I wouldn't pin this on 'the younger generation'. Plenty of old dudes seem to think this is 'unauthorized access'. See: court cases where 'hackers' were able to access 'private' data on a site through a publicly available URL but are convicted anyway.
I was too young to use it as a proper computer in the sense that you're describing, but don't be so quick to dismiss the games aspect. Psygnosis (Lemmings) made unbelievable games for the system, and I remember Arkanoid on my Amiga 1000 being as good as it was in the arcade, while everyone else's computer had to either scale back on the graphics or sound or both. Even at the time, I could tell that the machine was a cut above.
(My father was the programmer and I'm pretty sure he wrote his Masters thesis on that machine. We didn't replace it until the NeXT Cube was released.)
Because it takes up space. That's it, end of story. Space inside a phone is at a premium for all sorts of reasons. More battery could be fit there. It's easier to design the layout of the internals. You don't have a long connector intruding on the screen internals. You already have a port that can output audio.
Apparently the reason why the headphone jack was removed on the iPad Pro was because they couldn't make the bezels as small if they had the headphone jack; it intruded into the space that the screen components needed, so Apple removed it. They felt the screen experience was more important, and so they made the tradeoff.
Look, lots of people disagree with Apple's decisions, and that's fine, but they don't make these decisions blindly or capriciously. They thought about the product they wanted to make, designed it, and released it, and we're not obligated to buy it if it doesn't fit our needs. This is also the case with the notch. It was deliberate, and they decided they didn't have a better solution for the moment.
I actually think the real thing that people hate is that other manufacturers ape Apple for no reason other than Apple did it first. Most of the phones on the market with a notch have it just to look more like the iPhone rather than for any technological reason. They hate that their headphone jack is disappearing because some lazy designer thought it was easier to just follow Apple's lead than make real decisions for themselves.
More to the point, if you're trying to get audiophile quality and listening experience out of your phone when you're out and about in the world, you're 100% doing it wrong. The ambient noise in the world is worse for your audio quality than the transition from cable to bluetooth. And let's not forget that a cable doesn't guarantee good quality, it simply removes that from being a factor in the quality. But the $20 bluetooth headphones I have are 1000x times better than a pair of wired Skullcandys at any price. Skullcandy makes garbage headphones with garbage drivers, but they have a wire.
I totally agree that if you're going to claim you're interested in quality you should be getting a DAC+amp to drive your headphones rather than just jamming them into your phone in any case.
I don't think it's the waterproofing, I think it's just that it takes up space. The hole itself isn't very big, of course, but the jack itself extends quite far into the phone. That means you have to design the screen hardware so that the jack isn't interfering. It also takes up a non-zero amount of battery space. If you pretend charging and audio could be done perfectly without any ports at all, that would probably be the best phone. A single, do-everything port is a good compromise to that. A headphone jack is just another compromise to make on top of that (though it might be one worth making—depends on what your design philosophy is).
Isn't pornhub mainly located in Canada? Montreal, specifically. But in any case, that also goes to show that moving out of the USA would probably be a trivial matter.
I disagree that it's not a fair comparison. I know the Note 9 is pushing more pixels, but it's not clear what benefit that brings beyond being able to say they have more pixels in the screen. When people sit down and actually LOOK at the screens, it's very common to hear that the XR has a very good screen. It's a choice Samsung makes, and it's not necessarily bringing a lot of benefit to customers.
And if you check the linked article, the profit margins are flat. They're lower than at the peak, and only slightly above that of the first iPhone. It's arguable whether we think Apple should be making margins like those, but they're really not moving much.
The XR has the best battery life of any iPhone, and apparently some of the best battery life of any phone of this current generation. It comes in about even with the Note 9.
Apple makes approximately the same margins on their phones now as they ever have. Consider that the iPhone 3Gs was released in 2009 for $599. In today's money, that's a bit over $700, so just shy of the $750 that the XR costs.
Retail prices have crept up—and we can argue over whether Apple's prices should've crept up, given that many of the components must have come down in price over time, though they also always try to have some new stuff in there every year as well—but they haven't actually increased all that much. We tend to forget about inflation, but it affects tech companies too.
