Seems to me that any modern contract that charges for SMS is pretty antiquated, but then in the US you can be charged merely for receiving an SMS, which still strikes me as batshit-crazy.
Believe it or not some people can live with only a few texts a day which actually can make pay as you go cheaper depending on your plan. Especially so when considering that texts sent via iMessage doesn't count towards those few.
Only a chump would even think of PAYING for SMS. I certainly get unlimited SMS for my measly $35/month Virgin no-contract "plan".
Or someone who is not a teenager. If sending a hundred or less a month it could be a win depending on the plan, i.e. $0.05 per text vs $5.00 for unlimited. Now consider that the one hundred only applies to people not on iMessage and its even more plausible to be less expensive to pay per text.
Even if on unlimited the number of texts may still appear on the bill and cause annoying conversations with parents.
Opposite here. I was skeptical about buying a 6+, but I wanted a replacement for my iPad Mini that I could easily read while my commuter bus was bouncing along the freeway. It felt HUGE for about a week until it became the new normal. Now I can barely type on an SE because it feels like I'm jabbing at a tiny little Barbie phone. Now that I've acclimated to the Plus's form factor, I'd hate going back.
Perhaps if I wore cargo pants/shorts more often than jeans.:-)
I think it has more to do with the iPhone 6 generation being a very popular upgrade, mostly due to the larger screen sizes.
Am I the only one who remembers the pre-iPhone6 fanbois sneering at the Samsung phone large screen and insisting that the iPhone was "right-sized"? That goes to show the level of iPhonyness of the Apple zealots.
I only have a 6 because I needed it for development, it is at the upper limit of what I consider pocket sized. 6P no way. I still prefer the 5 since it is more convenient to carry around. I'll probably get an SE next, its basically an updated 5. I'll use an iPad if I want to watch TV/movies not the phone.
I've met quite a few 6 users who miss the more convenient size of the 5. Nearly all agree there is something nice about everything being easily reachable by your thumb and that the 6's hack to scroll the screen down on demand is awkward. So you may find many 6 owners still of the opinion that the 5 was "right sized".
Do you know what a typical Office environment is, what typical hardware is? Its more likely to be a small business that is getting a PC from a second tier supplier that is using second tier less expensive parts, a business without an IT department that does careful evaluations and selections.
Actually, That describes my work environment to a "T".
Well, I was inspired by my work environment two employers ago. Our PCs came from the PC Clone shop a couple of blocks away. Fortunately my boss let me specify the parts for my development team's PCs so all went well. He regretted that since the PCs weren't as inexpensive as he expected but when we talked I was able to explain my choices and he reluctantly accepted them. The Macs for my team were fine since he had no choice other than what Apple put in the box.
The original Mac under Jobs' tenure was an utter failure. Lots of press, disappointing sales. Many years after the Mac's introduction the Apple II was still paying the bills at Apple, carrying the Mac project. Jobs' Apple III (note 3 not 2) was a failure. Job's NeXTcube was a failure.
And of course the Lisa too.
The Lisa was a spectacular machine. Best monochrome monitor in history. A very well designed business-oriented computer. Just too damned expensive, and too far ahead of its time.
I used one a little. When my friend upgraded his Profile to 10M I bought the 5M and put it on my Apple//e. No more swapping out assembler and source code floppies.
Beside the $10K price tag (1980s dollars) it also suffered from Jobs mentioning something better and incompatible was under development (the Mac).
I used a NeXTcube a little at school too, also nice. But like the Lisa also limited due to Jobs' "vision" and design decisions. They were what he wanted, not what the market wanted/needed. Ahead of its time in terms of tech maybe but not in design, design wise they were failures, Jobs' vision failed. As did the Mac G4 Cube, cute but impractical.
The original Mac under Jobs' tenure was an utter failure. Lots of press, disappointing sales. Many years after the Mac's introduction the Apple II was still paying the bills at Apple, carrying the Mac project. Jobs' Apple III (note 3 not 2) was a failure. Job's NeXTcube was a failure.
