kirklennon

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 think it's pretty wild that criticizing something as ill-conceived, arbitrary, and protectionist government overreach will get you labeled as a fascist by some people.

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.

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.

That’s not true. Apple sold a mini version for several generations and consistently the mini was always the worst performing version sales wise.

The "mini" lineup was never truly comparable to the flagship product. The specific deficiencies varied with the year but they were all missing an entire camera, and cameras are one of the single most important features of an iPhone.

The mini phones were significantly and arbitrarily gimped to mark them as a distinctly (and quite visibly) lower tier phone.

No, that's precisely my point: they don't because no major phone manufacturer has simultaneously sold both a large and compact flagship. And when there are legitimately comparable models in different sizes, the smaller size fairly reliably sells better.

No one big releases a small phone because no one buys them.

Except we don't have any good data to say why. Do people buy a bigger flagship over a smaller model that has older technology? Yes, but the only thing we can say with confidence from that is that people want the latest technology. The closest comparison we can make is Apple's Max/Plus and non-Max/Plus versions, which offer essentially the same model in two sizes. The smaller size consistently sells better. It's also cheaper. Does it sell better because it's smaller or because it's cheaper? Probably both, actually. But as long as nobody offers a small flagship (since Apple stopped making them entirely and switched to larger flagships), nobody can say for sure how well they'd sell.

It should also be noted that Apple admitted at one point to purposefully slowing down older iPhones too, which very clearly was done to get people to upgrade. If that’s not planned obsolescence I don’t know what is.

It is the literal exact opposite of planned obsolescence. Apple introduced a new feature, still present in all of their phones, to extend the useful life of old phones. Batteries degrade with time and use and, after a certain extent, are not able to maintain the sufficient and stable current levels for a phone to operate, particularly during moments of peak power draw. If this happens (and this applies to every Android phone as well), the phone will just shut itself down. Specifically it will shut down right in the middle of you trying to actually do something, since that’s what’s going to cause a spike in power demand. Apple added additional power management to iOS to dynamically throttle power use only when and to the extent needed. On a phone with a perfectly healthy battery, it’s not in use at all. On a phone that’s had years of hard use, it might still only barely be noticeable with some high-demand tasks running slightly slower or the screen slightly dimming. The worse health the battery is in, the lower its current charge level, and the greater the temporary spike in usage, the greater the throttling. Recharge it or resume less intense use and the throttling stops.

So after release (unplanned), they gave new life to what were otherwise obsolete batteries so you could wait longer to upgrade.

There's no "too." This is the (US) price to have Apple themselves replace your battery for you with a new OEM battery, inclusive of the battery and labor. It basically represents the highest available cost.