This is the silliest rant I have come across this week... Why would anyone compare an abbreviated word with a non-abbreviated word, and then use that as proof that the abbreviation is not as clear as the non-abbreviated word - duh!

Wait till you discover acronyms... the same 3, 4, or 5-letter acronym could mean so many different things... now that is something we should all rail about!

If you want to use the full word, nobody is stopping you... do it for clarity's sake... but for heaven's sake, don't introduce yet another abbreviation like "perms" into the mix.

This seems to be primarily US-only problem... at least for now. As with previous US prohibitions such as Huawei, ZTE, etc. or pseudo-prohibitions such as Alipay, WeChat Pay, QQ Wallet, SHAREit, etc. it is only a matter of time before Five Eyes countries, followed by EU countries, are pressured to follow suite with their own prohibitions.

National security will continue to be used as an excuse by governments the world over to block access to services or ban companies that they don't like, don't trust, won't tow the line, or whatever (e.g. China blocks access to Google, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook for failing to adhere to the country's data security laws; India blocked TikTok and other apps for over privacy and data sovereignty concerns; Nigeria blocked Twitter for deleting/censoring tweets made by the country's president, etc.)

However, the most important thing is that for more than 85% of the worlds population, the sun will continue to rise in the east and set in the west; the most dominant smart phone manufacturers will still be Apple, Huawei, and Samsung; the most important social media platforms will still be Douyin, Facebook, Instagram, Kuaishou, Pinterest, Snapchat, TikTok, Twitter, Wechat, and YouTube; the companies that the world depends on for global telecommunications infrastructure will still be Cisco, Ericsson, Huawei, Nokia, and ZTE; and TikTok will continue to be the global phenomenon it is today - at least outside of the US.

According to the Reuters article the most valuable part of TikTok (other than the 1.6 billion users it has amassed) is its algorithm. Given that the same algorithm is used in the other popular ByteDance apps such as Douyin, Resso, Toutiao, and Xigua, it is understandable why ByteDance wouldn't want to sell this secret sauce to a future competitor. And given that TikTok's US daily active users barely make 5% of ByteDance's total worldwide DAU, it is understandable why ByteDance might conclude that their global growth outside of the US market will outpace the pain of shuttering the loss-making US experiment... at least they will get to keep the recipe of their content discovery, recommendation, engagement, and personalisation secret sauce.

I suppose the price of building a successful ecosystem is that one day the EU will force you to open it up and share it with the same competitors who tried and failed or simply sat on their laurels and didn't bother to even try to build their own successful ecosystem.

The reward for failure to build your own successful ecosystem is that one day the EU will force your competitors who succeed to open up their own successful ecosystems and share it with you, without having to take any risks of your own in market development, partner incentives, ecosystem development, international billing and settlement systems, world-wide tax compliance, etc.

It is a pity that the Apple report does not break down the revenues by geography because that would enable us to see how much the US weirdness is weighted in the results.

For instance, the US retail space tends to be dominated by a few massive brands like Walmart, Amazon, Uber, McDonalds, etc. In the rest of the world, there would be a dozen or more big brands that people regularly interact with on a regular basis. Shopping via an app means that users do not have to have their payment card details scattered across dozens of websites - some of which may be local delivery services, several ride hailing services (its weird that the entire US is dominated by just 2 - Uber and Lyft), etc.

While in the US it might be normal to ask: "Why would people use an ads filled app when you can get no ads and better performance with a browser?" In the rest of the world (particularly Africa, Asia, Europe, Middle-East, South America, etc.) most people would ask: "Why would people use an ads filled website on their tiny mobile browser when you can get no ads and better performance with the app?"

Several second and third tier developers have built entire economies monetising access to otherwise free content through these APIs. However, recently we have see the owners of popular social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, etc. start to restrict or limit free access to their public APIs. Sometimes it is in the name of limiting unrestricted access to personal or private information, sometimes it is in the name of controlling the cost of running the cloud infrastructure providing the APIs, sometimes it is just a blatant attempt to monetise the popularity of their API investment.

