yeah. my iphone 7 will be in my pocket for quite a few more years to come.
I was taking your statement of ‘the three hundred dollar phone spies on its users less than the cheaper phone’ and etrapolating out for the sake of effect. bnasically I dont’ believe the more expensieve phone spies less than the chepaer one.
I would buy one if it could replace my face.
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$1000 for a phone? It better last at least 10 years. Somehow, I don’t think that’s going to happen (especially with Apple’s penchant for making everything unrepairable).
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Yeah but nobody is going to actually pay $1000 for it.
That’s just base price.
I’m sure $1000 will be for the 32gig version…
Oddly enough, iphones have consistently been one of the few apple gadgets that are relatively easy to repair. You need special screwdrivers to crack the case and Hobbit hands to deal with the teeny parts, but IIRC, every Iphone before now has been held together with old fashioned screws rather than glue.
Exactly!
I’m curious to see if the face-key technology will be able to distinguish me from @Otherbrother.
Pretty much this. The Apple Watch edition was a vanity product made because Jony Ive wanted one. It got canceled pretty fast and Apple went back to its comfort zone, which is making “affordable premium” computerish gadgets.
Affordable premium means that it costs some more but not hugely more, and for that extra cash you get a high end product with a fuckton of brand cachet.
The Iphone 8 is a high end phone, for the extra money you get the fastest CPU, one of the best cameras you can get in a phone, one of the best screens in a phone, etc. The Iphone X is just an Iphone with the “high end” value dialed to 11 - a far more expensive screen, dual OIS cameras, and loads of fancy facial recognition enabling hardware. Naturally it’s going to cost more than the next step down.
Apple loves them their high profit margins, but (with the exception of the edition watch) they always keep those margins pretty consistently around 35-40%. Add in their huge economies of scale, and the price premium over an equivalent device from another company (rather often there is no fully equivalent device) isn’t usually all that much.
It has various opt-in things that log stuff like crashes that may have personal information. It also uses some client-server type apps that may not deliberately identify you, but do contain “asked locations of adult bookshops”, “asked for directions to the #3 most popular one (hey should we give that a rank boost?)”, as well as “wants to know the weather in Montana”.
If you use iCloud backup they have a backup, I’m fairly sure it is encrypted so they can’t get at the contents, but they do have the size & rate of change.
If you opt-into iCloud Keychain sharing and don’t use apple’s key escrow they can’t read that, but the can do finer grained traffic analysis. If you do have them escrow the keys they probably can’t read them, depending on how secure the HSM they use really is & if the write their little HSM management app thing correctly.
However I’m sure they don’t record anything on purpose that people would object to. …however it is way easy to price little fragments of information back into something people consider creepy.
Note that I nowhere said that an iPhone does not leak private information or that Apple cannot get data about the users of their phones. Actually, I am not even sure that the data on the backup is entirely encrypted. One can access contacts and appointments from a web browser, for example.
This being said and since you appear to know what data phones leak, could you run the same analysis for a typical 150$ phone? Consider that most of them, particularly the feature-rich at a knockout price from Asian origin, come with a dubious layer of extra software.
Actually, most of this tech already exists.
- There are Chinese phones (OPPO) and Samsung in the market that have dual front camera and take portrait mode photographs with various settings to make you prettier. Heck I use front camera panorama selfie with leaner cheeks and smoother skin on my low-end Samsung mobile with 14MP camera.
- There is software that can unlock anything base don facial recognition - thats for $75. And its a security hazard as well…since a video of a person blinking can also unlock as its the “face” (Google it)
- There are Android phones available for ages, without any buttons, and full edge to edge screens
- There are Samsung and other company phones available with full glass body - and yeah they look beautiful - and dont crack easily as they use special glass.
So…whats new Apple? A finessing of existing tech, I can believe, but don’t say “innovation”.
But then, the FanBoys will never agree.
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I didn’t run an analysis…I worked at Apple for 9+ years…
…also they publish a security white paper that goes over most of this ground.
A typical $150 phone probably leaks many of the same things if it has the same services…but the people running the backend said are less concerned about customer trust & bad publicity, and more concerned about deducing your citrus treat preference & selling it to someone for an extra $0.18/phone in revenue. Or using it directly to fuel ad selection. So they rely more on policy to not deduce the “wrong” PII, or do “wrong” things with it, as opposed to cryptography, or never gathering the data. That is just a gut feeling though.
A bit more than $0.18, I think. Google average yearly revenue per user is about 15$:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/tristanlouis/2013/08/31/how-much-is-a-user-worth/2/
They make considerably more in the USA, of course. That average takes into account all world countries.
As their sole business is to sell target advertising, it makes sense that they would sell your preference for “citrus treat”.
Yes, pennies (or fractions of a penny) on each magic info nugget that gets mined about you. I wasn’t trying to imply they made eighteen cents off you, but that they grub around for many many things for a few pennies each. “This user buys shoes a lot!” “This user is in the market for a car!”, and so on.
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