A few days ago we saw that talks between Apple and Meta had amounted to nothing. There was talk about including Meta’s AI efforts into Apple Intelligence, unti Apple said “Forget it” or somethign to that effect. I skimmed the headlines but don’t remember the details.
This is significant. The reason for this is simple. The EU is being criticised by Apple for the Digital Markets Act and Apple is trying to give the EU a bad name by saying “We won’t make Apple Intelligence available in the EU because we’re not clear about the DMA.
Yesterday Facebook, discguised as meta, and Meta, disguised as Instagram launched Threads. Threads is meant to be a twitter competitor. The paradox is that Facebook has always been a twitter competitor, and this has become more evident with every iteration of both social networks. It is paradoxical that Facebook would need threads, to compete with Twitter.
Not Available in Europe Threads, at the time of writing this blog post is not available in Europe because it requires data, which brings it in breach of GDPR rules.
By a large majority the European Union has voted to bring back user replaceable batteries to mobile phones. This is fantastic for one reason, over all others. I keep my phones for years, not seasons. Over that time the battery health degrades. As it degrades the battery life goes from lasting an entire day, to lasting a shorter and shorter amount of time.
The issue at the moment is that if we want to replace a battery we need to take it to a phone repair shop, because a battery replacement requires the phone to be unglued, elements to be disconnected, the battery to be swapped, and then for the phone to be put back together.