But maybe the real question here is whether we feel that we're getting the same value for money that we once did. The iPhone 4 felt like the future. The phones of today simply feel like what we've always had. Is the problem the phones or our expectations?
I personally *try* to make sure my data is worthless. I mean, they know I like math and science questions, but that's hardly news. I lie about nearly everything personal they ask me; I just make sure my age is over 18. I use a shitty password because I couldn't care less if they crack it and use it to log onto some other shitty site where I have a forum account or something. Personal questions? I tell them that I grew up on Dingleberry street, and my first pet was named "flame retardant banana". (Note: I made those answers up on the spot. See how easy it is?)
The trick is to know what information is worth caring about. Lie as much as possible on the internet. Nobody needs to know your real birthday except your Mom and the government.
Quebec isn't bad; there's some extra competition here in the form of Videotron, so the various providers tend to offer sales more often. I'm currently paying $69/month for 8GB of data, and that's also paying off the iPhone 7 I got November 2017. I go back to the site every few weeks and check if the price has dropped or if they've upped the data. I'll switch plans if it saves me even $1 a month. My partner's plan dropped $5 at some point, and I jumped on that right away.
It's still expensive compared to Europe, but I'll take what I can get.
It's worth noting that Google and companies like it have offices all over the world, and lots of their workers will move to the USA for promotions or to do other jobs, but they were employees to begin with. I know that people working at the Google office in Montreal decided to make the jump to the main campus at some point for various reasons, so even if there are a high number of immigrant workers, it's not like they were just scooped up off the street in India or China or something. These people aren't working for peanuts; I hardly think they're driving wages down.
We have a bike share system in Montreal, and I see obvious business people riding in their suits around town. I even saw one lady on the Bixi in her high-heels. You can do it, you just have to make some allowances for time if you need to move a little more slowly. It's like saying that walking is going to make you too sweaty by the time to get to work. Sure, if it's hot or you're walking quickly. Slow down and you'll be fine.
I suspect that this is not uniform across locations. For instance, in Holland, I greatly suspect that respect for the law is much higher.
But cyclists are doing exactly what you're saying drivers do. The Idaho Stop (treating stop signs as yield signs, and red lights as stop signs) is demonstrably safer and better for traffic than adhering to the law the same way cars do, but most jurisdictions don't allow it.
I've honestly never heard the argument that being unlicensed makes us immune to the law--pedestrians aren't licensed either, and obviously they're expected to adhere to certain rules; why would it be different for cyclists? The only cyclists that I know of that regularly and as a group bend or break the law are couriers.
So yeah, most (North American) cyclists bend the rules when they are unreasonable or produce a bad result, just like you in your car.
The last time Apple almost went bankrupt it was because the generic Mac makers were eating Apple's lunch. It was only by going back to proprietary hardware that they rescued themselves. Ultimately, Apple relies on being a complete package and commodity hardware is where they lose their margins.
I hope they fix this issue, though. My first Mac was a PowerBook G4 running MacOS 9, and I installed Linux on it to make it useful to me. It eventually ended up having OS X on it, so in a very real way, Linux is what made me a Mac user. It's a niche path to take, I know, but I think it's a mistake to ignore the niche power users.
I'm sure the phone companies are listening intently to your list so they can find a way to sell exactly one phone to someone.
If this is your list, welcome to the era of never buying a new phone ever again. Or making your own phone company, I suppose.
Of the items you listed, I would find 1, 2, 3, 7, 9, 10, 12 actively hostile to me. It makes the phones more cumbersome, less portable and less usable. If I want those things, I'll buy a laptop. 3 and 4 are relative, I'm ambivalent about 5, 6, 8, 11, 14 and 16, but only as long as they don't take up more space.
I look at my smartphone as a lightweight (figuratively and literally), ultra-portable communication device. It shouldn't need a huge battery (or a replaceable one), it shouldn't need to be heavy, it shouldn't need expandable storage. This is all stuff that I need when I sit down or perhaps if my phone is literally the only computer I own.
To each their own, I guess, but I feel like your list is antithetical to the very philosophy of the smartphone. And if that's the case, stop complaining about modern smartphones and buy something else.
The iPhone XR is an LCD screen, and has a notch. From what I've read, it was a major hassle, too. Getting the backlights in was a big problem (and why the XR has wider bezels than the XS), and rounding the corners took some creative masking.