I understand that these app developers are providing alternative user experiences to the services offered through the free APIs - otherwise end users would not pay extra for what they can already get for free directly from the website or the platforms own apps. Developers deserve to be compensated for their efforts to offer an enhanced experience to users - even if the content and APIs are publicly available and free.

If this becomes a trend, the era of free or near free third-party social media apps, browser plug-ins, etc. may be coming to an end. End users will need a good reason why they should pay more to access content and social media services that they can get for free through the platform's own website or first-party app

Any data that can be read back, can be accessed... whether it is in a data centre down the road, bottom of the ocean, or on the moon. That is why we have zero knowledge encryption. It allows companies like Apple, Boxcryptor (RIP), etc. to respond to government data requests without violating their users data confidentiality. Of course governments will try to crack the encryption... and if the data is worth it, they will invest the full might of their government resources to do so... regardless of whether the data came from a data centre down the road, bottom of the ocean or the moon.

The problem of government and legal data requests is easier solved by putting your data centre in practically any country other than the United States, Iran or China - countries that are known to surveil virtually all data on all communication networks that they can reach... Okay, maybe not just any country given that more and more western democracies seem to have adopted the same data and telecommunication surveillance practices as... umm... the United States and European Union. But you get the idea... build your data centre in a place like Argentina or Iceland, offer your clients an easy to implement end-to-end zero knowledge encryption solution, make sure that all your logs are scrubbed every 24 hours, and lawyer up... because if you become the data centre of choice for information pirates, malware distributers, etc. many governments will be coming for you.

Well, even if you achieved super-dupa-mega-fast bandwidth (when the moon is in direct line of sight), I still don't understand what the moon offers from a compute or processing perspective that can't be achieved here on earth - at a fraction of the cost.

Surely it is much cheaper to run power and fibre to a data centre built in the the arctic or antarctic or even under the sea.

These companies don't own the news... they never have. They used to control the distribution of the news content in the days when owning a printing press, controlling an efficient physical delivery mechanism and having access to prime space on street poles, grocery stores and busy sidewalks was a prerequisite to being able to operate a successful newspaper or magazine business. Of course I am not forgetting the importance of the people who ran around and collected and bundled all this content into interesting news stories that we would want to read... but you know what I mean.

I thought that this had been settled in the late nineties (or was it the early noughts) when these businesses realised that the internet was a way more efficient and faster distributer of the same time sensitive content (ahem... news) that they were peddling a day later. I remember almost every news outlet (even CNN) experimented with tryng to turn ordinary joe (I should also say "and jane" just to be politically correct) into a citizen journalist - they were usually the source of the story to begin with. But soon hundreds of thousands of people realised that they could tell their own story... skip the middleman. Ahhhh... I miss the internet chaos of the nineties, when blogs were cool and awesome.

I think that the few news businesses that hire passionate journalists (who need to be more than just content gatherers) who do real jourlalism (that stuff that is taught in journalism schools) - as opposed to just reporting and distributing the news - are thriving. Why... because... well... the internet thingie got out of hand... who knows what is real and what is fake these days - it's just your intepretation of what you think are the facts vs my intepretation of what I think are the facts.

Most of these companies are in the business of vacuming up new interesting content that is already out there, curating it to fit whatever bias their audience holds, calling it news and shoveling it out. Just because the public is willing to pay for that curated delivery (because heavan forbid that we should inadvertantly come across a view point from a source that is contradictory to our own bias) does not give them ownership to the content... just its curation and delivery.

Just my 2 cents worth.

iOS 16 doesn't run on the iPhone 6...

This is true... but I think that you are deliberately absolutising (yes, that is a word) what the OP meant with their statement that

My daughter uses my old iPhone 6 from 8 years ago, and it just recently updated to iOS 12.5.6, which is a security update that came out in August 2022. When she was showing me the update, I was surprised at how many iOS features that I use regularly on my iPhone 12 Pro, were also available on her iPhone 6. Now, I am aware that there are many iOS features that I have on my iPhone, that she will never have on her phone... but, while I was playing with her phone, it struck me that there were so many iOS features that I had been excited about when they first appeared in a new OS update, that I had forgotten about, and the daily essentials that I relied on the most (bar a few hardware dependent features that I love) were all there on my daughters 8-year-old iPhone. Many of these features were not there in 2014, when the iPhone 6 first came out. I can't imagine what it would be like to have to use an iPhone running iOS 8 - which is what shipped with the iPhone 6.

