kirklennon @ kirklennon @kbin.social

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2 yr. ago

The statement in the article is literally incorrect. You cannot send a message to an Android user through iMessage. That fact is at the core of the discussion and they got it wrong. It’s not degraded from an iMessage. The conversation is just happening over SMS/MMS, as the Messages app has supported since launch in 2007.

Google wants Apple to use Google’s proprietary extension of RCS, which runs on Google’s own servers as is precisely as open as iMessage. Effectively nobody uses the industry-standard version of it.

The app is called Messages. The entire point of the article is to discuss iMessages versus SMS so I absolutely do think it’s important to get the distinction right in this case.

On the tech side, Android users also get lower-quality photos and videos when they're sent through iMessage.

Android users don’t receive anything at all through iMessage; the whole conversation becomes SMS/MMS. I suppose getting major, relevant tech details is hard for an outlet like Engadget.

Why should someone bother to read something if you couldn’t be bothered to write it in the first place? And how can they judge the quality of your writing if it’s not your writing?

He also argued that Apple's approach explicitly violates the DMA's Anti-Circumvention provision that forbids subdividing a platform's market share to avoid regulation. The provision says those providing core platform services "shall not segment, divide, subdivide, fragment or split those services through contractual, commercial, technical or any other means in order to circumvent the quantitative thresholds laid down in Article 3(2)."

This quote is plainly incorrect. Apple hasn’t fragmented their browsers in order to circumvent thresholds that didn’t even exist; each OS gets a separate version for clearly legitimate reasons. The legal question is if they are separate enough to count separately, which at the very least isn’t an absurd argument to make.

The government can't compel them to actually lie, and under their current public disclosures, they do not do such things. At any rate, demands are not unlimited in scope; US law doesn't require them to secretly re-architect the whole service to create a backdoor from scratch. AT&T willingly built 641A.

Yet, my wife's Siri can always find the nearest whatever
You can choose to let your phone use your location for requests. Her questions to Siri are not associated with her Apple ID but are instead linked to a separate anonymous Siri ID, which allows a degree of context without creating any records linked to an identifiable person.

and suggest stuff based on my wife's "preferences".
Suggestions for random stuff on your phone (Do you want directions to work? Do you want to listen to this playlist that you listen to every freaking day?) are generated locally on the phone. Apple the company never sees that sort of stuff.

The abbreviation i.e. is short for "id est," literally "that is." English-language alternatives would be "that is to say" or "in other words."

The abbreviation e.g. is short for "exempli gratia," meaning "for example."

Yeah, that’s all true, but who really needs that kind of power?

The people featured in the presentation: music and video production people, medical researchers, machine learning experts. The MacBook Air is their most popular notebook. The MacBook Pro is for people who actually need more (with a new lower-tier MacBook Pro added for morons who insist they need a "pro" model but really don't).

At that point, why even go for a laptop, vs. what would clearly be a high end desktop station?

Because you can take that high-end computer with you across the room, on a plane, or anywhere else.

Yes, but X is still using "Twitter." It takes an extended period of complete abandonment before you can petition to have the trademark canceled.

She's built like a steakhouse, but she handles like a bistro.

Just for you I did a couple of quick searches and discovered something extraordinary. I'll leave out most of the specific terms I tried but basically anything for an explicit topic just doesn't have web results at all. It merely offers to search in the browser using your default search engine.

"Masturbation" also had no Apple web results but pulled up a Shortcuts result with the option to turn on the "Do Not Disturb Focus"!

Apple got into search years ago, though. If you search in Safari, Apple will provide a single top result (if it has one) above your selected search engine results. Search for a famous person from history and you'll most likely get a Wikipedia link at the top with the picture and small excerpt. This is powered by Apple's own search engine. It's not limited to Wikipedia either but is powered by their Applebot web crawler. If you want to be able to see more than one result, you can use the Spotlight search by swiping down on the home screen. Depending on your search term you'll have a Websites section with multiple results from their search engine.

What Apple doesn't offer is a web page for you to access their search engine. Even without it, though, many millions of people have been using Apple's search engine for years now, clicking on the results usually without even realizing that's where it came from.

A non-profit that owns a for-profit company is very well not realy non-profit.

All of the profit of the subsidiary goes to the nonprofit parent, in furtherance of its nonprofit mission. The subsidiary doesn't exist to make anybody rich but just to earn (taxable) income for the parent.

The whole concept of a parent company owning the foundation is fishy.

The non-profit foundation is the parent company. It has some taxable subsidiaries that, among other things, handle certain revenue-generating business deals.

Microsoft already was trying to leverage the popularity of Windows to make Windows Phone more popular but it didn’t work. Apple, meanwhile, licensed Microsoft Exchange for iPhone and basically established Microsoft’s entire product strategy under Nadella: providing high-margin services on whatever device people actually want to use.

Microsoft made a decent touchscreen Windows laptop, but that’s a niche within a shrinking market. I don’t think they did much to reinvent the category. It’s better, but it’s not a fundamentally different product than what was for sale 20 years ago.

In retrospect, I think there could have been ways we could have made it work by perhaps reinventing the category of computing between PCs, tablets, and phones.

I'm sorry but no, Microsoft was never going to be capable of reinventing any category of computing. They've never done it before and it's just not within their expertise. I think Nadella was right at the time to cut their losses. Windows Phone represented Microsoft's best efforts in that space and, while it had its fans, it just wasn't enough.

Meanwhile, they've done really well with their "apps and services on every platform" approach. How many millions of people use Outlook on their phone? How many apps are running their back end on Azure? Microsoft may have given up on an aspect of "mobile," but is still raking in piles of cash from what people actually do on mobile devices. Take the win where you can find it.