prof

You're so horribly misguided in your smear piece but one question that keeps on popping up in my head: Why the frog do you even give a shit? Cui bono? As you've said so eloquently yourself: We Europeans have not requested your opinion and are even less looking for you to be our saviour. If Apple decides that the European market is not relevant enough to comply with the DMA; fair game to not serve it or less well then. I'm thinking hard of desirable features which are missing, I can truly live without the (botched!) Apple AI and US people do envy us for the ability to have third party app stores already... If you want to moan and bitch about bonkus laws, try the UK for the back door requirements or the US for their spy laws... oh wait, supposedly doesn't bother you due to being a US citizen: frog the f off!

The only problem with parental controls is that they're so halfassedly implemented that they're close to useless. There're whole guides explaining in detail how to circumvent them with ease and yet Apple decides to do shit about it, e.g. https://www.wikihow.com/Hack-Screen-Time. Even Android Parental Controls are much tighter nowadays than Apple.

There're so many issues which could be easily fixed that this is really laughable.

There're issues related to Apple wanting to ensure that they can milk the parents by making it hard to restrict what and how can be installed on the devices. Heck, I don't want to have to supply in credit card in the first place and rather allow my kids to spend their own money or vouchers on apps and other iAPP (you know, to learn financial responsibility), but nope. I would like to completely prevent the use of certain apps or even uninstall them remotely, but nope, uninstallation is not possible and I can't set the allowed time to zero as Apple insists the minimum is 1 minute. I also can't set time windows in which an app is allowed, either Downtime is on, or it's off so it's all or nothing for each day.

Then there's issues with the settings: Why can't I prevent making specific configuration changes like the time settings, why does it have to be pretty much all? And why can't I change or at least see the actual settings but only allow/block changes?!?

Then there's the maddening loopholes: If I want to block/limit YouTube, I want the whole f'ing phone to obey those choices! Not having to block the app and all individual country domains and then still see that if someone sends an iMessage with a link, they can just watch the "preview" in Messages as well as other messengers, or embed them in a Keynote presentation and watch them that way! Or browse to duckduckgo.com and watch them embedded on that website.

And last but certainly not least: The screen time accounting is faulty as hell; I see a screen time of 8 hours but all Apps accumulated only account to a much lower number, like 2h. WTF?!? I've mitigates the timezone and the app reinstall trick, yet something fishy is still going on.

If I had been aware of that nonsense beforehand, I would have never allowed my kids to have iPhones as the ability to limit their lust to become smartphones zombies was pretty much the only key argument in favour of doing so!

I for one do want a smaller phone but certainly not the iPhone 17 Slim but rather the iPhone 17 Mini! I still think it was the perfect form factor but unfortunately I have to take what's available. And yes: I also do want better battery life, but I disagree very much about how to achieve it. My iPhone 7 used to last a week to 10 days, my iPhone 13 and 15 only 3 to 4 days under the same circumstances despite having a better and larger battery and way more power efficient processors. Why's that? Simple, because the OS is doing a lot more shit in the background I absolutely do not care about and there's no way to effectively turn this off; low power mode is a true joke.

Fun fact: the iPhone SE 2020 was truly terrible in that regard, small battery AND a less efficient processor AND iOS doing it's background madness are a horrific combination.

mike1 said:

It's worth noting that Home Depot did not accept any type of contactless payment options. It wasn't only Apple Pay that wasn't available.

Of course. Basically the title should read: "Home Depot and H-E-B are finally arriving in the 2020s by adding contactless payments"... which is absolutely ridiculous. Here in Europe you have to search very hard to find a shop that doesn't take (contactless) payments since various radical security improvements over the last couple of years have enforced payment fulfilment providers to replace their card readers a few times and it would be ridiculous to swap outdated technology against slightly less outdated technology without contactless payment support.

Cesar Battistini Maziero said:

The video was great! People are getting so miserable.

I found the video terrible, pretty much everything about it: The plot, the acting, the filming and post-processing and the mock-up of Thailand. TBH, I didn't even think they had actually shot (much of it) in situ since a lot of the scenes were evidently not the original location they claimed to be. I wouldn't say Thailand (and especially Bangkok) is all summed up better than portrayed, but it is very different indeed.

I do agree that people are getting miserable, though. If I were the Thai tourism center, I'd have doubled down and told people: That short portrays the idea of Thailand from people who have obviously not spent much or even any time here, come and see what it's really like.