kirklennon

You’re leaving out the most import part. Class members are:

Individual persons who are United States residents and who own or owned an Apple iPhone 7 or 7 Plus between September 16, 2016 and January 3, 2023, and reported to Apple in the United States issues reflected in Apple’s records as Sound-Speaker, Sound-Microphone, Sound – Receiver, Unexpected Restart / Shutdown, or Power On – Device Unresponsive

Based on the amount of money allocated for the settlement, the class members represent significantly less than 1% of iPhone 7 owners.

Honestly I don’t get why they apologized at all. This was a lame story yesterday. The apology stretches the story an extra day. Say nothing and nobody remembers the pearl-clutching next week.

I think it’s pretty wild that criticizing something as ill-conceived, arbitrary, and protectionist government overreach will get you labeled as a fascist by some people.

I agree that it seems like inconsistent thinking though. (EU vs China)

The EU is ostensibly capitalist democracies. Publicly criticizing arbitrary and ill-conceived regulations, that can perhaps be improved, is useful. China makes no pretense about being a free country and I think the moral calculus is rather simple: are Chinese citizens better off with Apple there, doing the bare minimum to comply with Chinese law, or with Apple taking the “principled” stand of leaving?

China banned Signal and WhatsApp but has not banned iMessage. If you want secure end-to-end encrypted messaging, iPhones offer that built right in. Apple could leave, but the inevitable result of that is less privacy for Chinese citizens. It’s a binary choice. Apple can’t make China free, but they can at least offer services without bending over backwards to go above and beyond the CCP’s demands, as Chinese companies do.

I think Apple’s position is quite consistent: it tries to change the things it can change, fights the things it can fight, and does the bare minimum to comply with things that it doesn’t want to but must.

Do not install any third-party antivirus software. It’s unnecessary and is itself a massive security risk. You have to literally override the built-in protections in order to allow the antivirus application to scan the other applications and files.

I think this is one step in ongoing efforts to further enhance the security of iMessage and has nothing at all to do with random topics that the tech press happened to focus on. Contact Key Verification came out in October. Beeper Mini came out in December. One of the third-party security analyses Apple provided for this PQ3 enhancement is dated January 15. I think it’s pretty clear that PQ3’s development long preceded Beeper Mini.

If you want the tech that badly why NOT license it?

Because they don’t think the patent is actually valid. Getting it officially invalidated is a process but if it really should have never been issued in the first place, then Apple is not truly infringing it and has no obligation to pay a cent to anybody else for it.

but the two that held up seem pretty valid to me

I’m not qualified to say either way but Apple’s $1000+/hour patent attorneys clearly don’t think the patents are valid and they’ve already shot down most of the rest. And Apple is so confident that they’ll win that they’re willing to pause sales and even (temporarily) disable a marquee selling point. Apple doesn’t need to be right on this and yet is confident that they are. For Masimo this is an existential question so they can’t not fight, even if they thought they had a weak case.

So based on all of that, I think Apple will prevail.

I don’t see how intimidation has anything to do with it. If you think the patent is BS and you have the financial resources to actually fight it, it’s good to fight it. It’s better for everyone when patents that shouldn’t have been issued are invalidated.

The short version is that a lot of patents were issued in the 90s and early 2000s for “inventions” that actually already existed “but on a computer!” After a lot of legal wrangling the standards got stricter and these never-should-have-been issued patents have been systematically invalidated, though it’s a one-at-a-time process. I think Masimo originally claimed infringement of a dozen patents. From memory, it’s now down to two patents that have not been entirely invalidated, and I think even those have already been carved down to remove most of the claims. So basically there are two half-patents left to litigate and Apple thinks they can finish those off as well.

No surprise here. Apple’s position, which I expect they’ll likely eventually prevail on, is that none of Masimo’s relevant patents are valid and they should have never been issued. Why pay money to license an invalid patent?

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.

My understanding is that it’s the reverse of this. The iPad app is available by default. They’re putting in the (minimal) effort required to proactively disable availability of the iPad app.

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.

I work with drones, which means I work with 4K video. I’m a photography writer, which means I work with photos. I’m just the kind of creative who ought to have a MacBook Pro.

Not really. This honestly isn’t that complicated, and editing 4K video isn’t particularly taxing by modern standards. They should get the 15" M2 MacBook Air. Probably spring for 512GB storage. It’s $1,499 and it’s a certain to be a big upgrade over their current Mac. Problem solved.

So you already have HomePods? Because if so, all of your cheap dumb smoke alarms automatically become smart. It’s just recognizes the alarm sound and alerts you.

When you pay a merchant, the merchant pays processing fees, which in addition to running the service, help cover fraud and the rewards you earn with credit cards. If someone isn’t a merchant, you don’t want to actually pay them.

Person asks how to use SMS when they don’t have data service, gets recommendation for an app that requires data service.

An advertisement strongly implies some sort of payment. This is editorial content.

(I feel like I am missing another one)

I’d categorize them primarily as thrillers, but Severance and Dr. Brain are also both sci-fi (and both very good).