Dan_Dilger

gentooguy said:

p-dog said:

And at a starting price of $399, the iPhone SE is yet again a threat to Android ASPs in their typical $250-$400 range. Many Android users are aspirational, only using their (non-flagship) Android phones because of their commodity prices. A super fast $400 iPhone can help them attain their dreams.

If that were true then Android users would have used iPhones back when most carriers - basically all but T-Mobile - would give you the phone for free in return for a two year contract. They definitely would have switched when the iPhone SE came out. Look, everything that iPhone advocates have claimed would cause legions of Android owners to abandon the platform have come and gone. The end of AT&T exclusivity. The adoption of 4G. The switch to 64 bit. The switch to biometrics. Apple Pay. Privacy/security/malware issues. Apple going bigger than 4' screens. The iPhone SE. None of that has changed. Android OEMs - save HTC and Sony - haven't exited the business because for them Android devices are as profitable as anything else they make. Asus, Acer, ZTE etc. weren't rolling in billions before Android so not making iPhone profits is no reason for them to stop. (Xiaomi, Huawei, Oppo, OnePlus and others weren't selling consumer products - or literally didn't exist at all - before Android.) They won't until Android has a significant drop in marketshare. It hasn't. Despite DED's quarterly column for the past 12 years claiming that it would - which included various claims such as Google giving up on Android, OEMs abandoning Android for another OS, Microsoft crushing Android etc. - Android has maintained about 50% marketshare in the U.S. and 70% worldwide since breakthrough devices like the Samsung Galaxy S2 and Note, the LG G2 and the HTC One came about in 2011. People who want a cheap iPhone have always been able to get them. You can get an iPhone 7 cheaper than an iPhone SE 2 right now on major carriers and an iPhone 8 for the same price. So it is not aspirational. The Android advantages that DED dismissed above ... people like. Lots of them. That is why for the past several years study after study has shown Android users to be more loyal than their iPhone counterparts. They may switch from brand to brand. But they like what Android offers. People just like different things. No problem with that. You would expect Apple fans to understand this. Apple TV has a 13% market share. Macs have a 7 percent global market share. HomePods have a 3% market share. It has always been this way. The only products where Apple has ever enjoyed bigger than a 25% market share are the iPod, iPad (35%) and iPhone. So why is it that Apple fans insist on trying to justify the fact that 50% of the American population and 70% of the world population likes something else? People. Like. Android. Companies. Make. Money. Making. And. Selling. Android. Devices. It isn't going to change. If it does, the change will come from Google deciding to replace Android with Fuchsia. Google is expected to launch the first Fucshia device in 2021. Even if Fuchsia takes off it will just replace one Google platform that Apple fans irrationality hate with another.

"everything that iPhone advocates have claimed would cause legions of Android owners to abandon the platform have come and gone" oh really? "iPhone advocates" weren't saying legions of Android owners would come to iOS. You're getting it backward: it was Android enthusiasts who were harping (and still are) that there is going to be a straw that breaks Apple's back and causes a global one world under Android utopia. iPhone users just wanted Apple to stay in business to advance the state of the art.

Nobody predicted that iOS would become half of the US market, or the top-selling models of Japan, or would effectively take the entire market for premium phones. That just happened because people bought iPhones for various reasons and didn't similarly buy Android. Google and its fans constantly predicted that apps, phones, tablets and wearables would all somebody be running Google maps without anyone checking the company's surveillance.

You repeat a lot of things that aren't true and falsely claim I predicted them. Yet Google did give up on Android with its tablets and netbooks, and has wound down its focus on Android repeatedly. It barely announces copies of what Apple did the previous year these days. 

"study after study has shown Android users to be more loyal than their iPhone counterparts" [citation needed]

I don't irrationally hate Google or its knockoff phone platform, I just point out that Android predictions were wrong and that consumers in a free market are not doing what Google and its employees and fans claimed it would do. 

Why are you peddling your tripe on AppleInsider comments? Who are you trying to convince that Android is wildly successful, you or somebody reading my articles? 

 

buckkalu said:

Over the last 10 years, everyone from celebrity influencers including Elon Musk, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Al Gore, to major technology brands including Apple, have repeatedly claimed that renewables like solar panels and wind farms are less polluting than fossil fuels.

But a new documentary, “Planet of the Humans,” being released free to the public on YouTube today, the 50th Anniversary of Earth Day, reveals that industrial wind farms, solar farms, biomass, and biofuels are wrecking natural environments. 

“Planet of the Humans was produced by Oscar-winning filmmaker Michael Moore. “I assumed solar panels would last forever,” Moore toldReuters. “I didn’t know what went into the making of them.” 

The film shows both abandoned industrial wind and solar farms and new ones being built — but after cutting down forests. “It suddenly dawned on me what we were looking at was a solar dead zone,” says filmmaker Jeff Gibbs, staring at a former solar farm in California. “I learned that the solar panels don’t last.” 

