Apple keeps its costs down by burning out its engineers. Its a very abusive work environment. Also it uses Foxconn and other very abusive contract manufacturers to do its manufacturing. All the time charging a a high price premium by pretending to be a premium product while they are using the tech industry equivalent of sweatshops. Its a model well executed by luxury brands like Gucci who pay a child laborer 5 doallars to make a bag and then sell it for 500 dollars.
Whether that is sustainable or not in the long term depends on how much Apple's manufacturing processes and Engineering processes come under scrutiny. At some point the economy will recover fully from the 2008 tech crash (we still havnt gone back to 2007 levels of tech employment) and Apple will start having problems as they wont have quality people. Problems will start appearing in the phones. (Already the innovativeness is gone and now we are getting execution defects as well . Till now the marketing has covered up for it but for how long). When the inflection point comes and people stop looking at Apple products as premium products the change away from Apple will be drastic. Think Sun Microsystems. Just like Sun a company which made its money selling premium workstations when people stopped wanting them the company went belly up. Apple has shown the same kind of hubris by expanding into Hardware design (always a capital intensive and tough business) as well as trying to get Swift to be the next Java (I would say Sun would have survived if they had not spent so many resources on Java). Apple is walking a very thin rope. yes it has 200 billion in offshore tax havens but since it doesnt want to bring the money back it also has billions in US loans to pay for all the expansion. If things go south Apple could survive on the cash pile if they retrench but what is likely is that they will blow the cash pile on newer and newer projects trying to get the next iPhone but by that time the smart engineers would have seen the writing on the wall and left and only the political animals would be around and the political animals while great at claiming credit cant innovate even if they have cash thrown at them.
Learn about whitespace, moron. No one wants to wade through an solid wall of text.
Apple phones ARE relatively expensive. This has never been a debate. Obviously most people that buy them find them to be good value for the money. The fact that they charge more than some others is irrelevant.
Excuse me. You DO realize, of course, that the infamous Exploding Samsung GN7 actually costed MORE than an UNLOCKED iPhone 7 PLUS (for the equivalent storage).
Yet NOBODY EVER WHINES ABOUT SAMSUNG'S HIGH PRICES!!! Why?
Wait.. Apple actually fixes their products? I was under the impression that they released broken products and had their customers pay to fix them.
The products weren't broken when they reached the Customers. Therefore, Apple did not RELEASE "broken" products. Or else, the "Touch Disease" bullshit would have been a news story when the 6s was RELEASED, September 25, 2015, instead of a couple of months ago.
You DO NOT want the company you are buying things from to make record profits.
It means that they are taking a higher percentage of your money than any of their competitors.
You might want the company to have the greatest sales figures (not true of Apple), or the greatest proportional re-investment (not true of Apple), or the greatest customer base even (not true of Apple).
But, like walking through Las Vegas... all that show and money to blow on things comes from one source... people like you paying over the odds for their products.
Mods: Insightful?!? Really? I see plenty of Hate; but Where is the INSIGHT?
You might want the company to have the greatest sales figures (not true of Apple)
Citation, please?
[...] or the greatest proportional re-investment (not true of Apple)
Citation, please?
[...] or the greatest customer base even (not true of Apple)
Citation, please?
Be careful: We're talking about BRANDS, not PLATFORMS here.
Women's pants don't have functional front pockets, often. As for me, I use it when I'm shopping and needing to check prices online and so on frequently, but otherwise I agree and keep it in front.
Yeah, but you gals get to carry around a piece of luggage to carry all your stuff in without people snickering at you; so who needs pockets?;-)
It's only a hardware defect in the way that they didn't design the circuit board to bend.
You wouldn't take the same stance if your Car's manufacturer refused to repair your car under warranty because YOU BENT IT, would you? (You should be answering "no" here.)
How do you explain that this only happens with the iPhone? Feel free to make up another irrelevant car analogy if you don't have an answer in you fanboi handbook.
It doesn't. It's just harder to Google other phones with a similar problem, because nobody has given it a catchy, easily-searchable name. But the references are there if you take a few minutes and search.
