> The new encryption system, which will be tested by early users starting Wednesday, will roll out as an option in the U.S. by year’s end, and then worldwide including China in 2023, Mr. Federighi said.
They seem to be abandoning China, they are planning to move some 40% of the total iPhone production to India within the next couple of years, so China might not have all that much leverage.
The times have changed in the past 5 years, going all out on China is simply untenable. Leaving China on the other hand is positive PR.
Just because Apple couldn't officially sell any iPhones in China doesn't mean that the Chinese public would suddently stop coveting them. I don't think they'd blame Apple if it came to that.
They have to respect the laws of the countries they operate in but they don't necessarily have to do so silently.
If you go to set up encrypted backups and find out the feature isn't available or get a message saying something like "Feature cannot be activated in China, Turkey, and Russia", that's better than the feature not being available anywhere.
Are they? Email, calendar, online office, cloud storage etc. are all available from various other companies(even beside the big few corporations). The only two areas where you'd really have to sacrifice features would be Android apps, and YouTube if you're running a channel.
tell me which provider has an integrated single signon service for all of those above? Which provider has apps for their service for all major OS'es (including mobile), and is mostly free (or low cost)?
Microsoft does. OneDrive for storage, Outlook webapps does email and calendar. Office online has Word, Excel, etc. All accessed with one Microsoft account. All free.
You might not want to be tied to Microsoft but Google is not the only option.
Edit: Overlooked the comment about Apps. Microsoft offers apps for mobile, but not Linux. Although even on Windows I use the browser to access the services which will work on Linux.
Microsoft's office offerings comes very close (cept for the free part - which i guess is just a bonus and not a requirement). Although i have to say, despite microsoft's attitude for keeping compatibility and old stuff working, they too could chuck a google reader one day, and deprecate/remove a needed service (along with all your data).
What's needed is a syndication of data, and inter-operable apps. Like how xmpp worked. But of course, all vendors don't like this, because it turns themselves into a commodity.
this comes from the cult of metrics. If you need to know all the numbers about every single thing, about every single action taken every day in order to make decisions, then it naturally results in all the data being collected. And thus having to find ways to use the data because you already spent all your money on collecting and storing this information. And if you sell it, you can make more money!
"Cult of metrics" -- I like it. Perhaps "you can't improve what you can't measure," but it's also true that sometimes "you can't improve what you can measure," or that it's just not worth improving. Sure, you could pitch me a smart toilet paper dispenser (yes, this is a thing) that measures how many times it turns, then sends me coupons for toilet paper when I'm close to running out, but... it's toilet paper. I doubt your margins cover a discount I would care about, much less your server costs.
