hackintoisier

Apple to remove popular DOS emulator for iOS from App Store

July 2021

This is why sideloading or alternative app stores would be great on iPadOS and iOS. Here we have a perfectly legal app that has been in the store for years, now suddenly being booted, arbitrarily.

There are so many ideas for Apps that Apple would never allow in its App Store. Here we have Apple restricting trade between a perfectly legal app and would-be customers. Who is Apple to restrict such trade? Just a matter of time before some government some where says “no” to Apple’s shenanigans.

Meanwhile, despite Apple’s locked down ecosystem, which allegedly exists in the name of security, Pegasus has shown us that the locked down iPhone isn’t as secure as Apple lets on.

Amazon UK allegedly destroys millions of unsold items a year, including Apple products

hackintoisier

June 2021

So much waste. Destroy unused products rather than put them to use through charity. I mean I understand capitalism and all and having a sticker price, but it seems so wasteful to destroy a perfectly functional product rather than let someone else use it, even if for free. Just my opinion.

Texas homes heat up as power companies alter smart thermostats

hackintoisier

June 2021

The alternative in the worst case could be rolling blackouts. Demand response is a cost effective way to shave the peak load so that the utility can keep demand and supply in balance, and Martian the grid frequency at or near 60 Hz. These programs are to help protect the integrity of the power system, not cause headaches for individual consumers. And as the utility said, customers can opt out at any time. Some utilities even give credits for participating in their demand response programs.

Verbiage such as “tampered with” makes it sound like a nefarious hacking event when it is not, it is to help keep supply and demand in balance.

UK to investigate Apple and Google's 'effective duopoly'

hackintoisier

June 2021

darkpaw said:

There is a market of consumers, and they have decided that Apple and Google are just fine. They decided against the Facebook phone, and they decided against the Windows Phone. The market has already decided.

that’s not strictly true as while Android and Apple became the two major dominant platforms, some consumers still liked Microsoft and RIM. Those private companies chose to shut down their cellphone business though, if they were still in operation, they likely would have a user base, albeit much smaller than android and Apple.

But you have to remember that from a government point of view, they tend to prefer that consumers in any market place have choice. So no one or two suppliers grow so dominant as to stifle innovation and prevent competition. This is the government world view: to protect consumer choice.

Remember when at&t used to be the dominant phone company in the USA, the government broke it up and now we have Verizon and at&t (we used to have others like cellular one, but they somehow merged back into at&t again.)

So when there is a duopoly like you have rightfully pointed out, governments want to ensure that consumers aren’t being shafted that there is adequate choice, and also that innovation isn’t being stifled.

On the Apple App Store, Apple is the gatekeeper of what apps can and cannot be on the iPhone and iPad. This may be stifling innovation as Apple might deny apps that would otherwise be very popular with consumers. For example, what if we had apps that replaced the default homescreen on iPadOS with better multitasking and windowing support, users might pay for that, but Apple would never allow such a thing on the App Store, thus preventing competition, as well as preventing an ambitious developer from making any revenue on this idea.

This is why governments are looking into this issue. Should Apple have that much power? Who is Apple or even Google to say that certain ideas shouldn’t be able to come to market (like a better window manager than the iPadOS default) ?

iPadOS 15 confirms Apple's M1-equipped iPad Pro is a V8 engine powering a Ford Pinto

hackintoisier

June 2021

AppleZulu said:

So Apple releases expensive hardware with obvious capacity for future expansion of operating system capabilities, and the complaint is that the OS doesn’t max out the hardware out of the gate. Got it.

Of course, if iPadOS already took full advantage of the capabilities of the M1 model, there would be much louder complaints about how last year’s pre-M1 hardware has been rendered obsolete so quickly by OS features the pre-M1 devices can’t handle.

The M1 iPad Pro was released with iPadOS 14.5. Version 15 is now in beta and doesn’t fundamentally change the multitasking experience. What reason is there now to expect that Apple will ever make significant changes to the UI in the future, if they chose not to do so in iPadOS15?

As to your second point, the A12 chips in the prior iPads were used in the developer transition kit to run an ARM build of macOS (with its much deeper multi-tasking and windowing support), and the chip ran macOS just fine. Clearly they have enough horsepower. So I highly doubt that if Apple added the changes requested here in this article that the 2018 and 2020 iPad Pros would be rendered obsolete.

Until Apple makes fundamental changes to iPadOS, the M1 chip is a waste of hardware honestly. The A12z in the 2020 version is just fine. The only real difference with M1 is the addition of thunderbolt so you can connect to peripherals like 10gbps lan cards, high speed storage, etc. But other than that, there’s nothing about the iPadOS experience that is significantly different on M1 vs the A12x/A12z. Multi monitor support is still limited to 4x3 and does not scale to the 16x9 or 16x10 aspect ratio of monitors. iPadOS has some fundamental limitations, even though the hardware itself has been proven to not be limited in that regard, as M1 and A12x/A12z can run the more complicated window manager of macOS. And we have to tell the truth.