I still want a USB-A port on my MacBook Pro. The number of times I don't have the right cable/adapter with me is still way too high.

But no, I meant phones, where Lightning was dumped on iPad in 2018, but didn't go away on the iPhone for another half decade.

Yes. At the very latest, they should have changed when they changed the iPad over. Having a different charger for iPhone than for every other Apple device was overtly user-hostile. It meant carrying around extra crap for zero reason other than because Apple extracted four bucks worth of MFi revenue off of every licensed iPhone cable sold, and couldn't extract revenue from every USB-C cable sold.

And given how thin Lightning cables had to be because of the miniature connector and the inability to use a bigger connector because of case manufacturers building the holes too small to accommodate them, and how often the cables failed because of the too-thin wires, I'd imagine that was quite a nice revenue stream. The number of Lightning cables I went through was nuts.

USB Mini was in 2000. Micro was in 2007. Both were before the first iPhone. Don't get me wrong, micro-USB sucked. But we'd all have been better off if they had gone with mini-USB and stuck with it. We'd all have been better off if Apple had stuck with the Dock connector another two years and pushed the USB Forum (of which they are a member) to make a reversible connector happen, then switched to USB-C. We'd all have been better off if they had switched to Lighting, scared the rest of the industry into making USB-C happen, and then dumped Lighting for USB-C in 2018, starting with the iPad and then quickly progressing through the entire product line, rather than changing the iPad, but keeping the iPhone on Lightning until 2023.

Instead, Apple waited until the EU forced them to do it. By the time they finally switched, I was about to give up and move to Android, because the experience was so much better being able to share power infrastructure with my Mac instead of carrying around special sh*t-quality, low-data-speed cables just for the iPhone. Don't get me started on the fact that Apple never put USB 3 silicon into any iPhone, so they maxed out at a pathetic 480 Mbps data rate. It made photography and videography on iPhone absolutely horrible, because you couldn't get data off of them in a timely manner.

Everything about the way Apple handled Lighting on iPhones was botched just about as horribly as you could possibly botch it. Consumers put up with it, but that didn't make it suck any less.

Apple has sold two different versions of their display on Mac laptops for years — a glossy screen and a matte screen. An OLED screen option wouldn't be unthinkable. They'd just have to price it appropriately based on availability.

But you're right that doing it across the entire product line would be a lot of hardware. Even doing it for the Pro line would be a lot, largely because that's more than half of Apple's laptop sales — a sad testament to how badly Apple screwed up when they dropped the standard Macbook in favor of the thermally throttled Air. Contrast that with when the first Macbooks came out and the Pro laptops were maybe a percent or two. This doesn't leave Apple with the wiggle room to have truly high-end-only features except by making them BTO/CTO options.

It's still noise compared with the 1.1 billion OLED panels expected to be sold this year. Whether manufacturing capacity drove Apple's availability or Apple's demand helped drive capacity is unclear. Probably both.

As far as I can tell, this is an Android phone minus the phone. It is the iPod Touch of the Android world (which Apple discontinued years ago for lack of any real-world demand beyond use as a developer test device).

Why are they building this?

Oh. For "audiophiles" (in the "I don't understand how anything works, but making the back of the device out of some special kind of metal sounds like it could make the sound better, so I'll spend thousands of dollars on it" sense of the word). Now I understand.

Therefore, don't look. Yeah, this is indeed a fairly likely explanation.

To be honest, I don't think this is them ignoring privacy. I think this is them having gotten so complacent about privacy that nobody there even understands how to protect privacy anymore.

I mean the first rule of privacy on the Internet is "DNS isn't private." This is such a basic mistake that nobody with an ounce of privacy sense should make it. The URL's hostname should contain only the organization name or individual username and maybe some unique identifier if they really need that. But 99% of titles aren't secret in and of themselves, so I'll give them a pass on this one for now, even though it is still a horrible bug for the remaining 1%.

And the second rule of privacy is "Knowledge of a resource is not authorization." The fact that a resource that has not been shared can be accessed by its URL, and that apparently no attempt has been made to ensure that only people who are authorized to access that URL can view its contents means that they effectively have no access control at all. This would be an epic fail even if the first security bug weren't there.

This makes me suspect that some intern vibe-coded this thing as a prototype with no human design review at all, and that their team shipped it without actually taking the time to understand how it worked, relying too much on AI to do the review, and that the AI had inadequate training on how to implement privacy and security. Either that or the design docs did not adequately cover how the authentication worked and the reviewers did not bother to ask, which is an even bigger concern.