I think that you are missing the point...

The iPhone is more secure because of the tight control that Apple has over security updates. Within a week or so, the vast majority of active iPhones will have this update (I upgraded to iOS14.4 on all my devices already).

But just because Apple has this tight control (walled garden) does not make iPhone or its software more or less bug-free than a Samsung or LG running Android. All software has bugs... some of those bugs can lead to security exploits and system vulnerabilities.

Apple is not necessarily more responsive or faster as addressing these flaws than Google (they certainly are faster than Samsung and LG)... but when they are addressed, the rollout is more comprehensive, which makes the entire ecosystem a lot more secure because attack vectors that might exploit unpatched devices in the Android world find it much harder to find these kind of gaps in the iOS ecosystem.

I think that this is a no-win situation for China and ByteDance, so they have decided that if they are going to lose, then at the very least, they will not let an American company gain from their loss. Let Trump keep his America (and five eyes)... ByteDance will still get to slowly eat up the rest of the world with their TikTok algorithm - issues in India, notwithstanding. If they give up their secret sauce to a giant American corporation, then the last two years will have all been for nought.

China can exert pressure on US operations when its a chinese owner but if its an american based owner their power over the platform to use it to spy on people is lost.

I think that this is a no-win situation for China and ByteDance, so they have decided that is they are going to lose, then at the very least, they will not let an American company gain from their loss. Let Trump keep America... ByteDance will still get to slowly eat up the rest of the world with their algorithm - issues in India, notwithstanding. If they give up their secret sauce to a giant American corporation, then the last two years will have all been for nought.

My family (wife and kids) has had 36 iPhones and 3 iPod Touches since the days of the iPhone 3G.

Between us, we have had 2 really bad battery swellings - one iPhone 5 and one iPhone 5S - where the screen was actually pushed out by the swelling battery. I think that there was one minor iPhone 5 swelling that we caught before the screen was pushed out and had repaired. The iPhone 5S probably had the shortest life span of just over 4 years - even the iPhone 5's outlived that iPhone 5S.

The most common cause of iPhone death in my family has been water (swimming pool, toilet, washing machine, etc.), major trauma (a rough tackle on the playground, falling off a motorcycle or quad, a well-placed ball strike, etc.) and loss/theft (stolen, forgotten somewhere, etc.).

The oldest iPhone still in active and daily use in my family is an iPhone 5, that my wife uses as a second phone for business - that is almost 7 years old now.

Wait a minute...

Many different kinds of imposters ask you to pay with gift cards. Someone might call you and claim to be from the IRS, collecting back taxes or fines [...] once you buy the card, the caller then will demand the gift card number and PIN on the back of the card [...] and once they’ve done that, the scammers and your money are gone, usually without a trace.

Whoa... do people really think that they can pay for their taxes and general computer repairs using an iTunes gift card... the actual gift card... not through Apple Pay, but by using the actual gift card!? Wow... that is very special indeed.

Of course Apple knows which iTunes account the gift card was redeemed into... the money is not gone without a trace. I don't think that the challenge is tracing the gift card to an AppleID. I think that the challenge is trying to arbitrate between two people, both claiming to be the legitimate owners of the gift card (...and maybe one of them does not even have an AppleID). In a world where all gift cards were still physical plastic and the store that sold the plastic gift card had a copy of the purchaser's ID, this might work because the purchaser could prove ownership. But those days are mostly gone.

I don't think that Apple wants to act as a small claims court, arbitrating between random claimants to a used gift card and its contents. That is what the courts are for... and the courts have the power to make apple reveal the personal details and identity of the other claimant to the gift card. The courts have the tools to determine which claim is the legitimate claim... Once ordered by a legitimate court, Apple should notify the other claimant that their information has been requested as part of an ongoing court case and then immediately release the information that the court requires to do its job.

If Apple opened up this back door, I would be buying Apple gift cards en masse, using them to buy a whole bunch of stuff through Apple Pay, and then asking for a refund after each purchase claiming that I was defrauded.... ha ha ha... good luck with that.