Initially we were thinking it was a ball/pad issue, but we've found even with the jobs redone and bracing on the chassis to stiffen up the area, there's still a non-insignificant number of units coming back with the same issue (across multiple shops, not just one). Starting to look a bit more like an issue with either the actual chip itself or the PCB, not to say it definitely isn't a ball issue but it's not clear cut.
Either way, it's good to see Apple now admit the issue, though the $149 cost is still a bit of a cop-out ( no worries, people who have made a good income with the replacements will continue to do so for a while then ).
Oh, and internal IC wire-bonding issue. That's another possibility, or micro-cracks in PCB traces. Both of them possible. I wonder if it can be traced to particular "lots" of the components and/or PCB?
And if you heard something about bendgate or about it being a problem with people who dropped their phones, just know that there has been multiple reported cases of phones that never suffered any physical damages, and that were never put inside tight back pockets and whatnot that also had the defect.
It usually happens overtime. Solder balls from a specific chip gets loose or cracks, which then causes the issue.
Then that is laid SOLELY at the feet of the Contract Manufacturer, or possibly the chip supplier and/or PCB supplier. Those are MANUFACTURING issues. It has NOTHING to do with "Design".
It requires dropping or sitting on the phone a few times, but it's a design flaw because nearly every other phone on the market can withstand the same forces and more without any problem.
Wrong. Do a little Googling without your Hater-Goggles on, and you will find reports of the same kinds of failures triggered by customer's dropping (sometimes even once) and flexing (usually by sitting-on) their phones.
I'm not sure what to think, is that a design flaw, or user error?
User error is something that is caused by a completely new technology or device that someone has never seen before. The fact that there was no "touch disease" on the iPhone 5, 4, 3, and isn't a "touch disease" on any competitor phones effectively rules out user error, unless holding that one specific model of phone significantly alters the holder's use and interaction with the device, at which point one would ask "is this fit for service"?
Oh, but there ARE reports of "Touch Disease" on competitors' phones. They just don't have a catchy name like "Touch Disease", so they are harder to Google-for.
And do we know whether the packaging on the IC(s) responsible has changed between the iPhone 3 through 5, versus the iPhone 6? Specifically, did the earlier chips have "legs" vs. simply "pads" (e.g. PLCC-like, vs. BGA-like)? Because that VASTLY affects how resilient the overall product is to mechanical shock, PCB prep, co-planarity (warpage) of the components and the PCB board and even soldering techniques and solder formulations (I'm looking at you, RoHS).
tl;dr - There are a BUNCH of factors that are at play, and Apple really only has control over a few of them.
Sadly, that page links to a page that no longer exists (it just redirects to a generic Apple welcome page). I have not been able to find OS X El Capitan on the App Store.
Have you tried those links FROM a "Mac that doesn't support Sierra"? If not, you may not be able to d/l El Cap.
Here's an article that has some additional suggestions.
Ask around. You may find someone that has an installer for El Cap. laying around. Then, you can use the Freeware DiskMaker X to create an Installer USB Stick.
One thing I discovered: If you go the DiskMaker route, before you do the Install, make sure you set your System Time & Date to the CREATION Date of the Installer "App" that you are Installing!!! Just look at the Creation Date of the Installer in the Finder, and set your Mac's clock accordingly.
I guess you've never used a landline (or rather, paid the bill to one) in your life. Usually, the bill comes with a full listing of all dialed numbers.
If EFI can run then chances are the motherboard is in a fairly good state...
I've had one just recently where the motherboard was toast (due to a can of coke) but the SSD was fine.
I agree; which is why you could likely boot with an external if the mobo is ok except for the SSD.
In the (quite rare) second scenario, then it sucks to be you. Find someone with an SMT rework station and some good soldering/desoldering skills......or Restore from that Backup...
But in the second scenario (bad mobo, good SSD), you aren't going to get back up and running in any reasonable amount of time (e.g. 30 mins), even if the SSD was socketed; so it really doesn't matter. Plus, there's a VERY good chance that the file you had open and being written-to when the mobo drank the soda is going to be trashed anyway, so....?