Either way, Meta needs to seriously clean up their act. This should have never shipped without a proper security review, and the fact that problems this severe were not caught is clear evidence that a proper security review did not happen. Identifying the underlying reasons for that failure should be a top priority, and the answer is never "Fire person X for not doing their job," because something this bad is never the fault of one person or even a small number of people. It's always systemic. It's always a lack of adequate controls, adequate numbers of eyes on design, adequate review, etc. And until they address the systemic problems that led to this outcome, I won't trust anything that Meta does going forwards as far as I can throw it.

So my advice to Meta would be that they do a very detailed internal postmortem, identifying all of the different places where this could have been caught and why it was not caught, identifying mitigation strategies to ensure that similar things don't happen in the future, etc., then implement all of those mitigation strategies, and finally create a second, publicly sanitized version of that doc and publish it externally as a "Here's what we're doing to make sure this never happens again" document. That's what they need to do to restore the faith of the folks who have witnessed this disaster.

Anything short of that level of public documentation showing that they truly understand how badly they screwed up and have genuinely taken steps to ensure privacy and security in future products would be inadequate, given the level of corporate ineptitude required to reach this point.

False. The DoD banned imports of new, foreign-made consumer wireless routers due to claims of national security, supply chain, and cybersecurity risks.

There's no evidence that crappy consumer-grade routers with firmware written by contractors to hit a specific set of bullet points on a spec sheet are going to be any more secure merely because the low-quality firmware was installed on the devices at a factory in the United States. The national security risk is a total farce. And the supply chain problem is still a supply chain problem even if it is assembled in the United States, because few (if any) of the components inside it are made in the United States, nor do U.S. manufacturers exist for most of those parts.

So what you actually have is a lunatic executive branch leader whose tariffs got thrown out by the Supreme Court who then weaponized the DoD and the FCC to raise the price of many electronics goods, despite no evidence that doing so will actually create any short-term or long-term improvements in the near-total lack of U.S. component manufacturing (which for silicon parts is itself dependent on foreign silicon wafer manufacturing, because U.S. manufacturers consume far more silicon wafers than U.S. manufacturing can produce, though ironically, most of the sand that goes into them was mined in the U.S.).

This is actually surprisingly rare. Most of the time we've berated Apple, it has been because they've dragged their heels on basic stuff like USB-C. I see no reason that Apple dragging their heels on OLED displays will be any different.

I've been complaining about Apple displays not being bright enough to use outside since my first active-matrix Mac laptop. Ironically, the passive matrix black-and-white Mac displays from the early 1990s actually could be used outside easily. You changed the contrast to a mode where it behaved like a reflective LCD panel. So from my perspective, Apple is finally getting back to the level of usability that I had with my PowerBook 145 more than thirty years ago.

In fact, I can't think of any examples of what you're describing, and certainly none where users would not have been better off with Apple introducing the feature sooner and then making it better in a subsequent generation. After all, having a feature, even if it is not refined, is usually better than not having it at all.

In general, when Apple is late, they're just late. They're either doing it because they have some financial advantage to delaying it (Made for iPhone revenue from the Lightning connector), because they didn't have the engineering resources to integrate it for a particular release cycle, or because they didn't think the components available were good enough (e.g. early folding displays).

But Apple has been shipping OLED panels on phones since 2017. Almost a decade later, laptops are finally catching up. Maybe they thought the early ones wouldn't last as long as people kept their laptops, maybe the cost for larger panels was high enough to discourage laptop purchases, or maybe they just dragged their heels because they knew they wouldn't have anything interesting in the feature pipeline and wanted people to have a reason to replace their laptops. Either way, they're fully a decade behind in display technology, and it's about time they finally caught up.

Looking forward to the touchscreen as well, at least in principle, though in practice, I doubt it will get a lot of use. :-)

No, it isn't. To be fraud, the lie has to be material. Would him saying that he fought in the military have disqualified him? No. Because being in the military of a communist country doesn't automatically make you communist. It might have caused a deeper investigation, and that investigation might have concluded that he was, but given that the regime had already fallen and any records would probably have been nonexistent at that point, that's a pretty unlikely outcome — doubly so decades later.

Second, the lie has to be deliberate. In U.S. law, there's not a presumption that an error is deliberate; the government has to have some evidence to support such a claim. And given that he has been dead for a long time, there's no way to get him to admit that it was deliberate, so in the absence of some sort of documentation, this one isn't provable anymore, either.

