Servicing the S200E is also very easy. The Air might be a little lighter, but in a backpack full of other stuff, why complain about an extra half a pound, especially when it means a much sturdier unit?
CPU: The Air is a Haswell i5-4250U; the S200E is an Ivy Bridge i3-3217U; this obviously makes the Air's CPU more powerful (PassMark: 3419) than the S200E's CPU (Passmark: 2292). However, my purchase was partly based on picking a low power consumption laptop to attach to a set of solar panels, not on maximum CPU performance; that i5 is 15W TDP while the i3 is 10W TDP (1/3 lower). I don't feel bad about paying $389 less for the slower CPU though.
Storage: The S200E came with a 7mm 500GB hard drive. I upgraded it to a 120GB SATA-III SSD. My final price includes the part cost for that SSD. Its 8GB less than the Air's 128GB PCIe SSD and the performance between the two in real-world usage is probably identical (though the PCIe SSD shows better raw read speeds in simple benchmarks). Ultimately, the SSD differences are insignificant. The S200E comes with a portable slim USB 2.0 DVD-RW drive; the Air doesn't have an optical drive at all.
Ports: Both have SD card slots. Air has 2x USB 3.0 ports and I wouldn't mind having that on my S200E, but the S200E has 3 total USB ports, so I can plug in my mouse and USB 2.0 microphone and still have my USB 3.0 port free for my USB 3.0 external hard drive or flash drive when needed. Other than having more USB 3.0 ports, the Air clearly loses on ports vs. the S200E: no HDMI, no ethernet, no VGA, one less USB port. Sure, it has Thunderbolt, but Thunderbolt is useless without expensive stuff to plug into it (remember that $389 I saved? Tack on a $29 Thunderbolt network adapter add-on to that if you like.) My HDTV and 28" monitor have HDMI; does your HDTV have Thunderbolt? Nope. Does your sub-$300 28" monitor have Thunderbolt? Nope.
Input: ah, yes, Mac users love their trackpads...I hate to tell you this, but it's just a Synaptics ClickPad. The S200E has an ElanTech version of the exact same thing, and guess what? It works just as well. It detects when you're pushing to click and doesn't go haywire and move your pointer while clicking (as early PC ClickPads tended to do), it has a heap of multi-touch gestures from the factory and those gestures are all configurable, and it tracks wonderfully. The keyboard has great tactile response and even looks like it was taken directly from a Macbook Air, save the lack of cloverleaf and apple keys. The two computers are on equal footing regarding input devices. The S200E has a touchscreen as well, but fuck touchscreens.
Display: The panels in use are apparently identical; I doubt there are many choices for a thin glossy 11.6" LED LCD at 1366x768.
Conclusion: I paid $389 less. I sacrificed 1/3 of the CPU power but got 1/3 the CPU wattage back in exchange. I only got one USB 3.0 port but

Realistically, your choices are:

* Facebook and their ilk, who will sell your individually identifiable data without a second thought.

* Google, who will absolutely sell your info, probably aggregated. At least they're upfront about it.

* Apple, who views their non-release of your data as a market differentiator and thus a valuable part of their brand.

As long as people choose Apple for privacy, Apple will value privacy and not sell their data.

> 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.

Cook cited one reason for the decline: He said that last year the company started the second quarter with a backlog of iPad mini orders; fulfilling those goosed the quarter's sales. This year, he said, the company has been able to keep supply and demand in better balance.

http://www.macworld.com/articl...

Overall sales were excellent though.

They weren't validating SSL for the last TWO YEARS:

http://www.macworld.com/articl...

you might want to open up the package for the .app on your mac to see if it has all of the previous versions inside of it..

some people report that when chrome updates itself it leaves the old version inside of the .app

http://hints.macworld.com/arti...

Did she bequeath the iPad or the apps/data on the iPad and the iTunes account to go with it? I'm pretty sure that even if the device is locked, that you can still do a factory reset on it and then have access to the iPad. Granted you would lose all the apps and data on the device, but you would still have the device to use as you wish.

