kirklennon

joined 1 year ago
[–] kirklennon@kbin.social -3 points 4 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] kirklennon@kbin.social 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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.”

[–] kirklennon@kbin.social 11 points 4 months ago (5 children)

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.”

[–] kirklennon@kbin.social -4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] kirklennon@kbin.social 32 points 4 months ago

“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.

[–] kirklennon@kbin.social 3 points 4 months ago

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.

[–] kirklennon@kbin.social 16 points 4 months ago

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.

[–] kirklennon@kbin.social 17 points 4 months ago

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.

[–] kirklennon@kbin.social 21 points 4 months ago (11 children)

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.

[–] kirklennon@kbin.social 51 points 4 months ago (31 children)

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.

[–] kirklennon@kbin.social 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] kirklennon@kbin.social 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (3 children)

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.

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