Once upon a time, the ISPs would send you a modem and you had to buy a router separately. And then even for a while, they’d include a modem/wireless router combo, but it often sucked and a lot of people would buy a separate router anyway.

Nowadays? The ISPs are giving you free wireless routers that do everything the masses will ever need. My ISP, Verizon, even does little monthly self tests on the network and they’ll apparently send us free mesh networking nodes if they detect there’s an area where some of our devices aren’t getting good signal.

Why would apple even compete in this arena? When most users are having their needs met by their ISP for free? The only people really buying routers nowadays are the power users who want to be on the cutting edge of technology. And that’s an area where apple doesn’t like to compete. So it makes sense that they don’t.

Before iMessage, all text bubbles were green. For the original concept of iPhone, anything telephonic (that your carrier could charge you for, since Steve Jobs ensured that iPhones got unlimited data at first) was colored green. That’s why, to this day, the phone app and the messages app are both green, as well as the “you’re on a call” status that appears behind the clock.

Then iMessage came out in iOS 5 and they made it blue, the color of things that used data (like safari, stocks, mail, App Store, weather)

It wasn’t until the redesign of iOS 7 that they cranked up the saturation of all the colors, and the telephony green became like, anxiety-inducing electric green. I feel like that’s when people started hating these green bubbles so much, because iOS 7 actually made them an ugly, radioactive color. Where the blue remained a pleasant, calm ocean blue.

Being successful isn’t illegal. But using your success to stamp out the competition is illegal.

If you’re a Google competitor, you now know what number you need to offer Apple in order to start the conversation about switching safari’s default browser.

If you’re a consumer… I have no idea why you’d care. Especially when you can freely choose another search engine if you feel so inclined.

Imagine what happens when a big company like Facebook decides they’re going to create the Meta App Store, and they think they’re a big enough entity to get enough users to switch. Ultimately users will need to choose between the security they’re guaranteed today, or being able to continue to use their favorite apps.

You’ll likely need an Apple ID set with an address in the EU and/or an EU-issued credit card, plus will need to be physically present in the EU.

Yeah until the big apps decide they’re big enough to get users to switch off the App Store. Then grandma is trying to follow instructions from an email to install Facebook and disable the protections, and now she’s screwed it up and there’s malware.

Every trip home for the holidays in about getting all the crap to make her computer usable again. Now I’ll have to do that to her phone, too??

There was concerns when this was announced that Apple could legally delete all your sideloaded apps the moment you stepped outside of the EU.

The Blackmagic Camera app allows a monitor feed over HDMI.

Traditionally the “limit” was a point in which they’d either shut off your data for the month, or charge you an overage fee. Nowadays there’s no fee and they won’t shut off your data. You might be limited to 600 kbps but you can continue to use the web.

With my Verizon plan, I think my limit is 22GB before they start throttling.

It’s kind of the same in the US. Our “unlimited” data plans have secret limits. You don’t pay extra once you hit it, but the carriers will slow you down to unusable speeds. And also for tethering, there’s usually a hard limit where they will charge you more once you exceed your plan’s tethering limit.