Wrong. With IOS7, if the activation lock is enabled, the device is a brick without the account credentials:

http://www.macworld.com/articl...

Since when is a Cray a personal computer? (And yes if you read the full quote he does says *personal* computer.

Where did you see that?

"Every company that made computers when we started the Mac, they’re all gone,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, in an interview on Apple’s Cupertino campus Thursday. “We’re the only one left. We’re still doing it, and growing faster than the rest of the PC industry because of that willingness to reinvent ourselves over and over."

From:
http://www.macworld.com/articl...

I didn't see anything about a personal computer qualifier in the FA. Schiller said "computers".

Wrong. If you go to the ORIGINAL SOURCE of the quote, a story at MacWorld, you find that Schiller is in fact talking about PCs:

"Every company that made computers when we started the Mac, they're all gone," said Philip Schiller, Appleâ(TM)s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, in an interview on Apple's Cupertino campus Thursday. "Weâ(TM)re the only one left. We're still doing it, and growing faster than the rest of the PC industry because of that willingness to reinvent ourselves over and over."

That may or may not be an accurate opinon, none the less, the subject here is PCs.

I'm just going by reviews that use superlatives like "insanely quiet". Apple claims an impressive 12bDA at idle, which is going to be hard to hear even with the unit on top of a desk, but it is easy to turn the fans off at idle. I am assuming that the unique thermal design is really being exploited to minimize fan noise.

I disagree that about the competition being "very quiet". Quiet in a relative way, sure, but not as quiet as I would like. For reference, consider the recent Xeon powered HP workstation (non-liquid-cooled) under my desk for reference. It is actually quite nice compared to the screaming hair dryer fans of old, but, under load, the whooshing of air through it is plainly audible even with a gas fireplace fan blasting away 2m from my ears. Turning off the HP under these circumstances gives me a sense of relief from its noise. Compare that with this description: "during an Apple demo, a high-end Mac Pro, complete with upgraded processor and graphics cards, was live-rendering multiple 4K videos, and we couldn’t hear the fan over the normal room noises."

Fuck the release notes, I'm talking about real-world experience. And in my real-world experience, if you've got a crashing Android device, you've got a shitty Android device.

It's not as though this problem is unique to Android, iDevices crash and/or lock up hard as well. You're pretending that only Android crashes. That, sir, is a lie.

'Other companies came up with the guts for a machine and then the engineers would find a way to stuff them into a box,' says Zufi. 'Steve Jobs started with the box and said, "You need to find a way to get the guts in."'

No, these other companies weren't coming up with "the" guts, not back in the eighties and nineties.

Back then the "ap" was called an "expansion card" by serious users. If you had 10 megabits and you wanted 100 megabits, you could do that. If you wanted to stagger upgrading your system board and your video card, you could do that, too, with a bit of planning. Not "the" guts. Any guts.

We also had the notion of consumables which could be replaced, like CMOS batteries which didn't last forever, unlike the batteries Apple now uses after their break-through innovation in pentalobular lithium alkaloids.

Jobs was designing for a highly integrated potting-compound future long before the economics of this made any sense in the mass consumer marketplace. Design takes over once functionality plateaus, i.e. once Moore's projection passes into menopause. Just because you can stuff the circuitry into a designer's wet dream doesn't mean you should.

The six worst Apple products of all time
Apple Puck Mouse

The truth of the Apple story is that the company was fortunate to survive their reality distortion field until Job's vision of the ubiquitous appliance was right for the times.

If we want to move forward and see Apple healthy and prospering again, we have to let go of a few things here. We have to let go of this notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose. We have to embrace a notion that for Apple to win, Apple has to do a really good job. And if others are going to help us that's great, because we need all the help we can get, and if we screw up and we don't do a good job, it's not somebody else's fault, it's our fault. So I think that is a very important perspective. If we want Microsoft Office on the Mac, we better treat the company that puts it out with a little bit of gratitude; we like their software.

