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I get what you mean, but seriously, for security concerns, at minimum upgrade to 10.8.

Here are some tips to make it work more like 10.6:

Get Save As back on your menu.
http://www.tuaw.com/2012/07/29...

Disable Auto Save (versions):
System Preferences, General, "Ask to keep changes when closing documents"

Stop killing my inactive apps: Disable auto termination.
defaults write -g NSDisableAutomaticTermination -bool yes

How on Earth can Apple tie your account activity to a credit card without ever having that credit card number to generate that token?

And, if at ANY point in this chain Apple has your credit card number ... why would I trust they (or any other corporation) aren't retaining that.

I don't see how any of this one-time token stuff can be generated without first having your credit card information.

There's either a missing step there in which they certainly do have it ... or there is voodoo magic by which they can attach your account information to you without knowing anything.

Well, they have your credit card number, for a few seconds during setup.

Here's what happens:

You get your phone, and you snap a photo of your credit card. Your phone recognizes the card and number, and forwards that information to Apple Corporate HQ. Apple then uses that information to determine which bank to talk to (because all banks have different ways to implement this step, and why Apple Pay only works with certain banks). Apple forwards that information to the bank. Apple also forwards some hardware information hash to the bank.

Your bank then calls you (or verifies you in some way) to ensure that you're actually registering your card (the bank looks up the information - Apple doesn't have that information after all). If it's approved, the bank sends Apple a token. The token is a virtual credit card where the last 4 digits are identical to the real credit card. That token is what is stored on your device, and the credit card information promptly forgotten as it's no longer necessary.

When you use Apple Pay, you select the card, and then use the fingerprint reader. When the iPhone talks to the payment system, it passes on the token and a hash representing your hardware ID. The payment system sees the token, and passes it onto the bank who verifies the hardware ID against their own database. If it matches, then they lookup the token against their database to find which account to charge.

The credit card is used during initial setup only - after that you're passing around tokens which are unique identifiers for your card, phone, account by the bank. The bank issues the token and generates the mapping of tokens to cardholder accounts.

If your number is stolen, then attempts to use it will fail because the hardware ID is invalid, and the bank sends you a NEW token to replace your old one.

If you lose your phone, you can wipe your phone's secure element which erases keys to access your card information.

Apple Pay is a fancy term for the EMV payment standard - there's no magic in it, and it's just implementing what the payment industry says is how they want to do it. It's why it "just works" in a lot of stores because the standard was done a while ago and implemented.

http://www.macrumors.com/round...

A more detailed analysis is
http://www.tuaw.com/2014/10/02...

(Read it quick because AOL is killing TUAW)

That old tale again. Here's the scoop: back in 97, Microsoft invested $150M on Apple as part of a patent cross-licensing deal, which also included Microsoft's commitment to keep producing Office for Mac, and Apple making IE the Mac's default browser. The money itself is the least important part, Apple was not in dire straits, they had billions in the bank.

No. In recent versions of IOS, Macs do not run local web servers. People have to add in a web server by themselves & very few do so. In your little corner of the world (assuming you do web development or some such), people may add a web server (through macPorts or the Server Application) but there is no web server in a normal recent OSX installation. Yeah, there is the niche of MacMinis that people use as servers where this is not true, but they are the tiny minority. Most Macs sold today are either Airs or MacBooks & very few people want to have a local web server or "other advanced unix services"* on them.

As for your comment on their being "rarely updated", that's rich given the antiquated, nay archaic RHEL servers often I see in datacenters on things like Cisco VOIP gear.

The people geeky enough to be aware of the attack so far are also probably aware of how to update bash all by themselves. Everyone else will be able to get the update shortly when Apple publishes a fix.

* As labeled by an Apple spokesperson.

But Apple said 3.5" was the best size so those guys in their 40s must have been wrong. Or not? ;-)

Actually the supposed problem was one handed navigation. This is what we used to read for years. Now that the Pope of the Apple Church became an heretic cultists are finding out that it didn't matter at all.

And to prevent even that, Touch ID doesn't work with a cut off finger.

I'd heard that you could redownload without DRM now.

I understand anecdotes do not constitute data. Anecdotes are not what I'm referring to.

