> I'm still angry about how I must use an iPhone if I want to be able to text high quality video to people I don't know very well

You’re mad at the wrong people in this case though. iMessage can do high quality video and images because it’s a separate channel from the telecoms. RCS can now do high quality video and images too because it’s a newer standard and was built for that (and iPhones do support RCS now). But for normal “text” messages using the MMS/SMS systems, your quality is capped by the carriers and the carries have ridiculously (relative to current standards) low size limits. AT&T limits them to 1MB [1]. Verizon limits you to 1.2MB for images and 3.5MB for video [2] and T-Mobile limits you to 1MB for outbound and 3MB for inbound. Low quality is just baked into those paths and there’s nothing Apple (or Google) can do about it other than build parallel messaging systems

[1]: https://www.att.com/support/article/wireless/KM1041906/

[2]: https://www.verizon.com/support/knowledge-base-14641/

[3]: https://www.t-mobile.com/support/devices/device-troubleshoot...

Apple has absolutely been dragging its feet on RCS. The DoJ explicitly accused them of degrading cross-platform messaging to protect their smartphone dominance. Internal Apple communications revealed that executives were worried that bringing iMessage to Android would "remove an obstacle to iPhone families giving their kids Android phones."

Apple is clearly the bad guy on the RCS issue.

And USian could refer to folks from Mexico (and at prior points in history a number of other countries), so it's hardly unambiguous.

You already live in a world where anyone can send you any ad they want without your consent, paid for by your tax dollars. The postal service had been trafficking ads direct to your door since before Twitter was a thing.

Billionaires and Autocrats by the very nature of having massive amounts of money can use their money and power to amplify their lies no matter how easy or not it is for normal people to also amplify their own lies. Again, Disney was buying swamp land in Florida through shell companies long before the internet decided forcing Elon Musk to buy twitter would be funny. Or see also that insider trading is illegal for you and me, but if you're a congressman, that's just a perk of the job.

As far as "utterances that no court has ever recognized as speech", I'd be interested in what you think qualifies here, because the recent history (where by recent I mean over the course of the 1900's) has been an ever expansive definition of what sort of things constitute speech. Tinker v. Des Moines found wearing a black arm band is speech. Texas v. Johnson found burning a flag was speech. Brandenburg v. Ohio found advocacy of force and law violations was broadly speech, leaving only a small exception against speech that would induce "imminent lawless action". Hustler V. Falwell found parody of public figures even when that parody intends to cause emotional distress of the person being parodied were speech. Snyder v. Phelps found posters saying things like "Thank God for Dead Soldiers" and "God Hates Fags" outside of a funeral were speech. And let's not forget National Socialist Party v. Skokie, finding that a literal Nazi rally was speech.

Apple has been dropping older subsystems and backwards compatibility layers long before app subscriptions were the default way people got paid for software. The 68k -> PPC transition happened in the mid 90's and 68k support was dropped entirely somewhere around OS 8 and the start of the iMac era. The Carbon framework might have been the most long running one, going from about 2000 to 2012 for deprecation and basically ending once the 64 bit transition happened around 2018. The PPC -> Intel transition, including the original Rosetta emulator was ~2005-2011. The app store itself only debuted in 2011.

I do agree that Apple does this in part to force developers to either stay active and maintain their apps or stop shipping for the platform, but I personally posit that the move of more and more apps to subscription models is simply due to how many more apps are connected and user expectations for update timeliness (and the devaluing of updates both by increased popularity of "free as in beer" open source apps and also the distribution of no-cost OS updates by Apple. People expect more for free and expect it as soon as someone notices a problem. I think the idea of not only waiting a year or more to have new features or some bugs fixed and then on top of that having to shell out more money for that is just not something people are as wiling to do. So subscription models become necessary to fund the continuous work that goes into keeping up with all the new trends. Apple's dropping of old libraries and frameworks is part of that churn, but it's only one part in a sea of other pressures driving the subscription model.

When I had less than $50 in savings and lived paycheck to paycheck, I still had a BJs membership. When I was growing up living in a single teacher income home and “K-Mart” was our luxury store, we had a BJs membership. Sales clubs like Costco and BJs are absolutely affordable even to the working poor.

These days Taco Bell for two people will easily hit $15-20 and that’s at the drive through. If you’re crazy enough to order it through door dash, that’s closer to $40

Okay but that's a far cry from "$65 for one or two fast food meals"

I’ve never been “need to stop at the food bank” poor thankfully, but I have been “dinner this week is rice and 50¢ frozen pot pies”, “living with 4 other people to make rent”, “boss I need more hours or I literally can’t afford the gas to come to work for the hours you’ve scheduled me” poor. And even in those times one of my very first purchases was a BJs membership (Costco like club) because it was absolutely cheaper to buy a lot of my groceries and food stuffs that way.

It is possible to be too poor to afford a membership club (even Sam’s Club). But you absolutely do not need to be a “professional with a good wage” to afford it or benefit from it.

I read that as they're going to pay the COBRA premiums for 6 months for the laid off employees.

It’s really only “misleading” to the extent that any offset/credit scheme is also misleading. Inherent in the words “net zero” is the fact that emissions will continue, but the claim is that something else will be done to make the total effect the same as if zero emission occurred.

It’s no more misleading than “my net income was $X” is misleading because my gross income was $X + $Y.

The touchbar was great when apps used it for useful things. It’s main sin was replacing the physical escape key and I suspect if even just that key had remained physical most people would have been fine with the touchbar because most people don’t really use the f-keys by touch. Most of the time when I’m using the f-keys, it’s to use the debugger for an IDE. And that’s where the touchbar really shined because instead of remembering whether f6 or f5 was step over, the touchbar could just display the expected symbol.

Personally I’d love to see the touchbar make a comeback either as an addition to the fkeys row, or as a set of e-ink/oled physical buttons where the fkeys are. Allow the displayed legends to update while still keeping the physicality.