Will these ones retain vendor support longer than the last batch?

I suspect that they feel at least incrementally less burned in this case; since, while it wasn't obviously a good idea for a product, it at least goes somewhere: if you can make a phone functional and adequately rigid at that size; it's quite possible that there's a more sensible device size that you can still apply the miniaturized motherboard and whatever mechanical engineering you did for rigidity to; and just fill the rest of the case with battery; and there may be some other cases where the ability to get an entire SoC and supporting components into a particularly tiny area or make a thin component of a larger system quite rigid is handy.

Still doesn't really explain flaying a normal phone until it barely has a normal day's use with a totally fresh battery when you are still going to glue an entire baby spy satellite to one end of it; but some of the actual engineering is probably reusable.
The 'butterfly' keyboards, or the under-mouse charging port, by contrast, went nowhere. They tried and failed at a few iterations of keyboards that committed expensive suicide if you looked at them wrong; then just went back to allocating the extra mm or whatever once Jony was safely out of the picture; and it's not as though putting the port on the bottom rather than the front of the mouse involved any interesting capability development.

Whatever product manager thought that the 'air' would be a big seller deserves to feel bad; but the actual engineering team can probably feel OK about the odds that a future phone will look somewhat air-like if you were to remove the normally shaped case and larger battery.

By Dominic's Cummings own admission revealing this secret is a criminal offence which we can hope will be treated a bit more seriously than driving all the way to Barnard Castle during the pandemic lock down.

True, but when you actually look at the differences between where a UK (ranked 8th), Canadian (ranked 9th) or US passport will get you without a visa let's just say it's not a list of places I plan to be visiting anytime soon but at least I still get to feel morally superior! ;-)

It's stupid; but at least more honest than trying to dress 'grok' up as the master control computer.

In the MS case; it wouldn't be too surprising if that order is also the one that urgency dictates. Neither is totally unavailable on-prem only; or entirely without more-chatty-than-one-would-like behavior; but if your concern is about your dependence and Redmond's potential direct control their groupware stuff is moving faster than their OSes(at least if you have enterprise licenses and someone to handle keeping them quiet) in the direction of pure SaaS.

You'll get some nagging about how Azure Arc is definitely the cool kid's future of glorious hybrid manageability; but your ability to run Windows as though it were 15 years ago is definitely greater than your ability to run Office that way.

I suspect that this won't be the last case we see; as MS has shown comparatively little interest in backing down on the future being azure SaaS, and there's no real equivalent to some steep but temporary discounts for dealing with people who have fundamental privacy and operational control issues; while it's not terribly challenging to find a special discount that makes sticking with the status quo look cheaper than trying to do a migration.

I obviously don't expect better from these sorts of people; but I'm honestly puzzled as to why they would turn the screws so quickly and blatantly despite having gone to all the trouble of a reshuffle and a new lineup and some spiel about being likeable rather than Alexa just being something that you sort of poke at because Prime members were given a free surveillance puck with some offer one time.

Is Panay one of those abhuman lunatics who genuinely thinks that the only objection to relentless advertising is that it isn't "relevant" or "engaging" enough? Does he have a scorpion nature that leads him to knowingly doom his own product just because that's what he is? Is he just a figurehead who got to choose the case plastics colors and smile on stage; but some adtech business unit calls all the shots?

I'd fully expect this sort of thing to betray you; but only after enough of a honeymoon period for people to be pleasantly surprised by the behavior of the launch units so that there is actually enough of an install base to betray.

It sure is a good thing that 'AI' companies are notoriously discerning and selective about their training inputs and not doing something risky like battering on anything with an IP address and an ability to emit text in the desperate search for more; so this should be a purely theoretical concern.

Snark aside, I'd be very curious how viable this would be as an anti-scraper payload. Unlikely to be impossible to counter; but if the objective is mostly to increase their cost and risk when they trespass outside the bounds of robots.txt something that will just look a trifle nonsensical in places to a human but could cause real trouble if folded into a training set seems like it could be quite useful.

It can certainly be done otherwise; but it's not exactly unrelated when, in practice, a TPM is the industry standard mechanism for making a PC or PC-like system capable of cryptographically secure remote attestation; and when TPMs quite specifically mandate the features you need to do remote attestation rather than just the ones you would need to seal locally created secrets to a particular expected boot state. They are certainly can do that, and it's presently the most common use case; but locking down remote attestation was not some sort of accidental side effect of the design.

....that natural stupidity is even more dangerous than artificial intelligence.

The place where TPMs potentially get toothy is remote attestation. As a purely local matter having your boot path determined to be what you think it is/should be is very useful; but, by design, you can also request that from a remote host. Again, super useful if you are dealing with a nasty secure orchestration problem(Google has a neat writeup of how they use it); but also the sort of thing that is potentially tempting for a relying party to use as part of authentication decisions.

We've seen hints at related issues on the Android side; where hardware attestation API or 'Play Integrity' API demands are made by some applications that block 3rd party ROMs, even if the boot sequence is entirely as expected(and even if the 3rd party ROM is almost certainly in much better shape than the first party one; eg. Graphene vs. some out-of-support entry level Samsung); which has chilled 3rd party ROMs considerably.

If relying parties who are important(ISPs, banks, etc.) do start demanding attestation the situation in practice becomes a great deal more restrictive.

It's rare to see such a good example of damning with faint praise. It even managed to cast aspersions on their next generation product all while seemingly heaping praise on them.

How's that going to work exactly? How will Sony know whom to sue if they contact me and I tell them I made the video myself? If they do not believe me they will have to sue me to get a name and what happens if the court does not believe me too? Even if I did make the video with some AI company's product, I'd be the one who made money by uploading it not that AI company so why are they the ones who have to pay?

You can't cut the creator out of the legal process so easily: they are the only one who knows whether the video used any AI and they are also the one potentially making money from it. It's clear though that the problem is out-of-control greedy companies: the artists are caught between AI companies who want to trample over copyrights and studios who will dump them the instant a much cheaper, photo-realistic AI actor is practical. At the same time moves to strengthen copyrights against AI will almost certianly be abused by the same studios to come after creators.

I agree that laws should treat humans and AI algorithms differently but for that to work you have to be able to distinguish AI vs human work and so far we can't do that with anything like sufficient reliability..