Did you read the summary? Not only do the plastics bind to chemical pollutants, the stomachs or the fish get full of plastic leading to reduced feeding. Both those things will lead to lower lifespans and likely, reduced reproduction rates. When you consider bio accumulation as you work up the food chain, it just makes life even harder for animals like tuna and dolphins.
Over long time scales, this will work itself out, but who knows how long that will take and how species will be impacted by the time they evolve around this.
So there's no denying that Apple has fewer users. That's always been the case, and it's part of how Apple makes money. There's profit in a perception of exclusivity.
But you still can't even make the claim that Android is *preferred*. That's too broad a claim. People might choose Android handsets because they're cheaper. There's nothing wrong with that, and there's no reason to always buy the most expensive thing. But we do know that iOS retention is better than Android retention overall. That is, more people leave Android every year for iOS than the other way around. This is partly a consequence of the larger Android user base, of course. Even if retention percentages were the same—so 99% of iOS and Android users are content with the platform and won't leave it—3x as many Android users move to iOS as move from iOS to Android every year.
At the high end, Apple still overwhelming draws people over. Apple sells far more of its top end phones than Samsung does...and again, Samsung is the only game in town when it comes to real, upscale Android sales.
Until recently (that is, the iPhone 8, 8 plus and X), iOS tended to be *better* about keeping apps in memory. If you watch any speedtest involving the iPhone 7, it decidedly trounced any other handset, even with only 2GB of RAM. (Web tabs have always been reloaded, which is good or bad depending on your point of view—I usually want the tab reloaded anyway.)
Anyway, it's still *very* close between the iPhone 8 plus and the Note 8, for instance. Despite having twice as much RAM, the Note 8 only barely beats the iPhone.
THAT SAID, I think Apple could probably afford to put more RAM in if they wanted to. It's a bit of a tradeoff, and over time, I think we'll see the amount of memory increase. iOS is just really memory efficient in general, so it'll probably always lag Android devices, but if Apple wants the biggest and best games developed on its platform, they'll have to yield here and just jam more in. But it still doesn't represent a major loss of performance for most day to day use.
The iPhone X and 8 Plus have 3GB of RAM, only the iPhone 8 has 2GB.
iPhone apps are rarely RAM limited, and indeed, when you watch those speed tests on YouTube where they open a whole bunch of apps to see how fast each phone can process things, iPhones win will considerable regularity. The iPhone 7 was winning those tests right up until the iPhone 8 was released.
iPhone single core performance has always been better than the multi-core, because most day-to-day tasks on phones don't parallelize well, outside of games.
If you think that iPhones are underperforming in the real world, let alone because of RAM issues, I'd like to see a test or some evidence for that other than, "I feel like this phone is slower." iOS has notoriously elaborate transition animations which can make it feel like it's lagging, even though it's usually prepared to accept your input before you can see what you're tapping at.
But to a large degree, nobody will ever notice the speed difference in most situations because most tasks just aren't intense enough to slow down a modern iPhone OR Samsung or Pixel. The only real time that comes up is in stuff like image processing, and devices like the Pixel are now running custom silicon JUST for that, which makes a difference for both quality and speed.
As should be obvious, this product is meant for Apple customers. Itâ(TM)s not a way to draw people in, itâ(TM)s a way to KEEP people in. At the moment, they just donâ(TM)t care if you use Spotify or if youâ(TM)re on Androidâ"itâ(TM)s not an oversight, itâ(TM)s a design decision. Maybe theyâ(TM)ll remedy it in the future, but bringing it up doesnâ(TM)t really add anything to the conversation; they donâ(TM)t care that you donâ(TM)t want one.
Yeah, no. What you'd have to believe for your statement to be true is that there's some Chinese company out there that's selling phones and is making at least twice as much money in profit as Samsung in the phone space, and somehow NOBODY KNOWS ABOUT IT.
It's a ridiculous claim on its face. There's no such company, or group of companies. There are Chinese companies doing well, to be sure, but they sell their phones at razor thin margins so that they can make money on the exclusive services or integrations that they provide.
Samsung is the big dog in the non-Apple phone space, and unless you have something more concrete to back up your claim, there's no reason to believe any other manufacturer is even close to them, let alone Apple. There's a reason why Google PAYS APPLE so that Google is the default search on iOS—if you want to make money, you have to appeal to Apple users.
