applefan84

Leftklick said:

As long as we are still talking about *charging*, I think we are missing the point entirely. What is the main problem of electric mobility? It is range. How can that be solved? Larger batteries? Maybe. Faster charging? Probably. But wait. Is the problem really RANGE? Or is it the time it takes to CHARGE a battery? Well, the former is a result of the latter. So, why bother trying to solve the (re)charging problem? Why put up with the time it takes to complete this process? Why not just swap out the battery? Think about it. Changing a battery could be a matter of seconds if perfected. Who would care about range if all you needed to do was to drive through some battery-swapping point, pay with your Apple-ID and off you went. Apple has the resources to implement swapping (not charging) stations and to perfect the process. It is all about standards. If Apple sets the standard for swappable battery packs then other car manufacturers could participate by supporting the same system. If Apple lets them. Which they probably would have to. No point any other way, really.

First of all, let me disclose that I currently have an electric car, Chevrolet Spark EV and I can tell you that for me, range and recharge time are not issues at all.

My car has a17 kWh battery, and it goes roughly 80 miles on a full charge. To fully recharge an empty battery, it takes 20 hours on a Level 1 charger, 4 hours on a Level 2 charger (which I have at home), and 20 minutes on a Level 3 DC fast charger (available all over California). 

With that in mind consider typical usage. When I leave in the morning my battery is fully charged. I go to work, I do some shopping, etc, which takes me no more than 20 miles, so when I get home, I plug into a level 2 charger and my battery is full again in less than 1.5 hours. If I go to a place that offers free public charging (there are plenty of those) then I don't even have to plug in at home. 

Long stiry short, for local commuting, the current EVs with current charging technology are more than sufficient to meet our needs. We just need to get out of the gasoline car mentality of driving it until we are nearly out of fuel and refilling. If you do that with an EV, you will have a problem. Luckily that's not how we use EVs. We immediately refill the little capacity we used in the day so we actually never worry about refilling. It is a huge convenience compared to going to the gas station every week. I'm not even talking about the cost savings associated with EVs. 

The only thing left is long distance travel. Tesla offers access to their supercharger network and for non-Tesla EVs there are stations from NRG EVgo, and a few other companies. When I go to San Francisco Airport, which is 130 miles from my house, I leave with a full battery, I stop at an EVGo station about halfway, I spend 20 minutes recharging and I am on my way. With a Tesla or Chevy Bolt I wouldn't even need to stop. My point is, stopping for 20-30 minutes to recharge isn't such s big deal. And that's with current technology. ChaDeMo and CCS plugs pump current at 50 kW, while Tesla superchargers run at 120 kW. In future, CCS will run at 350 kW, meaning that it will recharge a car capable of traveling 300 miles, in less than 1 hour. 

Looking a little further into the future, we could have highways that inductively charge EVs. There is a lot of research in that area, with the BMW i8 already capable of inductive charging. 

Finally, Tesla already offered battery swapping for Model S, but after a trial run they discontinued the practice. They found that almost no customer was willing to pay $60 for a battery swap, when they could recharge their own battery in 30 minutes for free. It makes perfect sense, you've been driving 200 miles, stopping for 30 minutes to stretch your legs and grab a bite to eat is perfectly plausible, after all, charging stations are located near restaurants and other retail spaces, so it's very convenient to do that. 

brian green said:

The sooner Apple makes it to where NOONE can crack the encryption, the better.  Government is never one to help in the privacy of any citizen, but will do everything they can to spy on absolutely everyone.  


The irony here is that this case throws the bu!!sh!t flag in the face of the NSA who's been quietly telling the world that they have everyone's data already.  If that were literally the case, the FBI could walk over to the NSA and get everything they wanted without the phone at all.  This obviously isn't the case, so the NSA isn't doing what people thought they were.  

Apple needs to improve encryption and make it bombproof so that no one, even them, can access anything against some's will.  

Unfortunately there is no easy way to make a 4-digit pin bombproof. If the phone didn't wipe out data or block itself after a certain number of failed attempts, you can break into it in less than 2 days, by simply typing all possible 10 000 unique combinations. If you have a piece of software that can try pin codes for you, the process will take mere minutes (assuming a hardware-imposed delay of 80 milliseconds between each attempt).

So the fact that the phone "self-destructs" after 10 unsuccessful attempts is the only thing that makes it secure, and this is the feature Apple is being asked to circumvent by creating a new version of iOS, that does not have this feature and installing it on the San Bernardino iPhone, something Tim Cook calls a piece of "software that doesn't exist today". Apple should do everything they can to keep it that way because they are the only ones in a position to create this software. Without access to the iOS source core, even the smartest hacker/computer scientist, will find it difficult to circumvent this feature.

Also, to all the security experts saying that Apple can create this version of iOS for the specific UUID of the recovered iPhone, can they guarantee that I would not be able to install it on a different iPhone by spoofing the UUID. My point is that if Apple complies with this request, there could potentially be catastrophic and irreparable consequences for the many hundreds of millions of iOS devices (assuming the majority of Apple's 1 billion active devices are iOS devices)

Apologies for going off topic here, I just felt like getting this frustration off my chest.

josha said:

Didn't Apple say it was impossible to break into the latest iPhones and iOS ?

But if it has the touch entry, hasn't the FBI tried the touch of that dead terrorist's fingers.

I recall when a well know top end car had a touch function to start it,
 thieves who took over a few of those cars from the owners,
  cut off a few fingers so they could leave the owner at the roadside.

That is correct. FBI doesn't want Apple to break into the iPhone. They want Apple to remove the mechanism whereby multiple failed attempts to enter the passcode would result in all data being wiped. With that mechanism out of the way, they will try to brute-force the passcode without the risk of wiping the phone in the process.