jasenj1

So if I, for example, store all my child porn, or plans to blow up the White House, or a second set of accounting books in Google Docs or some other cloud based storage solution, where is that data? What judge can issue warrants to search what servers? Does the vendor (Google, Amazon, whoever) even know the physical location of the data? If I live in NY but store all my bad stuff on a server in CA, or Russia, or China what happens? How about I get more devious and store my data on personal computers infected with some malware that lets me "steal" some of their storage - distributed so that pieces of the data are scattered across hundreds or thousands of computers (all encrypted, of course)?

Now, the authorities could search my local computer, and possibly find incriminating info in my browser's cache or some such. But that would be your simple, not-very-clever, criminals.

On the one hand, I sympathize with law enforcement that people are able to store and access data scattered across the globe and that makes it really difficult to gather evidence. On the other hand, I fear the ever-watching (and gathering) eye of big government.

I wish they'd replace the lightning connector with something magnetic. I thought the MagSafe design would take off and physically inserting things would fade away on mobile devices.

"for battery recharging and wired audio signal transmission"
Perhaps the novelty and patentability here is the battery charging aspect.

I'm unclear what benefits the Lightning connector has over USB-C. As for a digital format, I suggest MQA. MQA goes all the way back to the mastering stage, so it's a bit more than just taking a CD and resampling it to a different format. If Apple went to a hi-res format, I'd be very likely to subscribe. I have a pretty decent home sound system, and I would invest in some true high quality headphones or earbuds for in the office. The free streaming services meet my needs for background-noise level of listening, but I know I'm not getting good fidelity. 

Given Apple's vast capital, it is now in a position to buy up any number of struggling, emerging technologies at a discount as the rest of the vendors in the smartphone, tablet, PC and wearable industries struggle to sell undifferentiated commodity Android products at low, low prices and their suppliers suffer upstream because of it.

I don't think I'm very happy about this. Qualcomm seems to have tried something different with Mirasol; I suspect there are many other emerging technology companies with great products. But they can't break into the market unless a behemoth like Apple, Samsung, Intel, etc. buys them and puts the tech in their products. The little innovator's only chance is to survive long enough to be noticed by a giant company and get acquired? That sounds like a sad world.

Even if a smaller Android maker tried to incorporate some cool cutting edge tech, the market segment is so fragmented they would be a tiny ripple in the pool of products.

boltsfan17 said:

Personally, I don't think you can really compare the Apple TV to gaming systems like the PS4. The Apple TV isn't powerful enough to run console titles. I love my Apple TV and some of the games on the App Store, but it will never have in depth games with great graphics like the WItcher 3, Uncharted, Last of Us, etc. 

Agreed. I bought an Xbox One for Christmas. Many of the games are over 20GB! I think the aTV could be a great successor to the Wii. Lots of sub $5 and free games.

There is a great stable of existing iOS games that can be ported to tvOS with (I suspect) relatively little effort. I think Apple will really need to tackle the issue of multiple players & controllers before the aTV can really break out as a casual family game machine.