No disagreement. That sort of software sucks horribly. The point was that it is out there, and it unfortunately isn't rare.
Well, if we are talking Multitrack Audio Recording, Logic Pro doesn't pull any of that shit, and ProTools can just STUFF IT if they do (which I don't think they do, either). If Ableton does that crap, they can just have it.
Anything else is probably not being used in a "Live" situation; so having the ability to "instantly recover" from a suddenly bad SSD is pretty much a non-issue if you aren't in a "real-time" recording situation.
The copy protection is, indeed, often that paranoid, though most software I've seen will work as long as you cloned the entire disk (not just the filesystem with dd so that the volume UUIDs match, the folder IDs containing various files match, etc.
I repeat: If the publisher is that paranoid, make it use a hardware key. In the end, it's much more reliable and easier for the user AND the publisher.
2. Then DO a dd clone! Afterall, dd exists in macOS [ss64.com].
You can certainly do that, but you aren't going to do it very often, because it means not touching your machine for eight or ten hours every time you do....
But if you're just using it for an emergency "on-location" "Hail Mary" backup, having a reasonably up-to-date (monthly?) backup like that might be well worth it, especially as cheap as spinning-rust drives are.
You know most people don't hook up an external drive. Yes it's dead easy but even I don't do it for all my systems. I have my main Macbook Pro I use for video and photo work that is hooked to a backup drive most of the time but everything else is hit or miss.
I never have, either.
But, if I was using the system to record can't-be-repeated live performances, you can bet that I would have THAT system backed-up...
Spoken like someone who hasn't been burned by Time Machine. When it works, it is great. When it doesn't, you're screwed. Mind you, this is true for a drive failure anyway, but realistically SSDs rarely fail, whereas other components on the logic board frequently do (GPUs), so this significantly increases the number of people who will lose data.
BTW, I ca think of several audio apps that don't work at all if you restore them from a Time Machine backup. The software sees it as a new installation and makes you buy a new license. There's only one reliable way to back up those apps, and that's with a block-by-block copy to an identical drive. It also requires you to stop using your machine for several hours, so it isn't worth doing unless you have no other choice.
You are exhibiting some kind of failure. You seem to be caught in some kind of feedback loop in your Positronic Matrix, resulting in a "Circular Logic"-like phenomenon.
And if a piece of software is truly that worried about piracy, then they can use a hardware key, or GTFO. Those sorts of DRM that depend on hardware enumeration are the true sign of lazy programming, and in the end, cause more "false positives" (usually at the most inopportune moments) on suspected piracy than they actually protect against true piracy. I simply wouldn't have a mission-critical piece of software that depended on such kludgy DRM. No way, no how. Because one fine day, it is just going to "decide" to de authorize itself, and the integrity of your hardware won't mean SQUAT at that moment; because you'll STILL be on the phone begging for a reauthorization...
It does get you back up and running immediately if some other part of the system failed and not the drive, simply swap the good drive out of the failed system into a new system and boot.
I have done exactly this myself on a laptop (smashed screen), and we've done it at work several times due to faulty keyboards, bad batteries, broken screens, faulty motherboards etc. Only if the drive itself failed have we had to restore a backup onto a fresh drive.