I've said it before and I will say it again: Without Jobs Apple is toast. Just like the last time Jobs left.
The original Mac under Jobs' tenure was an utter failure. Lots of press, disappointing sales. Many years after the Mac's introduction the Apple II was still paying the bills at Apple, carrying the Mac project. Jobs' Apple III (note 3 not 2) was a failure. Job's NeXTcube was a failure.
The Mac only became successful after Jobs was gone, when design features he opposed were introduced. An open box, slots, etc.
The iMac G3 of 1998 was Jobs' first successful computer. Prior to that he misread the market, the customers wants/needs over and over again.
That said what really made Macs popular was the shift to Mac OS X, which Jobs deserves some credit for since it was a fork of NextOS, combined with the shift to Intel CPUs. Basically once people no longer had to make a choice between Mac OS or Windows, but could dual boot or effective emulate (the cpu architecture no longer had to be emulated so performance was many times faster) so they could have both operating systems on the same machine. This is when Apple's Mac sales rapidly doubled.
In short while his record with digital music players and mobile devices is pretty damn good, Jobs' record with computers is pretty spotty, more likely a failure than a success. The Apple II was successful in part because Wozniak ignored Jobs on important design decisions and the Apple II had to carry Jobs for many years when he was able to bully people to get his way and those projects failed.
This doesn't seem like a surprise. You can't expect people to keep replacing $700+ devices every one or two years.
I think it has more to do with the iPhone 6 generation being a very popular upgrade, mostly due to the larger screen sizes. That was a significant differentiator between the iPhone 4 and 5 generations. The iPhone 7 generation is too similar for many people to want to accelerate their device upgrade plans.
In short its not that sales of the current generation are bad its just that the previous generation was phenomenal, a spike above the trend.
Do you know what a typical Office environment is, what typical hardware is? Its more likely to be a small business that is getting a PC from a second tier supplier that is using second tier less expensive parts, a business without an IT department that does careful evaluations and selections.
The top tier parts I tended to buy are *not* the typical parts, that is part of the Windows PC problem.
Who else's fault would it be that Windows requires 3x more support?
The vendors who supply the 3rd party drivers.
Macs are more reliable/require less support because there is very little a corporation or end user can add to it, to customize it beyond built-to-order. I've been building my own PC desktop machines for decades and I have had very few problems because I tend to carefully select the parts and use "better" rather than "less expensive" parts. However my PCs are sort of anomalies in this respect. When helping friends and family "debug" their PC problems the BSOD was usually coming from a 3rd party driver, from a second tier low cost vendor. By maintaining a higher degree of control Apple is less susceptible to such problems.
The secondary benefit of my BYO approach is that I have had very few Linux compatibility problems over the decades.
Oh, and Windows has been running natively (dual boot) very reliably on my Mac laptops for many years now.
So the fallout to Apple would seem to be mostly limited to people being able to load alternative firmware, it would be a 'jailbreak' thing. And for a very small number of people law enforcement could access their phone when being 'searched'.
The former of which Apple simply does not want us to be able to do and the latter of which they want us to believe impossible. Oh, and it would be all law enforcement, as well as even the smallest of small-time hackers and data thieves.You do realize that, if the key gets out publicly (you know, since you mentioned people being able to load their own firmware), it's out there for everyone, right? Not just the good guys?
Of course, in case you forgot I wrote: "So its disclosure would seem to require physical access to the device to compromise it". Note that limits the number of hackers, and that they are also defeated by remote wiping. I assume law enforcement has some way to tell Apple not to remote wipe.
I'm just guessing that Apple wouldn't do something so dumb as permanently burn a public key paired to a potentially (no matter how unlikely) guessable and (more likely) leakable private key into their CPUs, leaving themselves absolutely no way to revoke that key and replace it with a new one if someone cracks it or when someone leaks it.
But, then, I don't know anything about security, I just work in the industry.