Who promulgated that caustic narrative in the first place?

Nokia went from undisputed market leader to zero on June 29th 2007 Along with everybody else who made phones. They've done very well to survive in any form, let alone one that is now showing pretty good signs of market growth.

Let me share those tips I've found:

No credit card required to create an Apple ID if you don't have one: tip 1

No Snow Leopard upgrade from Leopard (however you should have a Snow L. licence for this Mac): tip 2

One still needs a Snow Leopard at least to use the new App Store and download the Maverick files.
Maybe you can go to a friend's and use your new ID to download your Maverick copy... or wait for a tip 3 someone may post here !

Bill will prevent a new CEO that "remakes" the company via massive layoffs to save costs - which has never once worked to "turn around" a software company, but no one ever seems to learn that.

Ahem...

"[Steve Jobs] product cuts resulted in the layoffs of over 3000 employees during Jobsâ(TM)s first year as iCEO. But those cuts, while painful at first, allowed Apple to focus on creating a handful of good products instead of dozens of mediocre ones."
http://www.macworld.com/article/2009941/steve-jobss-seven-key-decisions.html

As was explained in the Apple keynote, a capacitive (not optical) sensor is used, which scans sub-epidermal skin layers. So lifting a fingerprint will not work.

Here is an extensive explanation of the technologies used.

In light of current news, care to modify your smug statement?

The sensor in the iPhone 5s utilizes two methods to sense and identify your fingerprint:

Capacitive -- A capacitive sensor is activated by the slight electrical charge running through your skin.

Radio frequency -- RF waves do not respond to the dead layer of skin on the outside of your finger -- the part that might be chapped or too dry to be read with much accuracy -- and instead reads only the living tissue underneath. This produces an extremely precise image of your print, and ensures that a severed finger is completely useless.

This means that the Touch ID sensor should be remarkably accurate for living creatures, but it also means that only a finger attached to a beating heart will be able to unlock it.

Why a disembodied finger can't be used to unlock the Touch ID sensor on the iPhone 5s

As was explained in the Apple keynote, a capacitive (not optical) sensor is used, which scans sub-epidermal skin layers. So lifting a fingerprint will not work.

Here is an extensive explanation of the technologies used.

Yes, because claims by the manufacturer and related sites that the technology is unbreakable have always stopped hackers. </sarcasm>

From this macworld article on the subject:

A capacitance fingerprint reader leverages a handy property of your skin: The outer layer of your skin (your dermis), where your fingerprint is, is non-conductive, while the subdermal layer behind it is conductive. When you touch the iPhone’s fingerprint sensor, it measures the minuscule differences in conductivity caused by the raised parts of your fingerprint, and it uses those measurements to form an image..

A capacitor works by having an insulator sandwitched between two conductors. The thinner the insulator is, the higher the capacitance. In the case of a capacitive fingerprint reader, the conductors are the reader itself on one side, and the subdermal layers on the other side. In between them, the skin works as an insulator. Hence, by measuring the capacitance, one is effectively measuring the thickness of the skin. I.e. the pattern of ridges and valleys visible on your fingers. This is the layer you claimed wasn't measured in the first place.

As was explained in the Apple keynote, a capacitive (not optical) sensor is used, which scans sub-epidermal skin layers. So lifting a fingerprint will not work.

Here is an extensive explanation of the technologies used.

