Donvermo

fotoformat said:

Quote... "Apple itself said the final tally of trees to be planted at Apple Park is close to 9,000 specimens, most of which will be fruit trees."

I wonder what percentage will be Apple trees?

100% of them will be Apple trees, not sure which fruit they will bear though

maciekskontakt said:

Do not want to pay tax in some country - do not do business with revenue there. This is as simple as this.

What is even more simple is this:

The arrangement is legal, as a treaty between Australia and New Zealand over dual income tax claims default payments to the country where the company is controlled from. Since Apple New Zealand is owned by a parent company in Australia, the taxes for both countries are paid to the Australian Tax Office. 

If the above quote is true then Apple is just following the law. If New Zealand doesn't like this law then they shouldn't have made it in the first place. If they did not intend for the law to be used in this way then they should just introduce new legislation to limit the scope. It's that simple.

fashiony19 said:

Yeah at this point, I don't believe Apple at all that they patched these exploits. Open source your code or I'm calling BS. Today's leaks prove only one thing, that no electronic device in major use today is safe from hacking/snooping.

Nor will there ever be. Electronic devices are designed, built and programmed by humans, each stage leaves opportunities for (intentional) mistakes.
You can make it really, really, really hard for someone to get in but as long as you yourself can than someone else can too.
At least we know that iOS had actually been aimed at protecting the user as much as possible for a long time now, meanwhile Android still faces many more issues because of fundamental design flaws that ensure it will take forever before Android users will get even close to running the latest version. Android being open-source didn't help with that and over reliance on Google Play services made it worse.

This is amazing news, the implications of this invention are massive!

lmac said:

Self fulfilling prophecy. Macs are not upgraded because demand is low. Demand is low because Macs are not upgraded. Apple doesn't care about its 20 billion dollar Mac business, because it has a 150 billion dollar phone business. But I think this is short sighted. Apple could gain a lot of respect and r&d experience by continuing to advance the most powerful and easiest to use computers in the world. That's worth more than just money.

While it is hard to see what Apple is actually doing under the surface I do have to agree with some of the sentiment in this. When Jobs ran Apple (bear with me) he probably knew that selling routers, displays and all sorts of secondary equipment wasn't going to make them much profit. He probably knew this but still went ahead with it because providing all of the bricks that you need to build your Lego garden ensures that you don't even have to start looking at the competition for answers. When my amazingly designed Apple features fail because my shoddy Wifi router fails me it still feels like my Apple product failed me even when that isn't the case. Having products and services that seamless integrate with one another seemed to be their guiding principle yet it feels like it couldn't be further away these days. Seemingly discontinuing products like Apple displays, airport routers, MacMini and MacPro just because they might not be making enough profit seems to stand in contrast with that previous sentiment.

While most of this is speculation since neither I nor anyone here on the site (probably) cannot see into the minds of Apple management, this is what I as a customer see and feel. If indeed the article is right and Apple is starving groups of consumers with intent then they are playing a dangerous game, because once you lose a market completely (especially a pro market) it will become hard for Apple to convince users to return just like that.