The iPhone 5S was released in 2013, five years ago. It was discontinued in 2015 in most places, 2017 in India. It's still getting software support. There are android phones that never got a single update. Apple has historically had better support for its phones than any other company. I'm on a 4 year upgrade cycle because that's generally how long my phones last (with a thin case).
I get absolutely every single dollar worth out of my iPhones while I watched friends have endless boot loops on their Pixels (which couldnâ(TM)t be repaired in Canada because google would refer them to the manufacturer and then be referred back to google BY the manufacturer).
The state of longevity and customer support in the market is fairly poor, but Apple is certainly miles ahead of everyone else.
That probably puts you in the minority. No, I'm not joking. The power of defaults is huge, and most of the people on Apple devices are using Apple Maps.
Apple's biggest problem has been relying on other people for data. They used to have TomTom as a map provider, and the maps were terrible. As it says in the article, some of the map data TomTom was using was 70 years out of date, collected from extremely old sources. And so every time someone logged a fix to Apple Maps, it had to go through Apple then to TomTom then back again, so it looked like nothing was ever updated.
This is a good change in direction for Apple, and I'm glad they're doing it. Personally, I keep Google's products the hell off my phone, and I use Google Maps about twice a year because they have cycling directions that Apple doesn't provide yet. But as soon as I'm done, I delete the app off my phone. I have no interest in Google knowing where I am and what I'm doing any more than necessary.
Even as it stands right now, Apple's stuff is decent enough if you live in a major city. It gives me good Montreal metro directions and takes me to the correct exits and everything. So even if you don't think this is a big deal, it kind of is. I mean, I don't expect you to change, but lots of people care.
As to 5), there is a downside, or at least a tradeoff. A non-replaceable battery can have a very unorthodox shape and take up space that would normally be unusable. Because of that, they can make phones thinner and lighter and more portable. Apple has never appreciably moved away from the 10 hours of battery life goal, and so as their phones get more efficient, they put smaller batteries in, making the phones thinner and lighter.
NOW, before you complain that you don't want a thinner and lighter phone, save your breath: I'm not claiming that thinner and lighter is inherently better.
But that's the design tradeoff we're seeing, and many people DO want a thinner and lighter phone, or at the very least, they want more things in their phone than just battery. They want bigger screens or stronger glass or FaceID. While not everyone cares for any one of those things, those are the phones being bought. There's really no way around it. There was a time where phones with replaceable batteries were being sold along side those without, and the non-replaceable batteries won. So from the user perspective, there IS a difference and there IS a downside. (Indeed, you would expect for the *manufacturer*, there would be no downside; it's probably much easier to design a rectangular space in some part of the phone and then just source a tonne of super-generic rectangular batteries from someone, rather than going through the hassle of designing a weirdly shaped battery that takes up the leftover space.)
People that replace a battery on the go is a niche market. There were never that many people that cared to do it when it was possible, and certainly if it were available now, I suspect we'd still see almost nobody doing it.
I have the exact opposite experience, particularly with portable headphones/earbuds. Wires snag, or the snaking of the cable puts stress on the connector. Until I switched to Bluetooth earbuds, I was going through a pair every six months on average. Not only have I found cheap (like, $20-$30) bluetooth headsets more convenient, I've found them vastly more durable. It takes me about 2 years to completely wear a set out (eventually the contacts to turn them on/off start to fail, it seems, and once the battery degrades sufficiently, they'll still hold a charge but I think the radios become more finicky as they try to draw power and can't quite get enough).
For headphones at my desk, sure, they'll last a decade. But for anything remotely active--which is precisely when I'm using my phone as an audio source--wired headphones are the worst possible solution. I switched long before it was mandatory to do so, and I'll never look back.
And frankly, I think that's the opinion of a tremendous number of people buying phones today. There hasn't been a mass revolt or any obvious trend to buy phones that only have the 3.5mm jack. It's one of those things that feels incredibly important to the people that want it, but the market appears to have shrugged mightily and moved on.
The rumour is based off a software find, not a parts leak. Adding support for USB-C over lightning is far more likely than changing the port. If Apple were going to switch connectors I think the would lead with the iPhone to force peripheral manufacturers to switch first.
