As others have pointed out, saying that "Apple has a monopoly on selling iOS software" is like saying that "Sony has a monopoly on selling PlayStation software". It's very unclear that there's anything monopolistic (in the legal sense) going on here. I personally don't love the direction that this kind of thing is moving, but that doesn't automatically make it illegal.
There is no doubt they are overcharging by huge factor.
I don't really agree. Sure, 30% seems like a big number - but then you need to consider what you get for that 30%:
* QA resources. This isn't just a rubber-stamp; they really do pay attention to your software and how the software might affect users. No, it's not a complete replacement for in-house QA, but it does mean that a modicum of quality is required before an app can be sold on the app store. While you as a developer might say "we have our own QA resources, trust us!", many users on the other hand are saying "we don't trust a lot of the developers" and rightly so.
* A store-front. Larger companies can probably tackle this themselves without sweating, but for a smaller company or one-man operation, this can be a big deal.
* Card processing, transaction fees, etc. Yeah, this is only a few percent, plus a bunch of extra work that you don't need to worry about.
* Massive audience. Very few companies can achieve the kind of audience that the App Store can give. On the flip-side, a large audience doesn't guarantee that anybody will buy *your* software, so it's not a magic bullet.
* Discounts. I have often walked into my local supermarket and walked out with a "30% off" prepaid card for App Store purchases. For any apps I buy with that card, Apple is getting around 0%. Sure, not all users are taking advantage of this, and sure, it's perhaps benefiting Apple in a not-directly-financial manner, but 0% is still 0%. More common perhaps are the 20% discounts, so Apple is getting more like 10% there (and remember that all of the above costs and fees are still coming out of this 10%).
In short, if you're a big player, you may be able to slim your costs below 30%, build your own store, run your own sales, bring your own customers, build your own brand trust, and so on - but tbh not that many developers fall into that kind of category. In the meantime, there are many advantages to consumers to being able to trust Apple's known-quantity storefront.
Again, I'm not saying that I don't see the downsides of this model - there definitely are many - but claiming that apple is simply biting off a big chunk of the developer's revenues is a vast, vast oversimplification.
You're both right, at least to some degree. Increasing the amount of hardware does increase the attack surface, undeniably, but it also moves critical functions from the main component (with the large attack surface) to the specialised sub-component (which may have a much reduced attack surface). The system as a whole may be technically less secure as a result, but the stuff you care most about is more secure.
From the perspective of a mac user: The Windows 3.X UI felt like an ugly hack compared to System 6, and was certainly way behind System 7. When I finally used X Windows a number of years later, I found it remarkably similar in feel to Windows 3.X.
Windows 95 was a different beast. I didn't like it personally, but it was a long way ahead of 3.X.
Yeah, I'm not saying that they literally stole the code, and I'm not sure what they had a legal right to copy, but it's clear that there is a lot in the Windows APIs that is strongly influenced by the design of the classic macOS.
I have to second this. It's not perfect. No phone is perfect. But it's very good.
Whether ANY phone is worth that kind of money is a personal decision. But the X is undeniably an improvement over the previous iPhones in many ways, and realistically doesn't step backwards anywhere except for price. Maybe a step sideways in some areas (trading off one weakness for a new, different, weakness) but not backwards.
..just like Objective-C before it (which frankly, is also a much nicer language than... C++).
Objective-C has one or two nice syntactic tricks, but it's a very weak language compared to C++. About the only thing that it had going for it was that Apple provides a decent set of libraries- not like that isn't also available for C++, but at least Objective C had "one true standard" for such things.
I suppose it's possible to do typed scalars in C++, not sure about Java (without tool extensions). But making a scalar into a full 'class' is probably overkill (with runtime impacts).
If the runtime performance is that important to you, you could consider invoking the preprocessor to select an 'int' in release builds and a custom strong type in debug mode (this is assuming your strong type is ONLY used for safety, and doesn't add special operators which understand multiple different strong types).
Actually, he's somewhat correct. There are definitely times where iOS refuses to allow word-level selection. This isn't the standard behavior for text selection but does seem pretty common when using Safari. The interaction might start off as word-level selection but then for some reason the phone will decide you actually wanted to select paragraphs and once it's "switched to that mode" it won't change back. I assume this has something to do with the way that the HTML is formatted but from a user perspective it's just stupid.
iOS also has issues with allowing you to select words or characters when a large block is already selected. It's technically possible, but can be frustratingly difficult to achieve in practice.
