DAalseth

Calling this a’spurious case’ is being generous. This is a classic legal extortion attempt. 

I think you’re spot on with this. Look at Samsung and the other companies that have brought out folding phones. They sell, as a top tier niche product. Most people don’t see any point to spending the extra money. Most people just want a phone, not a fancy, expensive, folding device for more money to do the same thing. It will sell to a small portion of the population. Lotus makes cars for them too. But the rest of us will stick with our flat iPhones and Toyotas. 

robin huber said:

I assume any Chinese app or hardware device is insecure. 

In the case of these apps you wouldn’t necessarily have known. They had to dig into the ownership chain to figure it out. There was a report that came out yesterday that a number of the large investors in SpaceX are Chinese front companies. They work very hard to hide.

What’s the old saw: If you aren’t paying for a service, YOU are the product.
Free VPNs should be viewed with utter distrust. They have to pay for the servers and bandwidth somehow. If you aren’t paying for it, then they are selling your data to someone to pay for it.

decoderring said:

Wow, I think this is the first time I’ve ever not wanted to install an update.

I’ll do it because there are likely some security updates, but I wish it were possible to not have all the AI stuff that, for me, just creates bloat.

If it’s any consolation, for the first time in a long time when I updated it did NOT turn Apple Intelligence on. I have it disabled and much to my surprise it stayed that way. Of course YMMV.