linkman

AppleInsider said:

Other critics have suggested that it's unfair for Apple to claim revenue from content it doesn't produce or host.

Just like credit card companies?

daveinpublic said:

Phone looks great, but saddened that they didn't put the optical zoom on it. It's being sold for $749, so it's the cheap version now, even though it's priced higher than the highest end iPhone 2 years ago, 3 years ago, etc. which all had optical zoom.

No, the iPhone 7 Plus was introduced in 2016 at prices of $769 and up. The priciest 7 was $849. The iPhone 8 Plus started at $799 and the 256GB 8 was $849. https://9to5mac.com/2016/09/07/apple-announces-iphone-7-pricing-availability-pre-orders-start-sept-9-available-sept-16/

AppleInsider said:

While much of the engine's popularity stems from being a default, alternatives like Microsoft's Bing -- used in Siri searches -- have been criticized for sub-par results.

Agreed. Google's search beats the pants off of the competition for most searches. Most of the time that I have to resort to Bing/Yahoo/DuckDuckGo I cringe. Bing's image search is fairly decent however.

Koliadascope said:

Rayz2016 said:

 But given the choice, won’t everybody just skip the ads? I might be missing something here. 

I'm guessing the thought might be if you're listening to music in the background while you're doing something else, you might not jump to skip every time a commercial comes on... maybe just the really obnoxious ones. The goal is to tune your ad preference like it does the music. It would be funny if the Skip did a skip to the next ad!

After reading the 9 to 5 Mac article on this subject it indeed appears that the listener skips to another ad; keep skipping until you get to one you like or are tired of skipping. The thought is that Spotify can charge more for better targeted ads and won't have to present as many ads (yeah, right), thus leading to better consumer satisfaction. I think if Spotify gets better ad revenue they'll keep just as many running and maybe not be as much in the hole in the financial sector.

Intel is running up against the fact that wavelengths of light can get only so short (10 nm is pretty stinking short) and physics is going to win at attempts to get much smaller. A transistor can't get smaller than an atom. Progress on ICs is getting slower and will need some sort of breakthrough (like power reduction, using neural-type processing, memristors, light instead of electricity, etc.) before we can see performance improvement rates that we've experienced over the last 40 years.