From what has been said, it seems that a typical-ratio movie will behave as GP describes. The user can opt to zoom in (in which case the cutaway does obscure the view, but the movie is also cropped at top and bottom. The user can probably also play a movie with an atypical ratio, which assumedly is always obscured although perhaps a default zoom-to-fit is used.
My daughter has an iPhone which I have a touch ID profile for. I've used her phone maybe 20 times in the last year and it's failed more than once, closer to once every 2 or 3 times I try to use it. This is a much higher fail rate than a tactile button which I push on my phone that seems to work at least 99 out of 100 times.
Less valid. That would be a false negative. Still a usability concern, but not a security concern.
I had the battery swell on my 5. It was just on two years old. Screen partially detached from the case, camera signal went funny if you applied pressure to the screen. I was travelling at the time. It lasted the week or so of my trip, and I took it straight in to an Apple store on my return home. It was close to closing time. They messed around with trying to repair it for an hour, by which point the store was supposed to have been closed for half an hour. Then they gave me a new 5, no cost.
Pity the phone died, but no serious harm done and the service was great.
This is certainly true (and I'd assume that kernel devs might be running with this turned off, or some kind of historical logs kept to track what state their kernel was in during a bug) but it's equally true that exercising things in this way could reveal bugs which were otherwise exceedingly rare, leading to better overall code quality.
In practice, I would think that read-write data structures are more likely to exhibit this kind of problem though, not the read-only code. There are certainly edge cases (timing changes, etc.) but it's not like an off-by-one error is going to affect you, like it might with data.
I think it's reasonable to consider a technology as "failed" if everybody building it gets out of that market due to lack of consumer interest. Like you, I have a 3DTV and do occasionally use that feature. But if all of the TV manufacturers have decided that it costs them more to include that small amount of extra hardware than they make back from consumers such as us, then I'll agree that it's a failed idea.
That's a stupid lie. Apple improves the performance of older devices by upgrading the OS.
Yeah, no. If you were talking about Macs, I'd totally agree. But this has never been the case on iOS. You buy a new device, you get 1-2 major iOS upgrades which actually make things better without substantially hurting performance, then (typically around the 3 year mark) you'll get another upgrade which completely destroys performance. And once you've patched and found out that you've made a mistake, Apple doesn't let you go backwards.
I'm a long-time Apple fan (since the Apple//e). I've used iPhones exclusively since they came onto the market. I acknowledge that Apple is better than a lot of the competition wrt/ releasing software updates for older hardware. But it's definitely true that Apple has a habit of releasing patches which.. let's be politic here.. strongly encourage users of old devices to upgrade their hardware.
That really depends on your definition of "support". Apple has an unfortunate habit of releasing an operating system update that technically supports older devices, but in practice brings them to their knees- operations which previously were quite snappy become unbearably sluggish, or cause the device to crash. Obviously it's great that they offer the option for those who need to upgrade for App compatibility or some other reason, but for everybody else it just feels like a forced (in the sense that the older OS version will stop receiving important updates as per this article) upgrade to something which cripples the device, requiring the purchase of a new device.
Unless you're extremely (and unusually) sensitive, this sounds like bad source media, or perhaps an unusually poor hardware implementation. Not something that most users will experience. I also have a Samsung TV with 3D capability. As others here have said, there are reasons why the 3D capability isn't used much in practice. But on the few occasions that we've used it, it worked well and caused no headaches, flickering, or other problems.
If you have other light sources active in addition to the TV, you may notice a flicker/strobe effect from that, in your peripheral vision - but not from the TV itself.
This is an excellent point actually. Having the watch be able to ping the phone saves a lot of time hunting for phones that are under a pillow or have fallen into the sofa.
They tell time: but my analog watch does that, even when I don't have my phone around.
The Apple Watch doesn't need your phone around to tell the time either. So; it's at least as good as an analog watch for this purpose (barring battery life discussions anyway).
They can buzz and show you text messages or phone calls, but they have to be within Bluetooth range of your phone anyway, so you will have your phone on your person and it can buzz you too. I don't see the advantage of this feature.