Yeah, but you didn't do it in the middle of a live multitrack recording gig, did you? THAT was the scenario alluded to by the OP. And you can get stuff off of a Mac using Target Disk Mode, even if nothing will run but EFI.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple keeps its costs down by burning out its engineers. Its a very abusive work environment. Also it uses Foxconn and other very abusive contract manufacturers to do its manufacturing. All the time charging a a high price premium by pretending to be a premium product while they are using the tech industry equivalent of sweatshops. Its a model well executed by luxury brands like Gucci who pay a child laborer 5 doallars to make a bag and then sell it for 500 dollars. Whether that is sustainable or not in the long term depends on how much Apple's manufacturing processes and Engineering processes come under scrutiny. At some point the economy will recover fully from the 2008 tech crash (we still havnt gone back to 2007 levels of tech employment) and Apple will start having problems as they wont have quality people. Problems will start appearing in the phones. (Already the innovativeness is gone and now we are getting execution defects as well . Till now the marketing has covered up for it but for how long). When the inflection point comes and people stop looking at Apple products as premium products the change away from Apple will be drastic. Think Sun Microsystems. Just like Sun a company which made its money selling premium workstations when people stopped wanting them the company went belly up. Apple has shown the same kind of hubris by expanding into Hardware design (always a capital intensive and tough business) as well as trying to get Swift to be the next Java (I would say Sun would have survived if they had not spent so many resources on Java). Apple is walking a very thin rope. yes it has 200 billion in offshore tax havens but since it doesnt want to bring the money back it also has billions in US loans to pay for all the expansion. If things go south Apple could survive on the cash pile if they retrench but what is likely is that they will blow the cash pile on newer and newer projects trying to get the next iPhone but by that time the smart engineers would have seen the writing on the wall and left and only the political animals would be around and the political animals while great at claiming credit cant innovate even if they have cash thrown at them.
Learn about whitespace, moron. No one wants to wade through an solid wall of text.
>The only way Apple or any company makes a big profit is if people like what they are getting for the price.
What a naive way of thinking. Either that or Apple uses predatory tactics to trap people and trick them into using their products.
Puh-lease.
Apple phones ARE relatively expensive. This has never been a debate. Obviously most people that buy them find them to be good value for the money. The fact that they charge more than some others is irrelevant.
Excuse me. You DO realize, of course, that the infamous Exploding Samsung GN7 actually costed MORE than an UNLOCKED iPhone 7 PLUS (for the equivalent storage).
Yet NOBODY EVER WHINES ABOUT SAMSUNG'S HIGH PRICES!!! Why?
Apple products are never broken, they're just held incorrectly.
You mean dropped and sat-on incorrectly...
Wait .. Apple actually fixes their products? I was under the impression that they released broken products and had their customers pay to fix them.
The products weren't broken when they reached the Customers. Therefore, Apple did not RELEASE "broken" products. Or else, the "Touch Disease" bullshit would have been a news story when the 6s was RELEASED, September 25, 2015, instead of a couple of months ago.
You DO NOT want the company you are buying things from to make record profits.
It means that they are taking a higher percentage of your money than any of their competitors.
You might want the company to have the greatest sales figures (not true of Apple), or the greatest proportional re-investment (not true of Apple), or the greatest customer base even (not true of Apple).
But, like walking through Las Vegas... all that show and money to blow on things comes from one source... people like you paying over the odds for their products.
Mods: Insightful?!? Really? I see plenty of Hate; but Where is the INSIGHT?
You might want the company to have the greatest sales figures (not true of Apple)
Citation, please?
[...] or the greatest proportional re-investment (not true of Apple)
Citation, please?
[...] or the greatest customer base even (not true of Apple)
Citation, please?
Be careful: We're talking about BRANDS, not PLATFORMS here.
ACT and FEIGN are the same thing. Good job there guy. WTF is FAIN?
Although you are right in your correction, "fain" is actually a word.
Women's pants don't have functional front pockets, often. As for me, I use it when I'm shopping and needing to check prices online and so on frequently, but otherwise I agree and keep it in front.
Yeah, but you gals get to carry around a piece of luggage to carry all your stuff in without people snickering at you; so who needs pockets? ;-)
It's only a hardware defect in the way that they didn't design the circuit board to bend.
You wouldn't take the same stance if your Car's manufacturer refused to repair your car under warranty because YOU BENT IT, would you? (You should be answering "no" here.)
How do you explain that this only happens with the iPhone? Feel free to make up another irrelevant car analogy if you don't have an answer in you fanboi handbook.
It doesn't. It's just harder to Google other phones with a similar problem, because nobody has given it a catchy, easily-searchable name. But the references are there if you take a few minutes and search.
Initially we were thinking it was a ball/pad issue, but we've found even with the jobs redone and bracing on the chassis to stiffen up the area, there's still a non-insignificant number of units coming back with the same issue (across multiple shops, not just one). Starting to look a bit more like an issue with either the actual chip itself or the PCB, not to say it definitely isn't a ball issue but it's not clear cut.
