Naiyas

I’ve refrained from commenting on this “reveal” for some time because I wanted to have a proper think about it. My view still isn’t fully developed but it runs down the following line…

There are many bad things in the world that occur when you embrace freedom of the individual and we accept those risks… freedom of speech implies that someone (somewhere) will find what you have to say offensive, but to limit it actually makes the world a worse place to live because you push the perceived hate underground and it will therefore manifest itself in other ways.

Privacy is another one. By executing this algorithm on your phone (ignoring the legal stuff around T&C etc) you are effectively having an illegal search performed on your private information or property. The reason may be valid in this instance, CSAM, but it is never the less an illegal search of your personal property taking the view that you are guilty (the act of conducting the matching search) until proven innocent (the lack of matches found).

Whilst I can get behind the reason, I just can’t get behind the method of execution. It’s very much like “curation creep”.  We see on the App Store things like porn apps being banned. Do I want them? No. Is that a good enough reason to ban them entirely? Not sure, but it’s Apple’s store and they are free to make that choice as store owner. But forcing a privacy invading search of your photos onto your phone is a step too far in my opinion. Search my iCloud Photo library on your servers by all means to ensure compliance with the service’s T&C, but to operate it on “my” phone… not convinced.

If this is how they want to go then perhaps they should treat all iPhone users like employees of Apple and provide iPhones to us for a small fee with the premise that we never ever own it ourselves. That way at least they have the clear legal right to search the phone just like your employer does when they give you a work device.

I have several and have been using them for a variety of purposes, though mostly for keys as I can’t tell you how many sets have had to be replaced over the years. Some of them are used as luggage tags and one in particular is used on my child’s school bag (they are 4.5 years old).

In the later use case I can tell you for certain that the three day notification period is for audible alerts only. My partner sometimes takes our child out for play dates without me and after a short time (a couple of hours) gets a notification on their iPhone that an AirTag is “following” them in close proximity. They know what it is so it’s not an issue and we share our location with each other anyway.

But even in the few days we have had the AirTag it has already served it’s purpose as we had to locate the school bag as it was left behind somewhere in a zoo. Rather than retracing our steps we simply opened Find My and saw it had been handed in at lost property, so from a real world use case perspective it has performed flawlessly.

As for those complaining about “stalking” why would I use an AirTag for that purpose? The device is directly associated with an AppleID so it’s dead easy to file charges once it is found. If I was going to stalk someone there’s plenty of other trackers available that can be bought and used, without the ability to be so easily identified, for about the same price as an AirTag 4-pack and also don’t need to rely on the iPhone network for its data. Hell if you really wanted to track someone you could just mirror their SIM card and use that to monitor them via the cell network using equipment that can be acquired for a reasonable cost if you look hard enough.

This is just another case of Apple bashing for the sake of it and focussing on the negative without regard to practical realities.

I was looking forward to the Apple Silicone release to see what benefits it would bring and in some ways it delivered, in others it has hobbled. For me, I see the pros and cons as follows across all of the new models:

• Pro - Massively extended battery life which is an important factor to me (MacBooks only)
• Pro - Mixed core chip to split workloads better between UI and OS operations versus Application performance
• Pro - Onboard ML speed boost
• Pro - Upgraded I/O in USB 4
• Con - Supports only one external display (I use 2 external 4K displays, plus the laptop screen when at a desk)
• Con - 720p Facetime camera (MacBooks only)
• Con - Limited to 16GB of RAM
• Con - No eGPU support (plays into the external monitor limitation)

I don't have an issue with the lower port count as I only ever use a maximum of two on my existing laptop anyway. A design refresh would have been nice, but that wouldn't affect the above list of pros and cons from my perspective. In balance the cons outweigh the pros for my workflow and use case and so I will not be buying in at this point and instead will shift my resources to an iPad Air 4 and wait to see what the next model release will look like.

elijahg said:

StrangeDays said:

docno42 said:

elijahg said:

I notice the price is the same as before, so rather than dropping the price due to cheaper CPU and increasing accessibility for people, they're just absorbing the extra profit. Great, that's the Cook Way. ߙ䦬t;/div>

You aren’t buying a collection of parts, your buying functionality.

If you don’t think the value proposition works for you, don’t buy it.  Frankly I’m surprised they didn’t raise the price - this little thing called inflation means they are already grossing less just from that alone.  

If you want cheap crap there are plenty of other vendors to choose from out there.  Have at it.   I have no problem paying for a better experience.  I originally typed out paying more for a better experience, but comparing previous Air to this one you aren’t paying more for a machine that appears to be better in every way.

Yup - damn those greedy Apple bustards!

Lol yeah these dudes crack me up, they’re used to lemonade stand economics and that’s about it. No real world experience in product, don’t grasp value propositions, likely have never run a business, etc etc.. Just IT nerds doin what they do best — bitchin’. 

You're the one with no real world experience, if Macs are such great value why is it a Mac with almost identical specs to a Windows machine is so much more expensive? A Dell XPS is cheaper than a Mac, has the same specs and is cheaper. And surely if "running a business" is a way to know value proposition, every business would be full of Macs, but they aren't. Why do you think that is?

All TCO results from all companies that have a mixed deployment show that for equivalent spec'd Macs and PCs, Mac's come out better value. They last longer (that's a bigger denominator in the equation) and have less support costs (that's a lower addition to the numerator). So whilst they may cost more upfront, they cost far less per year of ownership compared to the equivalent PC.

briananon said:

I wonder what this means for those of us who used to pay for MobileMe and still have no way to easily merge iCloud accounts. My dilemma is that my family of 6 is tied to my iCloud account via my old me.com address, and we use that for 2TB of iCloud sharing, calendar sharing, etc, but all of my Apple iTunes content and music is tied to my other email address, which I had long before MobileMe. I haven't looked that closely, but I'm guessing my only way to get to Premier will be to merge everything under one account. I'd pay the extra $5 to get the extra services, but a family sharing migration to my other iCloud account sounds like a risky/horrible proposition.

I felt a bit of your pain a few years ago. I used to have a similar issue with split accounts with different subscriptions on them but I self migrated all of them (and the family sharing) under the iTunes led account. However, I still have two iCloud/Mac/Me accounts that are split at the country level... one is for the US where most of my content is held and is treated as my primary, the other is in the UK.

Why two countries you may ask? Some US or UK apps I need (mostly banking, but there are others) aren't available in the UK or US App stores respectively. So, in order for me to ensure I have full app based access to these on my iPhone I have to retain multiple AppleID's locked to each country. In addition, migrating or merging these from one country to another would result in a significant loss of content. A niche issue I'm sure, but globalisation in my eyes just doesn't exist in reality and the digital world is where it really should!