CarmB

Maybe Apple could decontent the versions of their products sold in the United States and continue business as usual everywhere else. Also, their profit margin is such that a bit of decontenting combined with a hit to those margins in the US market might just do the trick. Whatever taxes the US government collects off of Apple, it will be less considering those lower profit margins. So some of that fabulous tariff income Trump and the Gang are counting on will be eaten away by that development. In addition, if inflation is one of the side effects of waging a tariff war, buying power will be diminished. That also means less money in government coffers. Trump simplifies enormously and in terms of gaining votes, that's effective. Yet if you oversimplify that which is exceedingly complex when governing, bad things happen. When running for office, Trump pushed the notion that if he were elected, life would go back to where it was pre-COVID. He has always claimed to love tariffs but he didn't run on the notion of using them to thoroughly remake the global economy and expecting initial pain in the process. He didn't because clearly not enough voters would have endorsed that approach. Folks just wanted it to go back to where it was in the earlier years of Trump's first term. He suggested this is what they'd get. Now he's pulled off something of a bait and switch. I suspect he has such faith in his ability to sell voters on whatever he wants to do, that he thinks they will stick with him. Some will but many will not. They've been had and some of them will clue in, especially, when there is direct impact on their lives. If what Trump has in mind is something akin to, impose tariffs, production returns to the US, badda bing, badda boom, this is going to be an epic fail. Is he capable of such massive mismanagement? Absolutely. He has the bankruptcies and mismanaged projects in his past to suggest he could blow it. He's not Midas even though some foolishly imagine him to be. He's brilliant at marketing himself. That doesn't mean he's brilliant at pulling off the major restructuring he apparently has embarked on. Nor was he elected with a clear mandate to embark on such a path. He would have had to run on doing that and he definitely did not. In any case, Apple is better positioned to manage this mess than some others like, for instance, the auto industry. The biggest issue for Apple will be making money during a recession which we surely are headed for. 

8thman said:

I avoid SERIES lock-ins. I don’t want the time commitment.
I prefer Movies.

The Stories are Mediocre and production values are lower than movies.

That's too broad a generalization. With movies as with TV series, there are a range of stories and production values. There are good movies and not so good. There are good TV series and not so good. Movies with bad storytelling and poor production values have been with us since the beginning, Ditto TV series. You have to assess them on a case by case basis. Bottom line good TV trumps bad moviemaking. Of course good moviemaking trumps bad TV. I will say though that TV shows would be better served if the length was tied more to telling a great story than keeping a popular show going. Having a show's storytelling compromised to stretch out a series  never ends well. In the case of movies, sometimes a story is stretched too thin and sometimes extreme editing can ruin an attempt at quality storytelling. Movies good, TV bad just doesn't cover it.  By the way, if you're committing time to a series, that would only happen if it was good enough to warrant it. 

Considering how much is being made regarding the power needed to implement AI, the most important element of Apple's hardware is its efficiency. Could be a dramatic advantage going forward. 

The most intriguing aspect of Severance at this point is the rather not-quite-real vibe given off by what we are told is the real world that characters experience when apparently not in the generated  Lumen Corporation environment. If a sort of reality can be generated - from the perspective of the characters - who's to say any of their perceived realities have any basis in a concrete world that exists beyond their perception. Parking lots full of cars that are not quite right. A too-structured landscape. There is a degree of messiness that we perceive in our shared version of reality that is eerily absent from either environment experienced by the Severence characters. It's as if at no point are characters experiencing anything truly genuine as in anchored in a reality existing beyond their perception. Just saying . . . 

By the way, I'm missing the good old days when you could structure your viewing around what came out on a given night of TV network programming. In my youth I am especially fond of the memory of being thrilled with the prospect of taking in the latest episode of Mission Impossible - Yes, I'm that old - every Friday night, if I recall correctly. Releasing shows weekly has its charms. Gives you something to look forward to and that's really not a bad thing. 

As a retired journalist, I would like to point out that humans themselves often get it wrong. I lost count of how many times I was dismayed by a misleading headline attached to a piece I had written or worse, sloppy editing that had entirely misrepresented what I believed to be the truth and had attempted in my original copy to convey. Whenever I attended a press conference it was fun afterwards to note that in reading the various articles based on it, you would think we had all attended separate sessions. Without question we need to guard against simply relinquishing control to artificial devices even more disconnected from reality than us flawed humans can be. It is, however, naive of us to have thought getting this right would be an easy task.