Look here for example.

The link actually states 88 apps per average not counting the ones that come by default, but considering they take up an icon on the home screen just the same, I see no reason to exclude them in the context of this discussion.

108 icons is a lot to manage, and it is certainly cumbersome to have no choice but to create folders to organize them. The app draw is a far simpler and more efficient approach, by every stretch of the imagination.

108 apps is about 9 iphone homescreens, obviously less if you use folders. I think it's nice to have the choice to just have say, 2 homescreens, with only frequently used applications on there, and not have to dig through folders or screens to find something.

I don't know how you don't see choice as an advantage, which is what it comes down to.

> How long does it take to etch a PCB (mould) and
> how long does it take for gelatine to cool down
> (finger cast)?

I don't know. How long does it take to use Google and learn that your method won't fucking work?

Not maybe the iphone isn't very popular, and people aren't designing malware for it because they want to go for Fort Knox instead of a piggy bank.

If the iPhone is not very popular then what smartphone is popular?

"Android was targeted by an astonishing 79 percent of all smartphone malware that year... iOS was targeted by 0.7 percent of malware attacks."

Oh wow! That must mean iOS is much more secure! That's what I was supposed to say, right? Not maybe the iphone isn't very popular, and people aren't designing malware for it because they want to go for Fort Knox instead of a piggy bank.

Android:
79.3% marketshare.
80% of malware.

Ordinarily, I wouldn't need to explain this, but given that it seems I'm one of the few people left on Slashdot with any understanding of statistics, I'll make this simple: Your "secure" operating system's only only real security is that it's too small to matter. This is like saying "DOS has the lowest rate of new malware infections of any OS on the market!" Well yeah. Nobody uses DOS anymore. And in a few years, nobody will use iPhone anymore either... it fell 3% in marketshare in just the last three months. Even malware authors are abandoning it because it costs too much to develop for such a small rate of return.

Yeah, lets be clear about this apparently...

The Dev in question happens to work for a competing phone manufacturer

The developer's name is Rémi Denis-Courmont [1], and while he's the lead developer for the VLC app, also worked for Nokia at the time, and thus the conflict of interest in his revocation of VLC iOS app.

[1] http://www.tuaw.com/2011/01/08/vlc-app-removed-from-app-store/

This was news to me, and every news article just vaguely mentions it without providing details. For those unfamiliar, here is an article by the Free Software Foundation explaining the incompatibility. and here is another article which represents a more nuanced position.

"... they may actually have contracts to prevent "poaching" of employees, so this trick should only be pulled with serous thought and legal review."

Such contracts are quite likely to be illegal, as evidenced by the Apple-Google-Pixar-et-all suit.

It's possible that non-compete agreements might an issue, but those are frequently unenforceable and, if some employee signs an employment contract containing one, it's prima facie evidence that they are too dumb to be worth hiring anyway. Failing to have a competent lawyer review your employment contract is also a bad move; it's unlikely that the lawyer will cost anywhere near as much as the contract is worth.

Can you tell I am a contractor? I really need to just write some angry contract-related blog posts and get it out of my system.

The Department of Justice is not seeking financial damages from Apple if the government wins the case.

http://www.tuaw.com/2013/06/03/apple-doj-ebook-price-fixing-trial-begins-today/
Not really a shakedown for bribes. Your forgetting government power also include contract law. Apple was seeking to control prices with contracts. If the courts enforced those contracts then they would be shutting down competition.

This is complete bullshit by any reasonable understanding of what it is to force someone to do something. Safari came as a default extra via the installer and the auto update mechanism. That approach is a turnoff for me. Even so users could still use Firefox. How were they forced to use Safari?

http://www.tuaw.com/2007/06/18/is-apple-aiming-at-firefox/ This is a sad looking Jobs in 2007 and the famous graph that does not include firefox anymore. How wrong he was.

The App Store itself has been an enormous cash cow for developers, large and small alike.

Let's test that theory. First up, who's making the big bucks? corporations. In fact, over half make Less than $3,000. There are other stories showing the lack of millionaires pouring out of Apple's "enormous cash cow" as you put it. I mean, besides Apple.

