That's your opinion on why people switched away, but if you use actual facts - i.e., adoption rates of phones and polls conducted asking people why they bought the phone they did the main reason that people switched away from iOS was that they didn't offer large phones and Android manufacturers did.

When the 6 and 6+ launched the trend swung back the other way.

I'm sure there were some converts because of price, but from the adoption numbers it's pretty clear people wanted bigger phones and went to Android to get them only to come back when Apple also offered them.

It won't make it to the App Store, but you can put one on yourself now if you like since you can now side load apps onto iOS9 as long as you build them from source without paying the $99 developer fee.

That would be an overreach - which is everything the president has been accused of doing by the GOP with very little actual evidence of such. Intervening directly in a non-federal matter like this is exactly the wrong thing to do. What he has done is neatly publicly shame the school district and the cops without intervening directly in their discipline.

In normal scientific terms, yes, but the Standard Model, especially now that the Higgs has finished the puzzle, is as pretty close to "here's a map of where you'll find each particle within these ranges" as you're likely to see. The next range is also quite generally defined by the nuclear forces, and it's considerably higher than anything we can reasonably do right now (i.e., nowhere close even if we build an accelerator that circles the earth's equator.

The title is obvious nonsense, but the "reasonable assumption" is the Standard Model.

Yes, but the private key is generated by the Apple ID password, or has some role in its creation.

Well, they can reset your Apple ID password to something they know and then get the data, so it's not "impossible", but if they do that then you'll know it has happened.

Bar that, however, I think they set it up so that they couldn't decrypt the data any other way, even when pressed with a court order.

They know the hash of your password and can reset it, but they otherwise don't know what your password is.

They could reset it to something they know, but you'd know they had done this, and they could also add a device controlled by them (or the FBI) to your send list, but this would also be evident to the end user (at least, to a security researcher).

They set up iMessage like that deliberately so that they could promote the fact that they can't decrypt the messages themselves as a feature of the system.

Obviously since they control the system (i.e., they can reset your password) it's not *totally* secure if they were really determined to decrypt the data, but they way it is designed right now it's about as good as they could make it for a system that you do not control. From what I understand from people with more knowledge than I about how it works, there are very limited ways that they could get the data without you knowing that they had done so (barring the lack of some giant, hidden backdoor in the system).

No they're not - they have a website you can go to that will de-register your number and fix the problem of vanishing SMS messages if you move to a non-iOS phone if you don't switch off the iMessage system on that number before changing phone.

It takes about 5 minutes and you receive a text message when it completes.

The official method to shut off iMessage is to do it before you stop using the iPhone, and that used to be the only way (leaving people stuck, since it's easy to forget to do it), but the website has been around for some time now.

There's no "fighting in court" or "not fixing it" because they fixed it, a long time ago, and the system to fix it is very quick and easy to use and fixes the problem immediately.

No way would the FBI want to do this, since it would set the precedent that surrendering the encryption key to that data would be self incrimination.

They have a vested interest in the encrypted data being treated as legally the same as the unencrypted data, since they don't want legal precedent for a fifth amendment defence on encryption keys being ruled on by a court. There's no solid case law on that one way or the other right now.

Apple have stated in the past that one of the features of iMessage is that they can't decrypt them and the fact that this court case exists seems to suggest they weren't just saying that (also, if they're caught in that lie, assuming it is one, the PR fallout would be enormous).

I'm not sure how they can't decrypt them, since iMessages are synced quickly and easily across all devices that share the same Apple ID (if you want them to), so you'd just assume that since Apple knows your ID it would be able to decrypt the messages themselves that clearly pass through their servers.

What I assume must be the case is that they don't know what your Apple ID password is, only the hash of it, and the only thing they can do it reset it. Now, this would mean that if they wanted to they could reset the password to something they know and then be able to decrypt your iMessages, but you'd obviously know if they did this.

I'm not knowledgeable enough to know if an end-to-end encryption system set up by a third party that is locked by an account and password can be designed to be totally secure (in content terms) from the system owner, akin to having Apple send messages inside locked safes between different users and being able to provide you with a way to make a key that can open them without having the ability to use that key itself.

So Apple is a software company now?

Also, what do you think this partnership is, exactly, if not to improve third-party iOS integration?

Ah, so your on;y criterion for a device being a "full computing device" is filesystem access.

Thus, in your world, the Creative Rio mp3 player is more of a "full computing device" than an iPhone because the former gives you filesystem access.

Interesting, but whatever works for you I guess. How do you check your email on that Rio? It must get annoying to read it 2 lines at a time, surely?

Right, but who said anything about changing that? They just want to make iOS devices work more effectively in an enterprise setting - that means tablets, phones etc.

There's no reason that iPads (for example) couldn't be used as handy video conference devices, especially at remote/off-site/smaller sites alongside all the current IT infrastructure.

Funny, you seem to think that products can only be bought for personal use.

What, I wonder, do you think this deal is designed to address? Perhaps it has something to do with wanting to make iOS devices more enterprise-friendly (they already have rudimentary enterprise support with curated app stores and local app deployment, but you think this chicken and egg problem shouldn't be solved because they're "consumer devices".

Whoever would buy an automobile! The roads are designed for horses and carts! There are hay stops and water troughs for the horses! Cars are nit designed for that! Pity the thought!