Agree with a lot of the points above, sometimes what is new is in the application and effects of the technology in a wider world. The iPhone being a case in point.
Similarly to @josehill above, every time I try VR, first was in 1989 or 1990 in London, I have had enough after a short period of time. It’s just not going to see widespread application. AR however will, if Apple manage to crack that one.
IBM made a corporate decision to abandon the PowerPC platform. But that’s primarily due to their decision to abandon personal/desktop computing altogether, focusing on servers.
But the POWER architecture is quite alive and well. They just announced a suite of servers (meant for data centers) based on the new POWER 11 processor:
Interesting quotes from the article:
Power11 is designed to provide 99.9999% availability, which corresponds to under 40 seconds of downtime per year. Maintenance tasks such as patching don’t require administrators to take applications offline. When a Power11 server must be shut down to make changes, the onboard software can move the applications that it hosts to another machine and thereby avoid downtime.
… a cybersecurity technology called Cyber Vault. According to the company, it can encrypt customer data with a cryptography algorithm that can’t be broken by a quantum computer.
…
the technology is capable of detecting ransomware in under a minute. For added measure, it creates immutable copies of customer data that ransomware can’t delete or encrypt.
… IBM’s Spyre Accelerator. Previewed last year, it’s an artificial intelligence chip with 25.6 billion transistors that are organized into 32 cores and 14 miles of microscopic wiring. The processor is packaged into a PCIe card that can be plugged into servers to speed up inference workloads.
… the Power E1180, which takes up an entire data center rack. It can be equipped with up to 256 Power11 cores and 64 terabytes of DDR5 memory. The most affordable machine in the series, the Power S1122, feature a considerably smaller chassis that has room for up to 60 Power11 cores.
Really cool tech, but nothing anybody will ever have on their desktop.
Definitely cool, but definitely niche, even if it generates hundreds of millions in annual revenue. 
I haven’t followed the POWER architecture in quite a while. I wonder if we’ll ever see a POWER11 workstation. I’m happy to see that Talos is still selling POWER9 systems.
It is also absurd for developers to think Apple owes them anything more than they’re already getting: a ready-made cash cow that didn’t exist at all until Apple invented it. Any developer who doesn’t like the terms of Apple’s developer agreement is perfectly free not to participate. I don’t understand where this attitude of “I’m entitled to this, and I’m entitled to that!” came from. It’s absurdly out of touch with reality.
Except that Apple enjoys a monopoly protected by statute in the US and most other nations. If I choose “not to participate,” and create an iOS app that I publish along with a non-App Store installer, I can be fined hundreds of thousands of dollars and put in prison (17 U.S. Code § 1201). That hardly makes me feel “perfectly free” to exercise my choice. Apple gets to take advantage of a “free market” while potential competitors have to labor under centralized control that gives Apple and Google protected status.
It’s their store. I can’t just walk into a Walmart and put my products on their shelves and expect them to sell them for me. If I want to sell in their store, I have to agree to their terms. If I don’t like that, I can go elsewhere. I have no inherent “right” to sell my stuff at someone else’s store.
Which means you can’t create iOS apps (i.e. participate in the iOS app-making business), but them’s the breaks. In this world, we can’t have our cake and eat it too. If you want to play the game, you have to follow the rules; and if you don’t like the rules, then you don’t have to play the game. There are many injustices in this world that some people quite rightly feel compelled to challenge regardless of the consequences; but not being able to earn money in the Apple App Store on your own terms isn’t one of them imho.
Apple is not legally a monopoly in the United States (per the Epic court case decision, which is the main one I know of that’s actually weighed the question). It does not control the smartphone market (with about 60% marketshare in the US) and there are alternatives for both the customer and developers to go to if they don’t want to abide by Apple’s terms.
Apple isn’t a physical retailer like Walmart—it’s a platform provider, more akin to a landlord renting digital space. A better analogy would be that Apple is a mall landlord requiring every store to give them a 30% cut of every sale made anywhere, even if the customer just found the product at the store and later bought it directly from the brand’s website. That’s not about fairness—it’s monopolistic behavior.