Third, even if you could prove both of the first two, the fraud was still committed by her father, not her, which makes it moot after the fact.

Continuing to spew this same nonsense over and over doesn't make it true. First, he was a citizen. Until such time as you get a court to agree that his citizenship should not have been granted (years after his death), all of this is purely academic.

Second, even if you did so, although removal of citizenship is considered retroactive to the time of the original grant of citizenship, you still run into the presumption of regularity when trying to extend that retroactive removal to a retroactive nullification of the citizenship of an additional person who relied on a presumption of the regularity of the prior immigration decision. That just won't fly, because as far as was known to her at the time, he was a citizen, and as far as was known to the immigration people processing the paperwork at the time, he was a citizen. And none of that changes even if his citizenship were removed retroactively, which means *she* did not commit fraud.

Further, his citizenship was likely not material to her being approved for citizenship. She didn't become a citizen because he was a citizen. She became a citizen *when* he became a citizen. Had she applied independently, even if we take the most outlandish interpretation of the law and assume that his military service would be disqualifying, it would not be disqualifying *for* *her*. And at that point, the courts would be effectively punishing her for not waiting a few extra months and filing a form independent of her parents. No court is going to do that, both because doing so would be a gross miscarriage of justice and because the specific form that she filed is almost certainly not material to whether a young adult would qualify for citizenship.

Plus there's that pesky little problem of you not having any actual evidence to support your absurd theory in the first place, which means that while you might get a lot of idiots on your side in the court of public opinion, you'd be laughed out of any actual courtroom.

Bzzt. Reading comprehension fail.

I didn't say you have to be high up in the military of a totalitarian regime to be a member of the party. I said you aren't guaranteed to be a member unless you're a military officer who took control of the country in a coup or someone who is very close to that person. That's what "does not constitute" means.

In a lot of foreign countries, military service isn't optional. And that was actually true in Somalia for many years, though I suppose that was after her father served. Regardless, there are many reasons for fighting in a military, including financial reasons, as an alternative to jail time, etc., which is why you cannot automatically assume that a member of a country's military supports their government's actions or is a member of their ruling party.

Moreover, that law was written with a very specific purpose in mind, and its purpose was not ensuring that no male over 18 from that country could ever become a U.S. citizen. Its purpose was preventing those who posed a high risk of spying on our country from becoming entrenched in our society and manipulating it from the inside. Those who did not support the ideology or were fleeing it presumptively are the polar opposite of that group. So claiming that they are party members is borderline nonsensical in the absence of actual hard evidence... which you do not have, or else you would have provided it.

Again, your claim has absolutely no legal merit, because it relies on a fundamentally absurd interpretation of the law in question.

If that claim is false, then I'm the President of the United States.

Her dad applied and was granted citizenship. Therefore that claim is not false. And even if his citizenship was obtained under false pretense, he still had it at the time when she applied, so that claim was not false at the time that she applied. Absent any evidence of her knowing that he lied to become a citizen, your argument has zero merit from a legal perspective.

You see, in the United States (and any other country whose law is based on English Common Law), there is an automatic presumption that government actions have been handled properly, and that you can rely on that presumption for all other purposes. The legal term is "presumption of regularity". Reliance on that presumption prima facie cannot be fraudulent in the absence of direct knowledge to the contrary.

So unless you can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that she *knew* her father got citizenship through fraud, once again, your argument has no legal merit whatsoever.

Please learn a bit about how U.S. law actually works before spouting such utter nonsense.

Here's the flaw in your logic. Her dad did have it. If someone had documented proof that he should not have been granted that citizenship because of fraud on his part, then it could be revoked. But that still would not change the fact that at the time she filed it, he had been granted citizenship, which means the form was filed legitimately.

So unless you can prove your age theory (which, without valid birth records, would be impossible), you have nothing.

+1 to literally everything you just said except the last part.

I do want a foldable phone so I can have enough screen real estate to blow up the font size and still have usable apps. But that would require supporting different accessibility text size settings on the different screens to be useful.

But I also critically want a home button. In every way, gestures are inferior to a physical home button. It's harder to swipe to kill an app, harder to switch apps, etc. And add a case around the phone, and usability goes downhill even more.