Apple's financial statements tell you exactly how much profit they make on the store (hint: it's extremely low, but it is above zero), and if you think they're lying about that as has been often suggested then file a complaint over fraudulent financial reporting - it's a very serious crime.

And as we all know, fraudulent financial reporting, because it's such a serious crime, doesn't happen very often. Like Enron, the subprime mortgage crisis, the "too big to fail" financial institutions, that debacle with Lloyds of London, and oh the list goes on. There isn't a week that goes by where fraudulent financial reporting doesn't make the news.

I'd be interested to see how you justify Apple making "the majority of any profit to be had" with some actual numbers, or if it's just more rampant, ill-informed Apple bashing as usual.

As opposed to blind fan-boy support? Well, regardless of your religious preferences, let's look at a similar business model and then discuss it: record companies. They also have made their profit by acting as middlemen in the distribution of apps. Essentially, the same business model Apple uses, except the percentages are different. Apple doesn't offer marketing support to its customers, whereas the record labels do. That's where a lot of that difference goes; And here's the thing... if you ever want your app to succeed, you're going to have to do more than just code it up and submit it. You'll need to market it. And marketing, my friend, is not cheap. There's also hidden startup fees. For example, did you know that Apple charges $99 a year to app developers for an 'iTunes connect account'? Now, when most app developers have made less than $3,000 for their entire portfolio, that "30%" starts looking more like "33%"... and when you add in marketing and advertising costs to get an "app of the day" or whatever, push that number higher. How much? Well, that's up to Apple. It's a "per customer" sale.

Now that we've discussed how many different ways you're screwed as a developer, let's look at the overhead costs for Apple: App approval. Distribution infrastructure. So basically, you hire a couple dozen people to evaluate apps and you need to rent space in a data center. For an $8 billion dollar a year service, I'm guessing this amounts to... uhh... dick.

So there you have it: Apple's making money hand over fist, and the developers... well... not so much. Did you really expect a different conclusion? That Apple is somehow different from every other publicly-traded company on the Earth? They have the largest market capitalization of any country on Earth. They didn't get there by being generous.

If the people producing the software for a product can't even implement a calendar correctly and then others can't find that fault in testing it makes you wonder what else they fucked up. Such a mistake would not even be considered acceptable in a high school project let alone a product.

Like Apple? They can't seem to puzzle out this whole time and date thing.

Just a few example.

http://www.tuaw.com/2011/03/14/more-iphone-clock-problems-reported/

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/01/apple-iphone-4-alarm-problems-worldwide-clock-app-alarm-broken-3-days-in-a-row.html

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/02/iphone-do-not-disturb/

Given that much of the rise in crime in New York last year was due to people having the iOS devices stolen, how long will it be before muggings at knife-point typically also involve the thief stealing the owner's index finger too?

Blackberry had some sort of agreement with MS, I believe primarily related to Exchange compatability.

Oh please, now you are cherry picking.

Look at who else did the exact same thing.

http://winsupersite.com/article/mobile-and-wireless2/microsoft-licenses-activesync-to-google

http://www.tuaw.com/2008/03/06/apple-licenses-activesync-for-the-iphone/

So why didnt the Blackberry kiss of death affect them?

I for one and sad to see Apple giving up this part of their product line. It is the only part I really like.

Quit hand wringing.

Do you live in the EU? No? Not affected.

Live in the EU? Lobby for this bullshit "Directive" to be repealed. Good luck with that. You want a good example of "not listening to people", look no further than your local government.

Otherwise, stop whining.

Oh, and since Mac Pros will still be available in the other 100 or so Countries where Apple products are sold, are you really so lame that you couldn't GET one if you wanted to, even if you lived in the EU? Or did the EU outlaw "possession", too?

Have you ever thought that maybe, just maybe, this is Apple's way of "pushing back" against this particular bullshit, by attempting to incite some of their customers to start pressuring for change in the law?

Oh, and I note that you have cherry picked your Apple "quotes". I seem to remember that Tim Cook himself penned an email to a nervous Apple fan (actually, a whole group of them), assuring him of Apple's dedication to the Mac Pro, specifically. But I notice that you have conveniently had a memory lapse about that.