Given the way the electoral college works, very small shifts in certain areas can lead to unusual results. Thus, you have a situation where Clinton received an extremely large number of votes, by far the plurality, and managed to lose despite that. It's not at all a stretch to think that extremely specific targeting may have turned the tables.
Did it happen? I don't know. Is it possible? I believe so, yes. There are dozens of examples through history, in various arenas (wars, elections, sporting events, what have you) where the weaker force deployed its resources more effectively and managed to win. In this case, it may have been well targeted propaganda.
Anyway, I'm not disagreeing with you per se—it probably did end up being noise. I just think that it's worth considering the possibility that it was more than that.
Cool. I didn't know that, last time I checked we were doing pretty well for ourselves here in Western Europe. I mean, granted, we do have a vocal minority of fear-mongering racists, but eh, what can you do?
Sorry, you're actually doing very badly. Any reports that you're doing well are fake news, and your lived experience has no bearing on the FACTS. You should just accept that you're a beta cuck and lay down in the street and wait for the ISIS to take over.
Lived experience is, in its essence, a fact. I'm not sure what your definition of it is, so you'll have to be clearer than that, but if we talk to a black American and ask them whether or not racism exists, we can use their lived experience to determine that yes, racism is a fact of American life, despite some people claiming that we're beyond all that now. So I'm honestly not sure what you're getting at here.
As for 'listen and believe', all that's attempting to do is level the playing field somewhat. Women have previously been dismissed out of hand when reporting sexual harassment, assault, or rape. It doesn't mean listening uncritically, or believing unconditionally, but it does mean treating the claim as serious, with as much validity as any refutation on the side of the accused. It still often takes literally dozen of women reporting the same thing for them to be believed—Harvey Weinstein was a known harasser for years, and it took forever for those stories to get any traction and any repercussions to come about. If we listened to and believed women more readily, maybe he would've abused fewer people. Will some accusers be lying? Yes, absolutely. Humans lie a lot, and women aren't magically exempt.
So what are we questioning here, on the left? The presupposition that (white) men are inherently innocent and correct.
That said, I'm not necessarily convinced that the left is any more interested in individual liberty than the right, just the kinds of liberty that are favoured.
It's unlikely that your iPad has this problem just because the batteries are so huge in relationship to the CPU. I've never heard of anyone having the random shutdown problem with their iPad (or any other tablet, for that matter). It's bound to happen eventually, I suppose, but my iPad 3 never had that problem and it was so slow in its end days that I could barely stand to use it.
You understand that there's a tradeoff here, right?
Nobody—no market—has said, "all things being equal, I prefer that my battery is non-replaceable". What the market HAS said is, "all things are NOT equal, and non-replaceable batteries are lighter, make for less obtrusive phones, and are sufficiently good that I don't really care about the replaceability".
We know this is the case because there ARE phones out there that still have user replaceable batteries, and people don't flock to those. That's not where the priority is.
Except for not being able to take an AUX input, the HomePod is basically exactly what I want. I don't want something to answer my questions or order things off of Amazon for me. If I wanted those things, I'd've already bought an Echo or Google Home.
I want a nice speaker with good quality that plays my music library. Currently, I have wired speakers set up in my kitchen, and I plug my phone or iPad in when I want to listen to music or podcasts. Add in the ability to set a timer and I'm basically set.
I will be the first to admit that sometimes even Apple doesn't understand minimalism properly: they either go too far (hi MacBook keyboards), or they throw in way too much (hi Touchbar MacBook Pro). I think the HomePod is serendipitously the device that I want the most (again, excepting the lack of an external input), and not because Apple designed it to be effectively minimal, just because they couldn't get all the features that I plan to ignore in by the time it ships.
I already have a phone and iPad that wake up and answer questions when I talk to them and I honestly don't need yet another. I think there's a market for a high quality speaker that integrates with the rest of your Apple stuff, and if Apple can keep their eyes on the ball and not throw the privacy angle out the window, they might just have a hit on their hands.
You can break up all of those companies, but virtually none in any way that's meaningful.
Break Google search off from Alphabet, and you're left with a giant search company that still makes money hand over fist, and a bunch of stuff that can't be funded.
Break Amazon up so that you have the Internet's online store, and a cloud service that definitely makes money, but doesn't impact the dominance of EITHER.