The key in question seems to validate only the firmware, other keys would validate other steps in the boot process. So its disclosure would seem to require physical access to the device to compromise it, or to compromise Apple's software update process which is secured with additional keys. So the fallout to Apple would seem to be mostly limited to people being able to load alternative firmware, it would be a 'jailbreak' thing. And for a very small number of people law enforcement could access their phone when being 'searched'.
That's how Apple, a company with a habit of misleading consumers with regard to how their products actually function, claims it works. I'm not going to argue, because that's what the documentation says, but I also won't have a surprised look on my face (like you will) when it's proven false in a month.
You are absolutely correct. I will be incredibly surprised if Apple's more recent phones do not behave as described in Apple's documentation. When I have been shown to be wrong I will humbly pay for dinner for you and your significant other to celebrate your superior insight.:-)
There is no need to actually infiltrate the factories manufacturing the original ROM since you can just throw them away and install your counterfeit rom instead.
No, you have to replace the entire processor with a counterfeit. The first "ROM" that starts the chain of signature checks at each level of software is burned into the processor and can not be changed. https://www.apple.com/business...
Right, and Foxconn can't add their own signing keys to the devices when they're the ones burning the ROMs that hold them.
There is more than one "ROM", there is a series of them. The first "ROM" is burned into the processor. Foxconn does not operate the foundry that manufactures these processors. And it is probably part of the QA process to have Apple verify the ROM burned into the processor before they bang out a million of them.
"When an iOS device is turned on, its application processor immediately executes code from read-only memory known as the Boot ROM. This immutable code, known as the hardware root of trust, is laid down during chip fabrication, and is implicitly trusted. The Boot ROM code contains the Apple Root CA public key, which is used to verify that the Low-Level Bootloader (LLB) is signed by Apple before allowing it to load. This is the first step in the chain of trust where each step ensures that the next is signed by Apple." https://www.apple.com/business...
If there is a backdoor in iOS devices it was put there by Apple not Foxconn. Firmware must be digitally signed by Apple or the hardware refuses to run it. Foxconn has no opportunity to modify the firmware.
Foxconn are the ones that build the hardware and install the software, they wanted to slip in a backdoor to idevices they are in the prime position to do it.
No. Firmware must be signed by Apple. Any substitution or modification (or a bit hit by an alpha particle) won't have a valid signature and the hardware will refuse to run it.
You underestimate the creativity of corporals and sergeants to improvise some countermeasures. Not to mention the stuff you are describing is far closer to James Bond movies than reality. If you are going the movie technology route then why not give the troops small phalanx like systems mounted on humvees?
If you read the NYT article you will find the US military has already been addressing the issue but has not equipped the Iraqis and Kurds. Also now that they are aware the Iraqis are shooting down drones with small arms. The drones being used are consumer/hobbyist devices.
Also note that the ability to disrupt/degrade civilian GPS has been a feature since day 1.
Parent is right... what user wants to constantly look at the keyboard and then look at the screen, back and forth? Shortcuts like F1, F2 etc make sense rather than icons on the keys. This is just another superfluous technology, like $160 wireless earbuds.
Redefining the images displayed on the keys would be useful for video games. No bringing up the help screen to figure out what key some functionality is on. Just a glance down at the keyboard.
It nice in theory, but I wonder how many software developers will put for the effort to add keyboard change functionality when the market is limited to those who have this keyboard. This is the chicken, we'll need the egg.
There is no backwards compatibility problem, no limited availability problem. The image displayed on the key may change but the character generated by the key can remain the same. Consider a video game that uses ASDW for movement. The displayed images could be changed to directional arrow while the keys still generate 'a', 's', 'd' and 'w' characters. So the only software change necessary would be to check for the new keyboard and if present update the key images for these keys.
Slashdot Mirror
Seems to me that any modern contract that charges for SMS is pretty antiquated, but then in the US you can be charged merely for receiving an SMS, which still strikes me as batshit-crazy.
Believe it or not some people can live with only a few texts a day which actually can make pay as you go cheaper depending on your plan. Especially so when considering that texts sent via iMessage doesn't count towards those few.
Only a chump would even think of PAYING for SMS. I certainly get unlimited SMS for my measly $35/month Virgin no-contract "plan".
