Every iPhone ships with a bitcoin miner. It gets activated once your phone is over a year old.

I wonder if that would generate a financially significant amount of BTC. Would they ever actually mine a block with that little compute?

if the hash rate drops by a sufficient amount, then they could :)

If nothing else, it'd generate a financially significant amount of USD for Apple :)

In a vacuum, yes. If you account for the fact that a large majority of people would get pissed with the battery drain and return their phones, no.

So it's not the battery going

Well, how much of that M2 chip do you really need for Netflix, bud?

Valid questions for any consumer.

I love the comments here all so awe struck by this that they don't realize how stupid it is. Literally any PDF document would have served the same purpose, the printer test page could have been enough. But this just reveals that even deep inside Apple development there are cryptobros who don't mind all the millions of dollars that the whole crypto movement has scammed from hard working gullible people.

I feel a difference between the rationality of a critique and the disappointment caused by disappointing human behaviors. The paper in question is a genesis, discussing it doesn't imply you "don't mind" about all the scammed people. The weird easter-egg-y nature of "hiding" this document inside a commercial OS makes your contribution a bit extreme; you created a imaginary bridge between two mountains.

the fascinating thing about observers of the crypto world is that they assign the same level of importance to an individual's phishing attack as to a 10 billion organization as to the entire 500bn commodity that powers them.

imagine doing that to the rest of the tech industry. "my friend lost money in an email! duh 'puters r scam!" come to think of it, there were people in the 90s like that.