The potential implications of 64-bit architecture go far beyond simply more computing power. With 18 billion gigabytes of address space, an iDevice could use iCloud as a giant virtual memory store, just as today's PCs use hard drives or SSDs. That means any bit of data--whether it's a document, a photo, or a chunk of program code--can be addressed by the mobile device as though it's in the device's local memory. If it's not, a "page fault" is generated, causing the data to be automatically fetched from iCloud, and the iPhone goes on like nothing happened. It's a much simpler and faster programming model than dealing with data in files, and I suspect the iCloud "Core Data" facility that is currently giving developers grief is just Apple's first step toward this. Stay tuned. Also, with that much available address space, Apple could dedicate a huge block of iCloud addresses to a massive database shared by all iDevices: things like maps, software updates, regional traffic and weather conditions, sports scores, Siri support, and on and on. (Cross-posted at http://www.macworld.com/article/2048623/how-apple-stretched-its-wings-with-the-iphone-5s-hardware-design.html)

It isn't hard to find, but here's a citation: http://www.macworld.com/article/2048514/the-iphone-5s-fingerprint-reader-what-you-need-to-know.html

Why is everyone over reacting about this? It sounds like a bug. If Mac users knew anything about their systems, they'd know it doesn't matter if files are installed anywhere... there are no "low level" directories... in UNIX everything is a file. It just doesn't fucking matter. Stop thinking like a Windows user.

Parallels is actually kind of neat in that it will unload the daemon from the kernel when the software isn't running. I haven't seen any other developer do that with their software, usually leaving daemons running in memory even if the application isn't launched.

If you really want to know what was installed and where, learn about the system and don't blame the developer for your own ignorance.

lsbom is your friend

more recent lsbom howtos

There are plenty of articles on the remote kill switch, here's one of the first: Steve Jobs confirms iPhone application "kill switch"

I call shenanigans.

The recent releases of the Mac OS (post Snow Leopard) have been weird and much less useful. Everything is animated, you can't turn the animations off and often, you are forced to wait for the animations to finish.

I think that's all releases of MacOS X.

Also, there has been this push to push UI metaphors from iOS on to the desktop. THIS IS TERRIBLE. On my 17" Macbook, in Lion, my scroll bars became the width of a quarter.

I don't know what quarters are like where you come from, but my peeve with Lion is that the scroll bars have become only slightly wider than the letter "I." And if you're on a "touch" device, like a MacBook Pro or an iMac with a Magic Trackpad, then the scroll bars disappear entirely. This was especially annoying when I was diagnosing somebody's Mail.app, looking at error messages and then accidentally discovered: Hey! There are more error messages. The scroll bar was just invisible!

Also, auto termination of apps, where the app isn't really auto terminated, but just the UI is? All to save 5 MB of RAM?

Yeah, this is bad. Maybe there is a way to turn it off. I'm not being facetious; I actually want to see if it works.

Sandboxing. This is the WRONG way to do security. I don't know what the right way is, but this is a royal PITA.

To me, sandboxing sounds like a great idea. It's defense in depth. The trick is seeing if they can execute it well.

Look at iTunes 11 (fugly) vs. iTunes 10 (crisp).

I think all iTunes releases have been ugly and bloated.

And no more 17" MBP? Look. We're all getting older and cramming more pixels into a smaller space isn't going to make the screen easier to read.

We're not all getting older. You're getting older, and a new generation is growing up around you. Besides, have you seen a Retina MacBook Pro? That's how I want all laptops in the future to be.

I guess the 17" MBP was a casualty of product line simplification. Apple can't source enough 17" 3840x2400 screens to make it affordable for them, and they didn't want a high-end 17" laptop with a lower resolution than the high-end 15" laptop.

Is this actually relevant for end-user electronics? Or is it yet another of those wonderful promising potential fast-switching techs that are announced every few months(since 1980 or so) yet never pan out to anything practical.

You'd be surprised of how many of those things that already have found their way into your home but still pop up on slashdot because someone finds out some new production method to make them more viable in other application.
Take for example this article about GaAs semiconductors from 2001
You also have retarded comments like "Ah, Gallium Arsenide chips, thw chip of the future. Always have been, always will be, the chip of the future." from Blaede, a comment that reminds me of yours.
Yet today I'm pretty sure that the RF components in all your wireless devices are GaAs today. We had to replace our RF switches with GaAs a couple of years ago since the old technology was phased out.
Of course you don't see it because that would require opening it up and reading the datasheet for the components.
Technology and science aren't selling points so you will never see the technology written about if you only look at consumer pages and shiny packaging. There are other pages that highlights the news that you are interested in, like PCWorld and Macworld

he devices would fly off the shelves so fast, the sales rate would make the iPad look like the Zune.