Break up Apple so that you've got an OS Apple and a Hardware Apple and now you have a significantly diminished shadow of both—the only reason Apple's products work well at all is because the hardware and software is considered in unison. This is an actively consumer-hostile decision. You COULD split off Apple's services from the rest of the system, I guess. That would probably actually make things a lot better, but it wouldn't impact the market in any meaningful way. (I'm also not convinced doing anything to Apple would positively impact the market in any way. They make the most money and have influence because of that, but remove them from the picture and a lot of the problems we started with haven't gone away. I'm really not sure why Apple is included in this list at all, tbh.)
Lastly, you can't really break up Facebook, but you could compel them to give ownership of people's social graphs back to them, since that's where all the value is. It's the connections, and connections of connections that are truly meaningful, and Facebook is the biggest and best in the social network space because they've got the most complete social graph, and they have that because they're the most popular. It's a self-perpetuating cycle. If what you want to do is break that, you could create a Facebook-esque utility that manages your social data, and Facebook or Twitter or whoever just sits on top of that.
I would worry more about how your rigid pedantry doesn't allow you to glean meaning from sentences that are sufficiently correct. You know perfectly well what they were saying and why that's a relevant metric in the smartphone market. The fact that Apple has a monopoly on iOS devices is a meaningless tautology, and comparing iOS' market share to that of Android is the only meaningful metric when talking about an anti-trust action that might be taken against Apple. They simply don't hold enough of the smartphone market to claim they're using their dominant position in the market to do anything untoward.
It doesn't matter that Apple sells more smartphones than most manufacturers of Android handsets, they still don't hold anything close to a monopoly no matter how you slice it.
Obviously when I replied, I was more responding to "Has Google prevented anyone from coming up with a superior search technology?" than "What laws have they broken?"
On that question, the answer is obviously: nothing that would deserve anti-trust scrutiny.
So Google is the only one I have an answer for, but after that, I still don't know how you'd break them up.
The problem with Google is network effects: Google's product gets better the more people use it, because fundamentally, their product is based on data. So the more you use it and find things, the more you reinforce their search algorithms, which means that searches are better. So you keep coming back and using their search engine because it gives the best results, and so the cycle goes. These compounding effects are hard to beat, so it's hard for other search engines—even if it were possible to write markedly better search algorithms—to compete.
I use DuckDuckGo as my primary search, but I still type in !g (open this current search in Google) a lot for certain things. Google simply returns the best results, and they're a long way from getting caught.
But how do you fix that? Literally any solution here would make the user experience worse.
And to go even further back, that's why these organisations are powerful. Google has the best search experience, Amazon has the best shopping experience. Facebook has the best (???) social network experience (or at the very least, the most comprehensive, by virtue of having the biggest network—again, compounding network effects are in action here), and Apple has what we could call the best device ecosystem experience, perhaps. (Even as an Apple user, that distinction is fairly tenuous. Not because of anything they've done recently per se, but of all the companies listed, they have the most subjective experience. You can quantify the experience for all the others in some way or another.)
But I don't know how one would break up any of these companies. Breaking up Amazon in any meaningful way would make it not Amazon. ACS separate from Amazon the store? Okay, sure, but what does that actually get any of us as consumers? Split Google (Alphabet, I guess) up? Into what—Android and Search divisions? Would that even matter? Apple doesn't even have the biggest market share in anything, so I have no idea how you'd be able to make any anti-trust claims against them, just because they make the most money. And Facebook...the only thing you might be able to do is force them to let you retain ownership of your social graph—that's where the real value is. If you could ship that around to other networks transparently, it might make it more possible for other social networks to compete, but that has nothing to do with breaking them up.
Like, without tools? That means all our phones will be bulky again. I don't want a phone like that. I hated that design, and I'll continue to hate it. I don't mind the possibility that I'll have to take my phone into a shop so someone can disassemble it and pop in a new battery any more than I mind taking my car into the shop so I can have something repaired. If I wanted to learn how to do those things, I would, and indeed, I can. iFixit makes kits so you can do it yourself, and people do it.
So I don't know that your wording makes it any better, except to possibly require companies to make phones that I feel are terrible by design.
I get that we don't agree on the design angle, but I don't want it legislated out of existence.
I'm honestly happy that you can do this arrangement, but the contractor climate is such that people that make considerably less money than you are forced into a situation where they still have all these burdens, and clearly not the resources to set things up with this, even if they happen to know that it's a possibility at all.
