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neilm said:

Somewhere in a closet I still have an old (maybe 15+ years?) Sony P&S digital camera with a periscope lens. The prism allows using the ample length of the camera for the light path in place of the highly restricted thickness. Pretty clever design which I've been surprised hasn't been widely (at all?) used in smart phones.

Yes, I remember the Sonys and I did wonder about them as prior art wrt some of the things Apple was trying to patent. A clever design regardless.

This is likely to be the final nail in the coffin of compact cameras: their only remaining major advantage over smartphones being the long end of their lenses. I would love to have a longer lens on my iPhone, it's the thing I most miss when the 'proper' camera is left behind (the other big missing feature being the viewfinder, so you can actually see what you're photographing in bright conditions).

Call me old fashioned but this just seems unacceptably rude to me. It's a bit like you invite someone into your house to do a particular job and then, when you can't see, they rummage through your private documents that have nothing to do with the reason they are there. The same thought applies to those apps that, given access to Contacts for a particular address, read/copy all the others too. And 'this is how we make it free' is no excuse!

So well done Apple.

In terms of Thunderbolt, I think it's integrated into the Intel processor that they've removed and not in the iPad processor that they've added. I think I've got that right.

The 'real' Apple Silicon Macs are set to have dedicated Apple processors rather than iPad hand-me-downs and I expect that's where it will reappear. They won't want to spend any of the hard won cost/power savings on a separate device. It won't have gone away.

If you wanted to produce a foldable phone then two flat edge-to-edge displays that lie next to each other sounds a lot more credible than one flexible, folded display - any unsupported part of a folding display will be delicate and literally folding will surely give a crease that won't go away.

That doesn't answer the question of whether you actually do want a foldable phone. A display that's twice the width you carry in your pocket is attractive but I'm not sure about the other design implications, it doesn't sound like a typical Apple minimalist solution.

larryjw said:

I keep wondering why Apple is unable to enforce privacy restrictions on apps. I take it as a given that automatic enforcement is hard. 

But, as we’ve seen forever, relying on the honesty and integrity of developers is a mistake. 

Also clear, that a fine-grained granularity of permissions one may grant or withhold is non-existent. 

And like this company they claim they are protectIng your privacy by selling to a third party who is merely contractually required to protect privacy and not use the data received for nefarious purposes. Nod, Nod. Wink. Wink. 

Is it even theoretically possible to architect a privacy system that allows users to control what information is shared and what is not? 

My guess is the difficulties are at least tied to proving program correctness. I only know two languages that have support for protecting against illegal input. One is Mathematica. The second is the Scheme implementation Racket. 

This case does have some very strange aspects. I presume there'll be an inquiry to establish if the procurement and the contractors were just not very smart or whether there were other aspects in play. I don't think the US is doing itself any favours by developing multiple systems rather than concentrating the effort and expertise on a single candidate. It's like the problem we will have in Europe when people travel between countries except I guess you guys cross state lines a lot more that we cross national ones.

Your point about about how to architect a system giving users control is valid. Both the Apple/Google framework and the UK NHS app address this by not letting data off the phone without explicit permission from the user at the time of sending it. When that permission is given, a well defined (and small) amount of data is released. Any system can have bugs and leak data but these two architectures make it much harder to get wrong so, with a competent development team, they have a very good chance of succeeding.

I keep banging on about the NHS system being open-sourced but that should be a comfort to those who doubt its data handling claims; it should also improve the quality of the software. Apple and Google working together should improve their quality too, as long as they go about it the right way and review each other's work, then test it properly.