misa

nht said:

macxpress said:

gatorguy said:

Android phones also accept MDM as a quick search would show. So yes the POTUS phone will still need a heavily modified operating system on a extremely limited function handset. 

Android might accept MDM but its extremely limited in what they can do compared with iOS. You can completely lock down an iOS device with an MDM, even if the device it wiped when the device checks back into Apple to reactive, Apple's servers will point the divide back to the MDM for configuration. There is no way around this for any user that happens to get ahold of a device thats managed via MDM.

Since Android devices have many different versions of the OS it makes it very hard to manage a device (or devices) since some may not support certain features.

Android MDM is more flexible than iOS.  You can lock out specific apps whereas in iOS it appears to be all or nothing.

Whether it's easier to break the MDM on Android is a different issue.

On Android I can lock up the Twitter app on my daughter's phone at will (which might be kinda a good thing on POTUS' phone too...).

On iOS not so much.

That's the point. You don't want an Enterprise phone to be able to anything BUT what the Enterprise allows. So Android MDM is an after-thought.

Using it to mess with your kids is not what it is for. You're an adult, if your kid won't listen to you, just take the phone away. When your President won't stop tweet-storming like a baby, you can't just take it away.

AppleInsider said:

it wasn't until Thunderbolt 3 that the bandwidth of the protocol fully caught up with the idea. 

And still hasn't. I'm sorry, but WHY would you buy another desktop to run off your laptop? That is what this is. You are using the CPU and RAM of your laptop to drive what is essentially another desktop-sized unit that contains just the Expansion bus.

Like OK, I'll bite, Maybe if I had a MacBook Pro, or MacPro where the "Base" unit exports 32 PCIe 3.0 lanes, this might be a worthwhile investment so long as the MacBook Pro, MacMini or Mac Pro can be replaced every year or two like an iPhone. But that will never be the case. A PC/Mac is supposed to last 8 years, but the individual upgrades (eg RAM and GPU) are supposed to be switched out every 4 years due to performance creep in software/games. USB-C/ThunderBolt 3 however only exports 4 PCIe 3.0 lanes. So this means you are not going to be buying this thing at all, because there is no point sticking a GTX 1080 in there if it's only going to run at 1/4 performance. You may as well buy a Sager Notebook with a GTX 1080 in it and forgo this sillyness.

But then you wouldn't have a Mac.

Like geez Apple, get with the program, Go back to the Mac Pro 2012 cheese grater design, we will forgive you. You can't tell me you took all the tools for making those and dumped them in the ocean like Delorean. 

I would be OK with Apple migrating the "trashcan" Mac Pro to the MacMini design and putting a more modest CPU/GPU in it, as that design is pretty much ideal for some of us who need better Monitor options (*cough*Cintiq*cough*) and the Intel iGPU is way too useless. But that compact design is terrible for the rest of us who need high end GPU's and several hard drives to do work.

Meanwhile, still nobody is making DDR3 or DDR4 RAM drives.

anome said:

I would love to discover that Apple were just leaking stuff about OLED and "bezel-free" displays to misdirect everyone. So all the Android manufacturers scramble to get their edge-to-edge, massive OLED display phones out, only for Apple to produce something else that no-one sees coming.

I mean, you can see from that render what the main problem with an edge-to-edge display - you can't hold it firmly without obscuring the edges of the display, which are also touch-enabled so you might end up activating something you don't want to.

I don't see "edge-to-edge" ever being a good thing, for exactly those reasons, and I hate OLED's I've seen in devices thus far. They always look dull.

I don't see Apple ever switching to OLED's for anything but iPod's and the Apple Watch. If the screen is larger than 3", the clarity of what Apple has been using so far is by far superior to what we've been seeing in competitors products.

Likewise I don't see the "home button" going away. If you've ever had the displeasure of using an Android device like this, you'd know why. You need a tactile button in order to orient the device without looking at it. You also need it for visually-impaired people to find it to use Siri. Android phones have more stupid useless buttons on them. 

It's the strangest thing, I've never, ever, seen two Android devices have any common UI language. So my Dad handed me his $50 phone he got off Amazon and asked me to do something with it and nothing on it is intuitive at all. Then I was handed my Dad's sister's phone and I mentioned that she had like 100 applications running on it (eg, never actually closed a web browser window, opened a new one every time.)

Like please, Android does a lot of sinful things, and I really wish that analysts would realize that Apple is in no hurry to steal Android phone manufacturers worst ideas. The entire removing of the 3.5mm jack on the iPhone 7 obviously happened without consulting enough of the Apple user base otherwise they would have realized what a boneheaded idea it was and would have at least included a second lighting connection or a usb-c connection for digital phones while using the lightning for charging. If they remove the headphone connector from the iPad then that will not go over well with people who use it for gaming or netflix. If Samsung didn't create such a (literal) bomb with their last phone, that might have been enough to push people away from Apple to Samsung, but nope. I think we're entering the market stable period where people are loathe to switch their devices a second time and have to re-buy software/apps all over again (which is why Blackberry, Nokia and Microsoft have all failed in the SmartPhone market.)

Coming back to the entire OLED idea. It's been suggested ever since the iPhone 4S, and Cook has pooh-poohed it.
https://www.cnet.com/news/oled-displays-theyre-awful-says-apples-ceo/

"If you ever buy anything online and really want to know what he color is, as many people do, you should really think twice before you depend on the color from an OLED display," Cook said.

So I don't expect OLED's in any of Apple's phone's, tablets or iMac's for the foreseeable future.

williamh said:

slprescott said:

> "...concerned that tampering in third-party products -- for instance by spy agencies -- could create serious vulnerabilities."

I'd like to think this concern is unjustified paranoia... but maybe not.

Not unjustified paranoia. I'll make a long story short.  Bought a Cisco switch for work from a company in New York.  The inner packaging indicated it started in Australia and shipped through Hong Kong before it got to me, which was weird. A colleague who is a kind of uptight IT auditor (great guy, but facts are facts) asked me how I knew it was genuine.  Based on the weirdness of the shipping, I answered that I don't know that it's genuine.  Everything looked just perfect, the switch, all the manuals, Cisco magnet pad thing, etc.  We never powered it on.  I contacted Cisco and eventually got to someone who asked for chassis serial numbers (on the logic board, not on the outside of the unit).  Cisco said they had no manufacturing record of it. It was fake. The FBI came over to my office. We wound up turning it over to them. 

That's actually quite interesting, but also consider that you maybe bought it from someone who sourced it from Hong Kong, which is where quite a bit of counterfeit stuff gets from mainland China into the domestic shipping chain. Anytime you see "drop ship" businesses on eBay and such, this is exactly what they are doing. eg you order from X English-speaking company, typically Canada, UK or Australia, they turn around and call their drop shippers in HK, and they just find one and send it.

Your business may not have been a target of the counterfeit, but whomever you sourced it from should have their ass kicked for it.

Meh, people are kinda looking at the wrong horse here.

Basically the investigation was "Apple's products are stupidly expensive, and LG, Samsung, et al are making cheaper products, but the RoBellUs (Rogers-Bell-Telus) Cartel is marking them up to the same prices as the Apple products because (supposedly) Apple is telling them to." Rather just cross out the "Apple is telling them to" and replace it with "because the Canadian Wireless Cartel decided by themselves to do so." That is what they do with services, and even their wireline solutions. Amazing how everyone decides to raise their prices at exactly the same time.