kirklennon

A fine of less than $1 million is absolutely not what anyone except Google is asking for.

The DOJ can really only ask for treble damages. If Google paid ~$3 million, that’s realistically as good as the DOJ was going to get. It sounds like the initial estimates were just way off. Nobody should be shocked that the inept antitrust division screwed up again. They’re going after big, buzz-worthy names without the facts or law to actually back it up.

The headline is strange. The DOJ sued for money and Google just straight up gave them the money they could have won upfront. That’s not a “pay off”; it’s literally what they asked for. It’s a win for the DOJ. Google’s argument against a jury trial also seems on solid ground. The right to a trial by jury is meant as a protection for Americans; the government itself doesn’t have the right to demand a jury. If the defendant thinks the legal issues in the case are too arcane and a judge is more likely to get it right (and get it right faster, which is cheaper), that’s their prerogative.

Apple made no announcement or advertisement of any sort. Government patent examiners, after careful review, determined this is a novel invention or improvement. It’s not possible for your comment to be any more literally wrong than it is.

They’ve used the same segments for a long time and presumably maintain them for consistency, so I think it really just tells us that they used to sell very little there. India, in particular, has been a large growth market for Apple in the past couple of years, but is still just thrown in with “Europe.”

The EU is only one chunk of Apple’s “Europe” segment, which is defined as “European countries, as well as India, the Middle East and Africa.”

Seems like you’re Canadian. America doesn’t have limits on tap to pay.

“The industry is at a pivotal point - new technologies like Gen AI are rapidly shifting how we shop and manage our finances,” said Jack Forestell, Chief Product and Strategy Officer, Visa.

This is so cringey. I get that investors are randomly throwing cash at companies that talk up “generative AI,” but it has nothing to do with anything they announced. Is it impossible to just be content with ridiculously sophisticated algorithms? Did someone hold a gun up to these people and demand they spit out some drivel that uses the buzzwords du jour?

Also, the headline feature was solved a decade ago when Apple Pay was released (and no, not by the janky predecessors of Apple Pay but specifically with the launch of Apple Pay, which everything was then changed to replicate). One device that can hold an entire wallet of cards and I can choose what to use right when I pay? Wow! So new.

The “bento box” graphic during the presentation yesterday said AV1. From the press release:

The Media Engine of M4 is the most advanced to come to iPad. In addition to supporting the most popular video codecs, like H.264, HEVC, and ProRes, it brings hardware acceleration for AV1 to iPad for the first time. This provides more power-efficient playback of high-resolution video experiences from streaming services.

The main reason sales fell this year compared to the year-ago quarter is because the quarter before that Apple wasn’t able to keep up with iPhone 14 demand leading to shortages and depleted channel inventory. The following quarter they were able to meet demand and replenish the sales channel leading a boosted year-ago quarter that was $5 billion bigger than it really should have been. Apple didn’t have the same production shortages for the 15 launch. It makes this quarter they just reported look like a big decline but that’s not really the whole story.

I think it’s a privately-owned, profit-focused endeavor that is nevertheless beholden to the Chinese government and which the government wants to take as much advantage of as possible. Deep down, I’m certain that their sole goal is to make as much money for themselves as they possibly can. If they also need to exfiltrate some data and send it to the CCP, that’s just a necessary business expense.

This means absolutely nothing. How much of their advertising revenue comes from the US.

To quote the article again, “The U.S. accounted for about 25% of TikTok overall revenues last year, said a separate source with direct knowledge.” Honestly, I think that makes the case for shutting it down even stronger. TikTok isn’t in some growth-at-all-costs phase in the US. It’s likely near its peak potential userbase. If they haven’t been able to make it profitable by now, that doesn’t bode well for it ever becoming significantly profitable. Absent the legal issues, they think it’s still worth at least trying, but as it stands, it’s just a lot of money in and, just as quickly, out, with nothing to show for it at the end of the day.

TikTok’s daily active users in the U.S. is also just about 5% of ByteDance’s DAUs worldwide, said one of the sources.

So much drama in the US over this but it’s apparently merely a money-losing afterthought for its owner.

You ignore that it’s physically impossible to put a flagship performance in an under 5 inch format.

Not even slightly.

The battery alone scales with size. The camera is a physically space occupying bunch of glass and sensors, that even the ultra size phones have to put them in awkward bulges outside the phone main body to deliver the kind of qualety demanded by users.

