eWaste 'Я' US
Aren't smart phones good enough already? Do we need any more? It's the manufacturers creating the need. Maybe we can spend less time gazing into our smart phones and maybe go for a walk or something instead.
Smartphone markets the world over are in decline, but that news doesn't appear to have reached North America, where the market grew by 4 percent in the first quarter of 2022. Tech market analytics firm Canalys reported that smartphone manufacturers shipped a total of 39m units in North America in Q1 2022, and most of it was …
Apple has realized that this is coming, which is why they want to offer a leasing scheme: you pay them $X per month, and they'll keep sending you their latest shiny, every year. They probably hope you won't notice the new phone isn't substantially different from the old one...
Well, their phones' software last longer than most, their official battery replacement cost is roughly ten percent of the handset cost (in line with rival Samsung), recent hardware revision has been more durable materials.
The predictability of the iPhone resale market was such that people could already determine a cost per month for an iPhone if the latest model was their fancy.
Also, I haven't seen the data regarding who upgrades their iPhone each and every year. No point getting anecdotal here. It is possible that many folk are on two-plus year cadences. It is likely that the majority of people don't upgrade every year, so let's not phrase our comments as if they do.
Apple has realized that this is coming, which is why they want to offer a leasing scheme: you pay them $X per month, and they'll keep sending you their latest shiny, every year.
So a scheme that’s already been normal for some years, Apple will adopt it and call it their own? Where have I heard that before?
Suggesting someone take a walk is probably the best advice I can give anyone, given I'm not a physiotherapist or mental health professional. And I consider myself a lucky soul that I have green hills on my doorstep. For those who don't, phones make using public transport easier.
And whilst I've just dug out the charger for my dedicated camera (and found the gubbins needed to empty the camera's SD card on to the computer, more faff) I'm more likely to use my phone's camera for recording which fungi I've found where. Waterproofing wasn't standard on phones ten years ago, today it is common - and it has saved me replacing one phone several times over.
It is very easy to use phones in ways that don't benefit us. It's better for my head to listen to birdsong instead of a podcast. Photographing instead of just looking? Why not both? Different but both valid experiences.
Workers at an Apple Store in Towson, Maryland have voted to form a union, making them the first of the iGiant's retail staff to do so in the United States.
Out of 110 eligible voters, 65 employees voted in support of unionization versus 33 who voted against it. The organizing committee, known as the Coalition of Organized Retail Employees (CORE), has now filed to certify the results with America's National Labor Relations Board. Members joining this first-ever US Apple Store union will be represented by the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM).
"I applaud the courage displayed by CORE members at the Apple store in Towson for achieving this historic victory," IAM's international president Robert Martinez Jr said in a statement on Saturday. "They made a huge sacrifice for thousands of Apple employees across the nation who had all eyes on this election."
Apple has introduced a game-changer into its upcoming iOS 16 for those who hate CAPTCHAs, in the form of a feature called Automatic Verification.
The feature does exactly what its name alludes to: automatically verifies devices and Apple ID accounts without any action from the user. When iOS 16 ships later this year, it will eliminate the frustrating requirement to select all the stops signs in a photo or decipher a string of characters.
The news was mentioned at Apple's 33rd annual Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) along with the usual slew of features designed to enhance the functionality of iPhones.
Not many people are talking about Apple's recent WWDC from an enterprise standpoint. But identity and machine management tool maker JumpCloud says a "shim" to connect "the login to the device through to the Safari browser" is a notable development.
JumpCloud provides identity services, which is why chief strategy officer Greg Keller zeroed in on the feature, which his company details further in its latest IT trends report.
The result, said Keller, was "an even more powerful login experience into these devices."
Another day, another legal claim against Apple for deliberately throttling the performance of its iPhones to save battery power.
This latest case was brought by Justin Gutmann, who has asked the UK's Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT) to approve a collective action that could allow as many as 25 million Brits to claim compensation from the American technology giant. He claims the iGiant secretly degraded their smartphones' performance to make the battery power last longer.
Apple may therefore have to cough up an eye-popping £768 million ($927 million), Gutmann's lawyers estimated, Bloomberg first reported this week.
Democrat lawmakers want the FTC to investigate Apple and Google's online ad trackers, which they say amount to unfair and deceptive business practices and pose a privacy and security risk to people using the tech giants' mobile devices.
US Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), and Cory Booker (D-NJ) and House Representative Sara Jacobs (D-CA) requested on Friday that the watchdog launch a probe into Apple and Google, hours before the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, clearing the way for individual states to ban access to abortions.
In the days leading up to the court's action, some of these same lawmakers had also introduced data privacy bills, including a proposal that would make it illegal for data brokers to sell sensitive location and health information of individuals' medical treatment.
A security flaw in Apple's Safari web browser that was patched nine years ago was exploited in the wild again some months ago – a perfect example of a "zombie" vulnerability.
That's a bug that's been patched, but for whatever reason can be abused all over again on up-to-date systems and devices – or a bug closely related to a patched one.
In a write-up this month, Maddie Stone, a top researcher on Google's Project Zero team, shared details of a Safari vulnerability that folks realized in January this year was being exploited in the wild. This remote-code-execution flaw could be abused by a specially crafted website, for example, to run spyware on someone's device when viewed in their browser.
Researchers at the University of California San Diego have shown for the first time that Bluetooth signals each have an individual, trackable, fingerprint.
In a paper presented at the IEEE Security and Privacy Conference last month, the researchers wrote that Bluetooth signals can also be tracked, given the right tools.
However, there are technological and expertise hurdles that a miscreant would have to clear today to track a person through the Bluetooth signals in their devices, they wrote.
Apple's Intelligent Tracking Protection (ITP) in Safari has implemented privacy through forgetfulness, and the result is that users of Twitter may have to remind Safari of their preferences.
Apple's privacy technology has been designed to block third-party cookies in its Safari browser. But according to software developer Jeff Johnson, it keeps such a tight lid on browser-based storage that if the user hasn't visited Twitter for a week, ITP will delete user set preferences.
So instead of seeing "Latest Tweets" – a chronological timeline – Safari users returning to Twitter after seven days can expect to see Twitter's algorithmically curated tweets under its "Home" setting.
Analysis For all the pomp and circumstance surrounding Apple's move to homegrown silicon for Macs, the tech giant has admitted that the new M2 chip isn't quite the slam dunk that its predecessor was when compared to the latest from Apple's former CPU supplier, Intel.
During its WWDC 2022 keynote Monday, Apple focused its high-level sales pitch for the M2 on claims that the chip is much more power efficient than Intel's latest laptop CPUs. But while doing so, the iPhone maker admitted that Intel has it beat, at least for now, when it comes to CPU performance.
Apple laid this out clearly during the presentation when Johny Srouji, Apple's senior vice president of hardware technologies, said the M2's eight-core CPU will provide 87 percent of the peak performance of Intel's 12-core Core i7-1260P while using just a quarter of the rival chip's power.
A woman in the US has been charged with murder after she allegedly tracked down her boyfriend using an Apple AirTag and ran him over after seeing him with another lady.
Gaylyn Morris, 26, found her partner Andre Smith, also 26, at Tilly’s Pub in an Indianapolis shopping mall with the help of the gadget in the early hours of June 3, it is claimed.
A witness said Morris had driven up to him in the parking lot and inquired whether Smith was in the bar, stating she had a GPS tracker that showed he was inside, according to an affidavit [PDF] by Detective Gregory Shue. Morris, the witness said, subsequently spotted Smith within the establishment.
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