Like many environmental documentaries, “Planet of Humans” endorses debunked Malthusian ideas that the world is running out of energy. “We have to have our ability to consume reigned in,” says a well-coiffed environmental leader. “Without some major die-off of the human population there is no turning back,” says a scientist. 

In truth, humankind has never been at risk of running out of energy. There has always been enough fossil fuels to power human civilization for hundreds and perhaps thousands of years, and nuclear energy is effectively infinite. 

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2020/04/21/new-michael-moore-backed-documentary-on-youtube-reveals-massive-ecological-impacts-of-renewables/#16384bed6c96

Moore is a storyteller, not a scientist, but he raises some interesting ideas as a form of mostly thoughtful entertainment. However, finding some flaws in how "green technology" has been historically rolled out does not mean at all that we shouldn't be pursuing better alternatives to burning oil and coal, which are massively more destructive to our environment and ecology.

The projects Apple has rolled out are not deforesting the planet. There is no "dead zone" above Apple's biogas or geothermal projects. This entire bit you copied and pasted here is a string of logical fallacies, particularly the idea that green energy is based on "Malthusian ideas," and that the primary intent of moving to renewable energy is that we are running out of oil.

Malthus was a religious philosopher writing in the late 1700s, not a scientist. He postulated that societal problems he witnessed centuries ago could only be solved by a huge die-off in population. It's absurd to say that's the basis of moving to green energy today.

And while there was once the fear that we would run out of good sources of oil back in the 1970s, we've since developed technology to extract oil from shale and frack it out of sources formerly considered worthless. There's lots of oil left, that's not even the issue.

The issue is that fracking blows new toxins into the ground that end up in our water, and cause all sorts of unexpected things like earthquakes in places that are unusual because we are changing the composition under our feet. These issues are just as bad if not far worse than "what do we do with old solar panels" and "hey lets not deforest the earth just to set up solar arrays."

Moore's film is raising an issue and blowing it out of proportion, and it's being promoted by interests who want to vilify the people raising awareness of renewable tech. He's the same filmmaker who visited Cuba and wondered aloud why it has a better healthcare system than the US, mixing some reality into a large bit of fiction uninformed to the point of being misleading.

We need to follow science and a constant re-evaluation of what's working best, not just more fallacious scaremongering so that we are paralyzed by outrage. And unfortunately, everyone in the media appears to be motivated by nothing other than outrage inducement, portraying everything as bad and the "somebody famous" behind it as being maliciously evil as part of a greater conspiracy. That only acts to protect the moneyed interests that depend on the status quo being maintained: a massive military-industrial complex that has to defend the oil underneath a religious battleground and maintain its price to keep the frack-destruction of our own nation in place, so we can continue to build a car-centric wasteland to support massively excessive vehicles making unnecessary trips. We need to rethink the whole thing.

danvm said:

AppleInsider said:

Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Amazon have all made various ineffectual announcements about their ad policies. At the same time, they continue to allow frauds to promote and sell fake masks, bogus cures, disinfection robots that don't do anything, and disseminate false information on their social ad networks -- all while taking a cut profiting from advertising this fraudulent activity. Incredibly, this is being done in full public view.

Isn't Apple taking a cut too by receiving billions of dollars from Google every year by making their search engine the default in Safari?  Maybe Apple should stop receiving money from Google, and change the default search engine to a company with better privacy track, in addition of removing Google Search / YouTube, Facebook / Instagram, Twitter and Amazon apps.  Based in your post, it would be the best for Apple customers, right?

Apple doesn't inject fraudulent messaging in front of users and take a cut of it. YouTube very much does. Facebook/IG does. Twitter does. Apple maybe has a problem with apps that are trying to defraud people, but it actively roots those things out. 

Google pays for access to Appe's platforms, but that access does not allow it to shove ads or videos in front of people. 

dysamoria said:.

His defensiveness of Apple is weird, conspicuous, and embarrassing, at this point. It’s like he’s trying to get Apple’s attention for a job in their PR department. 

What do you mean by defensiveness?

if anything perhaps I’m a bit lazy in criticizing people who aren’t very smart but have a big platform, while pointing out the obvious in how they are comically wrong. But I’m not defending anything that needs my defense and I certainly wouldn’t want a job in PR. Those people work so hard. 

hucom2000 said:

Let’s be real here for a second. 

Of course these actions are good. Certainly. But goodness may or may not be the primary motive. 

Personally, I suspect that the primary motive is to limit the damage to the company‘s bottom line. The longer the crises, the greater the recession, the greater the loss.

It’s smart leadership. Money well spent from which ever angle you look at it. It’s a win-win.

But it’s not altruistic. For that it would have to be selfless - which it is not.

Altruism means doing things selflessly for others, it does not mean there is no subsequent benefit to the doer. Mothers are altruistically selfless, and yet we love and celebrate them and take care of them in their old age. They do benefit in some way, despite being selfless and doing things that are right but perhaps not fun to do.