boltsfan17

dysamoria said:

“...a built-in battery...”

So, the controller is more disposable electronic trash, that has to be repurchased if you wear out the battery before you’re done with the PlayStation... or is it easily serviced to replace it with some standard battery?

Marvin said:

tommikele said:

InspiredCode said:

Although the mother is in part to blame, there really should be upper limits on the amount an app is allowed to collect for virtual currency. 

Limits or lack thereof have nothing to do with this. She should not get some of the blame as you say. She should get 100% of the blame. The idea Apple or the developer is responsible is almost offensive.

It's not offensive in the least to suggest the developer is responsible when they designed the game - a game aimed at children - with a bottomless pit of disposable and overpriced purchase options that are tied in with the gameplay.

https://www.androidauthority.com/sonic-forces-speed-battle-android-800455/

"Sonic Forces: Speed Battle is a pay-to-win game. The game has in-app purchases that cost anywhere from $0.99 to $99. These allow you to skip the cool down timer on the loot box you get for winning a race. These loot boxes contain in-game currency and power-ups that increase your performance during PvP battles. Since the more powerful player tends to win and gain even more currency and power-ups, you can see how this could be a problem."

Sega is involved in the gambling industry, they have made similar revenue from actual gambling machines as they do from games. It's a dangerous combination to have a gambling company producing games for a large scale global audience of children with direct payment options:

https://www.tweaktown.com/news/69459/sega-merge-pachinko-game-dev-branches-together/index.html

Apple is a middleman but they share some responsibility as they are aware of the size of the transactions. There's no reasonable justification that anyone, adult or child, would pay $16k on a game in such a short period of time. Even people who spend $2k per month on Candy Crush are considered to have addiction issues. The gambling industry has regulations for this reason.

She left a six year old unattended for months on end and it took months for her to pay attention to the credit card charges. She must have some load of money to not notice until it got well over $10k. $2500 in one day.Who did she think was running up the bills? The husband/partner? Seriously.

I get what you are saying ... Wow. 

As the linked article says, she claims the bank told her they were likely fraudulent charges originally - that could come from stolen card details:

"The reason I didn’t call within 60 days is because Chase told me it was likely fraud — that PayPal and Apple.com are top fraud charges."

She also assumed the charges could have been a mistake, there have been times companies bill people incorrectly and fix the error. If it was mistaken billing, there would be no reason to cancel the card. The bank rejected her fraud report after finding they were legitimate purchases. Sometimes there turns out to be more to these stories but there's absolutely no downside in having responsible measures in place to protect customers from this as a default and that's what the parent suggests. I can't see any legitimate reason why people would prefer there to be no protections in place, Apple could easily remove them on request.

MplsP said:

This is interesting and was one of my concerns about including 5G - there's a both a financial and a performance cost with no benefit. Because of the test, it's hard to say how accurate it is, but another consideration is the fact that Android phones are able to take advantage of the 5G modem being built into the processor where Apple is required to use a discrete chip -this has financial, power and space costs. We'll see how this shapes up once more real world data is available. 

Long term this is another reason Apple will want to make its own 5G modem. They can integrate and optimize it far better than a discrete 3rd party chip.

fastasleep said:

mushmash said:

I’ll be switching off 5G completely as there’s not really any coverage to speak of around here anyways.

That makes zero sense. 

What makes zero sense - turning off a feature that isn't useful or needed and takes extra battery life? Or how everyone is pushing for 5G when there's no real use for it? Or maybe just your comment?

mushmash said:

I’ll be switching off 5G completely as there’s not really any coverage to speak of around here anyways.

I still think rushing to include 5G was pointless, and driven by android manufacturers who always need to include as many features as possible if they wanna ship more than four units.

Sure, future-proofing is all well and good, but 5G won’t be of any real interest for another year or two, and 4G is still more than enough for normal people.

You are, of course, completely right. A couple months ago PC Mag did a comparison of 5G coverage and speeds. The bottom line is speeds were marginally better and sometimes actually slower than LTE speeds, coverage was widely variable and latency was not different enough to matter. Of note, LTE speeds in Canada were actually better than 5G speeds in the U.S. And not one person on this site has been able to give a real life example of a use that requires 5G in a smartphone. 

Someday 5G may be important, but certainly not today and probably not for at least 1-2 years. I know I'll get jumped on for this statement, but we were having the exact same discussion a year ago and the zealots were all touting how fast 5G was being rolled out. Well, here we are a year later and virtually nothing has changed. For now, if you need a new phone, go ahead and get an iPhone 12, but don't rush out and get one just for 5G. 

MacPro said:

Blood pressure, as well as O2 level, seems to be an obvious new addition but I've long wondered why measuring the body temperature of the wearer isn't already part of the Watch's bag of tricks, how hard could it be?

bestkeptsecret said:

Does the iPhone automatically detect that it is mounted on a tripod to up the exposure time to 30s? Do I need to use some setting for it?

Another query I had was, is the iPhone 2x Zoom lens a fixed lens or a moving one? When zooming between 1x and 2x, is it optical? Seems like a silly question, but I was always curious about it.

There seems to be a basic difference between the White Balance on the 2 cameras.