kirklennon
A long exposure allows more of the light to be captured but that’s not the reason for the color discrepancy. They really are as colorful as they appear in photos but human night vision is primarily black and white. We just don’t see a lot of color unless it’s sufficiently bright and since auroras are still quite dim in absolute terms, our eyes aren’t capable of recognizing the full intensity of the color.
Honestly I don’t get why they apologized at all. This was a lame story yesterday. The apology stretches the story an extra day. Say nothing and nobody remembers the pearl-clutching next week.
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.
I agree that it seems like inconsistent thinking though. (EU vs China)
The EU is ostensibly capitalist democracies. Publicly criticizing arbitrary and ill-conceived regulations, that can perhaps be improved, is useful. China makes no pretense about being a free country and I think the moral calculus is rather simple: are Chinese citizens better off with Apple there, doing the bare minimum to comply with Chinese law, or with Apple taking the “principled” stand of leaving?
China banned Signal and WhatsApp but has not banned iMessage. If you want secure end-to-end encrypted messaging, iPhones offer that built right in. Apple could leave, but the inevitable result of that is less privacy for Chinese citizens. It’s a binary choice. Apple can’t make China free, but they can at least offer services without bending over backwards to go above and beyond the CCP’s demands, as Chinese companies do.
I think Apple’s position is quite consistent: it tries to change the things it can change, fights the things it can fight, and does the bare minimum to comply with things that it doesn’t want to but must.
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.