If you were a tech savvy terrorist, you would've started using a much longer passcode a long time ago. The system only worked quickly on 4-digit passcodes (6.5 minutes), and 6-digit codes were reportedly up to 11 hours, which is 660 minutes or 10 times longer. Even if we assume that simple pattern held (every 2 digits increases the time by a factor of 10), a 10 digit code would be 1100 hours or 45 days, and a 14 digit code would be 12.5 years. In all likelihood, the rate of increase was considerably worse than that.
Really, this system only worked on complete dummies that were doing crime with a phone that just came out of the box. They deserved to get caught.
1) Apple doesn't command a significant share of the market. Particularly in Europe. 2) Apple makes a single product with many parts. The OS happens to be one part.
I'm sure point 2 would be more or less moot if point 1 weren't true, but the fact is that it is. Apple commands most of the profits in the industry, but there's still a lot of competition, and Apple isn't able to leverage any monopoly power to quash competitors. IANAL, but I would suspect that without being able to show that Apple is a monopoly power stifling competition in the phone market, there's no anti-trust case to be made.
Yeah, that's why I specifically pointed out that they might want to look into building developments like the ones in Singapore. I 100% agree that the affordability problem is impossible to tackle without the government.
Unfortunately for you, BC and Canadian federal politicians want to play both sides against the middle, and try to claim that they can improve affordability without anyone losing the value of their homes, which is obviously crazy. Low interest rates and the Conservatives' disastrous loosening of mortgage rules, with the CMHC underwriting banks so there's no risk to them have created the most pathological possible situation. The markets are hopelessly skewed and I have no idea how Vancouver or Toronto possibly coming out of it without a bunch of people going underwater.
It also requiresâ"and this may come as a surprise to some peopleâ"homes. And affordable ones at that. San Francisco can't be a small city masquerading as a big city any more. They have to build more places to live and stop paying attention to the small numbers of wealthy dopes keeping them from doing the re-zoning they need. They may also want to try getting the state to help them build affordable housing a la Singapore.
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I wouldn't pin this on 'the younger generation'. Plenty of old dudes seem to think this is 'unauthorized access'. See: court cases where 'hackers' were able to access 'private' data on a site through a publicly available URL but are convicted anyway.
I was too young to use it as a proper computer in the sense that you're describing, but don't be so quick to dismiss the games aspect. Psygnosis (Lemmings) made unbelievable games for the system, and I remember Arkanoid on my Amiga 1000 being as good as it was in the arcade, while everyone else's computer had to either scale back on the graphics or sound or both. Even at the time, I could tell that the machine was a cut above.
(My father was the programmer and I'm pretty sure he wrote his Masters thesis on that machine. We didn't replace it until the NeXT Cube was released.)
Because it takes up space. That's it, end of story. Space inside a phone is at a premium for all sorts of reasons. More battery could be fit there. It's easier to design the layout of the internals. You don't have a long connector intruding on the screen internals. You already have a port that can output audio.
Apparently the reason why the headphone jack was removed on the iPad Pro was because they couldn't make the bezels as small if they had the headphone jack; it intruded into the space that the screen components needed, so Apple removed it. They felt the screen experience was more important, and so they made the tradeoff.
Look, lots of people disagree with Apple's decisions, and that's fine, but they don't make these decisions blindly or capriciously. They thought about the product they wanted to make, designed it, and released it, and we're not obligated to buy it if it doesn't fit our needs. This is also the case with the notch. It was deliberate, and they decided they didn't have a better solution for the moment.
I actually think the real thing that people hate is that other manufacturers ape Apple for no reason other than Apple did it first. Most of the phones on the market with a notch have it just to look more like the iPhone rather than for any technological reason. They hate that their headphone jack is disappearing because some lazy designer thought it was easier to just follow Apple's lead than make real decisions for themselves.
More to the point, if you're trying to get audiophile quality and listening experience out of your phone when you're out and about in the world, you're 100% doing it wrong. The ambient noise in the world is worse for your audio quality than the transition from cable to bluetooth. And let's not forget that a cable doesn't guarantee good quality, it simply removes that from being a factor in the quality. But the $20 bluetooth headphones I have are 1000x times better than a pair of wired Skullcandys at any price. Skullcandy makes garbage headphones with garbage drivers, but they have a wire.