I'll not even go into how bad of an idea that is for Microsoft, everyone has covered that already.

But this shows a tremendous lack of understanding of the current market also. There are estimated to be around four million unsold Surface RT tablets, right?

Well guess what, just *last quarter* Apple sold 19.5 million iPads!! Even if the Surface flew off the shelves, it would in no way make iPad sales "look like a Zune", it would merely make iPad sales look amazing.

It simply does not work to bankrupt your way into market share, doubly so when you aren't even getting that much market share in the firesale.

Apple is shipping 5.4 million iPhones and iPads per week. PC sales are at 5.9 million units per week. These numbers were pieced together from macworld and reuters. Assuming all of Apple's dreams come true, in 2015 Apple must plan for the case it is selling more processors than Intel, which will mean that Apple needs all the fab capacity it can get. Additionally, given the recent track record on new product launches at TSMC and GloFo, Apple needs a backup plan if one or more fab suppliers have problems.

Even if Apple purchased a new fab, additional reserve capacity might be needed. That may be enough to ink a deal with Samsung. Samsung is the only company with the proven ability to make enough cell phone and tablet processors to cover the majority of the world wide market, including Apple.

It's well documented, you can find examples all over google, eg:

http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20111230095628470

Infact there are many people who use libreoffice to open and convert corrupted (or very old) files which are making msoffice crash, libreoffice is far more tolerant of unexpected data in the input files as unexpected data is a given when attempting to reverse engineer undocumented formats.

And to give one personal example, msoffice 97 onwards had a bug in the macro function whereby the line counting function ignored lines with bullet points, so we had an extremely kludgy macro which counted the lines and then iterated through looking for bullet points and increased the line count accordingly... MS decided to fix this particular bug in a "security update" for office 2003, but then reintroduce the bug in 2007... Obviously this kludgy macro catastrophically broke the day that patch got rolled out.
I could understand if it broke going from 2003 to 2007, but not for what is supposed for be a security update to change something like that.

Also even moving files between the exact same patch release of msoffice on different machines can cause problems with formatting, as it reformats depending on available fonts and printer settings.

And where was the political outrage towards Apple when they opened their own stores, for causing "unfair" competition with the other retailers?

(Obligatory computer analogy in this car thread.)

There were tons of complaints by tons of people; they were unable to buy the laws because the resellers were not franchisees. Here's a short list of pissed off people:

All U.S.: http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Apple-dealers-biting-back-Mac-sellers-say-2636871.php
Australia: http://www.macworld.com/article/1027780/australia.html
France: http://www.padgadget.com/2011/12/30/apple-reseller-sues-apple-in-france/
Portugal: http://appadvice.com/appnn/2012/07/portuguese-reseller-interlog-fails-sues-apple-for-hefty-sum
LA and Boston: http://appleinsider.com/articles/11/02/22/apple_repair_consultants_upset_over_changes_to_apple_retail_referral_policy

The current Apple pissing contest is over the changes to the repair referral channel. They're going to lose to Apple's wishes there, too, since what Apple sells is a holistic customer experience rather than selling only consumer devices.

