EsquireCats

Apple can't refund users who go down this route. But even if Apple's cut was 0% developers wouldn't be happy.

Take Gruber's example about the New York Times - if the subscription was made through the app using IAP: then unsubscribing is a simple tap of the button. If one chooses to subscribe through the website - then unsubscribing requires the subscriber to call the NYT and sit through an account retention person's best attempts at keeping you - a clear disconnect between the ease of placing the subscription online.

We also don't need to go very far back to see what less scrupulous companies get up to: Premium SMS gave us a taste of that. With users being surreptitiously charged high and repeating fees - to the order of thousands of dollars. Worse still, unsubscribing from them was equally byzantine - obscure wait periods and hoops for the user to jump through - the prevalence of debit-based Mastercards/Visas worsens that situation.

We don't see a similar effort being made with Kindles or Nintendo/Sony/Microsoft consoles - there seems to be this idea that Apple's store is somehow cost-less while those other stores aren't?

I'm skeptical that one of Apple's most important business units is not being carefully managed with visibility all the way up the ladder.

So I'm willing to believe this story if they can provide some real evidence. Otherwise it's just like "the big hack" - which was supposedly written with loads of insider sources, but turned out to be science fiction levels of fantasy and thoroughly debunked.

So how about a public word from one of the "many" that have left the company? Because on one hand we have people that "risk... our careers and went to Jeff. We went to HR", then have the gusto to talk to business insider, but suddenly become shy when they have the freedom to? How hard is it to make a tweet?

Or just maybe, the situation isn't as BI describe, and rather their source is just a competitor or disgruntled employee trying to make waves.

Fred257 said:

This outage was done on purpose. On Sunday evening 60 minutes did a major story on Facebook from an actual whistleblower.  To get that story out of the media what better way than to create a major diversion.  Zuckerberg is a covert psychopath narcissist and I know how exactly he thinks because I have a lifetime experience with them.  Zuckerberg is a sick person who extracts energy and money from destroying our personal lives with his extraction tool called Facebook. 

This theory is insanity - the downtime not only draws more attention to Facebook, but also deprives facebook of the advertising revenue lost during the downtime.

Furthermore the news about Facebook is already widely published and this topic will continue to be news due to the ongoing congressional review of Facebook's activities.

There are so many types of chip specs that can be touted, but ultimately it's the experience that these can deliver which is important.
The A-series offers a wide range of additional processing capabilities which are not easily measured by benchmarking software. (e.g. enhancements to the AI capabilities).

Apple can't go on stage and say the device is x% faster because individual results will vary by the developer's skill in leveraging the chip's capabilities. Apple can make broad statements about improved performance - and this is what they continue to do, they don't want to be bogged down in another meaningless "MHz race". It's not particularly useful to keep reminding the audience that the device is faster than before, that is a given and isn't a novelty worth spending much time on.

Apple take a different approach with their pro-hardware because performance and capability are the reasons for purchase, here you will see a lot of detailed comparisons in commonly used pro titles, as well as details like compatibility with systems/racks/vesa mounts and so on.

KITA said:

AppleInsider said:

Despite rumors that the Apple Watch Series 7 would use the same chip as its predecessor, the wearable does feature a next-generation S7 SiP. Although the company didn't speak about the processor at all during its announcement event, subsequent materials indicate that it's up to 20% faster than the Apple Watch SE.

The lack of detail about the S7 chip suggests that the performance benefits aren't significant. 

That's because they're apparently the same t8301

https://twitter.com/stroughtonsmith/status/1437975564841803779

Apple in general aren't talking about computing performance in personal devices - the immediate (and incorrect) assumption from this is that the performance is not worth talking about. 
However Apple has been steadily shifting the focus of the discussion to features and experiences rather than performance statistics (which are arguably meaningless since the experience incorporates the snappy performance.)

The other reason: it's not a useful comparison - other smart watches have utterly pathetic processing performance, it's not even worth making the comparison.