You don't need to be in bluetooth range, although that's one option- wifi works too. This is actually something I find quite useful:
* My phone is always on silent and I don't always notice the buzz. It's much harder to miss a wrist notification. * I can quickly determine whether it's something that needs urgent attention or whether I can ignore it until next time I pick up my phone. * I still have access and visibility while in the shower, swimming, or if I've left my phone in the bedroom while working in another room.
I hear you can use your apple watch to originate a text, but for the life of me I cannot imagine it being worth the extra effort to text with an obviously clunky user interface over using that phone in your pocket.
It's really not, but I guess it's nice to have it available as a backup option (eg. if somebody else is using my phone and I don't want to interrupt them; or if i'm in the shower or holding something heavy and an urgent reply is warranted). In practice I don't use this, but I can see that some people might find it useful. You can also talk and listen via the watch, not just text.
Then there are the "health and Exercise" features like a pedometer to count your steps or monitoring your heart rate, but in both cases doing that kind of sensing is hard so it turns out to be of dubious accuracy and limited application. The pedometer function can be approximated on your phone with almost the same accuracy level, and the heart rate monitor is more of a "it's faster" or "slower" indicator that is of zero clinical use beyond that.
Yes and no. I think that health tracking is a big deal in the long run, but I agree that what we have now has too many compromises to be a killer feature. It's still nice to be able to track your heart rate and other exercise metrics over time, notice how lifestyle changes affect your daily walking distance, etc. For people who are serious about exercise, I'm sure that this is a killer feature, although there may be cheaper devices if that's the only feature they want. It's also nice how Apple aggregates data from multiple devices.
Finally there is the battery life problem. These wrist worn smart devices are of significantly limited size and weight. Doing all the "smart" stuff requires power and power requires batteries that are sizeable and of significant weight. This means that the more stuff your wrist device does, the more often you will have to take it off for a few hours and charge it.
It is possible to flatten the device prematurely, much like it's possible to flatten a smartphone quickly. That said, it's good enough for normal usage and it charges fast. Some people charge it overnight. I personally charge it at my desk during the day; it only means taking the watch off for an hour. People who drive to work could charge it during the drive. Would it be nice to have it last a month or more? For sure. But the 1.5-day battery life is not a killer, or even a meaningful annoyance in most cases.
My standby analog watch can wind itself when I wear it and only comes off when I bathe or swim (because it's not water proof).
I don't generally take the Apple Watch off while bathing or swimming. This is a gen 1 watch, so it's not even officially waterproof but it's rated against anything short of diving so it's fine for doing laps in the pool.
What's the point? If it's legal to use the VPN, then you just use the VPN directly without the added latency of TOR. If it's not legal to use a VPN, then the money trail is going to cause you problems even if they can't identify your traffic specifically. I'm sure there are edge cases, but I think for most people there's just no point.
Radioactive waste can be contained and when reprocessed as part of waste disposal
Therein lies the rub. Firstly, while you're absolutely correct when things are working properly, nuclear is very hard to clean up after things go wrong. While the immediate effect might still be reasonably small in global terms, a much larger area (and therefore politically more problemtic) is affected in a nuclear disaster than in an equivalent coal-power disaster.
An oil spill might be more comparable actually, but even there, hard radiation is much harder to clean up, and a much more dangerous environment (to humans, at least) than oil. Oil spills also likely to be further away from human population centers (easier to transport efficiently) which, while not a sound environmental argument, is pretty sound politically.
Secondly, there's historically been some conflict of priorities between "use nuclear fuel efficiently" and "don't allow anything that could be turned into a weapon".
I'm not anti-nuclear as such, but I do think that it's politically problematic and that "environmentally safe" fission power at large scale is a lot more expensive than what we're willing to spend on energy today.
Pretty much the same issue with my 6. The phone battery bottoms out at anywhere between 10% and 50%, depending on the day. Plug it in to a charger and 10 minutes later it's back at 65% and will run for a few more hours. I've been putting this down to a prematurely aged battery, but it's not something that has happened with my previous iPhones.
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Apple has a monopoly
As others have pointed out, saying that "Apple has a monopoly on selling iOS software" is like saying that "Sony has a monopoly on selling PlayStation software". It's very unclear that there's anything monopolistic (in the legal sense) going on here. I personally don't love the direction that this kind of thing is moving, but that doesn't automatically make it illegal.