How exactly would that help? Any idiot can access data on a phone without a passcode. If by forensics you mean accessing unencrypted data on a different device to the one it is stored on then I do it every day just by plugging in my USB drive. "if you use the iPhone’s passcode lock feature, you’ll need to disable it before you can make any changes using PhoneView; it isn’t sufficient to just unlock the screen." http://www.macworld.com/article/1133796/phonedrive.html

Yeah, because laptops never run out of juice. :-|

For some models of iPad with certain methods of charging and using, it can be on OR build up charge. For the most part, with a proper iPad charger, it can be on AND charging. He must have been running a first-gen Retina iPad on a low-power USB port or charger with the screen brightness way up and radios on, OR he was turning it off and taking turns between charging and using.

http://www.macworld.com/article/1150356/ipadcharging.html

Well the story assumes that Apple hasn't already secured their supply. This story from 2005 reports how Apple made 5-year deals with 5 different manufacturers to secure their supply. The deals have since run out but it doesn't take a grand strategist to guess that Apple may have negotiated new deals. Remember Apple is very secretive so that may not announced to the world all their plans. Also, Apple has been known to front money to their suppliers in exchange for guaranteed supplies. Today they are sitting on billions in cash.

I doubt such a deal could remain secret due to SEC filings from Apple. Not to mention the fact that the suppliers will want to say "Look at us! We just got a billion dollars!" so that they may boost their stock prices. If we haven't heard about Apple making such a deal, then it probably hasn't happened. And it may not happen easily. Everyone is using flash storage now, and there is likely to be a lot of concern over supply. The big players may not want to make a deal with Apple to guarantee a supply so that they do not artificially limit the supply for their own products. Of course with a few extra billion, you could possibly increase your production significantly.

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When your customer is rich, and the competition is limited. You can charge more. But you must be able to deliver volume and quality. Apple with deep pockets will pay more for product than another less financially endowed company.

Well the story assumes that Apple hasn't already secured their supply. This story from 2005 reports how Apple made 5-year deals with 5 different manufacturers to secure their supply. The deals have since run out but it doesn't take a grand strategist to guess that Apple may have negotiated new deals. Remember Apple is very secretive so that may not announced to the world all their plans. Also, Apple has been known to front money to their suppliers in exchange for guaranteed supplies. Today they are sitting on billions in cash.

Please rtf the original article. The deal with 5 different manufacturers is why Apple will find it difficult to source the supply in 2013. They schemed the manufacturers and always projected they needed way more than they purchased. This lead to oversupply in the market and lower prices. So the 5 year, 5 manufacturer deal fell off the cliff. Therefore Apple in 2013 will have to put up billions as opposed to 1.25 billion and they probably have to buy all of the nand they think they need. Not just project and then play one manufacturer against another. Therefore Apple will possibly pre-pay and possibly pre-pay much higher prices and will also need to buy it. They will probably not make as much money on the NAND but still a significant margin.

And the parent post is modded informative! The best of slashdot. This post needs to be modded down into negative territory.

Well the story assumes that Apple hasn't already secured their supply. This story from 2005 reports how Apple made 5-year deals with 5 different manufacturers to secure their supply. The deals have since run out but it doesn't take a grand strategist to guess that Apple may have negotiated new deals. Remember Apple is very secretive so that may not announced to the world all their plans. Also, Apple has been known to front money to their suppliers in exchange for guaranteed supplies. Today they are sitting on billions in cash.

I doubt such a deal could remain secret due to SEC filings from Apple. Not to mention the fact that the suppliers will want to say "Look at us! We just got a billion dollars!" so that they may boost their stock prices. If we haven't heard about Apple making such a deal, then it probably hasn't happened. And it may not happen easily. Everyone is using flash storage now, and there is likely to be a lot of concern over supply. The big players may not want to make a deal with Apple to guarantee a supply so that they do not artificially limit the supply for their own products. Of course with a few extra billion, you could possibly increase your production significantly.

Well the story assumes that Apple hasn't already secured their supply. This story from 2005 reports how Apple made 5-year deals with 5 different manufacturers to secure their supply. The deals have since run out but it doesn't take a grand strategist to guess that Apple may have negotiated new deals. Remember Apple is very secretive so that may not announced to the world all their plans. Also, Apple has been known to front money to their suppliers in exchange for guaranteed supplies. Today they are sitting on billions in cash.