I totally agree that if you're going to claim you're interested in quality you should be getting a DAC+amp to drive your headphones rather than just jamming them into your phone in any case.
I don't think it's the waterproofing, I think it's just that it takes up space. The hole itself isn't very big, of course, but the jack itself extends quite far into the phone. That means you have to design the screen hardware so that the jack isn't interfering. It also takes up a non-zero amount of battery space. If you pretend charging and audio could be done perfectly without any ports at all, that would probably be the best phone. A single, do-everything port is a good compromise to that. A headphone jack is just another compromise to make on top of that (though it might be one worth making—depends on what your design philosophy is).
Isn't pornhub mainly located in Canada? Montreal, specifically. But in any case, that also goes to show that moving out of the USA would probably be a trivial matter.
I disagree that it's not a fair comparison. I know the Note 9 is pushing more pixels, but it's not clear what benefit that brings beyond being able to say they have more pixels in the screen. When people sit down and actually LOOK at the screens, it's very common to hear that the XR has a very good screen. It's a choice Samsung makes, and it's not necessarily bringing a lot of benefit to customers.
And if you check the linked article, the profit margins are flat. They're lower than at the peak, and only slightly above that of the first iPhone. It's arguable whether we think Apple should be making margins like those, but they're really not moving much.
The XR has the best battery life of any iPhone, and apparently some of the best battery life of any phone of this current generation. It comes in about even with the Note 9.
Apple makes approximately the same margins on their phones now as they ever have. Consider that the iPhone 3Gs was released in 2009 for $599. In today's money, that's a bit over $700, so just shy of the $750 that the XR costs.
Retail prices have crept up—and we can argue over whether Apple's prices should've crept up, given that many of the components must have come down in price over time, though they also always try to have some new stuff in there every year as well—but they haven't actually increased all that much. We tend to forget about inflation, but it affects tech companies too.
https://www.theinformation.com...
But maybe the real question here is whether we feel that we're getting the same value for money that we once did. The iPhone 4 felt like the future. The phones of today simply feel like what we've always had. Is the problem the phones or our expectations?
I personally *try* to make sure my data is worthless. I mean, they know I like math and science questions, but that's hardly news. I lie about nearly everything personal they ask me; I just make sure my age is over 18. I use a shitty password because I couldn't care less if they crack it and use it to log onto some other shitty site where I have a forum account or something. Personal questions? I tell them that I grew up on Dingleberry street, and my first pet was named "flame retardant banana". (Note: I made those answers up on the spot. See how easy it is?)
The trick is to know what information is worth caring about. Lie as much as possible on the internet. Nobody needs to know your real birthday except your Mom and the government.
Quebec isn't bad; there's some extra competition here in the form of Videotron, so the various providers tend to offer sales more often. I'm currently paying $69/month for 8GB of data, and that's also paying off the iPhone 7 I got November 2017. I go back to the site every few weeks and check if the price has dropped or if they've upped the data. I'll switch plans if it saves me even $1 a month. My partner's plan dropped $5 at some point, and I jumped on that right away.
It's still expensive compared to Europe, but I'll take what I can get.
It's worth noting that Google and companies like it have offices all over the world, and lots of their workers will move to the USA for promotions or to do other jobs, but they were employees to begin with. I know that people working at the Google office in Montreal decided to make the jump to the main campus at some point for various reasons, so even if there are a high number of immigrant workers, it's not like they were just scooped up off the street in India or China or something. These people aren't working for peanuts; I hardly think they're driving wages down.
We have a bike share system in Montreal, and I see obvious business people riding in their suits around town. I even saw one lady on the Bixi in her high-heels. You can do it, you just have to make some allowances for time if you need to move a little more slowly. It's like saying that walking is going to make you too sweaty by the time to get to work. Sure, if it's hot or you're walking quickly. Slow down and you'll be fine.
I suspect that this is not uniform across locations. For instance, in Holland, I greatly suspect that respect for the law is much higher.