Or someone who is not a teenager. If sending a hundred or less a month it could be a win depending on the plan, i.e. $0.05 per text vs $5.00 for unlimited. Now consider that the one hundred only applies to people not on iMessage and its even more plausible to be less expensive to pay per text.
Even if on unlimited the number of texts may still appear on the bill and cause annoying conversations with parents.
Opposite here. I was skeptical about buying a 6+, but I wanted a replacement for my iPad Mini that I could easily read while my commuter bus was bouncing along the freeway. It felt HUGE for about a week until it became the new normal. Now I can barely type on an SE because it feels like I'm jabbing at a tiny little Barbie phone. Now that I've acclimated to the Plus's form factor, I'd hate going back.
Perhaps if I wore cargo pants/shorts more often than jeans. :-)
I think it has more to do with the iPhone 6 generation being a very popular upgrade, mostly due to the larger screen sizes.
Am I the only one who remembers the pre-iPhone6 fanbois sneering at the Samsung phone large screen and insisting that the iPhone was "right-sized"? That goes to show the level of iPhonyness of the Apple zealots.
I only have a 6 because I needed it for development, it is at the upper limit of what I consider pocket sized. 6P no way. I still prefer the 5 since it is more convenient to carry around. I'll probably get an SE next, its basically an updated 5. I'll use an iPad if I want to watch TV/movies not the phone.
I've met quite a few 6 users who miss the more convenient size of the 5. Nearly all agree there is something nice about everything being easily reachable by your thumb and that the 6's hack to scroll the screen down on demand is awkward. So you may find many 6 owners still of the opinion that the 5 was "right sized".
Do you know what a typical Office environment is, what typical hardware is? Its more likely to be a small business that is getting a PC from a second tier supplier that is using second tier less expensive parts, a business without an IT department that does careful evaluations and selections.
Actually, That describes my work environment to a "T".
Well, I was inspired by my work environment two employers ago. Our PCs came from the PC Clone shop a couple of blocks away. Fortunately my boss let me specify the parts for my development team's PCs so all went well. He regretted that since the PCs weren't as inexpensive as he expected but when we talked I was able to explain my choices and he reluctantly accepted them. The Macs for my team were fine since he had no choice other than what Apple put in the box.
The original Mac under Jobs' tenure was an utter failure. Lots of press, disappointing sales. Many years after the Mac's introduction the Apple II was still paying the bills at Apple, carrying the Mac project. Jobs' Apple III (note 3 not 2) was a failure. Job's NeXTcube was a failure.
And of course the Lisa too.
The Lisa was a spectacular machine. Best monochrome monitor in history. A very well designed business-oriented computer. Just too damned expensive, and too far ahead of its time.
I used one a little. When my friend upgraded his Profile to 10M I bought the 5M and put it on my Apple //e. No more swapping out assembler and source code floppies.
Beside the $10K price tag (1980s dollars) it also suffered from Jobs mentioning something better and incompatible was under development (the Mac).
I used a NeXTcube a little at school too, also nice. But like the Lisa also limited due to Jobs' "vision" and design decisions. They were what he wanted, not what the market wanted/needed. Ahead of its time in terms of tech maybe but not in design, design wise they were failures, Jobs' vision failed. As did the Mac G4 Cube, cute but impractical.
The original Mac under Jobs' tenure was an utter failure. Lots of press, disappointing sales. Many years after the Mac's introduction the Apple II was still paying the bills at Apple, carrying the Mac project. Jobs' Apple III (note 3 not 2) was a failure. Job's NeXTcube was a failure.
And of course the Lisa too.
The iMac G3 of 1998 was Jobs' first successful computer. Prior to that he misread the market, the customers wants/needs over and over again.
I guess it would be fair to say he misread the market during that era too at times, ex: Flower Power and Dalmatian themed iMacs.
I've said it before and I will say it again: Without Jobs Apple is toast. Just like the last time Jobs left.