I know you jest, but seriously, some functions just don't conveniently tie into an all-in-one device. Smartphones take crap pictures, for example.

Modern smartphones take pictures that are good enough for many people, like Ben Lowe, who does photography for the big boys (he uses an iPhone):
http://www.tuaw.com/2012/11/06/time-magazine-cover-shot-with-iphone/

What part aren't they doing from the list above?

Hosting app/in-app purchases - yep
Collecting payment - yep
Remitting to developer - yep
Distributing updates/purchases - yep
Providing notification service - yep
Making apps/updates easy to find - yep.

Apple's hosting Office 365 subscriptions and paying for Microsoft's data center hosting it(the topic of the article we're discussing)? Really?

Hosting Kindle ebooks? Sony ebooks(they banned Sony reader btw) ?

E.g. http://www.tuaw.com/2011/02/21/apple-rejects-readability-due-to-subscription-policy-where-wi/

The problem is that all of the points you list are FORCED by Apple, whereas Android allows competition to its Play Store. You could start a store for Android apps and charge only 5%, for example. Or throw an Android APK on your webserver and link it from your web pages. Try doing that with iOS.

No. It isn't. The only people who think that are those that have an axe to grind with Apple.

a) Pretty much every other app store out there has the same deal and, more importantly

No, stop playing the "poor Apple" card.

This is about in-app purchases like Netflix subscriptions, ebook stores etc. Not 30% cut of apps.

Wrong - it's about the 30% cut. What in-app purchases does office have again?

Seriously, the only people who still bring this up (and mod it "Insightful" on /.) are those who are utterly ignorant of reality and just want to gripe about Apple (while ignoring all the other app stores operating under the same terms)

Wrong again.

From http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsstore/archive/2012/07/20/making-money-with-your-apps-through-the-windows-store.aspx [msdn.com]

I see nothing there that says that MS will not take their 30/20% cut. What I do see is allowing third party payment processors. I'd guess, based on the fact that the statement includes original payment for the app itself, that you wind up registering your payment processor through MS, and MS continues to take their cut. How else would they know (or care) if the payment provider is PCI compliant?

For example, this wouldn't happen on Windows Store.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/fasterforward/2011/02/apple_bans_sony_e-reader_app_a.html

http://www.tuaw.com/2011/02/21/apple-rejects-readability-due-to-subscription-policy-where-wi/

http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/digital/retailing/article/48130-apple-forces-e-tailers-to-remove-in-app-links-kobo-to-offer-html5-browser-ereader.html

This wouldn't have happened on the Windows Store and probably not on Play Store as well(you can always sell an APK directly for sideloading or use one of the 3rd party stores on Android).

Sorry, but Apple apologists like you need to come up with a better defense of Apple than trying to muddy up things by saying "everyone else is doing it". They're simply not.

You make a grand statement for a store that's been up just a couple of months. No one knows what MS will or won't do with their store. What we do know is that MS's store makes Apple's App Store look like an open garden in comparison. So this entire set of "examples" are merely a red herring with a healthy dose of speculation and a set of blinders.

No. It isn't. The only people who think that are those that have an axe to grind with Apple.

a) Pretty much every other app store out there has the same deal and, more importantly

No, stop playing the "poor Apple" card.

This is about in-app purchases like Netflix subscriptions, ebook stores etc. Not 30% cut of apps.

Seriously, the only people who still bring this up (and mod it "Insightful" on /.) are those who are utterly ignorant of reality and just want to gripe about Apple (while ignoring all the other app stores operating under the same terms)

Wrong again.

From http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsstore/archive/2012/07/20/making-money-with-your-apps-through-the-windows-store.aspx [msdn.com]

Using your own billing system

Your app and service may already depend on a particular transaction provider or benefit from ties to other lines of business. Your customers want the trust and efficiency of a familiar, trusted transaction experience. You can use your own transaction provider within your app to provide the experience your customers expect.

