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kirklennon

@kirklennon@kbin.social

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kirklennon ,

Apple made no announcement or advertisement of any sort. Government patent examiners, after careful review, determined this is a novel invention or improvement. It's not possible for your comment to be any more literally wrong than it is.

kirklennon ,

The EU is only one chunk of Apple’s “Europe” segment, which is defined as “European countries, as well as India, the Middle East and Africa.”

kirklennon ,

They’ve used the same segments for a long time and presumably maintain them for consistency, so I think it really just tells us that they used to sell very little there. India, in particular, has been a large growth market for Apple in the past couple of years, but is still just thrown in with “Europe.”

kirklennon ,

“The industry is at a pivotal point - new technologies like Gen AI are rapidly shifting how we shop and manage our finances,” said Jack Forestell, Chief Product and Strategy Officer, Visa.

This is so cringey. I get that investors are randomly throwing cash at companies that talk up "generative AI," but it has nothing to do with anything they announced. Is it impossible to just be content with ridiculously sophisticated algorithms? Did someone hold a gun up to these people and demand they spit out some drivel that uses the buzzwords du jour?

Also, the headline feature was solved a decade ago when Apple Pay was released (and no, not by the janky predecessors of Apple Pay but specifically with the launch of Apple Pay, which everything was then changed to replicate). One device that can hold an entire wallet of cards and I can choose what to use right when I pay? Wow! So new.

kirklennon ,

Seems like you're Canadian. America doesn't have limits on tap to pay.

kirklennon ,

The "bento box" graphic during the presentation yesterday said AV1. From the press release:

The Media Engine of M4 is the most advanced to come to iPad. In addition to supporting the most popular video codecs, like H.264, HEVC, and ProRes, it brings hardware acceleration for AV1 to iPad for the first time. This provides more power-efficient playback of high-resolution video experiences from streaming services.

kirklennon ,

The main reason sales fell this year compared to the year-ago quarter is because the quarter before that Apple wasn't able to keep up with iPhone 14 demand leading to shortages and depleted channel inventory. The following quarter they were able to meet demand and replenish the sales channel leading a boosted year-ago quarter that was $5 billion bigger than it really should have been. Apple didn't have the same production shortages for the 15 launch. It makes this quarter they just reported look like a big decline but that's not really the whole story.

kirklennon ,

TikTok's daily active users in the U.S. is also just about 5% of ByteDance's DAUs worldwide, said one of the sources.

So much drama in the US over this but it's apparently merely a money-losing afterthought for its owner.

kirklennon ,

This means absolutely nothing. How much of their advertising revenue comes from the US.

To quote the article again, "The U.S. accounted for about 25% of TikTok overall revenues last year, said a separate source with direct knowledge." Honestly, I think that makes the case for shutting it down even stronger. TikTok isn't in some growth-at-all-costs phase in the US. It's likely near its peak potential userbase. If they haven't been able to make it profitable by now, that doesn't bode well for it ever becoming significantly profitable. Absent the legal issues, they think it's still worth at least trying, but as it stands, it's just a lot of money in and, just as quickly, out, with nothing to show for it at the end of the day.

kirklennon ,

I think it's a privately-owned, profit-focused endeavor that is nevertheless beholden to the Chinese government and which the government wants to take as much advantage of as possible. Deep down, I'm certain that their sole goal is to make as much money for themselves as they possibly can. If they also need to exfiltrate some data and send it to the CCP, that's just a necessary business expense.

kirklennon ,

No one big releases a small phone because no one buys them.

Except we don't have any good data to say why. Do people buy a bigger flagship over a smaller model that has older technology? Yes, but the only thing we can say with confidence from that is that people want the latest technology. The closest comparison we can make is Apple's Max/Plus and non-Max/Plus versions, which offer essentially the same model in two sizes. The smaller size consistently sells better. It's also cheaper. Does it sell better because it's smaller or because it's cheaper? Probably both, actually. But as long as nobody offers a small flagship (since Apple stopped making them entirely and switched to larger flagships), nobody can say for sure how well they'd sell.

kirklennon ,

No, that's precisely my point: they don't because no major phone manufacturer has simultaneously sold both a large and compact flagship. And when there are legitimately comparable models in different sizes, the smaller size fairly reliably sells better.

kirklennon ,

That’s not true. Apple sold a mini version for several generations and consistently the mini was always the worst performing version sales wise.

The "mini" lineup was never truly comparable to the flagship product. The specific deficiencies varied with the year but they were all missing an entire camera, and cameras are one of the single most important features of an iPhone.