Either way, it's good to see Apple now admit the issue, though the $149 cost is still a bit of a cop-out ( no worries, people who have made a good income with the replacements will continue to do so for a while then ).
Oh, and internal IC wire-bonding issue. That's another possibility, or micro-cracks in PCB traces. Both of them possible. I wonder if it can be traced to particular "lots" of the components and/or PCB?
For those who don't know, there is already an ongoing class action lawsuit in the works: http://bgr.com/2016/08/31/ipho...
And if you heard something about bendgate or about it being a problem with people who dropped their phones, just know that there has been multiple reported cases of phones that never suffered any physical damages, and that were never put inside tight back pockets and whatnot that also had the defect.
It usually happens overtime. Solder balls from a specific chip gets loose or cracks, which then causes the issue.
Then that is laid SOLELY at the feet of the Contract Manufacturer, or possibly the chip supplier and/or PCB supplier. Those are MANUFACTURING issues. It has NOTHING to do with "Design".
It requires dropping or sitting on the phone a few times, but it's a design flaw because nearly every other phone on the market can withstand the same forces and more without any problem.
Wrong. Do a little Googling without your Hater-Goggles on, and you will find reports of the same kinds of failures triggered by customer's dropping (sometimes even once) and flexing (usually by sitting-on) their phones.
I'm not sure what to think, is that a design flaw, or user error?
User error is something that is caused by a completely new technology or device that someone has never seen before. The fact that there was no "touch disease" on the iPhone 5, 4, 3, and isn't a "touch disease" on any competitor phones effectively rules out user error, unless holding that one specific model of phone significantly alters the holder's use and interaction with the device, at which point one would ask "is this fit for service"?
Oh, but there ARE reports of "Touch Disease" on competitors' phones. They just don't have a catchy name like "Touch Disease", so they are harder to Google-for.
And do we know whether the packaging on the IC(s) responsible has changed between the iPhone 3 through 5, versus the iPhone 6? Specifically, did the earlier chips have "legs" vs. simply "pads" (e.g. PLCC-like, vs. BGA-like)? Because that VASTLY affects how resilient the overall product is to mechanical shock, PCB prep, co-planarity (warpage) of the components and the PCB board and even soldering techniques and solder formulations (I'm looking at you, RoHS).
tl;dr - There are a BUNCH of factors that are at play, and Apple really only has control over a few of them.
I'm not sure what to think, is that a design flaw, or user error?
I do. It's abnormal wear and tear as a result of user mishandling.
Sadly, that page links to a page that no longer exists (it just redirects to a generic Apple welcome page). I have not been able to find OS X El Capitan on the App Store.
Have you tried those links FROM a "Mac that doesn't support Sierra"? If not, you may not be able to d/l El Cap.
Here's an article that has some additional suggestions.
Ask around. You may find someone that has an installer for El Cap. laying around. Then, you can use the Freeware DiskMaker X to create an Installer USB Stick.
One thing I discovered: If you go the DiskMaker route, before you do the Install, make sure you set your System Time & Date to the CREATION Date of the Installer "App" that you are Installing!!! Just look at the Creation Date of the Installer in the Finder, and set your Mac's clock accordingly.
"Really? Have you seen those logs?"
I guess you've never used a landline (or rather, paid the bill to one) in your life. Usually, the bill comes with a full listing of all dialed numbers.
From the CARRIER, sure.
If EFI can run then chances are the motherboard is in a fairly good state... I've had one just recently where the motherboard was toast (due to a can of coke) but the SSD was fine.
I agree; which is why you could likely boot with an external if the mobo is ok except for the SSD.
...or Restore from that Backup...
In the (quite rare) second scenario, then it sucks to be you. Find someone with an SMT rework station and some good soldering/desoldering skills...