The obvious solution is to make the body of the phone very slightly thicker. Thinness is more important in a bigger phone to shave off some of the overall bulk and make it easier to hold but when the area of the phone is smaller, you can easily make it thicker, with the added advantage of making the camera bulge less ridiculous. I’m reluctant to even call it a tradeoff because you’re not really giving anything up. This would have been a legitimately comparable phone, but they never made it so there’s no direct sales comparison in the market. There is no hard data, only inferences.

The smaller phones were not comparable models. They were a lower-tier product with fewer features. This contrasts with the regular and Plus/Max versions where it’s very much positioned as the same phone in two sizes.

That’s not true. Apple sold a mini version for several generations and consistently the mini was always the worst performing version sales wise.

The “mini” lineup was never truly comparable to the flagship product. The specific deficiencies varied with the year but they were all missing an entire camera, and cameras are one of the single most important features of an iPhone.

The mini phones were significantly and arbitrarily gimped to mark them as a distinctly (and quite visibly) lower tier phone.

No, that’s precisely my point: they don’t because no major phone manufacturer has simultaneously sold both a large and compact flagship. And when there are legitimately comparable models in different sizes, the smaller size fairly reliably sells better.

No one big releases a small phone because no one buys them.

Except we don’t have any good data to say why. Do people buy a bigger flagship over a smaller model that has older technology? Yes, but the only thing we can say with confidence from that is that people want the latest technology. The closest comparison we can make is Apple’s Max/Plus and non-Max/Plus versions, which offer essentially the same model in two sizes. The smaller size consistently sells better. It’s also cheaper. Does it sell better because it’s smaller or because it’s cheaper? Probably both, actually. But as long as nobody offers a small flagship (since Apple stopped making them entirely and switched to larger flagships), nobody can say for sure how well they’d sell.

It should also be noted that Apple admitted at one point to purposefully slowing down older iPhones too, which very clearly was done to get people to upgrade. If that’s not planned obsolescence I don’t know what is.

It is the literal exact opposite of planned obsolescence. Apple introduced a new feature, still present in all of their phones, to extend the useful life of old phones. Batteries degrade with time and use and, after a certain extent, are not able to maintain the sufficient and stable current levels for a phone to operate, particularly during moments of peak power draw. If this happens (and this applies to every Android phone as well), the phone will just shut itself down. Specifically it will shut down right in the middle of you trying to actually do something, since that’s what’s going to cause a spike in power demand. Apple added additional power management to iOS to dynamically throttle power use only when and to the extent needed. On a phone with a perfectly healthy battery, it’s not in use at all. On a phone that’s had years of hard use, it might still only barely be noticeable with some high-demand tasks running slightly slower or the screen slightly dimming. The worse health the battery is in, the lower its current charge level, and the greater the temporary spike in usage, the greater the throttling. Recharge it or resume less intense use and the throttling stops.

So after release (unplanned), they gave new life to what were otherwise obsolete batteries so you could wait longer to upgrade.

There’s no “too.” This is the (US) price to have Apple themselves replace your battery for you with a new OEM battery, inclusive of the battery and labor. It basically represents the highest available cost.

they try to create a sense of urgency to sell people what they don’t need.

Do they? Yes, they certainly advertise what’s new but they’re not primarily targeting customers with last year’s phone. I recall seeing previously that the average time to keep an iPhone is three years. On Apple’s iPhone 15 product page, I found two spots where it called out direct comparisons to previous iPhones: “A17 Pro GPU is up to 70% faster than the GPU in iPhone 12 Pro” and “iPhone 15 Pro has up to 6 more hours video playback than iPhone 12 Pro.” They’re targeting upgrades to the newest flagship at people with the flagship from three years ago. Of course due to the long support for iPhones, that three year iPhone will inevitably end up in the hands of another user, where it will continue to live on, so there’s nothing at all wasteful about upgrading. It’s not even wasteful to upgrade every single year because those year-old phones are still used. It’s only when the phone is irreparably broken or hopelessly, legitimately obsolete (due to still rapidly-improving technology) that it’s then recycled (and Apple has developed special robots to make extracting the rare earth metals viable at large scale).

I wonder what the latest iPhone would look like if Apple were on a once every two years release schedule instead of annual.

I think it would look exactly the same as it does today except that it would include two years’ of innovations and changes rather than one, but would also mean that if you needed a new phone before its release, your only option would be an increasingly dated model. Customer: Hi, I’d like the latest flagship. Store: Here’s the best technology that was available 20 months ago.

I also think it’s worth noting that Apple pretty much single-handedly slowed the release schedule for phones. Prior to the iPhone, Nokia was releasing roughly a dozen barely-differentiated models per year, spread throughout the year.