I don’t think the price is the biggest problem. Although that’s certainly part of it, Apple sells lots of insanely priced shit successfully.

The problem is VR itself. Like yeah, it’s very cool for a few days or weeks but like…then you get bored with it and realize it has no practical purpose.

The best use case for it is gaming but that was very clearly not their intended primary purpose, based on their advertising. They wanted it to replace your computer. But no one wants to use a computer that way or walk around with this giant thing strapped to their face.

It’s just one of those things tech companies seem to be trying to force down your throat despite very little actual interest from consumers for decades.

Don’t take my word for it. Like I said, it’s written in plain language right in their Privacy Policy.

Firefox has never put a priority on privacy. Just take a glance at their privacy policy. And it’s plain to see that they are moving further away from it every day.

There are a dozen Firefox forks though. Mulch, DDG, TOR, Fennic, Bromite, etc.

What’s the actual difference? Is it just a fancy name for features we’ve been using

More or less, yes. AI is marketing grift tech companies have been trying to sell us for decades. It never ever works but they continue to try and shove it down our throats year after year. It has the potential to be extremely valuable in a lot of ways but in reality it falls short of what is needed in order to be valuable. We’ve seen this for decades with Siri and Google Assistant. I don’t know why, the only people buying it seem to be other corporations, right before it very predictably fucks them and then they discontinue it. There’s also tons of money to make by defrauding “investors” with farcical hype, taking their money, and never delivering anything practical.

OpenAI made some major strides with the likes of ChatGPT and Dall-E and really kicked this whole revolution off but it’s already crashing and burning.

Accubattery gives a plethora of useful information.

If you bought an iPhone a year ago, you definitely noticed that you now only have to carry 1 cable, and all of your cable and accessories cost less because they don’t have to pay Apple an exorbitant fee to license their archaic and proprietary connector. If you paid extra for the “Pro” model you’ll notice wildly faster transfer speeds over USB. If you bought the base model, fuck you, you’re stuck with USB 2.1 because greed.

It is native with GrapheneOS. Has been for a long time. Apple probably got the idea from them.

If you’re just going to either not read or ignore the parent comment, I’m certainly not about to type it out so you can do it all over again. Goodnight.

I did all of that in my parent comment. It’s only stupid if the government can prove it’s not true, which they can’t.

I just looked into it again out of curiosity. It no longer requires a Google login (nor does it even require Google Play services, because I don’t have them. This will probably change once they go paid, which they’ve apparently rolled back since the iMessage debacle).

It says it supports SMS/RCS, but it actually supports neither. All it does is connect to your Google messages web account. This is an absolute joke for an app that bills itself at the top of it’s home page as “all your chats in one app” and it doesn’t even support the most common chat method.

As far as I can tell the app is still closed source.

“we have reason to believe” is a lot longer headline than “could”.

This isn’t gaslighting

It is though, because they’re trying to convince you (and the government) that that’s not the reason.

Search engines are a dead end. The future is a LLM that can tie its results to sources.

I’m pretty sure we’ve already seen that that’s a dead end.

As always, Apple is gaslighting you. The only reason is because Google is paying them tens of b-b-billions of dollars a year not to. And they don’t want to give that up.

The best software doesn’t need to be trusted because it’s open source and self-hosted.

I haven’t looked into this in a while but I believe the current Beeper app only allows you to use Beeper servers, is not open source, and requires you to connect it to a Google account for unknown reason, for those reasons, I say no.

The previous “Beeper Cloud” was open source and you could theoretically self host it and run it on your own server. Probably still can.

But I stopped using it for a completely different reason:

Its intended to do something that the services it uses DO NOT want you doing. For that reason, they make it intentionally difficult to do. Apple demonstrated this really well when they predictably “patched” the iMessage loophole PyPush found. You’ll be logged out constantly, there are constant bugs caused by server-side changes, and your accounts will be flagged for “automated activity”.

Any convenience it’s supposed to give you is just negated by these complications.

Also it was acquired by Automattic a while back, which is, on it’s own, a great reason to avoid it.

So, yeah, there are many reasons not to trust it.

Not sure if serious.

I don’t really understand RCS. It’s supposed to be an open standard but unfortunately it’s only available in 1 of 2 Android apps, which are controlled by Samsung or Google. Personally, I don’t have a Google or Samsung account, and these don’t work without them.

They could have just used the actually open standard they already used 10 years ago (XMPP) but for some reason they’ve found some other one that doesn’t appear to be very open.

Because it’s better than what we have. And people are too dumb to know any better.

1. Of course it does. Everything that’s not an iPhone does.

2. Doubt. Pixels have had the best photos for several years.

LOL this is the biggest problem with AI. It gets it right most of the time but it is not remotely trustworthy, which makes it virtually useless.

AirDrop is just a fancy marketing term for WiFi-direct file transfers.