But in the second scenario (bad mobo, good SSD), you aren't going to get back up and running in any reasonable amount of time (e.g. 30 mins), even if the SSD was socketed; so it really doesn't matter. Plus, there's a VERY good chance that the file you had open and being written-to when the mobo drank the soda is going to be trashed anyway, so....?
No disagreement. That sort of software sucks horribly. The point was that it is out there, and it unfortunately isn't rare.
Well, if we are talking Multitrack Audio Recording, Logic Pro doesn't pull any of that shit, and ProTools can just STUFF IT if they do (which I don't think they do, either). If Ableton does that crap, they can just have it.
Anything else is probably not being used in a "Live" situation; so having the ability to "instantly recover" from a suddenly bad SSD is pretty much a non-issue if you aren't in a "real-time" recording situation.
The copy protection is, indeed, often that paranoid, though most software I've seen will work as long as you cloned the entire disk (not just the filesystem with dd so that the volume UUIDs match, the folder IDs containing various files match, etc.
I repeat: If the publisher is that paranoid, make it use a hardware key. In the end, it's much more reliable and easier for the user AND the publisher.
You can certainly do that, but you aren't going to do it very often, because it means not touching your machine for eight or ten hours every time you do....
But if you're just using it for an emergency "on-location" "Hail Mary" backup, having a reasonably up-to-date (monthly?) backup like that might be well worth it, especially as cheap as spinning-rust drives are.
You know most people don't hook up an external drive. Yes it's dead easy but even I don't do it for all my systems. I have my main Macbook Pro I use for video and photo work that is hooked to a backup drive most of the time but everything else is hit or miss.
I never have, either.
But, if I was using the system to record can't-be-repeated live performances, you can bet that I would have THAT system backed-up...
Deleting the log on your phone syncs the deletion through to iCloud as well, allowing the user to delete the log at any time.
And that's the difference that makes ALL the difference.
I agree that it would be much better if this was an "Opt-Out/In" Setting, and if it were encrypted from Apple's view, too.
But unless you are under an active investigation, keeping your call-log "pruned" is a good first step.
We know the telecoms have my call history, Apple has done this secretly, but you keep being an iTard apologist, typical Apple fanboy.
Really? Have you seen those logs?
Is there ANY possible reason for APPLE to want to know who you are calling?
Think about it.
I think they don't exist.
Spoken like someone who hasn't been burned by Time Machine. When it works, it is great. When it doesn't, you're screwed. Mind you, this is true for a drive failure anyway, but realistically SSDs rarely fail, whereas other components on the logic board frequently do (GPUs), so this significantly increases the number of people who will lose data.
BTW, I ca think of several audio apps that don't work at all if you restore them from a Time Machine backup. The software sees it as a new installation and makes you buy a new license. There's only one reliable way to back up those apps, and that's with a block-by-block copy to an identical drive. It also requires you to stop using your machine for several hours, so it isn't worth doing unless you have no other choice.
You are exhibiting some kind of failure. You seem to be caught in some kind of feedback loop in your Positronic Matrix, resulting in a "Circular Logic"-like phenomenon.
And if a piece of software is truly that worried about piracy, then they can use a hardware key, or GTFO. Those sorts of DRM that depend on hardware enumeration are the true sign of lazy programming, and in the end, cause more "false positives" (usually at the most inopportune moments) on suspected piracy than they actually protect against true piracy. I simply wouldn't have a mission-critical piece of software that depended on such kludgy DRM. No way, no how. Because one fine day, it is just going to "decide" to de authorize itself, and the integrity of your hardware won't mean SQUAT at that moment; because you'll STILL be on the phone begging for a reauthorization...
It does get you back up and running immediately if some other part of the system failed and not the drive, simply swap the good drive out of the failed system into a new system and boot. I have done exactly this myself on a laptop (smashed screen), and we've done it at work several times due to faulty keyboards, bad batteries, broken screens, faulty motherboards etc. Only if the drive itself failed have we had to restore a backup onto a fresh drive.
Yeah, but you didn't do it in the middle of a live multitrack recording gig, did you? THAT was the scenario alluded to by the OP. And you can get stuff off of a Mac using Target Disk Mode, even if nothing will run but EFI.