In a better world, we'd be able to choose one or the other as perfectly valid situations, but the reality is that these are people that are already making very little and the big corporations are pushing the major burdens down to them.
This sort of misclassification (for them, not you) also messes with a lot of state tax schemes. It's bad juju.
Tried using google and it doesn't bring anything up.
Also, Face ID 'failing' during the demo is actually an instance of it working correctly. It was picked up and triggered a few times but failed to authenticate the face of the person that picked it up, because that person wasn't C-Fed. When C-Fed went to demo it, the phone had turned on the passcode authentication because that's what the phones do when you try to authenticate too many times and fail, even with Touch ID.
I've tried using google to find this and there's still nothing. 'FaceID folded photograph' should bring up a hit, and it doesn't. If it were actually a real story, Google would be able to surface it using those search terms immediately.
The iPhone X might be deprecated as a low cost option. That means it wonâ(TM)t be around next year for cheap. Instead, the iPhone 8 will be the cheap option and the three new phones will effectively be 3 different updated iPhone X models.
There will still be Face ID on the new phones. They will still not have home buttons.
If you were hoping to get an X from Apple $200 cheaper next year, this might be disappointing to you, but it doesnâ(TM)t mean much else.
I understand your point fine, you failed to read my counter-point properly. I was acknowledging that while the link you provided indicated his net worth went down, however, there's no reason to believe that had anything to do with anything other than market conditions that are out of anyone's control. The fact that he's President will still make him money in the long run, but a local minimum does nothing to disprove that. You've cherry picked a single year and a single event that caused his net worth to drop.
But indeed, the link that I provided says that he's making money off the trappings of being President. He's going to Mar-a-largo and dignitaries from other countries are effectively forced by convenience and proximity to pay money to stay at his hotel. It's a blatant conflict of interest, and he seems to be completely unwilling to acknowledge that or do anything about it. This is, of course, not surprising in the least.
His whole Presidency is a bait and switch. He takes credit for things like saving the jobs at Carrier...which then went on to lay off or fire those people anyway (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/11/29/a-year-ago-trump-promised-carrier-workers-help-were-still-waiting/?utm_term=.6ac19f0695ff). He claimed that he stopped Ford from moving down to Mexico (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/01/04/the-real-reason-ford-abandoned-its-plant-in-mexico-has-little-to-do-with-trump/?utm_term=.a4c1c0e916e6), but it turns out that Ford wasn't actually going to move a plant to Mexico anyway; they'd already decided not to. (Though these companies are complicit, and they're using these photo ops to gain favour with the administration.)
There's also the chance that he did this intending to make money and he's just really bad at it. The guy has gone bankrupt several times over the years and would've made more money with the money he was gifted if he just tracked the stock market. He's one of the few people in existence that managed to go bankrupt owning a *casino*.
But this is why I say there's no long con here. I don't think there was some grandiose plan or conspiracy. He saw an opportunity, and while I don't think much of him, he played the political game well enough to get elected. But he doesn't give two shits about the USA except as a way to fulfill his petty and small goals.
DACs of the quality that we're talking about are literally pennies or fractions of pennies to buy in volume. The DAC that Apple chose to use in its phones was actually quite good relatively speaking, but there's no way it cost more than a few cents, and moving that outside the phone into the cable doesn't really cost any more.
Well, there's this thing where Trump doesn't pay his contractors and employees, has been sued in court 60 times for it, and apparently loses the lawsuits. So that's a con man's behaviour. http://www.foxnews.com/politic...
The guy lies constantly. Like, nearly every statement out of his mouth is demonstrably false; I'm not even talking about the things that are up for interpretation. He makes statements that have no basis in reality and are repeatedly shown to be false, like his polling numbers, the number of people that voted for him, the size of his electoral college victory, the effectiveness of his administration in passing bills, etc. He also hasn't been good about keeping his political promises...but we'll leave that out for now because that's never a meaningful measure of a politician.
Not to mention that his properties are making a lot of money because people want access to him and other politicians. https://www.theatlantic.com/po...
The CNN link you posted shows his net worth went down, and the claim was because of a rough real estate market in New York--it's not clear that his presidency has any effect on that at all. That is, he probably would've lost money in a bad market regardless.