The mini phones were significantly and arbitrarily gimped to mark them as a distinctly (and quite visibly) lower tier phone.

kirklennon ,

The smaller phones were not comparable models. They were a lower-tier product with fewer features. This contrasts with the regular and Plus/Max versions where it's very much positioned as the same phone in two sizes.

kirklennon ,

You ignore that it’s physically impossible to put a flagship performance in an under 5 inch format.

Not even slightly.

The battery alone scales with size. The camera is a physically space occupying bunch of glass and sensors, that even the ultra size phones have to put them in awkward bulges outside the phone main body to deliver the kind of qualety demanded by users.

The obvious solution is to make the body of the phone very slightly thicker. Thinness is more important in a bigger phone to shave off some of the overall bulk and make it easier to hold but when the area of the phone is smaller, you can easily make it thicker, with the added advantage of making the camera bulge less ridiculous. I’m reluctant to even call it a tradeoff because you’re not really giving anything up. This would have been a legitimately comparable phone, but they never made it so there’s no direct sales comparison in the market. There is no hard data, only inferences.

Fairbuds are Fairphone’s proof that we really could make better tiny gadgets (arstechnica.com)

But of course we all know that the big manufacturers don't do this not because they can't but because they don't want to. Planned obsolescence is still very much the name of the game, despite all the bullshit they spout about sustainability.

kirklennon ,

Selling you a gadget for $ 1000 every two years will always be more profitable than selling you one very five years and doing service in the meantime.

Are you aware that the current version of iOS is supported by the phones Apple released in 2018? And they're still releasing security updates for the prior version, with support for 2017's iPhone 8?

kirklennon ,

A battery replacement from Apple itself for an iPhone 8 is $69. You can get third-party replacements for less. They actually offer battery replacements going back to the 5s (released in 2013) and screen repairs going back to the iPhone 6.

A decade of first-party hardware support for the most likely to fail components in a phone is pretty hard to square with allegations of "planned obsolescence."

kirklennon ,

they try to create a sense of urgency to sell people what they don’t need.

Do they? Yes, they certainly advertise what's new but they're not primarily targeting customers with last year's phone. I recall seeing previously that the average time to keep an iPhone is three years. On Apple's iPhone 15 product page, I found two spots where it called out direct comparisons to previous iPhones: "A17 Pro GPU is up to 70% faster than the GPU in iPhone 12 Pro" and "iPhone 15 Pro has up to 6 more hours video playback than iPhone 12 Pro." They're targeting upgrades to the newest flagship at people with the flagship from three years ago. Of course due to the long support for iPhones, that three year iPhone will inevitably end up in the hands of another user, where it will continue to live on, so there's nothing at all wasteful about upgrading. It's not even wasteful to upgrade every single year because those year-old phones are still used. It's only when the phone is irreparably broken or hopelessly, legitimately obsolete (due to still rapidly-improving technology) that it's then recycled (and Apple has developed special robots to make extracting the rare earth metals viable at large scale).

I wonder what the latest iPhone would look like if Apple were on a once every two years release schedule instead of annual.

I think it would look exactly the same as it does today except that it would include two years' of innovations and changes rather than one, but would also mean that if you needed a new phone before its release, your only option would be an increasingly dated model. Customer: Hi, I'd like the latest flagship. Store: Here's the best technology that was available 20 months ago.

I also think it's worth noting that Apple pretty much single-handedly slowed the release schedule for phones. Prior to the iPhone, Nokia was releasing roughly a dozen barely-differentiated models per year, spread throughout the year.

kirklennon ,

There's no "too." This is the (US) price to have Apple themselves replace your battery for you with a new OEM battery, inclusive of the battery and labor. It basically represents the highest available cost.

kirklennon ,

The phone has advantages in that it’s more secure (because you’re not giving the merchant your real card number so when they inevitably have a hack, you don’t need to get your card replaced), and that you can carry multiple cards without taking up any extra space. Also, most people are playing on their phones while they wait to check out so it’s already in their hand.

kirklennon ,

Yahoo Inc. owns TechCrunch, Autoblog, and Engadget, plus some other stuff, along with their own Yahoo-branded stuff (excluding Yahoo Japan, which is a totally separate company). It's a ton of eyeballs, and they sell the ads on their sites.

kirklennon , (edited )

