Huge discounts on some Intel based Macs, but should you buy?
Back To School program launches in the Southern Hemisphere
And why Apple’s App Tracking Transparency might actually make us all less safe.
Big discounts on iMacs and 16” MacBook Pros, is it a clearance?
If you’re in the market for an Intel MacBook, and of course, as far as I’m concerned, most normal people should not be, you can find massive discounts right now as many retailers are attempting to clear stock. These are not generous discounts though in my opinion, but desperate ones, trying to cash in on the more casual buyers who haven’t paid attention to the value proposition of Apple Silicon just yet.
Now, don’t get me wrong, there will be people watching this video for whom buying an Intel Mac with a substantial discount does make sense, those who MUST have windows through Bootcamp as an option, who need access to multiple operating Systems or X86 support natively.
I do think even with these discounts, for the VAST VAST majority of users, Apple Silicon M1 based Macs are the right choice, and will offer better performance per dollar, but, if you MUST have 16” of display on your notebook and you must have it this week, its not a bad time to shop. But understand that these discounts are most likely making space for much better value, faster M1X based systems that are likely to be here in just a couple of months.
Back To School Promotion in Australia, New Zealand & More
Apple’s Back to School program is now underway in a number of mainly Southern Hemisphere countries, so if you’re in the market for a Mac, this is the first time you can buy an M1 based MacBook and get free AirPods as well as the Apple Education store pricing.
There’s an easy way for Social Media apps to get around App Tracking Transparency
Many of the tech blogs are now reporting that a number of Apps will try to circumvent Apple’s new App tracking rules with hashed email addresses to try to fingerprint your device for tracking. BUT… do they need to? We’ll talk about Facebook for the purposes of this, but bear in mind it seems that Google has been avoiding updating its apps recently too in order to potentially avoid these prompts.
But it occurred to me that there is a much more simple way that these companies could get around the App Store privacy restrictions in a way that Apple could really struggle to stop, and it seems like a number of companies may be going down this route right now for different reasons.
When the iPhone was originally introduced by Steve Jobs, there was no App Store. Web apps were the only way to build something for the iPhone. These browser based experiences were not amazing, but they worked, but in a decade we’ve come a long way in terms of mobile first web browsing with the majority of web traffic now coming from mobile browsers.
The App Store is that gateway that Apple uses to make sure that Apps are not infringing our privacy, as far as they can not using our data maliciously and its a function of Apple’s walled garden in the App Store that is what in general stops normal users, the ones who don’t know, and shouldn’t need to know about cookie settings, app sandboxing and reputable safe sources of software from making the mistakes that have made antivirus software and firewalls such a delightful feature on more open platforms like Windows or Android, where you have the freedom to make all the mistakes you want and its all on you.
So, I’d expect certain features of Facebook that arrive in future updates to maybe not appear in the Facebook app on iOS. Not because of any technical limitation, the developers could absolutely put them there, but because slowly and surely, Facebook would prefer people to start using their platform through a browser again, and if possible, probably chrome over Safari. So if you don’t find a new feature in the app, search online and find that it’ll work great through your browser, just take a moment to ask why. When Facebook starts to put more work into making the Facebook webpage on your phone run faster than in the App, or the App starts annoyingly stuttering when you’re using it, maybe ask the question of why that is.
Apple is not free of blame here, and while I think their intent is certainly on the right side of the argument, I think they’ve made bad decisions in places, especially with things like Stadia and XCloud game streaming services. They want each game listed in the App Store as its own app, which I didn’t think was a big deal, it stops the service including games that Apple may find questionable for certain reasons, but as Rene Richie pointed out, its almost exactly the same as a video streaming service, even at a technology level, just with more complex controls from the user’s side, as the game is being played on a remote server and simply streaming you the video output.