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Did you read the summary? Not only do the plastics bind to chemical pollutants, the stomachs or the fish get full of plastic leading to reduced feeding. Both those things will lead to lower lifespans and likely, reduced reproduction rates. When you consider bio accumulation as you work up the food chain, it just makes life even harder for animals like tuna and dolphins.
Over long time scales, this will work itself out, but who knows how long that will take and how species will be impacted by the time they evolve around this.
So there's no denying that Apple has fewer users. That's always been the case, and it's part of how Apple makes money. There's profit in a perception of exclusivity.
But you still can't even make the claim that Android is *preferred*. That's too broad a claim. People might choose Android handsets because they're cheaper. There's nothing wrong with that, and there's no reason to always buy the most expensive thing. But we do know that iOS retention is better than Android retention overall. That is, more people leave Android every year for iOS than the other way around. This is partly a consequence of the larger Android user base, of course. Even if retention percentages were the same—so 99% of iOS and Android users are content with the platform and won't leave it—3x as many Android users move to iOS as move from iOS to Android every year.
At the high end, Apple still overwhelming draws people over. Apple sells far more of its top end phones than Samsung does...and again, Samsung is the only game in town when it comes to real, upscale Android sales.
Until recently (that is, the iPhone 8, 8 plus and X), iOS tended to be *better* about keeping apps in memory. If you watch any speedtest involving the iPhone 7, it decidedly trounced any other handset, even with only 2GB of RAM. (Web tabs have always been reloaded, which is good or bad depending on your point of view—I usually want the tab reloaded anyway.)
Anyway, it's still *very* close between the iPhone 8 plus and the Note 8, for instance. Despite having twice as much RAM, the Note 8 only barely beats the iPhone.
THAT SAID, I think Apple could probably afford to put more RAM in if they wanted to. It's a bit of a tradeoff, and over time, I think we'll see the amount of memory increase. iOS is just really memory efficient in general, so it'll probably always lag Android devices, but if Apple wants the biggest and best games developed on its platform, they'll have to yield here and just jam more in. But it still doesn't represent a major loss of performance for most day to day use.
The iPhone X and 8 Plus have 3GB of RAM, only the iPhone 8 has 2GB.
iPhone apps are rarely RAM limited, and indeed, when you watch those speed tests on YouTube where they open a whole bunch of apps to see how fast each phone can process things, iPhones win will considerable regularity. The iPhone 7 was winning those tests right up until the iPhone 8 was released.
iPhone single core performance has always been better than the multi-core, because most day-to-day tasks on phones don't parallelize well, outside of games.
If you think that iPhones are underperforming in the real world, let alone because of RAM issues, I'd like to see a test or some evidence for that other than, "I feel like this phone is slower." iOS has notoriously elaborate transition animations which can make it feel like it's lagging, even though it's usually prepared to accept your input before you can see what you're tapping at.
But to a large degree, nobody will ever notice the speed difference in most situations because most tasks just aren't intense enough to slow down a modern iPhone OR Samsung or Pixel. The only real time that comes up is in stuff like image processing, and devices like the Pixel are now running custom silicon JUST for that, which makes a difference for both quality and speed.
As should be obvious, this product is meant for Apple customers. Itâ(TM)s not a way to draw people in, itâ(TM)s a way to KEEP people in. At the moment, they just donâ(TM)t care if you use Spotify or if youâ(TM)re on Androidâ"itâ(TM)s not an oversight, itâ(TM)s a design decision. Maybe theyâ(TM)ll remedy it in the future, but bringing it up doesnâ(TM)t really add anything to the conversation; they donâ(TM)t care that you donâ(TM)t want one.
Yeah, no. What you'd have to believe for your statement to be true is that there's some Chinese company out there that's selling phones and is making at least twice as much money in profit as Samsung in the phone space, and somehow NOBODY KNOWS ABOUT IT.
It's a ridiculous claim on its face. There's no such company, or group of companies. There are Chinese companies doing well, to be sure, but they sell their phones at razor thin margins so that they can make money on the exclusive services or integrations that they provide.
Samsung is the big dog in the non-Apple phone space, and unless you have something more concrete to back up your claim, there's no reason to believe any other manufacturer is even close to them, let alone Apple. There's a reason why Google PAYS APPLE so that Google is the default search on iOS—if you want to make money, you have to appeal to Apple users.
Indeed, so many people didnâ(TM)t care about smart watches last year that the Apple Watch outsold the entire Swiss watch market combined last year.