I recently finished reading His Majesty’s Airship, which focuses specifically on the R101 development and disaster, but also more broadly on the entire history of rigid airships through the 1930s. The recurring theme is that people want airships to work so they keep trying. A new design comes along that promises to fix the problems from before and it’s fine for a while, until there’s a problem like, say, a strong breeze, and dozens of people die in a horrible crash. I want airships to make a comeback. The basic idea of something that floats and you merely need to push around with some propellers sounds great. I’m not terribly optimistic about it though. The weather is a real problem. Planes and ships and trains and trucks can all function even in an outright storm; airships inevitably require fair weather. Worse still, if they’re outside a hangar when the weather starts getting bad, they're stuck. They can’t get into a hangar before it gets worse because the very act of getting in a hangar for protection requires extremely precise control with no chance of sudden gusts that could shove it into the ground or the sides of the hangar. Extra propellers to maneuver can do only so much; they’re not magic. Major advances in weather forecasting in recent years maybe mean there are more situations where an airship could be safely used, with greater confidence of agreeable weather for the duration of the trip, but you’re certainly not going to build a freight business model on “sorry, let’s try again next week."

kirklennon ,

WooPayments, formerly known as WooCommerce Payments, is a payment gateway. I think we can let it slide.

kirklennon ,

No it's not. The iTunes Music Store is available in the majority of countries in the world. Plus there are other services that cover some of the other countries. Vanishingly few people can choose only a CD.

kirklennon ,

I am aware, but unless you're saying iTunes doesn't sell pop music in most markets, it's not really relevant.

kirklennon ,

You don't own the music you buy on a CD either. You are buying a license to the music and physical storage of it. If you want you can burn your iTunes songs on a CD and you're in the same situation.

kirklennon ,

Many people don’t listen to local music or pop music.

I was responded to a comment about the availability of pop music.

And out of everything available iTunes is your first choice too?

Yes, the largest digital music store is, naturally, the first one I searched for availability numbers for (119 markets).

I don't really understand the rest of your rant.

kirklennon ,

Not to mention they can revoke your access to your music on iTunes.

iTunes got rid of DRM a decade and a half ago.

kirklennon ,

You own your own hard drive. That copy of an iTunes song is yours. No DRM, no remotely removing your ability to use it.

kirklennon ,

I’m upset when the government wastes resources on a big lawsuit that it’s absolutely going to lose, because it’s weak on the law and inept on the not-that-complicated technological issues. I also question the leadership of an organization that, in the name of consumer protection, decides to target a product with ludicrously high customer satisfaction ratings. Consumers love their iPhones, perhaps more so than literally any other product they own. What a monumentally stupid target.

kirklennon ,

The headline is right. Even if you don't know Best Buy's fiscal year, the tenses used in the quote makes it clear that they already closed 24 stores. Best Buy's 2024 fiscal year ended on February 3, 2024. They plan to close 10 to 15 more by roughly one month into 2025, so not literally "by 2025" but close enough.

kirklennon ,

CBDC is blockchain based, i.e cryptocurrency.

A CBDC can be blockchain based, but almost none actually will be. China's isn't. Japan's CBDC is not. In the US, the Federal Reserve is still in early stages but I'm confident it won't use blockchain either.

kirklennon ,

Intuit divested the tax product in that sale, which was bought by Block (FKA Square) and is part of their Cash App brand. So it’s still around and still not Intuit.

kirklennon ,

The login process for it is absolutely terrible and requires so much jumping back and forth between the dumb app and my computer, which is where I want to actually do my taxes.

kirklennon ,

I'm going to go ahead and just call this a nothingburger. The context is that you're already a registered user signed into the Facebook, etc. app. You've already volunteered the valuable profile data and the analytics data from actually using the app. If you're already OK with all of that, there's effectively no additional concern with the relatively minor data that can be collected or inferred from the notifications. The very idea that someone should or would turn notifications off on, for example, Instagram because they're concerned about privacy is ridiculous. It's like telling someone not to crack the windows on their car because it might rain, but they're in a convertible with the top down.

kirklennon ,

This is about third-party apps.

kirklennon ,

This isn’t going to fly with the EU.