There is no doubt they are overcharging by huge factor.
I don't really agree. Sure, 30% seems like a big number - but then you need to consider what you get for that 30%:
* QA resources. This isn't just a rubber-stamp; they really do pay attention to your software and how the software might affect users. No, it's not a complete replacement for in-house QA, but it does mean that a modicum of quality is required before an app can be sold on the app store. While you as a developer might say "we have our own QA resources, trust us!", many users on the other hand are saying "we don't trust a lot of the developers" and rightly so.
* A store-front. Larger companies can probably tackle this themselves without sweating, but for a smaller company or one-man operation, this can be a big deal.
* Card processing, transaction fees, etc. Yeah, this is only a few percent, plus a bunch of extra work that you don't need to worry about.
* Massive audience. Very few companies can achieve the kind of audience that the App Store can give. On the flip-side, a large audience doesn't guarantee that anybody will buy *your* software, so it's not a magic bullet.
* Discounts. I have often walked into my local supermarket and walked out with a "30% off" prepaid card for App Store purchases. For any apps I buy with that card, Apple is getting around 0%. Sure, not all users are taking advantage of this, and sure, it's perhaps benefiting Apple in a not-directly-financial manner, but 0% is still 0%. More common perhaps are the 20% discounts, so Apple is getting more like 10% there (and remember that all of the above costs and fees are still coming out of this 10%).
In short, if you're a big player, you may be able to slim your costs below 30%, build your own store, run your own sales, bring your own customers, build your own brand trust, and so on - but tbh not that many developers fall into that kind of category. In the meantime, there are many advantages to consumers to being able to trust Apple's known-quantity storefront.
Again, I'm not saying that I don't see the downsides of this model - there definitely are many - but claiming that apple is simply biting off a big chunk of the developer's revenues is a vast, vast oversimplification.
That's exactly what's happened to women who've accused powerful men for a very long time.
And still happens today
To be fair, if you're right, we should be fixing that rather than trying to make it worse.
You're both right, at least to some degree. Increasing the amount of hardware does increase the attack surface, undeniably, but it also moves critical functions from the main component (with the large attack surface) to the specialised sub-component (which may have a much reduced attack surface). The system as a whole may be technically less secure as a result, but the stuff you care most about is more secure.
From the perspective of a mac user: The Windows 3.X UI felt like an ugly hack compared to System 6, and was certainly way behind System 7. When I finally used X Windows a number of years later, I found it remarkably similar in feel to Windows 3.X.
Windows 95 was a different beast. I didn't like it personally, but it was a long way ahead of 3.X.
Yeah, I'm not saying that they literally stole the code, and I'm not sure what they had a legal right to copy, but it's clear that there is a lot in the Windows APIs that is strongly influenced by the design of the classic macOS.
But hell.... it is the best phone I have owned.
I have to second this. It's not perfect. No phone is perfect. But it's very good.
Whether ANY phone is worth that kind of money is a personal decision. But the X is undeniably an improvement over the previous iPhones in many ways, and realistically doesn't step backwards anywhere except for price. Maybe a step sideways in some areas (trading off one weakness for a new, different, weakness) but not backwards.
..just like Objective-C before it (which frankly, is also a much nicer language than ... C++).
Objective-C has one or two nice syntactic tricks, but it's a very weak language compared to C++. About the only thing that it had going for it was that Apple provides a decent set of libraries- not like that isn't also available for C++, but at least Objective C had "one true standard" for such things.
I suppose it's possible to do typed scalars in C++, not sure about Java (without tool extensions). But making a scalar into a full 'class' is probably overkill (with runtime impacts).
If the runtime performance is that important to you, you could consider invoking the preprocessor to select an 'int' in release builds and a custom strong type in debug mode (this is assuming your strong type is ONLY used for safety, and doesn't add special operators which understand multiple different strong types).
Actually, he's somewhat correct. There are definitely times where iOS refuses to allow word-level selection. This isn't the standard behavior for text selection but does seem pretty common when using Safari. The interaction might start off as word-level selection but then for some reason the phone will decide you actually wanted to select paragraphs and once it's "switched to that mode" it won't change back. I assume this has something to do with the way that the HTML is formatted but from a user perspective it's just stupid.
iOS also has issues with allowing you to select words or characters when a large block is already selected. It's technically possible, but can be frustratingly difficult to achieve in practice.