That said, the return of Touch ID goes a long way towards making iPhone usable again, so that's definitely a big plus for this design. (Face ID sucks. It can't be used while wearing Vision Pro. It can't be used while wearing a mask. It can't be used easily without having it in front of your face, which means you can't start unlocking until it is out of your pocket, which wastes precious time. It just randomly fails for no obvious reason at a much higher rate than Touch ID did. In every way, it is an inferior experience. So when I say this is a big plus for me, I mean a BIG plus, assuming this new tiny Touch ID sensor actually works. I'll be eagerly watching the reviews.)

But more critically than that, I want a phone I can operate with one hand. I physically am incapable of meaningfully operating the current phones without using both hands. They are too tall and too wide, and my thumb isn't that long.

So what I really want is an iPhone Duo Mini. Make the outer display be the size of an iPhone 5s. Add four action buttons on the side or top that we can configure individually. For me, one would be a home button, one would be a "take a photo right now" button (hold to start video recording), one would be a Siri button, and the fourth would be a normal power button. And add back the ringer switch.

Also, bring back the physical mute switch. The on-screen silence features are enough of a hassle that I just leave my phone on silent mode continuously, which isn't great, but I don't want to waste my one action button on it, and also you can't look at a button and see whether the feature is enabled, so it just wouldn't work very well with a button even if I did.

But most critically, it should be all of these things without sacrificing performance, camera quality, or other features. Every time Apple has made a small phone, they've made it trash. They've given it a low-end camera, saddled it with an outdated CPU, and tried to make it a cheap phone. So nobody buys them, and they say, "See, we told you nobody wanted this." Except we did. We just didn't want a low-end small phone, and we didn't want a huge phone that's small only because the newer ones have become even more ridiculously large.

That said, this does look like a step in the right general direction, with the exception of the missing action button.

Being a member of the military of a country does not constitute being a member of a communist party/regime unless you're high up in a military junta. So no, that law does not apply. And regardless, him being ineligible does not make his daughter ineligible, which means it is still not a material omission in the context of *her* immigration — only his. *She* was a kid.

No, there is not compelling evidence, or else it would have been presented by now. Years later, still no actual evidence has materialized — only a bunch of conspiracy theory nutters making unsubstantiated claims. But I'm sure you "did your own research" to come up with those "facts".

You're assuming it was a lie. He was known to be on active duty from 1977 to 1978. It's unclear whether he was on active duty after that period. That was before she was even *born*. And even if he was actively in the military in some capacity, that doesn't mean he wasn't also a teacher. Most militaries have those.

She was a kid. Even if he had been a high-level government official who ordered troops to butcher small children, she wouldn't have known anything about it.

And again, you and everyone else making those claims offer zero proof. Zero evidence. Just more baseless claims from the party of compulsive liars. If the claims were true, surely *someone* would have provided some sort of actual evidence by now.

And again, even if there were documented proof, that still wouldn't be adequate to vacate *her* claim to citizenship — only her father's. They didn't lie about who *she* was. She was a kid.

That may be how it works in some fascist hellholes, but that's not how it works in the United States. What I described are the legal requirements for denaturalization.

Even if those claims are true — and given that similar allegations were made years ago and DHS concluded that they were without merit, so that's a pretty big stretch — the misrepresentation would have been by her father, not her. She was not a member of the Somali military. So why do you think that would make a material difference in whether she, as a legal adult if the claims are to be believed, would be granted citizenship?

Answer: It wouldn't. The claims are not credible, and even if they were, they would not rise to the legal threshold required to remove someone's citizenship.

None of which is legally an adequate reason to remove someone's citizenship two decades or more later. Filing the wrong form would be considered a minor clerical error. It should have been rejected at the time, and she should have had to file the correct form at the time, but once citizenship is granted, that's moot.

There is a general presumption in the law that citizenship cannot be revoked unless all of the following criteria are true:

• That person misrepresented or concealed something
• The misrepresentation or concealment was willful
• The misrepresentation or concealment was material to the decision to grant citizenship

None of those apply, much less all of them. Omar did not misrepresent anything; her father did. The misrepresentation was probably not willful. See also the comments above about birth records in Somalia. And being born a year earlier is not material to the decision to grant citizenship. It is only material to whether that specific form would have been accepted or a different form would have been needed.

So absent some significant evidence that something else was omitted as a side effect of using the wrong form (which is incredibly unlikely), this would be a clerical error, subject to possible civil penalties against the father, were he still alive, and that's about it.

This isn't just a little bit short of the threshold required for removing citizenship. This is so far from reaching the threshold that even the most conservative immigration judge in the country would laugh in their faces for even making the attempt, and probably hit them with contempt charges for wasting the court's time.