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AirDrop is now limited to 10 minutes

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Re: AirDrop is now limited to 10 minutes

#131

are people really surprised the world biggest corporation has to cave to the worlds second largest economy? What do people expect really? Do people even understand the kind of incentives at play here? What does this have to do with the quality of their products? Apple is an artificial entity, a corporation and it's only loyalty by design is with the wallets of it's shareholders. What's surprising about this?

In actual practice corporations are only loyal to the board of directors and the officers. Shareholders are just the suckers used to jack up the share price.

Re: AirDrop is now limited to 10 minutes

#132
post #73

I have to admit that when you actually look at the details this is a rather perplexing change. Ditto for reading the comments here. Is Apple being Pro-CCP with this change? If you open airdrop to everyone, your device can be tracked and identified individually. When this setting is disabled, this becomes far harder. I'm of the opinion that this change is good and actually increases security across the board, includin…

Why is it being rolled out in China first?

Re: AirDrop is now limited to 10 minutes

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple quite literally had a scandal where it was exposed in court that they deliberately slow older devices down to prematurely make them appear obsolete so that users will discard them sooner. I'm sure there are Android devices that do this too, but Apple really shouldn't be applauded for the longevity of their devices.

Wasn't it the other way round? They slowed them down to make them last longer?

That’s what they did. They just didn’t told anybody why they were doing it.

Re: AirDrop is now limited to 10 minutes

#134
post #57
post #9

I don’t ever want to hear again how Apple is some champion of privacy and ethics. I’ve lost count of how many scandals have come out of their relationship with China from the suicide nets to the repeated investigations showing their supply chain was riddled with slave labor that they would later campaign against protections that would prevent it. Now this. They are fucked as a company, I can’t get out of their ecosys…

> suicide nets I assume this is about Foxconn. Does that mean you'll be boycotting other companies that also work with them, like Amazon, Dell, Google, HP, Intel, Microsoft, Vizio, Acer, Lenovo, Nintendo, and Sony? I'm genuinely asking. It's a tough pill to swallow to learn all our tech stuff we all enjoy is built on the backs of poor people on the other side of the planet.

The hysteria about Foxconn suicides was complete clickbait garbage. Even during their worst year of suicides that was reported by Wired, the suicide rate at FoxConn was 1/10th of that of the US and 1/20th of that of China overall.

>It's a tough pill to swallow to learn all our tech stuff we all enjoy is built on the backs of poor people on the other side of the planet.

This is actually overwhelmingly a good thing. Life expectancy and living standards have exploded in Asia. They just haven't reached the point of developed Western nations yet. It's impossible to transition from very shitty conditions to good conditions hitting a midpoint of moderately shitty conditions. For example, the abundance of relatively high paying manufacturing jobs incentives teenagers to drop out of school and work instead. Of course, we are right to call out Apple for relying on child labor, but the goal should be to have a better control of their supply chain rather than move manufacturing back to the US.

Re: AirDrop is now limited to 10 minutes

#135
post #9

I don’t ever want to hear again how Apple is some champion of privacy and ethics. I’ve lost count of how many scandals have come out of their relationship with China from the suicide nets to the repeated investigations showing their supply chain was riddled with slave labor that they would later campaign against protections that would prevent it. Now this. They are fucked as a company, I can’t get out of their ecosys…

> I don’t ever want to hear again how Apple is some champion of privacy and ethics.

Counterpoint:

They could have just rolled out the feature change globally. Instead Apple makes it clear with singling out China, that this change was demanded by the CCP.

Re: AirDrop is now limited to 10 minutes

#136
post #9

I don’t ever want to hear again how Apple is some champion of privacy and ethics. I’ve lost count of how many scandals have come out of their relationship with China from the suicide nets to the repeated investigations showing their supply chain was riddled with slave labor that they would later campaign against protections that would prevent it. Now this. They are fucked as a company, I can’t get out of their ecosys…

Their ethics are terrible. You pay $1000 for a computer, and you are only allowed to install software on it that Apple says you are allowed to. You can only pay for software on their own store. Complete bullshit, and it makes me sad that so many here on HN and elsehwere, tech people who learned to program because their 8088 was completely open and free to let you actually create things and learn about computing, so m…

No post body was provided.

Re: AirDrop is now limited to 10 minutes

#137
post #16
post #8

This seems to have been announced a couple of weeks ago, so we don't need to just trust the tweet: https://www.macworld.com/article/1377200/apple-to-limit-aird... Having it open to everyone for only a limited amount of time actually kind of seems like the right thing, but it's hard to come up with a legit explanation for why they rushed that change to China first.

To be fair: (1) it seems like the update landed recently, and (2) the article you linked does cite the same reasoning as the Twitter posts. Even if was a little ahead of the more recent Zero Covid protests, it seems like AirDrop's been a known vector in China to share government criticism, which is why Apple's cracking down.

Sure, I didn't mean this in the "this is old news" sense, but in the "this has been verified by Apple themselves, not just a random Twitter account".

Re: AirDrop is now limited to 10 minutes

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

Apple quite literally had a scandal where it was exposed in court that they deliberately slow older devices down to prematurely make them appear obsolete so that users will discard them sooner. I'm sure there are Android devices that do this too, but Apple really shouldn't be applauded for the longevity of their devices.

This is an incredibly disingenuous argument.

Apple decided to underclock CPUs when the battery had aged to the point where consistent voltage couldn't be applied at maximum power. They did this so users wouldn't complain about their phone randomly crashing. Really, they were damned if they did and damned if they didn't.

What you can criticize is that they did it without informing users or allowing an option — the lawsuit and backlash reversed that course and they now have a setting for it. You can argue they should have had that all along. You can argue they were doing it purposely for planned obsolescence, but the evidence isn't really there to support it.

Apple provides major software upgrades for years longer than most Android devices do. There are some exceptions for Android, but the rule is that you're lucky to get more than two years of software updates for your phone. Apple, on the other hand, supports for 4-6 years. That should earn them kudos compared to most Android manufacturers.

Re: AirDrop is now limited to 10 minutes

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their ethics are terrible. You pay $1000 for a computer, and you are only allowed to install software on it that Apple says you are allowed to. You can only pay for software on their own store. Complete bullshit, and it makes me sad that so many here on HN and elsehwere, tech people who learned to program because their 8088 was completely open and free to let you actually create things and learn about computing, so m…

Quoted post unavailable.

I mostly agree with you but am optimistic about the future of smartphones. We currently have some alternative operating systems like postmarketOS and Ubuntu Touch that can be used on select devices today. In 10 years I think the ecosystem will be much larger and more mature. Currently we just have iOS and Linux, but in a decade there may be OpenBSD as well, and possibly an order of magnitude more Linux distros for phones.

My dream is to have an OpenBSD phone that can be used as both a phone and normal computer. To use it as a "real computer" with an actual keyboard, mouse and screen, you could just plug those peripherals into the phone. Then take it with you and plug in someone else's mouse etc. if necessary when traveling.

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