alanaudio

chasm said:

I'm not disagreeing with the premise of this article -- indeed the Macalope makes a career out of it -- but 4740 words to tell us that "Apple doesn't listen to tech pundits and look at them; maybe you shouldn't either"? Really?

Any of us could say something like that and probably with even fewer words than you do, but Dan is not known for writing brief throwaway lines.  One of the reasons why I like reading what he has to say is that he has an opinion and then careful explains how he has reached that opinion, giving reasons and examples to support what he's saying and how he reached that conclusion.  I don't always agree with his conclusion, but I always enjoy hearing what he has to say. At school, it was never enough in science or mathematics to simply come up with the right answer, we had to show our working and demonstrate how we reached that answer.

Obviously there are people who need all information to be presented in brief sound bites, but there are also plenty of people who appreciate a more scholarly approach which obviously involves a lot more reading, but it also helps to educate and inform those who are prepared to put that little more effort.

My beef with the Apple pundits is not so much that they say what they say, but they are invariably wrong and yet those same people are readily given a platform to say something else which is also likely to be just as wrong in the future.  If I see a prediction by an analyst or a suggestion by some self-appointed expert, my first instinct is to check out what that individual has said before and to grade the significance of what they say accordingly.  It's a shame that web sites and newspapers don't also make reference to the past track records of those that they quote.

libertyforall said:

What's to prevent say Chinese government from forcing you to face ID authenticate to look at your phone contents, for instance during a business or pleasure trip there?  

You don't have to look as far as China.  In America, border security staff already have the power to insist that foreign visitors must unlock their smartphones and hand them over in that unlocked mode for inspection.  If you refuse, you may be barred from entry.

ihatescreennames said:

randominternetperson said:

Smart move from a security perspective, but I sure hope he was backing up that MBA regularly. No Time Machine backup if you're staying off the network.

Couldn’t he do Time Machine backups to an external drive plugged directly into the MBA?

I have no doubt that he would have used some sort of external drive as a backup and it would probably be kept in that safe when the MacBook was being used.

Those of us who've been using Macs for a while started off using Time Machine with plugged in hard drives before WiFi became ubiquitous.  I always remember the first time I plugged a huge hard drive into my Mac and it came up with an alert along the lines of " That's a huge hard drive you've got there - Would you like me to do a Time Machine backup on it?"

We frequently see incorrect reports that Samsung is about to win huge orders from Apple and those reports always seem to originate from South Korea.  If this story originated from a different country, I might take it seriously, but coming from ET News, I'll take it with a pinch of salt considerably more than 10 nanometers across.