But cyclists are doing exactly what you're saying drivers do. The Idaho Stop (treating stop signs as yield signs, and red lights as stop signs) is demonstrably safer and better for traffic than adhering to the law the same way cars do, but most jurisdictions don't allow it.
I've honestly never heard the argument that being unlicensed makes us immune to the law--pedestrians aren't licensed either, and obviously they're expected to adhere to certain rules; why would it be different for cyclists? The only cyclists that I know of that regularly and as a group bend or break the law are couriers.
So yeah, most (North American) cyclists bend the rules when they are unreasonable or produce a bad result, just like you in your car.
The last time Apple almost went bankrupt it was because the generic Mac makers were eating Apple's lunch. It was only by going back to proprietary hardware that they rescued themselves. Ultimately, Apple relies on being a complete package and commodity hardware is where they lose their margins.
I hope they fix this issue, though. My first Mac was a PowerBook G4 running MacOS 9, and I installed Linux on it to make it useful to me. It eventually ended up having OS X on it, so in a very real way, Linux is what made me a Mac user. It's a niche path to take, I know, but I think it's a mistake to ignore the niche power users.
I'm sure the phone companies are listening intently to your list so they can find a way to sell exactly one phone to someone.
If this is your list, welcome to the era of never buying a new phone ever again. Or making your own phone company, I suppose.
Of the items you listed, I would find 1, 2, 3, 7, 9, 10, 12 actively hostile to me. It makes the phones more cumbersome, less portable and less usable. If I want those things, I'll buy a laptop. 3 and 4 are relative, I'm ambivalent about 5, 6, 8, 11, 14 and 16, but only as long as they don't take up more space.
I look at my smartphone as a lightweight (figuratively and literally), ultra-portable communication device. It shouldn't need a huge battery (or a replaceable one), it shouldn't need to be heavy, it shouldn't need expandable storage. This is all stuff that I need when I sit down or perhaps if my phone is literally the only computer I own.
To each their own, I guess, but I feel like your list is antithetical to the very philosophy of the smartphone. And if that's the case, stop complaining about modern smartphones and buy something else.
The iPhone XR is an LCD screen, and has a notch. From what I've read, it was a major hassle, too. Getting the backlights in was a big problem (and why the XR has wider bezels than the XS), and rounding the corners took some creative masking.
The iPhone 5S was released in 2013, five years ago. It was discontinued in 2015 in most places, 2017 in India. It's still getting software support. There are android phones that never got a single update. Apple has historically had better support for its phones than any other company. I'm on a 4 year upgrade cycle because that's generally how long my phones last (with a thin case).
I get absolutely every single dollar worth out of my iPhones while I watched friends have endless boot loops on their Pixels (which couldnâ(TM)t be repaired in Canada because google would refer them to the manufacturer and then be referred back to google BY the manufacturer).
The state of longevity and customer support in the market is fairly poor, but Apple is certainly miles ahead of everyone else.
That probably puts you in the minority. No, I'm not joking. The power of defaults is huge, and most of the people on Apple devices are using Apple Maps.
Apple's biggest problem has been relying on other people for data. They used to have TomTom as a map provider, and the maps were terrible. As it says in the article, some of the map data TomTom was using was 70 years out of date, collected from extremely old sources. And so every time someone logged a fix to Apple Maps, it had to go through Apple then to TomTom then back again, so it looked like nothing was ever updated.
This is a good change in direction for Apple, and I'm glad they're doing it. Personally, I keep Google's products the hell off my phone, and I use Google Maps about twice a year because they have cycling directions that Apple doesn't provide yet. But as soon as I'm done, I delete the app off my phone. I have no interest in Google knowing where I am and what I'm doing any more than necessary.
Even as it stands right now, Apple's stuff is decent enough if you live in a major city. It gives me good Montreal metro directions and takes me to the correct exits and everything. So even if you don't think this is a big deal, it kind of is. I mean, I don't expect you to change, but lots of people care.
As to 5), there is a downside, or at least a tradeoff. A non-replaceable battery can have a very unorthodox shape and take up space that would normally be unusable. Because of that, they can make phones thinner and lighter and more portable. Apple has never appreciably moved away from the 10 hours of battery life goal, and so as their phones get more efficient, they put smaller batteries in, making the phones thinner and lighter.
