Mac O'Clock

> I believe the cost for repairing electronic devices in the next 5 - 10 years should partially be paid upfront. Making new devices slightly more expensive for everyone and making the repairs considerably cheaper for those who need them.

absolutely. and apple does this - you just described applecare. and that money prepays (heavily discounts) a couple repairs and maintains the parts supply/availability, and helps maintain a massive network of first-party retail locations to perform those repairs and keep those phones out of landfills. The parts go back and can get recycled or serviced and maybe used again (like the refurb phone cycle).

but y'all ain't ready to talk about that yet.

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apple's repair program is much more extensive than virtually any other phone vendor, can't go buy a OEM google repair tool or a first-party samsung phone screen off the website. And applecare is the "pay upfront to get cheap repairs later" model that does exactly what you are describing, pay the (averaged/amortized) cost to maintain those parts stockpiles and the repair staff networks etc and then basically just pay labor if you have an accident, and if you have any other accident in those 3 years you come out way way ahead.

OEM 16" XDR Liquid Retina screens have an estimated BOM cost of $250, versus applecare at $350. If you have a broken screen that costs you $100 with applecare or $450-750 without. So basically you are prepaying one screen and then if it happens you just pay cost…

Apple is hurt by being so centralized Cupertino IMO. A company that big in city that small and frankly, boring, isn't going to have the best hiring pool.

I know plenty of very talented people who simply won't apply to Apple. They don't want to live in Cupertino, or have to commute 2+ hours each day to go to work.

Steve Jobs was a middle-class guy trying to find his place in the world; the kind to travel India to to meet Neem Karoli Baba, shaved head, barefoot, wearing kurtas [1]. 50 years later, who grows up in Cupertino? It's no longer "middle-class". I'm sure Cupertino produces some excellent talent that did great at some top university, but I'm also sure it's not the kind that rocks the boat, or the kind that will push a "dumb decision" out of principle at work and get fired, like Jobs did back in 1985.

When I think Cupertino, the city, I don't think vibrancy of the built environment, diversity of professions, or wealth of ideas. I think comfort, complacency and quiet. The type of place that repels the kind of people who want to fight in the trenches, and slowly milds the fight out of those who move there.

I can only assume Apple, like a lot of the Bay at this point, survives from imported talent. The kind that is hungry enough to move across the country, or across the globe, to achieve something. But if you're in demand, why would you want to work in Cupertino and not San Francisco? Or better yet New York, Shenzhen, London, Tokyo, Shanghai, Paris, etc. Money only…

- Bluetooth headphones

I've never had that much to do to get them to just work.

I have done some Bluetooth tinkering to:

(A) Get them to use high quality codecs, something which also requires tinkering for a Mac: https://medium.com/macoclock/how-to-enable-aptx-on-mac-osx-big-sur-c543355a9185 - that's with pulse. With newer, Pipewire using, systems, even that is not needed which for my use case puts Linux ahead of Mac OS for Bluetooth headphone support.

(B) my previous headphones would get super confused if I paired them on Linux and windows on my dual boot device as they'd see different keys on the same host and that broke them so copied my keys from my Linux config files to my windows registry so both would use the same keys. My newer headphones seem to "just handle" this situation though. This is a dual boot issue and not specifically a Linux issue. My Linux only devices are fine.

- Mouse. I have since 2005, never had any issues with any mouse on Linux ever. Not even for all the extra buttons on my current Logitech mouse where they just happily show up as mouse button 5-9 and I can bind them in games.

- Brave: Honestly I'm surprised Pop is not setting up a GUI package manager with proprietary software able to be installed from it with their target market, but I'll take your word for this one.

Interesting, you say Facebook didn’t listen to anyone’s audio, yet they themselves admit their contractors routinely did: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/aug/13/facebook-messenger-user-recordings-contractors-listening

They even paid them to do transcribe chats: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-13/facebook-paid-hundreds-of-contractors-to-transcribe-users-audio

And this is just the publicly known stuff. So perhaps you weren’t privy to everything?

So Facebook (not Meta at the time) just “forgot” to turn off the camera after they were done with it? Sounds reasonable… except wait, they were actively re-activating it while you were scrolling, and until iOS 14 users were none-the-wiser. If it was an honest mistake, do you think FB testers would have not caught it during the MONTHS between iOS 14 developer preview and release? And yet, for this one I do think it was probably a bug about when to activate the camera.

https://medium.com/macoclock/apples-ios-14-catches-facebook-spying-on-millions-through-the-camera-be7853a3b39d

You might be right - maybe Apple's poorly operated bug bounty program is a result of incompetence rather than intentional malice.

But does that matter to security researchers or the public? No. Apple should fix their bounty program regardless of the reason it's broken.

Ultimately, this blog post is just another example on the already large pile[1][2][3][4][5]

1: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/09/three-ios-0-days-revealed-by-researcher-frustrated-with-apples-bug-bounty/

2: https://mjtsai.com/blog/2021/07/13/more-trouble-with-the-apple-security-bounty/

3: https://medium.com/macoclock/apple-security-bounty-a-personal-experience-fe9a57a81943

4: https://theevilbit.github.io/posts/experiences_with_asb/

5: https://shail-official.medium.com/accessing-apples-internal-uat-slackbot-for-fun-and-non-profit-25b167605f38

It wasn't my first search, but after few failed attemps with torrent, I did, which had better results[1], but the app stopped transfering, and she was unable to select more then one item at the time. Since I use Android I usually try press and hold to mark an item then use the option menu to select all. But she said that she didn't find that option and the pressing and holding just showed her the image.

Few hours of trying different stuff and apps later, I decided to google how to select multiple items on iPhone (You have to drag with two fingers), but by then we were already trying Mega.nz which for her kept interrupting.

[1] https://medium.com/macoclock/how-to-transfer-files-wirelessly-between-iphone-and-pc-50240eb83a5d