Status indications. Which were already at the top of the screen, so this is actually a great way to save space.
From what has been said, it seems that a typical-ratio movie will behave as GP describes. The user can opt to zoom in (in which case the cutaway does obscure the view, but the movie is also cropped at top and bottom. The user can probably also play a movie with an atypical ratio, which assumedly is always obscured although perhaps a default zoom-to-fit is used.
According to the salesperson right?
Valid point.
My daughter has an iPhone which I have a touch ID profile for. I've used her phone maybe 20 times in the last year and it's failed more than once, closer to once every 2 or 3 times I try to use it. This is a much higher fail rate than a tactile button which I push on my phone that seems to work at least 99 out of 100 times.
Less valid. That would be a false negative. Still a usability concern, but not a security concern.
I had the battery swell on my 5. It was just on two years old. Screen partially detached from the case, camera signal went funny if you applied pressure to the screen. I was travelling at the time. It lasted the week or so of my trip, and I took it straight in to an Apple store on my return home. It was close to closing time. They messed around with trying to repair it for an hour, by which point the store was supposed to have been closed for half an hour. Then they gave me a new 5, no cost.
Pity the phone died, but no serious harm done and the service was great.
This is certainly true (and I'd assume that kernel devs might be running with this turned off, or some kind of historical logs kept to track what state their kernel was in during a bug) but it's equally true that exercising things in this way could reveal bugs which were otherwise exceedingly rare, leading to better overall code quality.
In practice, I would think that read-write data structures are more likely to exhibit this kind of problem though, not the read-only code. There are certainly edge cases (timing changes, etc.) but it's not like an off-by-one error is going to affect you, like it might with data.
You're reading GP's comment backwards. His point is that Swift does not have a stable ABI, ergo programs must be statically linked.
"Bill of Materials" - the individual components necessary to make the product.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I think it's reasonable to consider a technology as "failed" if everybody building it gets out of that market due to lack of consumer interest. Like you, I have a 3DTV and do occasionally use that feature. But if all of the TV manufacturers have decided that it costs them more to include that small amount of extra hardware than they make back from consumers such as us, then I'll agree that it's a failed idea.
That's a stupid lie. Apple improves the performance of older devices by upgrading the OS.
Yeah, no. If you were talking about Macs, I'd totally agree. But this has never been the case on iOS. You buy a new device, you get 1-2 major iOS upgrades which actually make things better without substantially hurting performance, then (typically around the 3 year mark) you'll get another upgrade which completely destroys performance. And once you've patched and found out that you've made a mistake, Apple doesn't let you go backwards.
I'm a long-time Apple fan (since the Apple //e). I've used iPhones exclusively since they came onto the market. I acknowledge that Apple is better than a lot of the competition wrt/ releasing software updates for older hardware. But it's definitely true that Apple has a habit of releasing patches which .. let's be politic here.. strongly encourage users of old devices to upgrade their hardware.
All devices capable of FaceTime supported iOS 7.
That really depends on your definition of "support". Apple has an unfortunate habit of releasing an operating system update that technically supports older devices, but in practice brings them to their knees- operations which previously were quite snappy become unbearably sluggish, or cause the device to crash. Obviously it's great that they offer the option for those who need to upgrade for App compatibility or some other reason, but for everybody else it just feels like a forced (in the sense that the older OS version will stop receiving important updates as per this article) upgrade to something which cripples the device, requiring the purchase of a new device.
Unless you're extremely (and unusually) sensitive, this sounds like bad source media, or perhaps an unusually poor hardware implementation. Not something that most users will experience. I also have a Samsung TV with 3D capability. As others here have said, there are reasons why the 3D capability isn't used much in practice. But on the few occasions that we've used it, it worked well and caused no headaches, flickering, or other problems.
If you have other light sources active in addition to the TV, you may notice a flicker/strobe effect from that, in your peripheral vision - but not from the TV itself.
Bonus feature I like: Find my phone.
This is an excellent point actually. Having the watch be able to ping the phone saves a lot of time hunting for phones that are under a pillow or have fallen into the sofa.
They tell time: but my analog watch does that, even when I don't have my phone around.
The Apple Watch doesn't need your phone around to tell the time either. So; it's at least as good as an analog watch for this purpose (barring battery life discussions anyway).
