Hmmm... I don't know... an army of Chinese robots roaming the US. Kinda makes me nervous.

Please note that most of the billionaire's net worth is actually the value of the stock they own in their companies. When those values go up, so does their net worth. They're not actually "extracting" money from the economy, leaving people with no money to save. They don't have piles of cash under their mattress or in their bank accounts.

That's not what went down. The US asked Apple to make a special version of the OS that would not wipe the terrorist's phones after multiple failed attempts to log in.

It was Bill Clinton who signed the Most Favored Nation pact.

It's amazing that you know all this about a film which has not been released, and you definitely haven't seen it on a Vision Pro. How about we wait until it we actually see and experience the thing before we trash it?

The parent was trying to say that Apple intends to process most of these features on the user’s device without contacting a server, not use iPhones and iPads as servers.

You can also change a setting so you must be actively looking at it, not just in the vicinity.

There is good greed and there is bad greed. Good greed provides the driving force, the battery voltage, needed to motivate people to risk everything to start a new business, to mortgage the house to make payroll, to borrow money from friends and family to buy parts for a new gadget. The desire to succeed, to attain wealth, is the force behind going to college, behind learning a trade. Without good greed, very little would get done in the world, and you probably wouldn’t have the phones and tablets and computers to enjoy.

There is also bad greed, which provides the same motivation as good greed, but is utilized by evil persons such that they will do anything to attain their goals no matter who they or what damage to attain those goals.

Capitalism has been the force behind society’s advancement since time immemorial. Probably since before recorded history. The desire to have things, to take care of family, to succeed at a profession are all based in capitalism.

Without Capitalism, there would be little or no motivation or drive to invent all of the things that are required to have what we call "AI" today - the internet, massive banks of servers housing massive banks of AI-related chips, and a reason to spend money on those things.

There wouldn't be any AI without capitalism.

Microsoft’s investment in Apple wasn’t all that large, and didn’t materially change the cash balance at Apple. What it did was signal to the business world that Apple was viable. Microsoft also promised to keep Office alive and support it more vigorously. It was a strategic masterstroke, indeed, to leverage such a small amount of money into the turnaround that then occurred.

Microsoft didn’t do it out of the goodness of their heart, either. This investment was part of a settlement between Apple and Microsoft on a long-running lawsuit that Microsoft was probably going to loose.

Which is what they’ve been doing to the US for quite a while. Seems to be working.

My granddaughter, scarily, gets all her news from Twitter and doesn't trust any other source.

That's a choice that vendor freely makes. It's not like they are being forced to do so. They can always develop for Android, as well. Many do.

Please note that being so successful that you have a virtual monopoly (like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon) is not illegal. Apple does not have a monopoly in any business in which it competes, but it is clearly successful and huge.

The thing that *is* illegal is leveraging your monopoly such that people *have* to do business with you, or using anti-competitive practices (not clearly defined) to be successful. Just being really good at what you do is not illegal and is not anti-competitive.

And how did it not get caught with the extensive public beta tests?