If the EU didn't want to allow this then they should have written the law differently, but poorly-written regulations are their specialty. Apple's plan complies with the letter of the law. Developers are free to use a direct sales channel and can offer any price they want, along with various conditions that aren't an option in the App Store. They just have to pay a commission for access to the lucrative market Apple built. The specific percentage of the commission is such that it's not actually a desirable option for developers, but the law didn't say that Apple had to make it desirable to avoid the App Store's existing sales system.

kirklennon ,

Short on time but they’re identified early on in this decision:
https://www.bloomberglaw.com/public/desktop/document/Smartflash_LLC_v_Apple_Inc_No_20161059_2017_BL_62739_Fed_Cir_Mar_

kirklennon ,

Sorry, it loaded without a paywall when I originally found it.

kirklennon ,

You’re not missing anything. There was a period of time where a lot of patents were granted for “basic idea, but on a computer!” The USPTO stopped doing it and these patents, which should have never been issued, have been systematically invalidated, including most of this guy’s. He’s a classic patent troll suing over patents that were then invalidated.

kirklennon ,

This seems like an entirely academic, theoretical technique with literally zero real world risk, and without any path forward to ever turn it into a practical attack.

kirklennon ,

Nobody is going to use it against you, but a state actor could use it against a specific target like a politician or military to develop a more accurate assessment of information they already have been collecting.

I read the whole article and I think even that is a ludicrous stretch. In order to get a vague image of your hand it requires either several minutes of projecting a precise black and white bright checkered pattern on the screen, or over an hour of subtly embedding varied brightness in a video. The checkered pattern represents a best/worst case scenario for this kind of attack, and even that is completely impractical for anything in the real world. This is literally zero risk for everybody. Forever.

kirklennon ,

That’s why it would need to be a small piece of a greater set of information. Imagine a person walking through an office and into a stairwell. If you know the person is there, and you know the stairwell is darker than the office, you could infer the appropriate location of the person in the building

That has nothing to do with the technique described in the article. It's also still quite a stretch. Holding up a piece of paper and casting a shadow on the ambient light sensor will also make it appear darker. Are they in the stairwell or is Bob from accounting stopping by to tell a "funny" anecdote and blocking the afternoon sun? If you've managed to compromise a device enough to access sensor data, you're not bothering trying to make sketchy assumptions based on the light sensor.

kirklennon ,

It's a commission for access to a lucrative market that Apple created. Apple gives away the developer tools and charges an extremely modest annual App Store fee, which also covers the review process and hosting. It's been common for platform creators to charge third-party developers in some capacity for many decades. Some do it by charging high costs for the developer tools, others by charging a commission based on sales. I don't think any strategy is necessarily better or worse than the other on a legal or moral basis; they're just business decisions. Previously Apple has combined the commission and payment processing costs into one fee. Apple made a decision on what they wanted to offer developers on that platform and Epic wasn't satisfied with it. They got a court to agree on what is ultimately a minor technical point in how Apple's deal is packaged so Apple is offering an alternative that they don't want to but complies with the law. It's, ultimately, a worse deal for the developer. Developers don't have a right to demand that some arbitrary percentage is the right one, tough. Apple offered a deal: take it or leave it. Developers are perfectly free to leave it.

kirklennon ,

You also forget they also charge 30% for anything sold through their store.

That’s literally what we’re discussing.

Not for services they aren't providing, it isn't.

Third-party console game developers paid money to the console maker even for physical sales.

Again, these are for services that are being provided. Apple is charging people to not use their own payment service.

The payment service is 3%; the commission is the other 27%. That’s what a commission is. It’s for access to the market.

kirklennon , (edited )

No, we are discussing services not sold through their store and not using their payment provider. That is literally the topic of the post.

This is about purchases of virtual goods made by users of the app either directly in the app (30% combined commission and payment processing fees), or who click a link in the app to make the purchase using an external payment provider (27% commission). In all cases, these are sales originating from within the app.

Third party console games don't literally pay money to not use services.

I’m not sure if there have been any changes in the last few years (I doubt it), but developers paid Nintendo, Microsoft, or Sony a 15% “licensing” fee for physical media games sold for their consoles. That has been the basic business model for all consoles for decades.

kirklennon ,

I'm not sure if you're aware, but games consoles are a completely different market with completely different laws and standards governing them. Game consoles are not general purpose devices. They are closed platforms where you gotta sign lengthy NDAs and pay thousands just to get yourself a fucking dev kit.

iPhones are a closed platform. Ditto for iPad and Apple Vision Pro. They are essentially an app console. They have never been sold to consumers or presented to developers as anything else. For what it’s worth, almost all of the in-app revenue at the center of this discussion is gaming revenue. Everything else is a rounding error.

kirklennon ,

As a practical matter all they have to do is not proactively block their iPad apps from being available, which is the default.

Literally zero effort: Their iPad app is available for the Vision Pro and works perfectly fine.
Minor effort: Block the iPad app from being available.
Extra effort: make a specialized visionOS app that takes advantage of additional hardware features.

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