If there are only two near identical malls left in town and goods can only be purchased at stores in said malls, you can be very sure regulators would tell those two mall landowners who they are allowed to refuse a lease and why.
All these arguments about people having a choice fall flat because there is no choice.
There are essentially two smartphone platforms that work roughly the same way and cost roughly the same.
You do not have the choice to leave one and develop for one of the say remaining dozen. You essentially have the choice to develop or not develop at all. This begs the question why 8 billion people the world over should be forced to submit to just two mega corps.
And if there is no more real competition left, then laws and regulation will have to tell the two sole platforms how it will be. Just like the utility I am forced to use to transmit my power is told how much they can charge and how they have to do business. Because I don’t have a real choice in the matter.
Those of you who are advocating or calling for choice are essentially asking for Apple and Google to be broken up into many competing baby corps like Ma Bell was in 1984. I’d claim there are no signs right now that that will likely happen, in addition to considerable doubt that such a breakup would even work or lead to the desired outcome.
How many platforms would be enough? 3? 4? 12? You’re using monopoly in a way that does not fit the legal definition of it in the United States. That’s perfectly reasonable (this is not a court room) but you should at least note that.
From the Epic decision:
“the Court cannot ultimately conclude that Apple is a monopolist under either federal or state antitrust laws. While the Court finds that Apple enjoys considerable market share of over 55% and extraordinarily high profit margins, these factors alone do not show antitrust conduct. Success is not illegal. The final trial record did not include evidence of other critical factors, such as barriers to entry and conduct decreasing output or decreasing innovation in the relevant market. The Court does not find that it is impossible; only that Epic Games failed in its burden to demonstrate Apple is an illegal monopolist.”
(Bolding mine)
Ultimately, not liking a particular situation does not make that situation illegal.
That is a complete misunderstanding of the DMCA.
It is illegal to circumvent encryption designed to prevent copyright violation. It is not illegal to side-load software into a device. And you don’t have to defeat any copyright protection scheme to side-load software.
Now, if you were to somehow get Apple’s private key and self-sign your app image to make it look like it came from Apple’s store, then that might violate the DMCA, but I don’t think anybody has ever done that.
Note that even Apple’s official statement about jailbreaking doesn’t say or imply it is illegal. They warn against it and say they may refuse support for a jailbroken device, but that’s all they say.
With one big difference. Android devices don’t lock you in to the Google Play store. Third-party app stores exist and have always existed for the Android platform. It only requires one change to a standard system setting to enable side-loading any software, including third-party app stores.
Years ago, when I was using an Android device, I frequently bought software from the Amazon app store. (Sadly, Amazon will be closing their store in August.)
I would agree with you, with respect to Apple. Their support for third-party app stores is the minimum mandated by law, which isn’t nearly as robust or useful as what has always existed for Android.
Just want to add that mall owners can write leases that do the same thing in effect. A typical store lease is structured around a base rent plus a percentage of sales. Both the rent and the percentage, as well as other lease terms, can reflect mall owner’s estimates of a business’ total sales revenue.
Another common practice is to require stores to lease space in both premier and secondary malls as a package. In many cases, the locations in secondary malls lose money or are barely profitable. So that’s another way mall owners can, in effect, take profits from online sales and sales made at other locations from retailers.
Then I share that “complete misunderstanding” with some very good company. Apple themselves have long taken the position that jailbreaking is anti-circumvention and thus illegal under the DMCA. The Librarian of Congress also, apparently, misunderstands as completely as I do, as they felt the need to grant an exemption to DMCA anti-circumvention rules for those who choose to jailbreak. If the Librarian of Congress doesn’t consider jailbreaks to be anti-circumvention, then why would they feel the need to grant an exemption?
Unfortunately, the exemption granted applies only to individuals who choose to jailbreak their own phones. Distributing jailbreaking tools (such as an installer for an otherwise perfectly-legal app distributed outside the App Store) can still be considered anti-circumvention and prosecuted under the DMCA.