jdiamond

I feel like maybe there could be some compromise here, because Aritags are SO useful to be able to track stolen/lost items.  Maybe they could extend the stalker warning period to say 4-8 hours?  Sure, then a stalker could follow you for a single trip, but then that's it until he plants a new airtag on you.  And it's unlikely, because after that 8 hours, the stalker would be caught having done it.  But meanwhile, 8 hours could be a lot more helpful in tracking thieves.

Sure, you can conjure up specific scenarios where this could still be bad, but let's not pretend any of this is fool proof.  You could always stalk someone by just taping an airtags charging case to a car and using Find My.  Yet there is so much positive upside with theft protection.

And maybe this is the real solution?  It's a little more expensive, but now we have to stick Airpods on items we wish to track?

avon b7 said:

[...] Apple took a huge risk in putting all its chip related eggs into one basket mostly in Taiwan. It's paid off so far but the risk (political, economic, natural disaster or otherwise) remains and they are seeking to change that slowly. A wise move. 

Apple keeps trying and failing.  They tried so hard to make Samsung work as a second source, but they just weren't good enough. Apple even tried out Intel, but they weren't good enough either.  As you go down that list, foundries just get less cutting edge.

Seems like Android devices are ALSO talking to iPhones over SMS.  iPhone users don't get proprietary Android messaging features like tap back icons, full resolution photos and movies, etc.  For years, the most annoying thing was Android had a proprietary way to handling group message threads that iPhone's could not emulate.  As a result, everything broke apart - you received an initial group text, but if you replied, you were replying to one person, and all kinds of strange things happened from then on, where you'd get a reply from one person out of context, but not see the group replies.  It was crazy.  

ALL the hardware phone companies were not incentivized to collaborate on a unified rich messaging platform. Only software companies like WhatsApp tried to do that.  Which Apple freely allows on their platform.

danox said:

...

Full Mac OS on a iPad keep dreaming (maybe when Microsoft makes good competitve ARM hardware with an actual Apple level port of their Windows OS to a different chip architecture which is fully compatible to the systems of the past?)

That's how I've always felt - until I tried it.  You can try it, too - just run a VNC app that connects to the screen of your Mac Laptop.  It sounds like it would work well, but it just didn't.  The main reason was the screen size, the GUI element size, and accuracy of controls.  These are not impossible details to fix - and of course, the old 11" Macbook was somewhat useful.   But it's just not as big a win as you might think - I encourage you to give it a shot. The rumored 16" or 20" iPads might help this, but they won't be portable.  So does a touch based MacOS actually work, or are you really just looking for a 12" Macbook replacement?  (Those I found incredibly useful.)

I thought this article was pretty funny and a great way to illustrate the flaws in the arguments against Apple.  My only regret is he felt ha had to go so over the top to make sure everyone knew this was just an April Fool's joke.  (Come to think of it, maybe that's because many people would find this completely believable?)