Given the way the electoral college works, very small shifts in certain areas can lead to unusual results. Thus, you have a situation where Clinton received an extremely large number of votes, by far the plurality, and managed to lose despite that. It's not at all a stretch to think that extremely specific targeting may have turned the tables.
Did it happen? I don't know. Is it possible? I believe so, yes. There are dozens of examples through history, in various arenas (wars, elections, sporting events, what have you) where the weaker force deployed its resources more effectively and managed to win. In this case, it may have been well targeted propaganda.
Anyway, I'm not disagreeing with you per se—it probably did end up being noise. I just think that it's worth considering the possibility that it was more than that.
Cool.
I didn't know that, last time I checked we were doing pretty well for ourselves here in Western Europe.
I mean, granted, we do have a vocal minority of fear-mongering racists, but eh, what can you do?
Sorry, you're actually doing very badly. Any reports that you're doing well are fake news, and your lived experience has no bearing on the FACTS. You should just accept that you're a beta cuck and lay down in the street and wait for the ISIS to take over.
Lived experience is, in its essence, a fact. I'm not sure what your definition of it is, so you'll have to be clearer than that, but if we talk to a black American and ask them whether or not racism exists, we can use their lived experience to determine that yes, racism is a fact of American life, despite some people claiming that we're beyond all that now. So I'm honestly not sure what you're getting at here.
As for 'listen and believe', all that's attempting to do is level the playing field somewhat. Women have previously been dismissed out of hand when reporting sexual harassment, assault, or rape. It doesn't mean listening uncritically, or believing unconditionally, but it does mean treating the claim as serious, with as much validity as any refutation on the side of the accused. It still often takes literally dozen of women reporting the same thing for them to be believed—Harvey Weinstein was a known harasser for years, and it took forever for those stories to get any traction and any repercussions to come about. If we listened to and believed women more readily, maybe he would've abused fewer people. Will some accusers be lying? Yes, absolutely. Humans lie a lot, and women aren't magically exempt.
So what are we questioning here, on the left? The presupposition that (white) men are inherently innocent and correct.
That said, I'm not necessarily convinced that the left is any more interested in individual liberty than the right, just the kinds of liberty that are favoured.
It's unlikely that your iPad has this problem just because the batteries are so huge in relationship to the CPU. I've never heard of anyone having the random shutdown problem with their iPad (or any other tablet, for that matter). It's bound to happen eventually, I suppose, but my iPad 3 never had that problem and it was so slow in its end days that I could barely stand to use it.
You understand that there's a tradeoff here, right?
Nobody—no market—has said, "all things being equal, I prefer that my battery is non-replaceable". What the market HAS said is, "all things are NOT equal, and non-replaceable batteries are lighter, make for less obtrusive phones, and are sufficiently good that I don't really care about the replaceability".
We know this is the case because there ARE phones out there that still have user replaceable batteries, and people don't flock to those. That's not where the priority is.
Your false equivalence is not persuasive.
Except for not being able to take an AUX input, the HomePod is basically exactly what I want. I don't want something to answer my questions or order things off of Amazon for me. If I wanted those things, I'd've already bought an Echo or Google Home.
I want a nice speaker with good quality that plays my music library. Currently, I have wired speakers set up in my kitchen, and I plug my phone or iPad in when I want to listen to music or podcasts. Add in the ability to set a timer and I'm basically set.
I will be the first to admit that sometimes even Apple doesn't understand minimalism properly: they either go too far (hi MacBook keyboards), or they throw in way too much (hi Touchbar MacBook Pro). I think the HomePod is serendipitously the device that I want the most (again, excepting the lack of an external input), and not because Apple designed it to be effectively minimal, just because they couldn't get all the features that I plan to ignore in by the time it ships.
I already have a phone and iPad that wake up and answer questions when I talk to them and I honestly don't need yet another. I think there's a market for a high quality speaker that integrates with the rest of your Apple stuff, and if Apple can keep their eyes on the ball and not throw the privacy angle out the window, they might just have a hit on their hands.
You can break up all of those companies, but virtually none in any way that's meaningful.
Break Google search off from Alphabet, and you're left with a giant search company that still makes money hand over fist, and a bunch of stuff that can't be funded.
Break Amazon up so that you have the Internet's online store, and a cloud service that definitely makes money, but doesn't impact the dominance of EITHER.