They can buzz and show you text messages or phone calls, but they have to be within Bluetooth range of your phone anyway, so you will have your phone on your person and it can buzz you too. I don't see the advantage of this feature.
You don't need to be in bluetooth range, although that's one option- wifi works too. This is actually something I find quite useful:
* My phone is always on silent and I don't always notice the buzz. It's much harder to miss a wrist notification.
* I can quickly determine whether it's something that needs urgent attention or whether I can ignore it until next time I pick up my phone.
* I still have access and visibility while in the shower, swimming, or if I've left my phone in the bedroom while working in another room.
I hear you can use your apple watch to originate a text, but for the life of me I cannot imagine it being worth the extra effort to text with an obviously clunky user interface over using that phone in your pocket.
It's really not, but I guess it's nice to have it available as a backup option (eg. if somebody else is using my phone and I don't want to interrupt them; or if i'm in the shower or holding something heavy and an urgent reply is warranted). In practice I don't use this, but I can see that some people might find it useful. You can also talk and listen via the watch, not just text.
Then there are the "health and Exercise" features like a pedometer to count your steps or monitoring your heart rate, but in both cases doing that kind of sensing is hard so it turns out to be of dubious accuracy and limited application. The pedometer function can be approximated on your phone with almost the same accuracy level, and the heart rate monitor is more of a "it's faster" or "slower" indicator that is of zero clinical use beyond that.
Yes and no. I think that health tracking is a big deal in the long run, but I agree that what we have now has too many compromises to be a killer feature. It's still nice to be able to track your heart rate and other exercise metrics over time, notice how lifestyle changes affect your daily walking distance, etc. For people who are serious about exercise, I'm sure that this is a killer feature, although there may be cheaper devices if that's the only feature they want. It's also nice how Apple aggregates data from multiple devices.
Finally there is the battery life problem. These wrist worn smart devices are of significantly limited size and weight. Doing all the "smart" stuff requires power and power requires batteries that are sizeable and of significant weight. This means that the more stuff your wrist device does, the more often you will have to take it off for a few hours and charge it.
It is possible to flatten the device prematurely, much like it's possible to flatten a smartphone quickly. That said, it's good enough for normal usage and it charges fast. Some people charge it overnight. I personally charge it at my desk during the day; it only means taking the watch off for an hour. People who drive to work could charge it during the drive. Would it be nice to have it last a month or more? For sure. But the 1.5-day battery life is not a killer, or even a meaningful annoyance in most cases.
My standby analog watch can wind itself when I wear it and only comes off when I bathe or swim (because it's not water proof).
I don't generally take the Apple Watch off while bathing or swimming. This is a gen 1 watch, so it's not even officially waterproof but it's rated against anything short of diving so it's fine for doing laps in the pool.
What's the point? If it's legal to use the VPN, then you just use the VPN directly without the added latency of TOR. If it's not legal to use a VPN, then the money trail is going to cause you problems even if they can't identify your traffic specifically. I'm sure there are edge cases, but I think for most people there's just no point.
Radioactive waste can be contained and when reprocessed as part of waste disposal
Therein lies the rub. Firstly, while you're absolutely correct when things are working properly, nuclear is very hard to clean up after things go wrong. While the immediate effect might still be reasonably small in global terms, a much larger area (and therefore politically more problemtic) is affected in a nuclear disaster than in an equivalent coal-power disaster.
An oil spill might be more comparable actually, but even there, hard radiation is much harder to clean up, and a much more dangerous environment (to humans, at least) than oil. Oil spills also likely to be further away from human population centers (easier to transport efficiently) which, while not a sound environmental argument, is pretty sound politically.
Secondly, there's historically been some conflict of priorities between "use nuclear fuel efficiently" and "don't allow anything that could be turned into a weapon".
I'm not anti-nuclear as such, but I do think that it's politically problematic and that "environmentally safe" fission power at large scale is a lot more expensive than what we're willing to spend on energy today.
Pretty much the same issue with my 6. The phone battery bottoms out at anywhere between 10% and 50%, depending on the day. Plug it in to a charger and 10 minutes later it's back at 65% and will run for a few more hours. I've been putting this down to a prematurely aged battery, but it's not something that has happened with my previous iPhones.