danieldk
https://developer.android.com/privacy-and-security/security-...
This works by signing an attestation using a hardware-backed key (which is in turn signed by Google). So, there is no way to emulate this in software, because your ROM simply does not have the private key to do so. Part of the attestation is information on whether the booted operating system was signed:
https://source.android.com/docs/security/features/keystore/a...
Again, since this is all hardware-signed, you could only fake this information if you were somehow able to extract the private key from the secure element. The primary weakness is that you could try to patch out the part of the application that asks for this attestation. But they found a solution to that, remote attestation. Instead of the app asking for the attestation, e.g. Google's servers or your bankcan ask for the attestation and for the reasons outlined above, your custom firmware is not able to fake this. If your bank, etc. implemented remote attestation, you can simply do not do banking on your phone anymore.
Sorry, I was not implying they are far afield. We have seen this playbook in several nearby European/Asian countries in the last two and a half decades (I live in Europe). Of course, not all these countries did have a long democratic history, but they did show the fragility of democracy, you have to actively protect it.
Heck, even in the country where I live, which has quite a healthy democracy, a majority of parliament has just accepted a motion to request declaring antifa a terrorist organization because Trump did it as well (all Dutch experts, including former secret service personnel agree that antifa is neither an organization, nor terrorist). Some of them just to score a few points for the upcoming elections. Only a judge can declare an organization to be a terrorist organization, but it's all small steps in eroding the rule of law.
(Coincidentally, the next day 1500 right wing hooligans rioted in the streets of The Haglue the next day, burning police cars, damaging the office of a center-left political party and the parliament square.)
There are so many non-violent approaches that would be effective. First, there is the 3.5% rule [1]. Second, if 10%-20% of the general population would go on a general strike, pretty much all of society would come to a standstill and it would send a heck of a powerful message. One of the issues though in the US is healthcare tied to employment, combined with fire at will. It reduces preparedness of people to protest until it's possibly too late. So, it's simultaneously important to build/strengthen unions, etc.
Aside from that, and this is true for Europe as well, we need to heal as a society. People have divided themselves in stupid 'teams', fueled by politicians, foreign interference, algorithms, etc. Not woke enough? You are cancelled. Left-wing? You are cancelled (employer contacted and fired). We have to do a little less social media and go outside and talk to other people. Even if I disagree with people politically, there often a lot of common ground (we all want food, health, to be safe, etc.), we all like to talk about some sports match, and whatnot. We don't have to agree with each other, but we can at least try to understand and care for each other. Break the stupid tribe wars.
People want larger batteries and screens than small phones can offer.
(I was in camp 'small phones', but gave up when my 12 Mini had its best time.)
Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge was first with a thinner phone (and some Motorola that most people have probably never heard of?). But it is also quite misplaced, since they just released the 27 Pro, which moves the (stacked) logic board close to the camera to be able to fit a larger battery, going from 3582 mAh in the 16 Pro to 4252 mAh in the 17 Pro (both US eSIM capacities, 18.7% more!). But they also used the space to add a vapor chamber for better sustained performance.
The Air is just a different market. The Air and Pro optimize for almost the opposite:
- Thinness vs. battery life.
- Thinness vs. an additional GPU core.
- Thinness vs. sustained performance.
- One back camera vs three back cameras.
I like this year's line-up because there is much more choice: getting the absolute thinnest phone, getting an absolute performance monster with a large battery and plenty of cameras, or getting a great middle ground, which is almost as light as the thin phone, but has longer battery life, and one more camera, and no lousy 60Hz display this year.
Another time my wife wanted Apple Care, but decided on the last day and the website didn't offer the option anymore. She called, they were really helpful and again called back a few days later to check everything is good on our end.
They are a big-tech company, but actually being able to call someone and getting swift help is refreshing.