If you are not using the Windows Store as your transaction provider, you will want to make sure that your app meets all of the certification requirements such as: Identifying the transaction provider to the user during purchase confirmation Prompt the user for authentication before processing the transaction Your payment processor must meet the current PCI Data Security Standard

For example, this wouldn't happen on Windows Store.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/fasterforward/2011/02/apple_bans_sony_e-reader_app_a.html

http://www.tuaw.com/2011/02/21/apple-rejects-readability-due-to-subscription-policy-where-wi/

http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/digital/retailing/article/48130-apple-forces-e-tailers-to-remove-in-app-links-kobo-to-offer-html5-browser-ereader.html

This wouldn't have happened on the Windows Store and probably not on Play Store as well(you can always sell an APK directly for sideloading or use one of the 3rd party stores on Android).

Sorry, but Apple apologists like you need to come up with a better defense of Apple than trying to muddy up things by saying "everyone else is doing it". They're simply not.

Also we're at the verge of a netbook-caliber tablet crash where everyone realizes they all suck and stop buying them.

You must have just woken up from cryo-sleep you were put into just before the launch of the iPad.

What did you get wrong?

They're too fragile

The iPad is not at all fragile compared to a laptop. Inherently anything without a hinge is more durable , the same goes for anything with spinning media (though laptops are more and more using SSD so that advantage has waned).

they don't have a DVD drive

Which bothers no-one because they simply rip or download DVD's onto them.

they're harder to type on

They are harder for YOU to type on. When you get used to the difference you can type just as rapidly and the tablets having larger screens means easy to hit keys.

For people like you that need a crutch keyboard cases exist for tablets, though those of us that can type will tend to snicker a bit at your inability to adapt when we see you using it.

the screen is tiny

So is any laptop really, that's not stopped the march of them taking over desktops.

And with all of the window clutter of desktop OS's taken away the screen size is really not that much smaller.

they get dirty with fingerprints

Sadly so do laptops. But in use the fingerprints do not obscure the screen on a tablet.

they don't run 99% of software ever written

Here is the hugest disconnect. I would argue that at this point the advantage has flipped to tablets in terms of ability to run NEW software. The most exciting software today will ship on tablets first, desktops second if at all.

everything they do on it is designed to cost money

Another big disconnect, with tablet software costing FAR less than desktop software.

the browsers don't display pages correctly

Science wants to study your pre-WeKit brain to see what the past looks like.

The hallmark of modern tablets is that they in fact display pages just as they should be.

the battery life is a lie

Why did you buy a non-Apple tablet if battery life was important to you? Apple's battery figures are accurate and much better than other tablets.

But here's the real kicker - any tablet still has way better battery life than just about any laptop!

most don't have USB flash drive capabilities

The internet, look into it.

they don't work with the majority of printers

They work with some and that's enough. Mostly people don't print much anymore.

and it's difficult to do meaningful work on them in any way shape or form.

Again, adapt or get out of the way for those of us that can. I've done a TON of meaningful work on tablets and smart phones. If you can't you need to retire from work.

AFAIK, no HDMI interface is even announced let alone available

http://www.theverge.com/2012/9/13/3329062/apple-lightning-hdmi-vga-cable-adapter-coming-months
'An Apple spokesperson told The Verge that Lightning to HDMI and Lightning to VGA cables "will be available in the coming months."'

My understanding is that the 30 pin adapter they are selling provides analog audio but not iPod control

http://www.macworld.com/article/1168555/what_apples_new_lightning_connector_means_for_you.html
'Apple has confirmed to Macworld that these adapters support analog and USB audio-out, as well as syncing and charging. However, the adapters don’t support video-out or iPod mode, the latter a special mode that lets particular accessories, such as car stereos and some whole-home-audio systems, display your iPod’s menus on the accessory’s own screen.'
And as a commenter in this article points out, the iPod will still play audio over these systems since that's handled by the analog interface.

some of this is a desire to manage DRM

What DRM? None of the music on my iPhone has any DRM on it! The "FairPlay" DRM was removed from iTunes store music in early 2009.

They do? I could've sworn I heard about some field tests involving iPhone, Android, and Windows Phone 7, which later resulted in Android being selected. Granted, they cited a lack of secure encryption as a problem, but the nice thing about Android is that you can just put it in yourself. Plus, RIM's services all go through a central point of failure that has proven less-than-resilient in the last year or two.

The camera is almost exactly the same as in 4S?

No it is not.

