timpetus

Apple is unequivocally in the right, here. They are not required in any way to allow Epic to benefit from their actions in bad faith, and Sweeney is trying the same thing again by making further misleading statements to try to gain sympathy from the public.

There is an error in the article. It states that the 14" MBP comes in M4 and M4 Pro variants. No mention of the M4 Max 14" MBP, so I did a quick double check and Apple does indeed still offer the Max chip in the 14" model.

The issue is that APP2 are regularly on sale for $189. If you can get that deal, it's a no-brainer for anyone who finds the ear tips comfortable. I agree that the AP4 are an across-the-board upgrade from the AP3, but the AP3 never made much sense unless you got them for a significant discount. For my personal use, I need the best ANC possible, so never had any interest in regular AirPods but I bought the Pros as soon as I could afford them and now use APP2 daily.

neelypeely said:

I live in the UK and support Apple in this. They should pull out of the eurozone market, to hell with whatever financial loss that incurs. And people wonder why we voted for Brexit!?

Right you are! I totally understood Brexit and never heard an argument against it that made any sense. The EU is a cancer, like all bureaucracies, and it's metastasizing at a rate proportional to its behemoth size. I hold Apple stock, but I don't care if it takes a beating - they should pull out of the EU until these stupid demands cease. Hardball is the game they want to play, then so be it.

blastdoor said:

I’d say people who want to undermine privacy protections are using children as a cover for their goals.

This 100%. We can live in a world that has horrible people abusing children and privacy for other people who need it, or we can live in a world where we still have horrible people abusing children and privacy is a dream for all but the rich and powerful. It's not a trade-off, at least not in the direction the anti-privacy lobby would have you believe. The world will be far worse on net if we destroy the right to privacy.

foregoneconclusion said:

beowulfschmidt said: No, I don't really believe they would do that.  It would be nice if they did, though.

Why do you want less competition in the EU? 

Because it will prove the lie that somehow Apple is the one being anticompetitive. In reality it's the EU shooting themselves in the foot and then blaming Apple.

I seem to remember someone offering a program that "poisons" image data in a way that is undetectable by the human eye, but makes it not only useless for AI training but actually harmful to any AI model trained using the photo. This is a great way to (a) protect your work without relying on nearly impossible detection and legal enforcement measures and (b) accelerate the inevitable destruction of so-called AI image generation. I believe no matter what, we will get to a state of GIGO with "AI" soon, where the verifiably human-generated pool of training data will continually shrink in comparison to the massive deluge of AI-generated data, some of which will be unidentifiable as such at time of selection.

More pressure to take the privacy poison pill. Stand firm, Apple.

This demonstrates part of why Apple switched to MagSafe on their laptops. If the MM had a built-in battery, it might make some sense to enable power via something more easily disconnected, but I doubt Apple would ever see the need to add one to a desktop machine...

The answer is always dependent on whether you would have subscribed to all of the individual components of each plan. For me, only increased iCloud storage space is worth it. I've had Apple TV+ when it came with my devices for free, but it's not worth the cost to stay subscribed all the time. No interest in the other services, so Apple One doesn't make sense for me.