Edit: I only now realize the accidental pun: you probably won't be getting 'Swift' help. :p
As a Mac user since 2007 and iPhone user since 2009, this behavior of Apple disgusts me. (Yes, I know - vote with your wallet. I switched from Apple Watch Ultra to Garmin Fenix and do have a Pixel with GrapheneOS.)
It's the other vendors that are the issue. Even Fairphone is behind a lot (and they only release one model at a time).
I suppose it could be that they just don't care and are deliberately screwing their users, but never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence and all that.
I think for a long time Android users did not really care. Until a few years, Android security support was abysmal with many vendors only doing 1-2 years of updates. Users bought the phones and didn't care, so I guess it was a smart business move to not care.
This changed in recent years due to a mixture of the (then) upcoming EU requirement for supporting devices multiple years with security updates, Apple being able to tout this as an advantage, causing Google and Samsung to enter into a competition to promise the largest number of years of security support, etc.
The must have literally over tens of different models to roll out security updates for, with many different SoCs and software versions to target.
And compared to other Android vendors, Samsung is actually pretty fast with updates.
It's true that other manufacturers have smaller line-ups, but they also tend to be smaller companies.
Compare that with Apple: every yearly phone uses the same SoC, only with variations in simpler things like CPU/GPU core counts.
Our daughter still has an older iPhone with 60Hz and I cannot look at it. The flickery animations drive me crazy. Yet, I have had iPhones with < 120Hz screens for well over a decade.
Edit: 16 Pro 128 GB was $999 at introduction iPhone 17 Pro 256 GB is $1099. Better for the non-Pro though - the 16 128 GB was $799, the 17 256 GB is also $799.
One or two years ago, an US solution would be completely acceptable (with promises to comply with the GDPR). But a lot of damage has been done the last 9 months or so.
I think you are confusing with undervolting.
They are overpriced for 2025 (especially because the height-adjustable stand costs quite a bit extra). But they wake very fast from sleep and work fantastically with a Mac.
https://www.pugetsystems.com/blog/2024/08/02/puget-systems-p...
to;dr: they heavily customize BIOS settings, since many BIOSes run CPUs out-of-spec by default. With these customizations there was not much of a difference in failure rate between AMD and Intel at that point in time (even when including Intel 13th and 14th gen).
I'd rather run everything at 90% and get very big power savings and still have pretty stellar performance. I do this with my ThinkStation with Core Ultra 265K now - I set the P-State maximum performance percentage to 90%. Under load it runs almost 20 degrees Celsius cooler. Single core is 8% slower, multicore 4.9%. Well worth the trade-off for me.
(Yes, I know that there are exceptions.)
Yeah. If Asahi worked on newer Macs and Apple Silicon Macs supported eGPU (yes I know, big ifs), the choice would be simple. I had NixOS on my Mac Studio M1 Ultra for a while and it was pretty glorious.
[1] Well, most non-servers are probably laptops today, but the same reasoning applies.
And it's no bad power quality on mains as someone suggested (it's excellent here) or 'in the air' (whatever that means) if it happens very quickly after buying.
I would guess that a lot of it comes from bad firmware/mainboards, etc. like the recent issue with ASRock mainboards destroying Ryzen 9000-series GPUs: https://www.techspot.com/news/108120-asrock-confirms-ryzen-9... Anyone who uses Linux and has dealt with bad ACPI bugs, etc. knows that a lot of these mainboards probably have crap firmware.
I should also say that I had a Ryzen 3700X and 5900X many years back and two laptops with a Ryzen CPU and they have been awesome.
When you do not have a bunch of components ready to swap out it is also really hard to debug these issues. Sometimes it’s something completely different like the PSU. After the last issues, I decided to buy a prebuilt (ThinkStation) with on-site service. The cooling is a bit worse, etc., but if issues come up, I don’t have to spend a lot of time debugging them.
Random other comment: when comparing CPUs, a sad observation was that even a passively cooled M4 is faster than a lot of desktop CPUs (typically single-threaded, sometimes also multi-threaded).