waveparticle

jdw said:

Another politically "hot button" article under which comments are finally allowed.  Great work keeping the liberty going, AppleInsider!

Now, as to China gather info on "Americans," it should be understood that those Americans are not EVERY American, but instead younger people who throw caution to the wind for the sake of people popular.  I don't use TikTok and have zero intention of ever using it.  Heck, I don't use Twitter but once in a blue moon to enter a contest, although I do use FaceBook.  I also have a YouTube channel.  I don't use Instagram because I prefer Flickr.  And the list goes on. I doubt I am alone.  So it's not like the entire USA is moving to TikTok.  But let's say most Americans will eventually contract the same Brain Cloud as the younger generation and start the silly TikTok addiction.  Well, it's their choice.  It's like drinking alcohol.  I personally don't drink the horrid stuff but many do, and we know how the prohibition went in the past, right?  Ditto for smoking.  It's a stupid thing to do and it's even worse than alcohol because it is sadly breathed in by people around you, yet tobacco isn't banned completely.

So basically we have the US government stepping in and saying, "Americans are stupid because they use TikTok, and we must forcefully help them avoid the consequences of that stupidity."  Big Brother then tries to strong-arm US companies like Google and Apple into doing its bidding, which is in and of itself "weaponization."

I'm no fan of TikTok, alcohol or smoking, but I dare say it has series implications on individual liberty when you take the iron fist of government to step in and stop people from engaging in those stupid addictions.  While it may be an exercise in futility in light of how human beings love their awful addictions, we still need to preach the merits of not using TikTok, not getting ourselves drunk, and not smoking cancer sticks, for the good of ourselves and others around us.  We can do that without any new laws, regulations or punishments for non-compliance to the dictations of Uncle Sam.

Madbum said:

Jute said:

As one of the terminated employees I’ll share this. We were Channel Sales employees usually with 5+ years at Apple. We were terminated for “Business Reasons” not performance based. Although we knew our “Partners”, named in the article, were not fairing well in the current economic environment we were told “Apple doesn’t fire people. Apple finds new jobs for them just like we did when CompUSA closed”. Many times I was told “If something did happen at our Partner company Apple would just move you to another Partner not fire you”. All of this was bullshit. Apple is trying to avoid negative press right now. I suspected these Channel layoffs are but a start. It seems they are doing it in small chunks across many departments, these layoffs are estimated, by my former co-workers, to be between 50-100 people. Spread across all work groups or divisions the number keeps the headlines from reading “Apple fires 10,000 employees”. 

I am sorry for your job loss. Blame the FED, crazy Government spending , not Apple.

As for negative press, actually not really, Google and Microsoft announced huge layoffs and were cheered by CNBC and stock went up…

And they keep mentioning Apple as the only company with no major layoffs 

melgross said:

AniMill said:

“Wish I could simply plug a Mac mini into my iMac display.”

I believe this to be deliberate. If Target Displays Mode still existed, the reason and need for the Studio Display would be greatly diminished. I believe many iMac 5K users would see the Mac Mini M2 Pro as a great alternative to buying a new Apple display.

No. When Apple came out with the first 27” 5k model, there were no driver chips capable of driving a 5k display. There were kludges, but they didn’t work well. For example, using two driver chips and treating one side of the display as one display, and the other as another display, then syncing the two together. Horrible, but that all there was.

Apple designed their own driver chip to have one 5k display. But the conventions they had to use weren’t standard, and as a result, target mode had to go away. Sad, but not intentional.

ah, I didn’t see the other posts explaining this. Just to keep in mind, Apple had displays even when target mode was in effect, so having a monitor now is obviously not why it no longer works.