tjwolf

SpamSandwich said:

The overreliance on China for manufacturing and growth put company earnings at risk. What bugs me is Tim Cook was on an advisory council to the White House, so he should’ve seen the tariffs and trade issues coming from far away and spent more time trying to insulate Apple from the inevitable.

What could he have done?  Magically create a new market for iPhone?  Like every other multi-national CEO and mainstream economist, they advised against a trade war.  But our current US President prefers to listen to his "gut" rather than intelligent advice.  He thinks "trade wars are easy to win".  His gut tells him so.

The trade war with China intensified fairly quickly.  Strong words on both sides.  Just as the US has gung-ho "patriots" joining the President in his MAGA nonsense, so do the Chinese.  From what I've read, anti-American sentiment has grown rapidly - individual citizens have begun buying more Chinese goods - some companies have begun actively forbidding the use of Apple smartphones at work.  Some folks describe the sales slide as a side effect of a cooling Chinese economy - I don't think so.  It's an anti-American sentiment that has developed solely because of the Trump tariffs.

“After around 45 minutes of gameplay, the battery life was at 82 percent, meaning it used less power than the iPhone XR for a similar-length gameplay period.” - actually, it’s pretty much a toss-up: the Note 9 has a 4000mAh battery and used 720mAh.  The XR has a much smaller 2942mAh battery and used 735mAh.

I’m all in on the Apple ecosystem but have to agree with those who think the Apple TV is not one of Apple’s best products.   My biggest beef, really, has come recently: I bought two Apple HomePods and paired them so I could use them as a replacement for my TV’s crappy built-in ones.   It works well when I use Netflix or Amazon on my ATV4.  But god forbid I involve AirPlay - as in streaming something from our iPad to he ATV4 - the ATV4 then reverts back to using the TV speakers.  When I’m done and go back to watching via an app on the ATV4, I then have remember to manually set the sound destination back to the HomePods :-(.  Everything is Apple here - and they can’t make it work right.  That’s just crap.  Actually, the same behavior occurs from one particular app too: WatchAir.  This app receives a stream, via wifi, from an over-the-air antenna in another part of the house and sends the received channel to the TV.  It, too, reverts the ATV4 to using the TV speakers.

Between the ATV4 and the two HomePods, it’s almost $900 of Apple equipment - and its a pretty crappy experience.

Which is a shame - I love all my other Apple gear.  I think Apple is still treating ATV as a hobby - despite what Cook claimed a few years ago.

Good points - but what’s with your obsession with VPN and banking?  No, you don’t need VPN to do banking securely.

When I first got the X, I missed the percentage indicator most.  But not so important to me anymore.  The lack of indication when Airpods are connected (or, more importantly, when they failed to connect) is a lot more annoying.

You’ve also taught me something new: the location services icon: I actually never thought about what that icon was for.  Now I do - but I still don’t understand how that’s useful in any way.  Other than in the debugging case you mentioned.

Aside from what others have already stated about OLED being more efficient than equivalent resolution LCD (due to no need for constant backlighting), the author’s choice of using an iPhone X vs. Xs to make his point is also a bit silly - didn’t he know they *both* used OLED??