Break up Apple so that you've got an OS Apple and a Hardware Apple and now you have a significantly diminished shadow of both—the only reason Apple's products work well at all is because the hardware and software is considered in unison. This is an actively consumer-hostile decision. You COULD split off Apple's services from the rest of the system, I guess. That would probably actually make things a lot better, but it wouldn't impact the market in any meaningful way. (I'm also not convinced doing anything to Apple would positively impact the market in any way. They make the most money and have influence because of that, but remove them from the picture and a lot of the problems we started with haven't gone away. I'm really not sure why Apple is included in this list at all, tbh.)
Lastly, you can't really break up Facebook, but you could compel them to give ownership of people's social graphs back to them, since that's where all the value is. It's the connections, and connections of connections that are truly meaningful, and Facebook is the biggest and best in the social network space because they've got the most complete social graph, and they have that because they're the most popular. It's a self-perpetuating cycle. If what you want to do is break that, you could create a Facebook-esque utility that manages your social data, and Facebook or Twitter or whoever just sits on top of that.
I would worry more about how your rigid pedantry doesn't allow you to glean meaning from sentences that are sufficiently correct. You know perfectly well what they were saying and why that's a relevant metric in the smartphone market. The fact that Apple has a monopoly on iOS devices is a meaningless tautology, and comparing iOS' market share to that of Android is the only meaningful metric when talking about an anti-trust action that might be taken against Apple. They simply don't hold enough of the smartphone market to claim they're using their dominant position in the market to do anything untoward.
It doesn't matter that Apple sells more smartphones than most manufacturers of Android handsets, they still don't hold anything close to a monopoly no matter how you slice it.
Obviously when I replied, I was more responding to "Has Google prevented anyone from coming up with a superior search technology?" than "What laws have they broken?"
On that question, the answer is obviously: nothing that would deserve anti-trust scrutiny.
So Google is the only one I have an answer for, but after that, I still don't know how you'd break them up.
The problem with Google is network effects: Google's product gets better the more people use it, because fundamentally, their product is based on data. So the more you use it and find things, the more you reinforce their search algorithms, which means that searches are better. So you keep coming back and using their search engine because it gives the best results, and so the cycle goes. These compounding effects are hard to beat, so it's hard for other search engines—even if it were possible to write markedly better search algorithms—to compete.
I use DuckDuckGo as my primary search, but I still type in !g (open this current search in Google) a lot for certain things. Google simply returns the best results, and they're a long way from getting caught.
But how do you fix that? Literally any solution here would make the user experience worse.
And to go even further back, that's why these organisations are powerful. Google has the best search experience, Amazon has the best shopping experience. Facebook has the best (???) social network experience (or at the very least, the most comprehensive, by virtue of having the biggest network—again, compounding network effects are in action here), and Apple has what we could call the best device ecosystem experience, perhaps. (Even as an Apple user, that distinction is fairly tenuous. Not because of anything they've done recently per se, but of all the companies listed, they have the most subjective experience. You can quantify the experience for all the others in some way or another.)
But I don't know how one would break up any of these companies. Breaking up Amazon in any meaningful way would make it not Amazon. ACS separate from Amazon the store? Okay, sure, but what does that actually get any of us as consumers? Split Google (Alphabet, I guess) up? Into what—Android and Search divisions? Would that even matter? Apple doesn't even have the biggest market share in anything, so I have no idea how you'd be able to make any anti-trust claims against them, just because they make the most money. And Facebook...the only thing you might be able to do is force them to let you retain ownership of your social graph—that's where the real value is. If you could ship that around to other networks transparently, it might make it more possible for other social networks to compete, but that has nothing to do with breaking them up.
What's the threshold for 'easily'?
Like, without tools? That means all our phones will be bulky again. I don't want a phone like that. I hated that design, and I'll continue to hate it. I don't mind the possibility that I'll have to take my phone into a shop so someone can disassemble it and pop in a new battery any more than I mind taking my car into the shop so I can have something repaired. If I wanted to learn how to do those things, I would, and indeed, I can. iFixit makes kits so you can do it yourself, and people do it.
So I don't know that your wording makes it any better, except to possibly require companies to make phones that I feel are terrible by design.
I get that we don't agree on the design angle, but I don't want it legislated out of existence.
I'm honestly happy that you can do this arrangement, but the contractor climate is such that people that make considerably less money than you are forced into a situation where they still have all these burdens, and clearly not the resources to set things up with this, even if they happen to know that it's a possibility at all.