NOW, before you complain that you don't want a thinner and lighter phone, save your breath: I'm not claiming that thinner and lighter is inherently better.
But that's the design tradeoff we're seeing, and many people DO want a thinner and lighter phone, or at the very least, they want more things in their phone than just battery. They want bigger screens or stronger glass or FaceID. While not everyone cares for any one of those things, those are the phones being bought. There's really no way around it. There was a time where phones with replaceable batteries were being sold along side those without, and the non-replaceable batteries won. So from the user perspective, there IS a difference and there IS a downside. (Indeed, you would expect for the *manufacturer*, there would be no downside; it's probably much easier to design a rectangular space in some part of the phone and then just source a tonne of super-generic rectangular batteries from someone, rather than going through the hassle of designing a weirdly shaped battery that takes up the leftover space.)
People that replace a battery on the go is a niche market. There were never that many people that cared to do it when it was possible, and certainly if it were available now, I suspect we'd still see almost nobody doing it.
I have the exact opposite experience, particularly with portable headphones/earbuds. Wires snag, or the snaking of the cable puts stress on the connector. Until I switched to Bluetooth earbuds, I was going through a pair every six months on average. Not only have I found cheap (like, $20-$30) bluetooth headsets more convenient, I've found them vastly more durable. It takes me about 2 years to completely wear a set out (eventually the contacts to turn them on/off start to fail, it seems, and once the battery degrades sufficiently, they'll still hold a charge but I think the radios become more finicky as they try to draw power and can't quite get enough).
For headphones at my desk, sure, they'll last a decade. But for anything remotely active--which is precisely when I'm using my phone as an audio source--wired headphones are the worst possible solution. I switched long before it was mandatory to do so, and I'll never look back.
And frankly, I think that's the opinion of a tremendous number of people buying phones today. There hasn't been a mass revolt or any obvious trend to buy phones that only have the 3.5mm jack. It's one of those things that feels incredibly important to the people that want it, but the market appears to have shrugged mightily and moved on.
The rumour is based off a software find, not a parts leak. Adding support for USB-C over lightning is far more likely than changing the port. If Apple were going to switch connectors I think the would lead with the iPhone to force peripheral manufacturers to switch first.
If you were a tech savvy terrorist, you would've started using a much longer passcode a long time ago. The system only worked quickly on 4-digit passcodes (6.5 minutes), and 6-digit codes were reportedly up to 11 hours, which is 660 minutes or 10 times longer. Even if we assume that simple pattern held (every 2 digits increases the time by a factor of 10), a 10 digit code would be 1100 hours or 45 days, and a 14 digit code would be 12.5 years. In all likelihood, the rate of increase was considerably worse than that.
Really, this system only worked on complete dummies that were doing crime with a phone that just came out of the box. They deserved to get caught.
1) Apple doesn't command a significant share of the market. Particularly in Europe.
2) Apple makes a single product with many parts. The OS happens to be one part.
I'm sure point 2 would be more or less moot if point 1 weren't true, but the fact is that it is. Apple commands most of the profits in the industry, but there's still a lot of competition, and Apple isn't able to leverage any monopoly power to quash competitors. IANAL, but I would suspect that without being able to show that Apple is a monopoly power stifling competition in the phone market, there's no anti-trust case to be made.
Yeah, that's why I specifically pointed out that they might want to look into building developments like the ones in Singapore. I 100% agree that the affordability problem is impossible to tackle without the government.
Unfortunately for you, BC and Canadian federal politicians want to play both sides against the middle, and try to claim that they can improve affordability without anyone losing the value of their homes, which is obviously crazy. Low interest rates and the Conservatives' disastrous loosening of mortgage rules, with the CMHC underwriting banks so there's no risk to them have created the most pathological possible situation. The markets are hopelessly skewed and I have no idea how Vancouver or Toronto possibly coming out of it without a bunch of people going underwater.
It also requiresâ"and this may come as a surprise to some peopleâ"homes. And affordable ones at that. San Francisco can't be a small city masquerading as a big city any more. They have to build more places to live and stop paying attention to the small numbers of wealthy dopes keeping them from doing the re-zoning they need. They may also want to try getting the state to help them build affordable housing a la Singapore.