misa

AppleInsider said:

Where people have the money, the SE offers a unique proposition: an entry-level smartphone which doesn't make major sacrifices. The device has the same A9 processor as the iPhone 6s, and even the same 12-megapixel camera, along with Apple Pay support. The only serious drawbacks are a 4-inch display and a lack of 3D Touch, which may not matter to some people.

Indeed, many people prefer smaller phones, and newcomers may not care that bigger screens are available -- at least initially. This group could include children and teens, if just when their parents are rich enough to splurge on a state-of-the-art iPhone.

The smaller screen is not a drawback, if I had known this was in the pipe I'd have bought it instead of the 6s. But that's fine. The real question will be how long the battery life is compared to the 6s.

16GB is fine to get people to use/switch to the iPhone, unlike an Android device, it's actually rather seemless if you have enough space or not until you try to store all your music on the device.

16GB is the same size as the iPod Classic's first three generations (2001-2004) and since then music compression has improved, and power consumption has improved.

But a 16GB iPod still costs 250$ and the 7th generation Nano is still available and only in 16GB size. So Apple clearly makes a lot of money of the 16GB size because they likely have a very good deal on 16GB NAND chips.

9secondkox2 said:

Just another attempt to use the search engine as a way to leverage away from the competition. 

The only real reason for this. 

It's kinda difficult to say that the user agent of a search engine even matters. Most websites just see "GoogleBot" and just strip the the parts of the site that they don't want Google crushing the site with. For example, on some sites I operate, we send Google past the "Cookies are required to proceed" process so it can index the page but not the paywall content.

AppleInsider said:

There are other products that Apple could also upgrade, such as bringing 802.11ac Wi-Fi support to the AirPort Express, but those would be unlikely to warrant stage time at an Apple keynote.

There better be a Mac Pro refresh (or a move back to the 2010 tower design where GPU's can be upgraded) in the cards, because it's pretty pathetic to sell/update for like Final Cut Pro X, and not have any usable Mac Desktop in that cycle (currently 2013 model.) 

Also, please, a real laptop. Not a single model is viable for 4K/8K video, let alone upcoming gimmick VR visors. The existing models are too thin and too weak. 

It feels like Apple is catering to the "photoshop" creators, but telling video content creators to go back to Windows.



I hope everyone realizes that external GPU's are dead in the water. Why would you pay 800$ for an external GPU, only to cripple it to 4 PCIe lanes? Especially on a laptop. And these external bridge boxes cost hundreds of dollars. 

A fool and their money is soon parted speaks pretty loudly for that. You'd be better off saving the money spent on the external bits and buying the most amount of laptop CPU+GPU power as possible, and unfortunately the trend for the last 5 years has been to move backwards with weaker CPU's and weaker GPU's in all but the top-end part, and the top end part ends up being crippled by poor cooling due to the trendy "thin" ultrabook platform. Ughh.

AppleInsider said:
...

Similar legislation has been proposed in New York by Assembly Members Matthew Titone and Walter T. Mosley, while U.S. Senators Diane Feinstein and Richard Burr are expected to introduce a comparable measure at the federal level soon.

"It's just that I have a basic fundamental belief this is very important and that no American company should be above the law," Feinstein said regarding her proposal.

The level of support for these measures in their various chambers remains unclear, and neither the California nor New York bill has yet made it out of committee. Meanwhile, Apple and the FBI continue to spar through the media and the bureau has appealed to New York courts for the reversal of a decision that went in Apple's favor.

This just shows how out of touch politicians are when they aren't being bribed by the industries for tax breaks.

There's two loop holes introduced by doing this:
a) Apple moves the "OS Development" outside of California, or even outside of the US (eg to Canada, or Sealand or maybe Apple will build a moonbase, who knows) , like the actual OS development will continue to be done in California, but the signing will be done somewhere where the keys are out of reach.
b) Apple says "bite me" and "open-sources" the entire toolchain and sources necessary to build iOS's kernel/firmware, thus allowing Mac developers to recompile iOS without the backdoors. This would be the nuclear option, and have the consequences of enabling jailbreaking/piracy. Of course they would have to do this with OS X as well, otherwise the backdoors will just get installed into OS X.

The license itself for iOS can still say "only for Apple-branded devices" and thus still theoretically be only for Apple, but Apple doesn't have to open source all of iOS, all the stock apps that aren't part of iCloud functionality wouldn't need to be part of it.