The original Mac under Jobs' tenure was an utter failure. Lots of press, disappointing sales. Many years after the Mac's introduction the Apple II was still paying the bills at Apple, carrying the Mac project. Jobs' Apple III (note 3 not 2) was a failure. Job's NeXTcube was a failure.
The Mac only became successful after Jobs was gone, when design features he opposed were introduced. An open box, slots, etc.
The iMac G3 of 1998 was Jobs' first successful computer. Prior to that he misread the market, the customers wants/needs over and over again.
That said what really made Macs popular was the shift to Mac OS X, which Jobs deserves some credit for since it was a fork of NextOS, combined with the shift to Intel CPUs. Basically once people no longer had to make a choice between Mac OS or Windows, but could dual boot or effective emulate (the cpu architecture no longer had to be emulated so performance was many times faster) so they could have both operating systems on the same machine. This is when Apple's Mac sales rapidly doubled.
In short while his record with digital music players and mobile devices is pretty damn good, Jobs' record with computers is pretty spotty, more likely a failure than a success. The Apple II was successful in part because Wozniak ignored Jobs on important design decisions and the Apple II had to carry Jobs for many years when he was able to bully people to get his way and those projects failed.
Even if unlimited does the number of texts appear, that could cause annoying conversations with parents.
This doesn't seem like a surprise. You can't expect people to keep replacing $700+ devices every one or two years.
I think it has more to do with the iPhone 6 generation being a very popular upgrade, mostly due to the larger screen sizes. That was a significant differentiator between the iPhone 4 and 5 generations. The iPhone 7 generation is too similar for many people to want to accelerate their device upgrade plans.
In short its not that sales of the current generation are bad its just that the previous generation was phenomenal, a spike above the trend.
The biggest difference is that the iMessage-to-iMessage conversations consist of Blue bubbles, and the regular SMS conversations have Green bubbles.
Those Blue bubbles don't show up on the phone bill :-)
Do you know what a typical Office environment is, what typical hardware is? Its more likely to be a small business that is getting a PC from a second tier supplier that is using second tier less expensive parts, a business without an IT department that does careful evaluations and selections.
The top tier parts I tended to buy are *not* the typical parts, that is part of the Windows PC problem.
Who else's fault would it be that Windows requires 3x more support?
The vendors who supply the 3rd party drivers.
Macs are more reliable/require less support because there is very little a corporation or end user can add to it, to customize it beyond built-to-order. I've been building my own PC desktop machines for decades and I have had very few problems because I tend to carefully select the parts and use "better" rather than "less expensive" parts. However my PCs are sort of anomalies in this respect. When helping friends and family "debug" their PC problems the BSOD was usually coming from a 3rd party driver, from a second tier low cost vendor. By maintaining a higher degree of control Apple is less susceptible to such problems.
The secondary benefit of my BYO approach is that I have had very few Linux compatibility problems over the decades.
Oh, and Windows has been running natively (dual boot) very reliably on my Mac laptops for many years now.
So the fallout to Apple would seem to be mostly limited to people being able to load alternative firmware, it would be a 'jailbreak' thing. And for a very small number of people law enforcement could access their phone when being 'searched'.
The former of which Apple simply does not want us to be able to do and the latter of which they want us to believe impossible. Oh, and it would be all law enforcement, as well as even the smallest of small-time hackers and data thieves.You do realize that, if the key gets out publicly (you know, since you mentioned people being able to load their own firmware), it's out there for everyone, right? Not just the good guys?
Of course, in case you forgot I wrote: "So its disclosure would seem to require physical access to the device to compromise it". Note that limits the number of hackers, and that they are also defeated by remote wiping. I assume law enforcement has some way to tell Apple not to remote wipe.
I'm just guessing that Apple wouldn't do something so dumb as permanently burn a public key paired to a potentially (no matter how unlikely) guessable and (more likely) leakable private key into their CPUs, leaving themselves absolutely no way to revoke that key and replace it with a new one if someone cracks it or when someone leaks it. But, then, I don't know anything about security, I just work in the industry.