Up to two stops better performance is a good upgrade. And also there happen to be sample pics on DPReview from an iPhone 4s that match one of the shots the iPhone 5 was demoed with - the iPhone 5 captures detail better. Also I cannot find details on how the 4s camera was constructed but I believe the iPhone 5 is a step up in terms of the lens used.

I have a DSLR and profesional compact cameras too. What I want out of a cell phone camera is an image that does not make me wish I also had a compact camera, and the iPhone 5 meets that goal (really the 4s did as well, but the 5 has a nice boost beyond even that).

But its *not* impressive. Its totally *meh*. It looks so similar to a 4S that it barely deserves the '5' monkier.

Who cares how it looks? A good design is a good design. And I thought people claimed iOS users were just buying for the looks...

And even then, it actually looks pretty different with the metal back. In person it will not look that much like a 4s between the different back and taller form factor. I actually preferred the older size but the other aspects of the device are compelling enough for an upgrade.

The camera is almost exactly the same as the 4S

Incorrect. Google sample photos, you can see clear improvement in detail. Also, it's improved over the 4s in many other ways - up to two stops better low light performance for one thing (that is not at all nearly the same), and 40% faster to operate which is important in a mobile camera. The camera is actually what I am most interested in, along with greater processing power and more memory to handle some interesting photo manipulations or faster panoramic assembly.

We all were expecting better than what we got.

We were? I was expecting exactly what we got since it's now impossible for Apple to release a week after an announcement and have any secrets left to reveal, too many leaks along the assembly chain. Even then some aspects are better than I thought they might be, like the front camera for example.

Im more impressed with the S3.

And again you ignore the real core consideration that shoudl be present in the selection of any smartphone - what can you run on it? The iOS marketplace is still ahead of the Android marketplace, more in quality than quantity at this point - and that will continue as long as most Android phones are stuck at 2.x, while iOS apps are built atop more and more advanced libraries. You'll get some apps that take advantage of Android 4.0 but a tiny fraction of how many will be coding even against iOS6 at launch much less iOS5...

right on. because apple had the first portable digital music player in the world, right? no ...

No, you're right, Creative had some clunky MP3 players that nobody wanted to buy, and when Apple came out with a smaller, better, easier-to-use player that sold like hotcakes, Creative claimed a patent on the only sensible way of arranging songs into menus and extracted a $100m settlement from Apple. There are no nice guys in this game.

but they made the first clamshell laptop right? um ... okay, okay,

No - and they were famously late to the laptop game, but they did (in collaboration with Sony) "invent" the modern laptop layout with the keyboard set back and the pointing device in the middle of a wrist-rest (Powerbook 100) - subsequently adopted by virtually all laptops.

they certainly were first with the graphical operating system? the mouse?

Who's claiming that? It's always been common knowledge that (a) the inspiration for Lisa and Mac came from a visit to Xerox and (b) Apple paid Xerox (in share options) for the privilege. Before the Lisa and Mac, you could have your people talk to Xerox's people, hand over a few hundred grand and have a minicomputer the size of the filing cabinet. Yeah, you can see where the Mac came from, but there are also huge differences.

but certainly they had the first smartphone right? wait ...

Ooh look, another straw man. There were smartphones before the iPhone. They had stylus- or keyboard- based interfaces, resistive touch screens, no multitouch, mostly sucked and were only selling to a niche.

the first tablet computer?

You mean the Newton in 1993 - right?

Actually, no, you may have a point - Samsung made the GRiDPad in the 1980s. I think that we can safely assume that the Galaxy Tab evolved from a 20-year-old 4lb, inch thick MS-DOS tablet sold to a niche market of delivery drivers and stocktakers and had nothing to do with a hugely successful consumer-oriented tablet that created a new market segment a few years back.

You know, I really don't think that Apple deserves protection for "double-click-to-zoom", but to try and pretend that the current generation of tablets and smartphones weren't deliberate imitations of the iPad/iPhone is complete denial of reality (not to mention a shedload of "how can we make this more like an iPad" memos that turned up in the trial).

"seven Motorola Mobility patents on features including location reminders, e-mail notification and phone/video players" -- doesn't sound very standards essential to me.

