Yeah - I was too lazy to look it up.

Reagan got the Teheran hostages free by promising to unfreeze some shah-assets.

They were actually released on election day - and that's just a very public example.

Also, it's pretty clear that Russia has sent a little warning in the form of the Shadow Broker files.

That's why the Obama-Administration is so tight-arsed about calling out Putin. The Russians probably know a lot more about a couple of very shady intelligence operations than they could ever have gained from Ed Snowden - and they made it clear that they can leak it anytime.

The Russians basically said:
"We can play this game, too, you know? Don't rock the boat, be happy with your book-contracts, the Nobel-prize and your cushy 50000 USD/gig speaking engagements".

Your idea of the "users" of Google is just wrong. Their users are the companies that pay for the ads. What you think are users are really the products that are sold to the actual users.

That data was stored only locally. And an update reduced the size of the local cache significantly.

Also Apple is going to great lengths to keep data they collect locally on the phone or anonymize as much of the data that needs to be sent back to its servers, instead if selling it to the highest bidder like Google.

You would maybe go into one shop. But not into three dozen shops while you happen to walk through the mall during lunchtime.

Would you buy an iPhone instead?

Minority Report is 2002. Demolition Man is 1993: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Never Say Never Again is from 1983, but in it, somebody has his Iris altered to match the President's one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Make that decades. Or even centuries. The amount of dust that got blown into the atmosphere then was gigantic - after all, traces of it can still be found today, as a visible boundary.
It's probably the closest thing to hell we got.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...–Paleogene_extinction_event#Duration

I have battery-powered noise-cancelling headphones (Bose QC25). The batteries last very long. I don't think I would notice if they'd draw from the phone (which would be cool, kind-of). The phone consumes much more battery.

But I agree in that I don't necessarily need a thinner phone. I like my 4S's form-factor and will buy the SE. The 6 and 6S always seemed too slippery for me when I tried them in shops.

For extra battery, you can now buy the "hump" charger-case...

Competition is good - when it leads to better products.
Currently, products just get cheaper and shittier - because for most people, price is the only differentiator they know - and the lower, the better.
The MFI program ensures better compatibility and less danger that the accessory actually fries your phone.

There's a reason why almost all 3rd-party bluetooth-accessories work with iPhones out of the box, every single time - and mostly/sometimes with even the flagship Android devices.

Once I buy a new iPhone (which doesn't happen very often, I admit), I'll buy an adaptor for my Bose headphones. Or maybe Bose will just sell a cable that does the trick. Compared to the price of the iPhone and the headphones, the price of the adapter isn't really a concern. Even if they currently cost 70 USD (ouch).

Apple is a high-price brand. I don't get why people are complaining about this.
Do they also go on Porsche or Mercedes car-forums and complain about the high prices of original spares?

They uninstalled it a while ago, after one of those zero-days.
Then re-installed it, when a patch came around for that zero day
Then just let it rot. I think it's patched occasionally. Thank god I'm not forced to use that silly Windows-image of theirs.
They know what they're doing. They just think an APT can't or won't hit them. Or that AV and their silly proxy will catch it. I actually have to chuckle at the thought of that.

Apple does have a monopoly - on Apple products. I'm always amazed how people can overlook this fact.

As long as enough people like the products and the price is still within their financial means, Apple will do well financially.

Of course, there's a limit on how much Apple products and services the average household can buy before the monthly bill becomes existence-threatening.

I'm sorry, but you're either stupid or completely deluded. People who buy Android-phones (apart from the minuscule fan-base that trolls Apple forums) don't care what OS their handset runs. They don't even know. They don't even know what an "OS" is, to begin with. They also don't "buy" them, they get them for free when they renew a contract.

Android is almost exactly where Google wanted it to be. They wanted it to be dirt-cheap, on phones that even the poorest can afford, so they can deliver ads to these people, too. And that's what you've got today. The only thing that didn't exactly turn-out as they hoped is that Apple is still raking in almost all the profits in the industry and is slowly pushing them from the one platform that makes them decent money.

They thought Apple would be priced out of this race-to-the-bottom market, but that hasn't happened so far. At least not to the extent Google had obviously initially hoped to achieve.

Actually, the opposite is happening: Chinese (and others, like Amazon) companies are just forking Open-Source Android and slapping their own apps, app-stores etc. on top of it.

Support? Updates? Who cares, right?
You vastly overestimate the amount of influence Google has on what people do with Android. They have some influence on the source-code, of course - but once it's published, everybody can do with it whatever he wishes. And that's exactly what is happening now.

Also, as Google seems to come up with a new "winning" strategy for Android/ChromeOS every year, can you really blame any company for not getting resources behind this year's initiative (to be killed off next year)?

Talk about NIH!

:-)

Insane thing. The laptop, of course.

I remember, yes. It must be 20 years already. My first "real" job (an internship).