kirklennon

@kirklennon@kbin.social
kirklennon,

The main reason sales fell this year compared to the year-ago quarter is because the quarter before that Apple wasn't able to keep up with iPhone 14 demand leading to shortages and depleted channel inventory. The following quarter they were able to meet demand and replenish the sales channel leading a boosted year-ago quarter that was $5 billion bigger than it really should have been. Apple didn't have the same production shortages for the 15 launch. It makes this quarter they just reported look like a big decline but that's not really the whole story.

Fairbuds are Fairphone’s proof that we really could make better tiny gadgets (arstechnica.com)

But of course we all know that the big manufacturers don’t do this not because they can’t but because they don’t want to. Planned obsolescence is still very much the name of the game, despite all the bullshit they spout about sustainability.

kirklennon,

Selling you a gadget for $ 1000 every two years will always be more profitable than selling you one very five years and doing service in the meantime.

Are you aware that the current version of iOS is supported by the phones Apple released in 2018? And they're still releasing security updates for the prior version, with support for 2017's iPhone 8?

kirklennon, (edited )

I recently finished reading His Majesty’s Airship, which focuses specifically on the R101 development and disaster, but also more broadly on the entire history of rigid airships through the 1930s. The recurring theme is that people want airships to work so they keep trying. A new design comes along that promises to fix the problems from before and it’s fine for a while, until there’s a problem like, say, a strong breeze, and dozens of people die in a horrible crash. I want airships to make a comeback. The basic idea of something that floats and you merely need to push around with some propellers sounds great. I’m not terribly optimistic about it though. The weather is a real problem. Planes and ships and trains and trucks can all function even in an outright storm; airships inevitably require fair weather. Worse still, if they’re outside a hangar when the weather starts getting bad, they're stuck. They can’t get into a hangar before it gets worse because the very act of getting in a hangar for protection requires extremely precise control with no chance of sudden gusts that could shove it into the ground or the sides of the hangar. Extra propellers to maneuver can do only so much; they’re not magic. Major advances in weather forecasting in recent years maybe mean there are more situations where an airship could be safely used, with greater confidence of agreeable weather for the duration of the trip, but you’re certainly not going to build a freight business model on “sorry, let’s try again next week."

kirklennon,

You own your own hard drive. That copy of an iTunes song is yours. No DRM, no remotely removing your ability to use it.

kirklennon,

And yet that provision is itself still part of the constitution so really an amendment just needs to have an initial sentence to override that limitation first. If there’s actually support for a change, anything can be changed.

kirklennon,

Because we have an elected government. If the government causes somebody a loss, voters, and by extension their representatives, and by extension, the government itself, wants to make them whole. Without allowing lawsuits, the only option is passing individual laws for each possible claim, and also creating a way to adjudicate those claims. We already have courts to handle the exact same kinds of issues between private parties. Congress decided to let it apply to the government too, when appropriate.

kirklennon,

One of the more obvious use cases for the Apple Vision Pro is watching videos on a plane, which means you need to be able to download to the app first to watch offline. Netflix's iPad app already works perfectly fine on Apple Vision Pro so supporting it required literally no effort at all. They went out of their way to disable availability.

kirklennon,

That’s why it would need to be a small piece of a greater set of information. Imagine a person walking through an office and into a stairwell. If you know the person is there, and you know the stairwell is darker than the office, you could infer the appropriate location of the person in the building

That has nothing to do with the technique described in the article. It's also still quite a stretch. Holding up a piece of paper and casting a shadow on the ambient light sensor will also make it appear darker. Are they in the stairwell or is Bob from accounting stopping by to tell a "funny" anecdote and blocking the afternoon sun? If you've managed to compromise a device enough to access sensor data, you're not bothering trying to make sketchy assumptions based on the light sensor.

kirklennon,

Why are they just outright stripping this feature instead of just paying the patent fee? (As in literally removing the chips, actually stripping it.)

They're not. Despite some misleading press coverage, Apple never remotely suggested they were removing any hardware. They're just going to start importing them without the "functionality." They're disabling it in the US via software while they go through the legal process. When it's all done, they can activate it for everyone.

As for why they're not paying, Apple's position is that their product does not infringe any patents, and this is not an outlandish position. Apple has already had most of Masimo's patent claims from a dozen total patents invalidated. The ITC ban is a result of a single patent still currently left standing that Apple believes should never have been issued and is working to have invalidated.

I think there's a very good chance Apple succeeds and Masimo is left with no relevant patents. If they go through everything and Masimo is still left with something, at that point Apple can negotiate with them on a reasonable fee, and they'll be doing so from a position of relative strength. Masimo was obviously hoping an ITC ban would cause Apple to blink and pay whatever Masimo wanted. Clearly that didn't happen and Apple would prefer go for total vindication.

kirklennon,

Prior to the App Store, boxed retail software generally had a 50% cut.