Maybe the thought of not being able to buy iPads and iPhones will wake up the U.S. to how badly screwed up the patent system is? Or maybe that thought will stop ITC from treating the case the same way it has treated cases against MotoGoogle.

The gloves are really off, the floodgates are open, the fat is on the fire etc. Although Google inherited cases from Motorola, this is the first time Google has directly sued Apple. Google has been reticent to take on Apple directly but they don't have much choice left now.

Interestingly, probably the sole patent victory for any Android manufacturer has been the ban on push e-mail from iCloud on Apple devices won by MotoGoogle, which still exists: http://www.tuaw.com/2012/04/13/apple-still-blocked-from-using-push-email-in-germany/

It is possible that a similar patent is among those involved here. Maybe the Motorola purchase wasn't as useless as Florian Muller makes it out to be...

And there are cheaper music players than iPods, and cheaper laptops than MacBooks, and yet somehow Apple has turned into the biggest company on the planet than isn't a bank or oil concern. Apple is selling more and more computers, phones, and tablets year over year, every year. (The only thing that's going down is their iPod sales because everyone's buying iPhones instead.) The whole market is growing--people are buying tablets who never bought computers, and cell phones are literally going to hit the points where 99% of the PLANET owns one. (Did you know their iPhone business--something that didn't even exist five years ago--is bigger than the entirety of Microsoft?)

Apple is not a niche, small-volume luxury company like Rolex. You're comparing a multi-hundred dollar, multi-feature device to a multi-thousand dollar, single-function device--of course Rolex is going to have orders of magnitude less volume.

I always laugh when posts like yours get high "Insightful" mods. You're cherry-picking all these little facts here and there while ignoring the hundred-billion-dollar elephant in the room.

> How will Apple, with all their expensive stores on
> expensive real estate, and a business built on
> huge markups, deal with that?

LOL. Have you ever heard "you've got to spend money to make money"? Apple retail stores have the highest profit per square foot ratio of any retail chain by a HUGE margin. (Almost 2x higher than #2, Tiffany.) And it's been like that for five years.

Also: you really think all these companies with razor-thin margins are going to thrive in Apple's place? You can ask Dell how well that strategy worked for them long-term. And have you ever used a generic tablet? I have, and they all suck in every way you can imagine. Apple's resources give them the ability to make things people actually want.

I'm not saying Apple will reign forever, but it will take them a LONG time to fall.

hy-po-cr-isy |hipäkris|
noun ( pl. hypocrisies )
the practice of claiming to have moral standards or beliefs to which one's own behavior does not conform; pretense.

For EA to be upset about Zynga copying its games is pure hypocrisy. It wasn't upset when Zynga copied Tiny Tower... in fact, it followed suit with its own clone called Monopoly Hotels. I mistakenly downloaded the game on my iPad thinking it was some new variant of Monopoly... it turned out to be the unholy love child of Farmville and Tiny Tower with a Monopoly facade. Instead of plants growing, money falls from the sky and you have to catch it to build up your hotel... or you could pay them money to build faster to... who knows what... feel better about yourself because you have a bunch of imaginary useless hotels?

On the other hand, we can't give them too much flack for The Sims Social, because EA used it to inject a "dislike" function into facebook (see screenshot on their site of a user b*tch-slapping her real friend's avatar, which I interpret to be the opposite of clicking the "Like" button).

http://www.tuaw.com/2011/02/14/apple-to-become-samsungs-biggest-customer/

http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/08/apple-and-samsungs-symbiotic-relationship

http://www.razorianfly.com/2011/04/20/apple-refutes-previous-reports-claims-it-is-samsungs-largest-customer/

The figures suggest $7.8 billion, which is a seriously large amount of cash to simply give up on a whim.

http://www.tuaw.com/2012/07/09/apple-removes-epeat-green-certification-could-lose-government-c/

I'd say this constitutes "some justice."

You know, any single feature, it's easy to think, "Well, there are only so many ways of doing things, a pad has to be sort of rectangular, an so forth." But looking at them in combination, I think there is some justice for Apple to feel that Samsung is copying their products. Whether patent or copyright law actually protects Apple from this sort of "look and feel" imitation--or whether it should--are of course two different questions.

