So then… continue using exclusively Apple’s store then?
If you consider Apple to be the gold standard for security, you have just keep going as you are.
I don’t see how giving other people the freedom to choose infringes on your security.
Remember these are people who know what it’s like to go through apartheid and ethnic cleansing.
South Africa today is largely governed by the people who fought and won against apartheid, so it’s understandable that they feel a level of solidarity with the people of Palestine.
(in this context I’m choosing to gloss over the real and present issues with the ANC, because they are not relevant to Israel’s genocide)
I don’t know, your #2 reason doesn’t seem to stand up to reality.
I don’t know where you are, but where I am (UK) you can go on any high street (in most towns there will be an area where most shops are, think strip mall in the US) and you will find at least a couple shops that fix and sell electronics - primarily smartphones, but also vacuum cleaners, TVs, computers, games consoles.
Pretty much all of them are locally-run and are, I assume, profitable in spite of every electronics manufacturer trying to run them out of business.
I say I assume because they wouldn’t be everywhere if they weren’t.
I’ve had phones fixed by them, they offer warranties, reasonable prices, only had an issue once and it was put right after a tiny bit of back and forth.
I think by “we can’t afford it” you mean “capitalism hasn’t yet found a way to centralise the profits and run the small business owners out of business”.
Oh you mean debatable because it’s one of the cleanest, cheapest, and safest sources of electricity we have?
Which allows France a degree of energy independence which has helped it not suffer the same amount of pain other countries have now that they’re having to kick the cheap Russian gas addiction?
And through huge cross-border interconnects it allows France to sell electricity to neighbouring countries at a huge profit?
Nuclear is not always the answer, but as France has shown, as long as you invest in reliable infrastructure and don’t put it in earthquake/tsunami-prone areas, it can be a huge positive for your country.
And you don’t have to rely on antagonistic petrostates for to power your homes with gas, or on strip-mining huge swathes of land by equally-antagonistic China for rare-earth metals for your wind turbines/solar panels/battery storage.
I assume that you’re talking about the Dacia Spring which got 1 star (though the Renault Zoe got 0 stars recently and a few others did too in the past).
So whilst you’re not wrong that these cars currently hold the lowest ratings of cars tested with the new post-2020 procedure, I’m sure a lot of older cars would fare far worse.
And it’s fundamentally flawed to subject a tiny 970kg EV city car to the same tests as a 2-3 ton towering SUV. Besides the vastly different use cases, bigger and heavier vehicles will have an inherent advantage in most of the tests - hint none of them are adjusted for the weight of the vehicle.
I’m not saying this is somehow wrong, they’re simulating crashing into an average car or a stationary immovable object, just we’re automatically discounting small vehicles which have a genuinely valid reason to exist.
The new NCAP ratings only makes sense if we’re saying affordable, small, light cars don’t need to exist. Like everything automotive nowadays, it’s designed to gently nudge us towards big lumbering swollen hatchbacks as the holy grail of the car industry.
Holy cow, is that a thing?!
Some stuff in the US is pretty cool and money is nice and all, but then I have friends in senior positions within big tech who have only 12 days of paid time off which is real shitty.
At least they can work remotely for a few days so they get a couple of decent holidays, but that just means they can never fully disconnect.
And they can just use the healthcare system here when they’re back, which is nice for them but I’m sure not everyone has that luxury.
Having followed SpaceX for a very long time, I think that Elon kinda figured early on how to get engineers excited for a lofty goal and give them sufficient room to fail and innovate, whilst squeezing every drop of work out of them.
So he was a good hype man for things he broadly understood and he was willing to put loads of money into making it successful.
But following a long tradition of people who are actually excellent in a narrow field, he convinced himself that he can translate this into imposing weird and frankly really stupid philosophy onto the world. The Bloombergs and the Carsons of the world have already failed at this, happily it looks like he will too. Not that he’ll learn anything from it, just hope he goes away and stops trying.
I’m not sure how they got to that conclusion, but we can kinda guess.
The tongue is PACKED with blood vessels, so in case of any damage it can get tons of nutrients to fix itself. But this takes a very energy-intensive.
So if the rest of the body would have the same density of blood vessels, we’d need drastically more energy to feed all of that.
And I guess they’re asserting that all else being the same we wouldn’t be able to ingest or process sufficient food to keep that going.
It’s a bit of a strange argument though, I’m going far outside of my physiology understanding, but you’d have to imagine that had we evolved such advanced healing capabilities, we’d have also evolved the means to feed them. And OP underestimates just how much food someone can eat. As someone dealing with an ED, I can tell you that you can easily triple your calorie intake (though whether that’s sufficient I wouldn’t be able to say…).
All in I’d look forward to OP defending their assertion.
There’s loads of people who prefer iPhone and would sideload if allowed but it’s not a deal-breaker. I prefer iOS and Apple hardware but refuse to buy one without sideloading.
My S24 Ultra is arriving tomorrow, but I’ll likely be buying the iPhone 16 if it comes with sideloading.
So Apple is gaining a customer, I’ve been eyeing the MacBooks too ever since the M1 came out so might end up pulling the trigger on one of those as well.