radiospace

I see lots of people stating that the iPad Mini is doomed because it cannibalizes iPhone 7 Plus sales.  But I have both an iPad Mini and an iPhone 7 Plus and in real use they don't overlap at all.  The 7 Plus is a phone that resides in my pocket.  I'd have to gain about 20 pants sizes before I could dream of stuffing an iPad Mini in a pocket.

The Mini is a great device -- I had a full-sized iPad and when it was stolen replaced it with the Mini.  While there are definitely some uses where a full-sized iPad would be superior, there are just as many where I greatly prefer the size of the Mini.  The Mini is great for reading, holding with one hand easily while the other navigates the web, or even playing games on (Clash Royale!) where I can palm it with one hand and play the game with the other.

If I want a bigger iPad I will add the larger iPad Pro someday.  To me the regular iPad is actually the model that is kind of neither here nor there when it comes to being just the right size.

I have owned a Samsung Galaxy 6 Edge Plus since its introduction about 18 months ago.

Good lord, I hate this phone.  The list of reasons why would be as long as a ticker tape machine spitting out the losses on October 24, 1929, but one of the big ones is the curved screen.  Yes, I was enthralled with the cool-looking thing upon purchase, and imagined the infinite useful possibilities of the newfangled curved edges.  Alas, in practice, there are none.

First:  I prefer my phone without a case.  They are very dropworthy these days from my experience (including the Samsung) so why take a device that is manufactured to be as graceful and as small as possible, and make it ugly, and bigger, by putting a cheap plastic case on it.  (I actually bought a case for this phone when it was new and it was so crummy it started falling apart after three weeks, so I just ditched it).

So, with no case on, it's basically impossible to handle the phone without inadvertantly triggering the edge screen, which causes all sorts of unwanted, maddening behavior.  Then, to add insult to injury, when you do want to use the edge, it is highly unresponsive and usually takes 3 or more swipes to get it to respond.  Often when I swipe at the edge to open the quick launch window (my only use for the edge, it turns out), instead it will launch an app on the right side of the screen, usually a game that takes 45 seconds to load.  I've literally accidentally launched this game as many as five times in a row while trying to simply swipe the edge functions on screen.

All the face-down, lights-up-in-a-color when a friend calls is completely useless.

To conclude, the edge is useless, and less so, because of the endless misfires it causes with the phone.  If you need to put a case on the phone with square edges to compensate for the impossible-to-handle curved screen -- what is the purpose of the curved screen in the first place?

I go to the Apple store on occasion and lovingly hold the gently squared off edges of the iPhone 7 in my hand and dream of the day I have the Samsung paid off and can get this godforsaken curved screen out of my life.  Apple, take note.

Presumably Apple had lawyers go over its original agreement in the Upgrade Program to address contingencies such as short supply of a new product.

The people behind this lawsuit are pretty much everything that is wrong with Western Civilization.  They are exploiting laws that were intended to give people a means to redress serious life-altering negligence and fraud by corporations (i.e. you sold us baby formula with mercury in it and our infant died) and using them to try and extort money from corporations over every trivial inconvenience they can dream up (I didn't get my new iPhone until Wednesday OMG!)

I remember when the EU went after Microsoft o so long ago, many people in the Mac community were very glib about it, but I recognized it for what it was:  economic warfare waged by Europe, which is incapable of innovating and competing, versus the U.S., where we lead in cutting edge technology, software, content, ideas.... This is simply the other shoe dropping.  This isn't the end of something, it's the beginning...  The only consolation is that Brexit means our best ally all these generations will be at our side.

I think it's great that these banks want to compete with Apple in offering their own mobile payment system.  Now they just need to get to work designing a phone and a mobile operating system to host their proprietary solution.