DAalseth

jimh2 said:

Will never happen. DOJ will be flipped after the next election and all of these types of events will be litigated for years and years. By the time it is resolved the things they are worried about may not even be relevent

That’s my fear. I remember when the charges against Microsoft reached this point. MS was going to be broken up into Apps, Desktops, and Servers units and IMO that would have benefited the whole industry. But then there was a change of administration and the new DoJ seized defeat from the jaws of victory and went home. The result was ~15 years of moribund Microsoft development, the Ribbon, Windows Vista, Windows 8, an inept and ultimately failed mobile strategy crippled by a Windows Everywhere mindset. So yes I want to see Google broken up. It nwould be better for everyone involved including Google. 

StrangeDays said:

Didn’t the fear mongers suggest Desert was going to be Zune (poop) brown? Oops. They never learn 

To be fair though, many of the pictures that came out did look terrible, really brown. Now I always try to preface my comments to leaks and rumours with “If this is true then…” and more people probably should. But the pictures that prompted the worst comments, did look very Hershey.

CheeseFreeze said:

Having battery charge becomes more and more important when crucial actions such as identification happen with your phone.

That’s exactly why I’m holding off on using this. My wallet never has a dead battery or is damaged by water, or breaks if I drop it. Plus I can carry cash in it. 

sloth77 said:

djames4242 said:

Another health element users will miss out on is blood oxygen sensing.

Well that’s disappointing. I’ve been waiting for this feature to return so I can finally upgrade my tired (and now deprecated) S5…

Indeed, and it is one factor against upgrading (I have the Series 7).

I expect all the hardware is in place. Once the legal stuff if sorted out Apple would just activate the feature through software. 

Stabitha_Christie said:

sflagel said:

Stabitha_Christie said:

sflagel said:

Am I wrong to believe that animals are not killed for their leather alone? Would it not be better to source real leather, certified to be a by-product only?

Some animals are raised specifically for leather but the majority of leather is a byproduct of the meat industry. 

But that is a moot point. Apple didn’t move away from leather due  concerns about animal welfare. They moved away from leather because the process of taking a hide and making it into a leather product is environmentally taxing.  There are processes to produce leather that more environmentally friendly but they aren’t scalable and they skew to being more expensive. 

The hides themselves can be used in other ways that aren’t as rough on the environment so it’s not like they are going to waste if they aren’t converted to leather.  

The leather industry itself has been in decline for a decade. There are various reasons for this and the reality is that Apple is just joining the rest of the world in dumping leather. 

You make a good point about the production process, something I did not consider. (Although to be fair, I am not sure if the production and life-cycle of fine-woven plastic bands is better.) As so many things, understanding and taxonomising the full life-cycle is difficult; humanity needs to find a way to price all factors of production: price is the only communication / data transfer that works its way fairly reliably through the value chain.

FineWoven isn’t plastic, or at least not all plastic. It is made from recycled fabrics formed into a micro-twill. There is a foam core to keep it stiff and some sort of wax or plastic coating on the sides. Apple’s stated purpose for moving to FineWoven was to reduce environmental impact. I’m extending the benefit of doubt here but I’d assume they did the research required with respect to production and lifecycle to make that claim. I guess your insulation is that they were not being truthful?

Yes it is. It’s made out of recycled fabric and most of that is plastic. iFixIt tried a match test and it melted much like polyester. I also remember shortly after they were released the head of an environmental organization said that they shed microplastics just as bad as all other plastic fabrics. So while the idea was good, like Vegan Leather, it’s just plastic.