I suspect this is really another patent fight over Codecs used or worked around by VLC, and the Google Market (play store) is making sure they don't end up on the wrong side of the MPAA, (not to mention trying to keep Google's YOUTube ox from being gored.

I seem to recall Apple had no problem posting VLC on the App store, until one of VLC's copyright holders (and, in what I am sure was a complete coincidence, a Nokia employee) demanded it be taken down.

Thunderbolt is slower then pci-e and is shared vs haveing 2-3 pci-e slots that each have there own bandwidth.

Also Thunderbolt is to slow to put a video card on it's bus.

1. PCI-E ain't here yet, man.

2. Thunderbolt is NOT too slow to put a video card on its bus. IIRC, it would support up to an AGP 4X card. Besides, unless you are doing hard-core 3D gaming, you'd never need external video. I just saw an article with THREE external displays being hooked to an MBPwRD (albeit, one was hooked up to the HDMI port), along with the laptop's built-in, for a total of FOUR displays. So, that oughta do for MOST people.

But of course, it wouldn't be enough for YOU, even if I showed you EIGHT displays hooked up, right?

Are you refuting that Flash drains battery, runs slow and eats up precious RAM on the phones that support it? How many Android owners actually like to use it when other options exist?

Have you actually used Flash on Android? it doesn't drain the battery, slow down the phone, or eat up RAM. If you visit a website with Flash embedded in it, the Flash element is drawn as a letter F. You have to tap on the F to actually load and play the Flash. Apple just tossed up those strawmen (which any competent coder could work around in 5 minutes) to avoid talking about the real reason they were prohibiting Flash.

OP is correct. Apple's decision not to support Flash was to prevent the distribution of apps which can run on iOS bypassing the App Store. They have a very clear policy on all apps in the App Store - No Code Interpreters. And Flash is a doozy of a code interpreter. The only code interpreters Apple allows (due to a recent policy change) are ones where you can't download code.

Now, this isn't a one-sided profit thing. Yes it lets them take a cut of any iOS program which you might sell. But it also helps them control and prevent the spread of malware on iOS.

You can't get Firefox or VLC for iOS because of Apple's walled garden, both of which are things a non-technical person might reasonably want to use.

Amazing. These pictures would tend to tell a different story...

http://www.tuaw.com/2011/09/28/no-comment-proof-that-samsung-shamelessly-copies-apple/

so no, samsung did not "copy" the iphone

Yes, I understood. But he's completely missing the larger picture. His comment is dismissive and I think either it's flamebait or astoundingly myopic ("at the end of the day... minority of devices... minority platform"). Apple may be technically still in the minority, but at the end of every week, Apple's inventory has been entirely sold out.

And there are a fair number people I know who are way smarter than myself; I suppose you imagined I'd put myself on a pedestal, and your intent was to knock me off it.

"not their interest." -> And I believe that this is the heart of your misunderstanding. You believe, wrongly, that acquiring basic technical literacy is akin to a hobby, like gardening or trainspotting. It is not. As for Mac OS X computers acting as vectors for infecting other machines on a corporate network, there is some evidence to support that claim.

Apple moving from underage workers to underage customers.

Looks like it's time that their corporate culture goes through the same "trustworthy computing" initiative that Microsoft went through over the last few years.

They've been adding security to their system for a while now. You may not remember, but back in the day Microsoft security was extremely bad. Everyone running as Administrator was merely one symptom. OSX has had separate user accounts from day 1.

For instance, underage workers is a serious concern. He represented that he saw underage workers where the correction says that underage workers were rare. If you are interested in this topic, his report would lead you to the false conclusion that underage workers were a problem when they are not.

You don't know that. Factory workers claim Foxconn hid underage employees prior to inspection

The problem isn't moving money out of the US, it's getting it back in.

They've been trying to get that to work for years now. Maybe in OS XI :-)

apparently it's not so much the minimal labor wages that make China attractive to manufacturing, but the supply of trained engineers to manage the operation. Apple alone needs hundreds of engineers to supervise the thousands of workers.

http://www.tuaw.com/2012/01/22/why-apples-products-are-designed-in-california-but-assembled/