cloudguy

OutdoorAppDeveloper said:

Good. Talk to Toyota.

See above. Toyota wouldn't agree to these terms either. The auto industry is not the electronics industry. To put it another way: a lot of the suppliers that Apple deals with for the iPhone and iPad need Apple's business to survive, and a lot of them wind up going out of business even with Apple's money. You aren't going to see any established manufacturer agree to make Apple's car that will:

A. provide them tiny margins for manufacturing them
B. provide them no PR/marketing benefits for manufacturing them
C. compete with their own cars

Toyota is not going to make less money making cars for Apple than they would get for getting people to buy a Camry. Were Apple to:

A. pay Toyota as much money for making an Apple Car as they would get for making a Camry
B. allow Toyota to let everyone know that they are Apple's manufacturing partner in their advertising campaigns so that at the very least everyone who doesn't buy an Apple Car will be more likely to buy a Camry than a Ford, Volkswagen, Honda or Nissan

then they would probably sign up. You folks need to take the idea "being an Apple partner automatically benefits the partner so anyone and everyone who Apple wants to partner with should just drop everything else and agree to whatever terms Apple requests" and flush it from your heads. Because it isn't true. At all. 

Neither would it benefit Apple to go "bargain basement" until they find someone willing to meet their demands. Why? Because you don't get the best work that way. When Apple was in the middle of their little temper tantrums against Samsung, Google, Qualcomm etc. they tried to go elsewhere. It didn't work because LG, Intel, their in-house services etc. weren't nearly as good so they were forced to go back to the best in order to get the best components and services for their products. By the same token, Apple shouldn't seek the services of "we build terrible cars for cheap" outfits lest they get the equivalent of Intel 5G modems, LG screens and their own services before they went all in on AWS and Google to provide the backbones (i.e. back when they couldn't even produce a competitive navigation app).

Instead, pay Hyundai, Toyota or whoever else the money that it takes to build a good car. Including a company that is able to contribute their own pre-existing expertise to the product. Samsung, for example, was able to contribute some designs from some appliance-type devices (ARM-based but running firmware and hence not smart devices) to the original iPhone CPU. That is the sort of thing that they will need to get from their car-manufacturing partner if they actually want the car to be good.

pslice said:

The government has let big companies get away with this from the days of deregulating the airlines. Telecoms, entertainment, this is clearly a case of the horses are out of the barn. In computing, you have two dominant camps, Windoz and Apple. There IS competition. I don’t buy Windoz, I love Apple, and I appreciate Apple's quality. Break it up and government will lower the quality. 

You do realize that last year 30.7 million ChromeOS devices sold versus 22.5 million macOS ones sold, right? The previous year it was 17 million ChromeOS versus 17.5 million macOS. (If by "Apple" you meant macOS and iOS, then Android - which has more active devices than does macOS, iOS and Windows combined - says hi). So Windows and macOS being the two dominant computing camps is no longer true and hasn't been for awhile. And this is with ChromeOS only being released in 2011 and only beginning to gain real traction in 2016. Just as Apple platform devices started to gain market share the past few years as kids who grew up on iPods, iPhones and iPads the prior two decades are now entering the workforce, in about 5-10 years you are going to see kids who used Chromebooks in school enter the workforce and start buying them for themselves and their parents. 

I have absolutely, positively no desire or inclination to defend Apple here BUT ...

1. Joining the developer program was 100% optional.
2. $500 is a nominal fee for a veteran macOS/iOS developer who should be making $100,000 a year. I spent WAY MORE than that for hardware that I needed for my job and wasn't making anywhere near what Apple platform devs get. 
3. If you are a struggling/independent macOS/iOS developer who can't afford $500 in hardware costs you shouldn't have gotten the dev kit to begin with ... and you probably should be looking into a career change (as in trying to get hired by the many companies looking for talent to develop their iOS/macOS apps). Not trying to be a jerk, but rather just that the independent/contract dev game is very difficult and is getting harder, not easier. 
4. This was a lease. The only legit beef that anyone has is that Apple is terminating the lease early. Even there, they are giving you 40% of the lease cost back. It is only good for macOS hardware? No, Apple isn't going to give you $200 to spend on a Chromebook or Samsung tablet so you can go develop for those platforms in a huff to get back at them.
5. You don't have an M1 Mac right now? You are a dev. You should have ordered a 16 GB M1 Mac Mini the day the preorders went up. If you couldn't afford it, see 2. and 3.
6. All right. You already have an M1 Mac Mini and an M1 MacBook Air/Pro so you don't need the $200 because you don't need/want anymore Apple hardware right now. OK ... so why do you still need the dev kit anyway? You already have a pair of Macs THAT ACTUALLY HAVE THE M1 CHIP (which the dev kit ... doesn't). 
7. Devs are rock stars and deserve to be entitled or they will go elsewhere. I do not disagree. As someone who owns several Android and ChromeOS devices I say COME TO MY PLATFORM PLEASE!!! WE NEED YOU BADLY! Otherwise ... look. There are 1 billion iPhones in the wild. Apple had a record year last year selling Macs. Apple sold more iPads last year than any time since 2011-2014 when people still thought they were going to revolutionize computing. With all due respect to Samsung as well as FitBit/Garmin/Wear OS/cheap indistinguishable Chinese fitness trackers, the Apple Watch IS the smartwatch market. Apple TV ... well 4 out of 5 ain't bad! Apple has reached self-sustaining critical mass. They don't need you. If you rock stars move on, there are 100 talented guys with a guitar and a dream - or with a master of science degree in computer science/engineering and 5 years experience as it were - ready to take your place. Some people claim "millennials only use iPhones/iPads/Macs and wouldn't be caught dead with a Windows/Android/ChromeOS device." I am thinking that this is wildly overstated - they are just talking about their own kids and their kids' friends and have no clue about the other 90% of the population - but if even a fraction of this is true then the previous generation's "rock stars" are going to be replaced without Apple having to lift a finger because there is a whole class of people who spent their formative years on iPads and iPhones in the 2010s that are entering the workforce right now and have no concept of coding on anything else. 

