maestro64

seanismorris said:

The Bloomberg story seems politically motivated...

There isn’t enough information do determine fault in the separate firmware incident.  It also doesn’t say if Apple resumed using SuperMicro as a supplier...

Bottom line is Apple found a problem and addressed it before it could cause damage.  We don’t know the results of their investigation into whom was responsible.  Was the firmware modified by a third party?  Was it a beta firmware? Was the hardware intercepted and modified after leaving the manufacturer, but before getting to Apple and an exploit introduced?

No enough information... but Bloomberg needs to get their facts straight before publishing rumors.

I am kind of curious what Politics are at play here.

What we do not know about this, when did this first happen, it was found in 2015, how long have modified PBA's being in production with this chip onboard. Yeah Apple is not doing business with them today, but were they before 2015 and how many if any servers have the rouge chip on the boards.

I am personally familiar with Supermicro operations I have been in their factories and familiar with their board testing and the such. To make this happen two things had to happen, first the PCB design file needs to be modified, not too hard since the CAD and Gerber files have to be shared with the PCB manufacturer and Supermicro uses Chinese companies, like most high volume manufactures. 

The next and more difficult thing to do is to have the chip placed on the board. The part would need to be bought or smuggle into the PBA facility and the pick and place machine file would need to be modified to add the part, and someone actively has to put the part into the pick and place machines. This also means the test matrix algorithms had to be modify so the chip did not interfere with other tests run on the PBA. This means company who makes the PBA has to be actively involved. I know Supermicro made some of their high performance PBA in Taiwan in their own factory, then ship PBA to the Fremont facility to be assemble into systems and tested. It sounds like Supermicro outsources the PBA to another Chinese company to place the parts on the board. 

We had the same issue last year when the 8 came out, Apple keep insisting it was carrier issue, and after a carrier update the problem went away. Apple is using a new cellular modem and i think this has something to do with it and the fact the carries have to propagate software update throughout their network.

I know when I updated my iPhone to IOS 12 immediate afterward I got a notice for a carrier update, after the update it took some time to re-establish connection to AT&T network.

Consumers are so stupid you can manipulate them into doing what every want these days, even make pay more for something they had no interest in buying in the first place. We are in the world of anonymous sources so the media can always blame the guy behind the current that no one is allow to see. 

If you are going to put your files on Google's or any third-party service, I would recommend you use encryptions software to encrypt any files you store on their drives. One, it protect it from them snooping for data they can use to target you. Second if someone else happens to gain access they most likely are not going to waste their time trying to hack your files, since there are lots of other people's data they can get to without the extra work.

I still use dropbox, for sharing files with people but I use PGP or Stuffit Delux to encrypt the data and then I provide the person with the public PGP key to de-encrypt it.

I know Gatorguy will defend Google actions, but does everyone understand that Google used all the photos people stored on their servers to do their R&D on photo recognition algorithms. Google is now selling this technology to the governments and police. Not only are you the product they sell to their customers, you also provide the necessary data for do their R&D programs. There is no evidence that Apple is doing the same thing, Apple is not using customer information stored on their service to help develop the next product. This is why Apple charges for their service since nothing comes free.

Encrypted your data then your data can not be use against you or to help other companies make money off you and not share the profits with you.

Also, if this is not enough, you are adding to the carbon footprint, due to all the power use to keep your data on a server up and running 27/7. My backup drive is off line except when it is needed.

Eric_WVGG said:

maestro64 said:

The reason Google fails is because they see no value in the hardware, this company is run by a bunch of software types and they see hardware only a means to the end like using a pencil to write on paper.

I don’t think that’s true. The Pixel and Nexus phones have consistently had the best or near-best hardware of the whole Android ecosystem, surpassed only (occasionally) by Samsung. Nest hardware happens to be great too.

But despite being reasonably good at software, Android itself sucks. Java turned out to be a lousy platform upon which to build mobile devices and it’s gotten bad enough that they’re starting over with a clean slate (Fuchsia).

And their consumer experience also sucks. Lousy marketing, and no equivalent to the Apple Stores and Genius Bars. Going back to my story about my physical therapist earlier: If he were having these problems with an iPhone, I’d tell him to just walk down the street to the Apple Store (it's eight streets away). There's no Genius Bar for Nexus phones; his emails to Google support go into a black hole. 

Ironically, I think hardware is the only problem Android phones don’t have.

The hardware is junk I used them for 7 yrs because the companies I work for made us use them since they were cheaper while everyone else I knew include my family were on iPhones since day one. I can provide you a long list of issue Android phones had over the years That I never saw on Apple products. I am not saying Apple did not have it share of issue, but most had nothing to do with Apple not caring about hardware design.

One and this still exist battery life, android phones sacrifice battery life (Charge/Discharge cycles) to over all performance. Android phones over clocked the processors to get those few extra benchmark performance points but they over heated the battery in the mean time so batteries died in 6 to 12 months. This is why Android phones had replaceable batteries for so long, but they market as a much have feature verse a necessity due to the fact they knew battery would have an early life failure. Samsung had battery fires due in part to charging the battery incorrectly and damaging the battery cell.

Android phones had memory management issue this is why they have so much DRAM, against marketed as a mush have and apple was doing something wrong since they did not give consumer more DRAM to run apps fast. It was done to cover up short comings in their hardware memory management.

Why of you think Android phone have very low resale value because they are not work much after a yr or two old. Most end up being recycled, Apple has the opposite problem, thus the reason the sales have tops our in the 70M range their phones last a long time through multiply software updates. Part of the reason Google has not solved the software update product is due to hardware limitation that exist in the Android world.

Trust me they have lots of hardware issues, and Google does not respect the value that Hardware has in the overall strategy. If google really saw value in hardware they would not allow outside companies design their hardware.