Also, you can call it a duopoly, but Apple didn’t leverage market share into this 30% cut; it started when they were closer to 1% of the phone market, and the policy has only ever gotten cheaper (second year of subscriptions and small business program) and more permissive. They offered a closed platform and competed their way to the top based on the product. Developers are given the chance to sell to a huge market of high-end hardware with aggressive consumer uptake of software updates, making it a very attractive platform. Apple wants a commission. It’s not exactly outrageous of them.

kirklennon,

How ‘Dark Fate’ Visual Effects Team Brought ‘Terminator’ Stars Back to the ’90s

For the flashback sequence in Dark Fate, the team did digital head replacement on younger actors who functioned as body doubles and were filmed on set. The digital work started with a scan of each original actor. Then the team used a markerless facial capture system called Anyma, developed by Disney Research, to capture each actor’s performance.

kirklennon,

RCS does not support end-to-end encryption, only Google's proprietary extension does. Google has been simultaneously promoting RCS as a "standard" while prominently advertising a non-standard feature.

kirklennon,

OK, I finally read the original allegation and this is grossly irresponsible reporting. We can put our pitchforks down. The plaintiffs never even claim that the automakers can access your text messages in the first place. This is entirely about the car’s hardware locally caching the messages it displays, some of which could possibly then be read from the cache using specialized and not commonly available equipment.

Is it something to be aware of? Sure. Is something the average person should be concerned about? Not really.

kirklennon,

I'm short of time so I haven't found the original complaint but according to the appeals court ruling, the plaintiffs never claimed any actual damages. The heading of the law in question is "Violating right of privacy—Civil action—Liability for damages."

Is this a privacy violation? Yes. Did these people suffer any actual damages under the law? Evidently not.

kirklennon,

The abbreviation i.e. is short for "id est," literally "that is." English-language alternatives would be "that is to say" or "in other words."

The abbreviation e.g. is short for "exempli gratia," meaning "for example."

kirklennon,

Even taken at its face value, this allegation is literally an example of freedom of the press in action. Freedom means the ability for a publisher to choose what they publish. That includes telling staff no.

kirklennon,

That’s analogous to a conservative commentor saying, “an easy solution would be a few Democrats voting for Jordan.”

I'm pretty sure that was exactly the point. There have been endless articles asking if Democrats will step in to help Republicans out of the mess they created by voting for a marginally less extreme Republican. This person was flipping that nonsense around and asking why a handful of Republicans can't just vote for someone who actually wants to govern.

kirklennon,

What I’m curious about is why does her law firm do byod?

Trump is no longer able to hire attorneys from large firms. He’s toxic to their other clients and also tends to not pay. You have to be an ideologue without any other big clients in order to work for him. From their website, she seems to be the head of a four-attorney firm.

kirklennon,

This is curiously similar to the premise of the Broadway musical, Dear Evan Hansen.

kirklennon,

He ran on a rather explicitly white nationalist campaign in the 2016 election. He’s never not been openly racist. Republican voters are demonstrably OK with that.

kirklennon,

The criminal justice system is intended to be biased in favor of the defendants as innocent until proven guilty. Consequently, if everything were working perfectly, I'd expect prosecutors to only charge people if they were extremely confident that they could prove the person's guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Taking cases without solid evidence and regularly losing at trial would be indicative of a major problem.

kirklennon,

due to their coverage on the leaked iPhone 4?

They literally committed a felony, bought what at that point was a stolen prototype, damaged Apple's property, and then tried to extort Apple in exchange for returning what was, again, Apple's own property.

kirklennon, (edited )

I trust the little guy.

The editor of Gizmodo knows very well that "Apple" gets clicks and in this case he's trying to generate free press for his obscure book. His suit doesn't quite meet the standard of "frivolous," so I don't think anybody is getting sanctioned for it, but it's certainly not filed in good faith. It's not even an issue of "trust." What he claims is inherently ridiculous. You can't copyright historical events, and presenting it as a Cold War thriller isn't some radical creative choice of "tone." The dry facts are pretty thrilling on their own, and the extra-thrilling parts (car chase) are inventions of the film.

How many other people are they doing this to?

Not stealing from? Literally billions of other people are being treated the same way by Apple every day.

kirklennon,

This is such a lazy, dumb take. Nobody even complains about Cortana because nobody used it in the first place. People complain about Siri precisely because so many people are using is so often that they inevitably come up against its shortcomings. It can certainly continue to grow and evolve but it’s a real-world useful tool today.

kirklennon,

Lina Khan's stewardship of the FTC has been one of high-profile failures, clumsily targeting big companies over things that are, in fact, legal. It's like she thinks she's a senator trying to win political points with cheap, lazy shots rather than being the head of a wonky enforcement agency. Fresh after failing to block Microsoft's purchase of Activision, she's now targeting Prime, a service that consumers overwhelmingly actually like. I have no doubt that Amazon likely has violated antitrust law in some ways, but I have no faith in Khan's FTC to actually target the legitimate violations with boring, relatively minor solutions. They'll overshoot and bungle the whole thing, yet again.

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