In a better world, we'd be able to choose one or the other as perfectly valid situations, but the reality is that these are people that are already making very little and the big corporations are pushing the major burdens down to them.
This sort of misclassification (for them, not you) also messes with a lot of state tax schemes. It's bad juju.
Tried using google and it doesn't bring anything up.
Also, Face ID 'failing' during the demo is actually an instance of it working correctly. It was picked up and triggered a few times but failed to authenticate the face of the person that picked it up, because that person wasn't C-Fed. When C-Fed went to demo it, the phone had turned on the passcode authentication because that's what the phones do when you try to authenticate too many times and fail, even with Touch ID.
I've tried using google to find this and there's still nothing. 'FaceID folded photograph' should bring up a hit, and it doesn't. If it were actually a real story, Google would be able to surface it using those search terms immediately.
So basically, no.
Or even the summary.
The iPhone X might be deprecated as a low cost option. That means it wonâ(TM)t be around next year for cheap. Instead, the iPhone 8 will be the cheap option and the three new phones will effectively be 3 different updated iPhone X models.
There will still be Face ID on the new phones. They will still not have home buttons.
If you were hoping to get an X from Apple $200 cheaper next year, this might be disappointing to you, but it doesnâ(TM)t mean much else.
I understand your point fine, you failed to read my counter-point properly. I was acknowledging that while the link you provided indicated his net worth went down, however, there's no reason to believe that had anything to do with anything other than market conditions that are out of anyone's control. The fact that he's President will still make him money in the long run, but a local minimum does nothing to disprove that. You've cherry picked a single year and a single event that caused his net worth to drop.
But indeed, the link that I provided says that he's making money off the trappings of being President. He's going to Mar-a-largo and dignitaries from other countries are effectively forced by convenience and proximity to pay money to stay at his hotel. It's a blatant conflict of interest, and he seems to be completely unwilling to acknowledge that or do anything about it. This is, of course, not surprising in the least.
His whole Presidency is a bait and switch. He takes credit for things like saving the jobs at Carrier...which then went on to lay off or fire those people anyway (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/11/29/a-year-ago-trump-promised-carrier-workers-help-were-still-waiting/?utm_term=.6ac19f0695ff). He claimed that he stopped Ford from moving down to Mexico (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/01/04/the-real-reason-ford-abandoned-its-plant-in-mexico-has-little-to-do-with-trump/?utm_term=.a4c1c0e916e6), but it turns out that Ford wasn't actually going to move a plant to Mexico anyway; they'd already decided not to. (Though these companies are complicit, and they're using these photo ops to gain favour with the administration.)
There's also the chance that he did this intending to make money and he's just really bad at it. The guy has gone bankrupt several times over the years and would've made more money with the money he was gifted if he just tracked the stock market. He's one of the few people in existence that managed to go bankrupt owning a *casino*.
But this is why I say there's no long con here. I don't think there was some grandiose plan or conspiracy. He saw an opportunity, and while I don't think much of him, he played the political game well enough to get elected. But he doesn't give two shits about the USA except as a way to fulfill his petty and small goals.
DACs of the quality that we're talking about are literally pennies or fractions of pennies to buy in volume. The DAC that Apple chose to use in its phones was actually quite good relatively speaking, but there's no way it cost more than a few cents, and moving that outside the phone into the cable doesn't really cost any more.
Well, there's this thing where Trump doesn't pay his contractors and employees, has been sued in court 60 times for it, and apparently loses the lawsuits. So that's a con man's behaviour. http://www.foxnews.com/politic...
The guy lies constantly. Like, nearly every statement out of his mouth is demonstrably false; I'm not even talking about the things that are up for interpretation. He makes statements that have no basis in reality and are repeatedly shown to be false, like his polling numbers, the number of people that voted for him, the size of his electoral college victory, the effectiveness of his administration in passing bills, etc. He also hasn't been good about keeping his political promises...but we'll leave that out for now because that's never a meaningful measure of a politician.
Not to mention that his properties are making a lot of money because people want access to him and other politicians. https://www.theatlantic.com/po...
The CNN link you posted shows his net worth went down, and the claim was because of a rough real estate market in New York--it's not clear that his presidency has any effect on that at all. That is, he probably would've lost money in a bad market regardless.
There's no long con here, just a con.