Look, 99 times out of 100 I get sick of the developer bashing that goes on here by people who couldn't write a Hello World program in Javascript to get themselves off a desert island with an erupting volcano. But this is the ONE TIME that I have to say that folks are making a mountain out of a molehill on this. If you are actually a dev you shouldn't have any need for this dev kit running an outdated iPad chip anyway. You should have a 16 GB M1 Mac Mini/MacBook Air/MacBook Pro by now. If you don't, then you have bigger issues going on than a dev kit that you ... didn't actually NEED and probably shouldn't have never gotten in the first place (again, not trying to be a jerk but still) that you are better off tending to. So ship Apple's hardware back, get your $200 coupon and order yourself an M1 Mac off Apple's website.

Fidonet127 said:

You can still develop on the Intel Macs.

Not a developer I see. Why do so many people who have never been developers presume to know so much about those who are? (I am a former developer myself by the way.)

flydog said:

pulseimages said:

wood1208 said:

Under-screen touch ID is work/tech in progress. When it reaches to perfection of current touch id; Apple will adopt.

My brother-in-law has a Samsung Galaxy S10 with built in touch-ID and it’s reliable and fast. 

yeah, it's flawless:
 
https://www.valuewalk.com/2020/01/slow-galaxy-s10-fingerprint-sensor/

https://www.samsung.com/us/support/troubleshooting/TSG01200322/

https://thedroidguy.com/fix-s10-fingerprint-scanner-not-working-1101193

https://www.reddit.com/r/galaxys10/comments/bj4x9m/still_experiencing_fingerprint_scanner_issues/

1. I have it on my Galaxy Note 20 Ultra and it works great; more accurate than the rear fingerprint scanner on my Galaxy S8+. Credible sources state that the version on the Galaxy S21 is even better.
2. New features that are "Apple first" don't always work flawlessly out of the gate. They also don't always succeed! Instead it is the features that have become popular and refined from years of use on hundreds of millions of Android devices first that are more likely to be very popular and well implemented initially on Apple products.
3. Despite everyone claiming "Apple did it right" or "waited until it was ready", Apple features that are adopted after having been in use on Android devices for years don't work any better (5G, NFC, widgets, stylus support, OLED screens, phablet form factors, set top boxes with app stores) and at times are even behind the Android implementation and need years to catch up. Case in point: HomePod.

Apple is still with the waterfall SDLC while Google relies on agile. That means the latter comes out with more products faster, but at the cost of having a lot more products be half-baked and ultimately fail. Samsung for their part is SDLC like Apple, but unlike Apple they do their own manufacturing and are a leader in components and the basic engineering/physics behind them. So a lot of features are going to be in Samsung phones first merely because Samsung themselves invented the components for those features. 

It is no big deal: it just means that Apple's strengths are in other areas. But Google and Samsung have their own strengths and you should just go ahead and admit that Apple copies and benefits from those strengths on a regular basis. I myself prefer benefiting from new tech early instead of waiting 3-4  years until Apple is able to polish it nice and shiny. That is why I obtained my first phablet years before Apple introduced one - and years more before Apple's phablets actually had OS functionality to make it more than merely the same phone with a bigger screen - and on that phone was using Google Wallet years before Apple introduced Apple Pay, and why in a few months I am going to trade in my Galaxy Note 20 for a Galaxy Fold 3 (again at least a couple of years before Apple gets around to it).