it's about how aware to the rest of the system any given thread is to the rest of it. Android's implementation of keyboards is incredibly unsafe.

As far as intents vs iOS extensions go, you're right, but the reason why is that Android doesn't do much of anything to keep things playing cleanly.

They sell between 20 and 40 million iPhones in a quarter. at 600 bucks a pop. Granted, unsubsidized, but, let's be frank; they're not letting the carriers off the hook for the 400 bucks in revenues. Worst case scenario, 20 billion times 600 is 12 billion. A quarter.

Investing half a billion over time for production of key components for the camera, watch and touch id sensor makes a lot of sense. especially considering how tricky sapphire manufacturing is.

This deserves infinite mod points.

Yeah, but you're missing out on a few things like the value of the name Minecraft.

Minecraft has spawned a lot of merch, as an example of brand value. Shirts, hats, toys, blind bags, key rings, foam swords and pick axes, etc. etc.

That 2.5 billion isn't going to pay off right away. But it will pay off.

They're using sapphire in the Touch ID sensor, the rear camera and the apple watch.

It's not even close to a loss.

As a bitter partisan, I'd hate to say that the things that Apple is playing "catchup" on are things that by getting right now, they don't have to worry about everything going to hell later.

For instance, how iOS implements third party keyboards is that the keyboard itself is sandboxed away from the rest of the running process. In comparison, on Android, keyboards are basically key loggers running onto of the current running process.

Intents vs Plugins? Similar.

see: http://arstechnica.com/apple/2...

There were reports that Swiftkey was going to be announced for iOS 7, funny enough, as a third party keyboard. However, it seems like all of the XPC stuff Apple has been doing, Google has a LOT to catch up on. Apple now just has the low hanging fruit.

When you connect an iOS device to iTunes, one of the options is "encrypt backup"

Unfortunately, this option doesn't seem to be available to backups via ios. :(

(Just checked on my iPhone runnjng ios8 GM)

You mean like if someone took the crown off of a mechanical watch and turned it into a controller? :)

Fox News is often destructive and wrong. But nearly always coherent. Hrm... That gives me an app idea.

Wow. Major Poe here. I'm not sure if you're a troll or serious.

If you're not a troll, then what the hell are you doing stuck at 10.1? The intel transition was 8 years ago. What kind of lazy software vender are you using that hasn't updated for Intel? Also, 10.6 runs most PPC apps via Rosetta.

As a diehard apple fanboy, I'm pretty much OK with this. As long as i can have VLC or something similar for movies(Which is in the iOS store; and similar apps do exist) and side load MP3s, I'm good.

However, the creepy part isn't the bowl or the spoon, it's the bowl insisting you restock your cereal using amazon and you can order right from the fucking bowl.

It doesn't have that going for it anymore.

The UI's interesting as an experiment, but ultimately really creepy.

I'm pretty sure Aldous Huxley has a few things to say about an electronic gizmo that serves as an entry way to cheap consumer goods.

They failed on their own merits.

I doubt the Bigass iPhone thing today's the reason why they tipped on this.

The options are either compile a dumb ARM binary that's not optimized for your particular flavor of ARM(which is horribly inefficient), compile lots of binaries for lots of flavors of ARM(not to mention flavors of MIPS/x86/etc).

What about when 64bit ARM comes around on Android? Half the fun of 64bit ARM is ditching a lot of legacy ARM crap, I believe Thumb mode being one of them.

Either Google or the phone vendor would have to supply compiler farms to do this for everyone who's upgraded their phone and now needs to get ARM v(n+1) versions of their app or you're stuck with inefficient code because lol choices or you compile on the phone itself.

Dalvik cuts through this and just uses a pretty solid VM.

Well. No. The problem you'd run into is that some apps on some phones wouldn't compile in any meaningful period of time

Dalvik solves a lot of those problems.

(And introduces new ones to boot.)