mpantone

chasm said:

ranson said:

I think the better option is to just never ever connect your TV to your home WiFi (or via ethernet). If you want or need to do a firmware update, both LG and Samsung allow you to do this via a USB drive. If you're using an AppleTV (or less ideally, a competitor streaming device), there is never a need to have the TV networked.

I didn't know that was an option. Thanks very much for this info!

Firmware updates via USB for things like TVs, A/V receivers, etc. has been around since before the pandemic. And before that there were service ports for authorized technicians, before all these devices went online. Once a device goes online, it generally requires software updates for A.) bug fixes, B.) security updates, and C.) new functionality.

Nothing new about this, Read The Fine Manual. The USB updating is mentioned within.

I'm not surprised at all about the amount of data collection these devices do. Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy famously said "You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it." That was in 1999. Which means online data collection had been going on way before then.

That said, this article is very helpful in minimizing the amount of data that these two companies can harvest from your television sets. But they sell other devices too. And they have apps that communicate with these devices.

It's important to be utterly realistic and understand that your smartphone collects WAY more data than your television. Unless it spends 99.99% of its uptime in airplane mode, it's sending plenty of data to many people.

JinTech said:

So, how many offices does Apple currently have in Cupertino? Legit question.

Short answer: no one here knows.

Longer answer: Apple has many properties in Cupertino. The leases are staggered and don't come up for renewal at the same moment. Apple periodically moves out of old locations and moves into new ones based on their needs. So the correct answer six months ago may well be incorrect today.

I would expect Apple to have some unmarked, clandestine properties in Cupertino with their long history of corporate secrecy. So driving around Cupertino and counting the obviously marked buildings (with logos) likely won't be a complete tally. We know that Project Titan was allegedly occupying unlabeled property(ies) in neighboring Sunnyvale. It is likely that Apple will have some locations that they don't want to advertise as theirs. This might include some small warehouses (not for shipping retail products to customers) but rather storage of their own property and supplies for internal use.

The people who really know the answer are all in the administration division at Apple, certainly not the engineering division, retail or marketing people. Some of the legal and finance staff (like the Accounts Payable people who get the utility bills, the controller), security personnel, facilities & maintenance planners, corporate IT staff, etc.

This is pretty typical for any larger organization (beyond the Fortune 500) not just Apple. The typical line employee and even mid-level managers probably don't know the answer, especially in engineering driven organizations like tech corporations.

Even amongst senior management I bet most of them don't know exactly. It doesn't really matter to guys like Srouji, Federighi, Alan Dye, etc. It matters to the CEO, COO, maybe the CFO, SVP of HR, general counsel, etc.

Strictly speaking, Apple did NOT move out of 1 Infinite Loop. It continues to use that campus. What they did do was move the HQ to Apple Park (the spaceship) in 2017 when that property came online. Apple has divisions that don't need to be at Apple Park and thus needs property elsewhere including (but not limited to) 1 Infinite Loop. It's believed that some senior management have desks at both locations because some meetings take place at 1 Infinite Loop. A lot of the admin teams are based at the old campus plus some non-core engineering teams.

Yes, best to avoid using this feature until Apple gets some brains and figures out how to exclude items from the recommendation algorithm. In the long run, they need to figure this out without user intervention. Joe Consumer isn't going to spend the time flagging content. And Apple is making their data collection less valuable by weighting this stuff normally. In fact, it should be the opposite. For certain kinds of content (like white noise), it should be opt-in. By default it should be excluded from the recommendation algorithm. Same with things that you rarely listen to. If I listen to one or two country songs in a row whereas I've listened to none in the past six months, those should be kept out.

Until Apple can figure this out thoughtfully I'll stick with a third party app for white noise. White noise apps were amongst some of the earliest apps on the iOS App Store (2008). Surprisingly a couple of those early apps have been maintained by their developers and run on both older hardware and recent devices. I still have TMSOFT's White Noise and White Noise Lite apps that I originally downloaded in 2008 (App Store). Another benefit: no Internet connection necessary to run these old-school standalone legacy white noise apps, they're just looped sound files.

Look, the topic of reciprocal tariffs has been beaten to death. Before the current administration, a lot of tariffs weren't reciprocal.

Here's a TIME article from mid February on the topic:

https://time.com/7222082/what-are-reciprocal-tariffs-who-might-be-impacted-by-trump-plan/

Not only did the current administration apply reciprocal tariffs, it subsequently also increased them in many markets. And then escalated tariff wars with certain countries.

Like I have repeatedly said, these tariffs aren't really beneficial from a global economy perspective. And the reasoning behind them is even more debatable. But the calculation itself isn't pulled out of thin air. The logic behind using that particular formula is not sound but that's what the current administration has decided on. They aren't picking percentages randomly out of a fishbowl.

However the main point the Pegatron CEO is making is that the flow of goods between borders will be constrained to the point where American consumers will see some empty shelves. Not every product but for some things yet. My guess is that we'll start to see it in August/September with some back-to-school supplies becoming harder to find, followed by Halloween costumes/decorations, then Christmas decorations will likely get hit hard. The lead time for these wholesale orders is like six months so the Christmas merchandise will be the first major wave under the higher tariffs just due to timing.

I never said the tariff calculations were reciprocal. They are just based on halving the trade imbalance percentage which as I mentioned many economists think is asinine. Your comment is that the tariff calculation was based on nothing. This simply isn't true. They are based on a primitively simple calculation that a ten-year-old could do. You're the one who commented on Charlesn's contribution here.

Let's remember that there were reciprocal tariffs that existed for some products before the current wave.

Reciprocity happens when both countries levy the same tariff percentage on each other. Leaving China out of the discussion, the other countries (and the EU) stated that they were going to increase tariffs on imports coming from the USA to the new levels proposed by the current administration. There's a temporary reprieve right now for many regions -- a stalemate one might say -- but at some point reciprocal tariffs will kick in for both sides. If the USA levies 36% tariffs on Thai imports, Thailand will levy 36% tariffs on USA imports. That's reciprocal. Because Thailand has an interest in protecting its economy and its companies too. 

It's the same with visas. Travel reciprocity is when different places have the same standards. Like the EU waiving visa requirements for US travelers and vice versa.

And yeah, a tariff is basically a federal sales tax without showing up on a store receipt. Governments like revenue that is hidden from plain view for consumers like gasoline taxes, alcohol taxes, tariffs, municipal bond measures, etc.