I really hope the Pro models finally come in some bold colors. Just give me the same options as the back side of the iMacs. I'm so tired of these dull, dark colors. By all means keep the "starlight" and "midnight" for people who want a boring choice but if you're going to offer a color option, actually offer some color.
This definition would make it so basically only hardware, OS and some cloud infrastructure service companies could count as tech companies because technology is generally not made for its own sake.
Yes, that's pretty much my point (but you also need to add companies selling software itself). The alternative is that every company is a technology company, making the term completely meaningless.
Google is a big company and some of what it does is tech company stuff: Gmail, Chrome, Google Cloud, Pixel. But all of that is tangential their main business, which is just selling ads. I don't object to the tech parts being covered by tech news. I just don't think a company's tech-focused side projects (as a percentage of its business) make it a tech company.
If you took technology away from social media, you don’t have anything left.
I don’t think the mere fact that you access something solely on a website or app makes it a tech company. That’s merely a means to an end. But there’s no more technology involved in running a social media company than there is a modern bank. The technology is actually a lot simpler.
Sure, today anyone can host a Mastodon, but I wouldn’t call that any less technologically-focused.
I’d say that Mastodon as a software project is technology; the various instances, however, are not.
There’s a merit to say that technology is connected to all sort of fields and purposes today, but that doesn’t make it less of technology, or the companies behind them less technology-focused.
My contention is that the use of technology is so universal that it's not meaningful to call a company a technology company just because they use a lot of technology, even if they have to create a lot of it themselves. Pretty much every big company has on-staff software engineers making and implementing custom technology. It takes a lot of technology to make a law firm work but that doesn't make a law firm a technology company. If we use too-expansive of a definition for what's a technology company, then it applies to almost every company, making it a useless term.
I do not think social media companies are technology focused. They just use technology to achieve their social media (/advertising) business goals, the same as every bank, every hospital, every trucking company, etc.
Technology is a means to an end so I like to make the distinction of what the company actually does or make. Apple's primary business is selling computer hardware (an actual technology product) so it's a technology company. Microsoft sells software and cloud services (tech tools) so it's a technology company. Netflix sells access to video, so it's a media company. Are algorithms involved? Sure, but they're child's play compared to the algorithms used by high frequency traders, yet those people still unambiguously work for finance/banking companies. Every large retailer employs data scientists and teams of data analysts, but they're still retailers rather than tech companies. Amazon is the trickiest to categorize. Amazon.com is a straight up retailer but AWS is clearly a tech "company." Best to think of that one like a conglomerate.
Or a 11% increase in price overall. Meanwhile inflation is at 6-7%?
Over what time period, though? We'd need to know when the 255g for $10 price was introduced. If the price and weight have been unchanged for a few years, this could even be below the rate of inflation.
If you read this patent, it explicitly says that it's a continuation of an application that was granted as 9,965,157. If you look at '157, you can see that it was granted in May 2018. It has the same line drawing of the headset and the same quotes on how it could be used. 9to5Mac somehow missed this five years ago. The corresponding published application, 2014/0129938, was made public in 2014, with the same drawing and example uses. Actually, we can go back to the 2008 published application 2008/0276178, with the same drawing and examples.
Just to make it clear, this isn't a new revelation at all. These were all public patent applications going back at least 15 years. Patently Apple first noticed it in 2014, so they were only six years late.
Honestly I'm not complaining. This was, functionally, a large transfer of wealth from rich venture capitalists to everyone in the form of below-cost rides for several years.
Uber was unsustainably underpriced in order to gain market share. Pricing is temporary; the core benefit as a consumer was always the ability to request one from anywhere using an app (where you also paid) and have them come directly to you instead of needing to hail one. Taxi companies added that ability and now everything is better. There's no reason why the approximate cost should vary much, outside of limited promotions. An Uber, a Lyft, and a taxi should cost roughly the same. Why wouldn't they? Perpetual VC-funded pricing wasn't what we were promised; the promise was convenient ordering and stress-free payments.
Do you mean to say it's not perfectly logical that USB 3.0, USB 3.1 Gen 1, and USB 3.2 Gen 1 are all actually the same version? I wish I could travel back in time to the meeting where that was proposed and slap the person in the face until they realized the error of their ways.
It's a retroactive name just to keep the numbering scheme logical. It would be weird to start off giving the next version "1" so they added numbers to all of the old versions. 802.11n was renamed a full 15 years after it was released!
The confusing alphabet soup of Wi-Fi versions got renamed. 802.11n became Wi-Fi 4, 802.11ac became Wi-Fi 5, and 802.11ax became Wi-Fi 6. Wi-Fi 7 is still in development so 6 is the best in-use version.
wouldn’t he still lose out on a lot of potential voters
Again, no, he wouldn't. Just because he hasn't openly used the N-word doesn't mean he's been evenly slightly coy about his racism. 100% of Trump voters already knew he was a white nationalist before they voted for him the first time. They either specifically like that about him, or just don't care because it's something they're willing to accept as long as they get the regressive misogyny or whatever else they want from him. He represents an alliance of the worst people. Some are in it for the racism, others for controlling women, others just want naked authoritarianism. They understand it's a package deal and they are all on board with it.
He ran on a rather explicitly white nationalist campaign in the 2016 election. He’s never not been openly racist. Republican voters are demonstrably OK with that.
Disney has none of that. They also have a market cap of $160b. Apple would need to pay a large premium to do an acquisition. This would cost them well over $200b, maybe even encroaching on $250b.
To preface this, I don’t think this is at all a likely thing to happen but my understanding of the current theories is that Disney would first divest itself of some of its business units prior to a sale of the company. No more ESPN or ABC, for example. The acquisition would still be huge, of course, but not as big as Disney is today, perhaps closer to 5% of Apple’s value.
I don’t think there’s anything particularly partisan about the law in the first place so it’s not so much an issue of what any party supports but rather education of the electorate at large. People aren’t going to get excited about encryption but they will be angry when WhatsApp stops working (which is what is going to happen) and they need to know why. Ideally they’ll hear enough rumblings that literally all of their messaging apps are going to stop working before the law goes into effect to stop it in time.
Apple offers to match donations from employees so this is a case of an employee making a small donation and Apple matching it rather than Apple explicitly choosing to make a tiny donation itself.
I really hope the Pro models finally come in some bold colors. Just give me the same options as the back side of the iMacs. I'm so tired of these dull, dark colors. By all means keep the "starlight" and "midnight" for people who want a boring choice but if you're going to offer a color option, actually offer some color.