y2an

As with a lot of things Brexit, this is a crock. Apple will build to the EU requirement and UK customers will get that, for better or worse. Smoke and mirrors by a UK government in distress to explain any actual benefits from Brexit. 

cropr said:

I do understand the EU.  

I am an app developer.   From an app developer perspective, I can choose my payment system provider I want if my app is running on Windows, on Mac, on Linux and even on Android (although Google does not like the latter), but I cannot choose my payment system provider on iOS.

This has nothing to do with security as a lot of you claim, because my preferred  payment service provider is Ingenico (https://www.ingenico.com), a well established company with a proven security record.   

The fact that for iOS I have to use Apple, has also a serious impact on my accounting system and my customer support.    For Ingenico, all transactions are booked between the end customer and me, while Ingenico just lowers the transaction amount with its commission (<3%).    For Apple, the transaction happens between the end user and Apple and Apple reimburses 70 or 85% of the amount to me.   

In case of my customer contacts my customer support team for any question, the customer support team can immediately identify the all the payments the customer made, across all the apps on all devices the customer is using .  With the Apple payment system such thing is possible. 

This last point is fro me the main reason why I will never choose Apple as payment service provider, if I have the choice.  If Apple would allow competition in the iOS payment service, the service towards the app developer could increase significantly.

The consequence of the current situation is that I am only investing in apps where I can avoid any payment on iOS.  

It’s the same for a third party seller on Amazon. Amazon handles the payment transaction. This eliminates the risk of non-payment of fees by the seller as they receive the proceeds net of fees. Overall this reduces operating costs since there is no chasing of delinquent sellers.

I think there is a mythical belief that alternative payment systems would eliminate fees to Apple (or Google for the Android store) but this is false. The stores have operating costs for hosting, distributing and providing upgrades to app developers, and for services like push notifications. Developers would most likely still owe fees, but the fees payment process would be more complex and costly. I see this as pressure from other payment processors to deliver business to them which is really just self-serving lobbying, not a real benefit to consumers. 

Sweeney is being dishonest and disingenuous. 

mattinoz said:

Do they need a special block for that?
Once you take analogue out it seems a lot of the signal processing could happen in GPU. If they can make that work an Ax could be just the Mx Soc with the extra cores dedicated to being soft modem. 

If you’ve nothing better for the GPU to do, probably. But they need to exact top performance from the GPU to be competitive at the high end, support gaming, etc., so stealing cycles from the GPU would not make sense. Plus a lot if this is not signal processing, it’s protocol handling. It’s a highly specialised real-time activity.

Sigh. Stop mischaracterising. Hiring someone legally is not poaching. 

Beats said:

The fact anyone can reverse engineer this is scary.

Anyone with the right (fairly advanced) skills can reverse engineer anything, given time and resources. 

This is really passing the buck, and it applies to anyone offering a tracking device, not just Apple. Tags create new vectors for stalking and other nefarious activities and manufacturers have a responsibility to make safe products. Transferring that to the police (often overstretched in any case) places a cost burden on them without any compensation. This simply doesn’t work. Technical solutions need to be created such as immediate alerting of potential stalking and suppression of data to the tag owner until there is a positive action to confirm the tracking is ok. Less convenient for the tag owner, but rightfully so. 

A useful article would include links to the patents in question. 

I continue to think Titan doesn’t aim to build a car, rather it will build a suite of hardware and software capabilities for manufacturers to include in their models, all seamlessly integrated with iPhone, watch, satellite services (watch out, OnStar!), and so forth. Any effort towards physical car prototypes will turn out to be test bed vehicles to design and prove the hardware and software. If there’s a re-org coming it will likely be because they are moving beyond research into full scale development if not manufacture. 

thrang said:

I don't understand the mass-market use case for a foldable phone. The way the vast majority of us utilize a phone - constantly referencing and glancing at it for dozens of tasks, from morning to night, who wants to constantly open and close it? What purpose does it serve? It will only be thicker to put in your pocket.

Perhaps there is some use case for the iPad, given its use is a bit more measured and purposeful, and perhaps it integrates a digital keyboard into the foldout. Still, I cannot envision it having very large interest.

We’re men, pocket sounds fine. For a woman with a petite purse, a folding phone would be great, like a compact. So this might be too niche and why would a watch not serve better?

IMHO folding phones are too thick. A successful folding phone would be about as thick, folded, as an iPhone. That’s tough.