The key in question seems to validate only the firmware, other keys would validate other steps in the boot process. So its disclosure would seem to require physical access to the device to compromise it, or to compromise Apple's software update process which is secured with additional keys. So the fallout to Apple would seem to be mostly limited to people being able to load alternative firmware, it would be a 'jailbreak' thing. And for a very small number of people law enforcement could access their phone when being 'searched'.
That's how Apple, a company with a habit of misleading consumers with regard to how their products actually function, claims it works. I'm not going to argue, because that's what the documentation says, but I also won't have a surprised look on my face (like you will) when it's proven false in a month.
You are absolutely correct. I will be incredibly surprised if Apple's more recent phones do not behave as described in Apple's documentation. When I have been shown to be wrong I will humbly pay for dinner for you and your significant other to celebrate your superior insight. :-)
There is no need to actually infiltrate the factories manufacturing the original ROM since you can just throw them away and install your counterfeit rom instead.
No, you have to replace the entire processor with a counterfeit. The first "ROM" that starts the chain of signature checks at each level of software is burned into the processor and can not be changed.
https://www.apple.com/business...
Right, and Foxconn can't add their own signing keys to the devices when they're the ones burning the ROMs that hold them.
There is more than one "ROM", there is a series of them. The first "ROM" is burned into the processor. Foxconn does not operate the foundry that manufactures these processors. And it is probably part of the QA process to have Apple verify the ROM burned into the processor before they bang out a million of them.
"When an iOS device is turned on, its application processor immediately executes code from read-only memory known as the Boot ROM. This immutable code, known as the hardware root of trust, is laid down during chip fabrication, and is implicitly trusted. The Boot ROM code contains the Apple Root CA public key, which is used to verify that the Low-Level Bootloader (LLB) is signed by Apple before allowing it to load. This is the first step in the chain of trust where each step ensures that the next is signed by Apple."
https://www.apple.com/business...
If there is a backdoor in iOS devices it was put there by Apple not Foxconn. Firmware must be digitally signed by Apple or the hardware refuses to run it. Foxconn has no opportunity to modify the firmware.
Foxconn are the ones that build the hardware and install the software, they wanted to slip in a backdoor to idevices they are in the prime position to do it.
No. Firmware must be signed by Apple. Any substitution or modification (or a bit hit by an alpha particle) won't have a valid signature and the hardware will refuse to run it.
You underestimate the creativity of corporals and sergeants to improvise some countermeasures. Not to mention the stuff you are describing is far closer to James Bond movies than reality. If you are going the movie technology route then why not give the troops small phalanx like systems mounted on humvees?
If you read the NYT article you will find the US military has already been addressing the issue but has not equipped the Iraqis and Kurds. Also now that they are aware the Iraqis are shooting down drones with small arms. The drones being used are consumer/hobbyist devices.
Also note that the ability to disrupt/degrade civilian GPS has been a feature since day 1.
Parent is right... what user wants to constantly look at the keyboard and then look at the screen, back and forth? Shortcuts like F1, F2 etc make sense rather than icons on the keys. This is just another superfluous technology, like $160 wireless earbuds.
Redefining the images displayed on the keys would be useful for video games. No bringing up the help screen to figure out what key some functionality is on. Just a glance down at the keyboard.
It nice in theory, but I wonder how many software developers will put for the effort to add keyboard change functionality when the market is limited to those who have this keyboard. This is the chicken, we'll need the egg.
There is no backwards compatibility problem, no limited availability problem. The image displayed on the key may change but the character generated by the key can remain the same. Consider a video game that uses ASDW for movement. The displayed images could be changed to directional arrow while the keys still generate 'a', 's', 'd' and 'w' characters. So the only software change necessary would be to check for the new keyboard and if present update the key images for these keys.
The attackers could send several drones from different angles ...
Which is sort of what happens on a skeet range, different launch points, different directions of travel, etc. :-)
... and program in a series of flight waypoints that take them between structures in the target area ...
Ah, choke points, put up a cheap bird net. The sort used to protect fruit trees. :-)