mr. h

shamino said:

• Cost to add higher speed communication to the iPhone.  If a USB-C iPhone continues to use USB 2.0 data rates, that eliminates much of the technical advantage.

There is no cost to implement higher data rates; A-series chips already support higher speeds, as evidenced by iPads with USB-C. Higher transfer rate is a necessity to make ProRes video on iPhone practically useable. As it is, it takes hours to transfer the footage, so who is actually going to use this feature? Wireless data transfer won't cut it.

shamino said:

• Other Lightening capabilities ... a Lightening headphone adapter only has to (as far as I know) identify itself as such (via the ID chip) and then connect the analog I/O pins to the connector

This is not correct. The Lightning headphone adaptor communicates with the iPhone digitally and incorporates a DAC with headphone amplifier - https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Apple+Lightning+to+Headphone+Jack+Adapter+Teardown/67562

Another rumour that thankfully didn’t come true is increased pricing. In fact, if you need 128 GB storage, iPhone 13 represents a decent price drop.

fastasleep said:

You have Spotlight indexing everything every day. You have Photos using machine learning to identify faces and pets and objects every day. What's to stop Apple from exfiltrating that data at any point? … Live Text is coming to iOS 15 and macOS Monterey and is going to make a whole lot of image-based text indexable, why aren't people freaking out about that?

Why are none of the naysayers in this thread addressing this extremely valid point? The above features, which have been in iOS for years (apart from Live Text, obviously) actually fit the profile of what is being complained about, far more than the newly-proposed CSAM detection process.

omair said:

tommikele said:

Hollow victory. 

As soon as the uproar has died down and Apple thinks it is safe they will be back. They will frame what they put forth next time as "look what we have done to protect you." when in reality it will likely just be cosmetic.

I agree.  I have lost faith and I have been busy divesting out of the ecosystem for the last month.  Moving out of photos and imessage so far.  Will be giving up on icloud as my i replace the services backing into it.  And I am also looking into getting a personal email account and just give up on that from apple.  Perhaps it wasnt a good idea to put so much faith in one company for two decades.

Please could you let us know what alternatives you are using, and how you went about verifying that they don't have any similar (or worse) features? For the avoidance of doubt, this is a genuine question.

gatorguy said:

I get that you really REALLY want to paint a glowing picture of "gosh Apple is doing this for us", but is there any even circumstantial evidence Apple was ready to make everything end-to-end encrypted in a way they could not access any of your data even if they were ordered to? Not as far as I know. It's more of a hope and prayer since otherwise it's not for the betterment of us users. 

All I can say about that is that the whole scheme would be totally pointless if they weren't going to encrypt the photos. Why go to all the effort of designing this enormously complicated system, calculating hashes on-device, doing the CSAM hash-matching in a "blind" way so even the device itself doesn't know if there's been a match, and then going to all the convoluted effort of generating doubly-encrypted "vouchers" and associated "image information", if the photo itself was uploaded to iCloud unencrypted?

Certainly, this system would enable the photos to be uploaded to iCloud encrypted, but I concede that as far as I know, Apple hasn't said that they would do that. It's just that, as I said, the whole scheme seems totally pointless if the photos are uploaded to the server in the clear anyway.

How about Apple just offers a toggle in iCloud photos settings? The two options would be:

1. Photos are CSAM-scanned and encrypted before being uploaded to iCloud.
2. Photos are not CSAM-scanned, but are uploaded to iCloud in the clear. The server then does the CSAM scan.

Would this solution make everyone happier?