vvoaterr

The original owner dropped it off somewhere when his YouTube app stopped working, which probably happened years and years ago.

Regarding ridiculously-expensive Apple heirloom tools: Go to eBay right now, and buy any Activation-Locked Apple device. It's OK, I'll wait.

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OK, now: try to use it to do something. Anything. Something as simple as write a NOTEPAD note, or play one song from iTunes.

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Nope! You are surely getting screenfulls of information telling you, this Apple device has been locked and only the original owner can unlock it.

I suppose this is to prevent people from stealing Apple devices and reselling them to pawn shops or on eBay and Craigslist, and it must be working. All thieves everywhere must know by now, don't even bother to try to steal an Apple device or a Tesla car, for as soon as you do it gets bricked from all the satellites in space.

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I'm writing this because I bought a nine year old iPad on eBay and have spent the last two weeks trying to get through to AL-SUPPORT Activation Lock support at Apple, asking them to unlock it. And of course they don't care, I am not the original owner of the device, and unless I am, it is as useless as a digital brick. Battery life, screen quality, beautiful craftsmanship of the item itself, nothing matters. It just sits there telling me I'm practically a criminal for even owning this device.

No matter that the original owner gave up on it long ago, when even the simplest apps like YouTube and Gmail stopped working on it, by design, intentional planned-obsolescence coming down from Apple themselves. With the iOS getting relentlessly updated every year, all the apps get forcibly recompiled and anything old just doesn't work any more at all.

They don't care about this device any more. It was just a real-world dongle they used to get information from and about the original owner, information they've got stored in their giant database in the Cloud. They don't really care about me at all.

I imagine the universe is now littered with these devices, an Oort Cloud of them completely surrounding the planet, mentally bricked by annual iOS updates and physically bricked by Activation Locks, I'm a criminal for owning one, and were I to bring it to an Apple store to complain, they would have no useful help for me at all, "Buy a new one!" they'll tell me, "that's our company policy!"

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Who is causing the problem here --- me, or Apple?

Well don't tell Facebook, those greedy bastards. They'd probably provide the people in those countries with Facebook-only smartphones, or Facebook-only Internet connections, or something else horrible and dystopian like that.

Considering how Google’s treated AR and VR in the last 10 years, hyping people up then quietly pulling back support and finally cancellation after just 2-3 years, I don’t see this going well.

They had a toehold 6-10 years ago which they could have easily kept iterating on and making small marketshare gains, but I guess that wasn’t good enough. Now instead of entering 2022 with 10-20% marketshare, a mature platform, and developer/user mindshare, they’re starting the new year with none of that and the idea “Hey maybe we should try AR/VR stuff again.”

Get bent Google. You shouldn’t have cancelled Daydream and killed the small amount of goodwill you were starting to cultivate. Lenovo got burned, developers got burned, users got burned. And they still want to try again?

Instead of taking your Google Glass ball and running home with it after everyone was mean about the idea, maybe listen to the feedback and change the product? But no, despite Glass being introduced almost purely around consumer-targeted ideas and concepts, it’s now an “Enterprise” product out of reach of us mere mortals.

ARCore, with its many naming and branding changes, has also failed to catch on like Google hyped.

Google, you’re charging into battle with Apple and Zuck and you got a dildo made of American cheese. Good luck.

There's a special kind of grumpy old techno-luddite, and I am describing myself here, who says "Ha! You actually fell for all that e-book and digital downloads trickery, buying DIGITAL-ONLY products with no way to be sure that you really truly own them or have them? You TRUSTED THE CLOUD? Then you get what they deserve when they all disappear, I've been bracing for the day that happens ever since the whole thing started."

and since 1998 have only bought actual tangible physical books with pages that turn, video games on physical disc, and movies only on VHS and DVD and BluRay. ((But yeah, I have a STEAM library. Nobody's perfect.))

Once I used a brand new credit card with a $1000 credit limit at a Walmart in the deep dark of a Sunday morning at 2a.m., to try to buy a PS4 game system and a copy of DEATH STRANDING. The card was declined. I contacted the bank via phone and they asked me to upload copies of my driver's license and/or passport. I never did. Oh well, so much for that credit card!

I didn't believe in the Metaverse when William Gibson or Neal Stephenson wrote about it, when people were selling virtual office space in virtual malls, when it was called SIM CITY or SECOND LIFE, and I don't believe in it now.

you mean, hedonic treadmill

you mean, hedonic treadmill

Why won't they just lift the regulations, so we can have the free money? --Maine

Anybody is welcome to download the Robinhood app, and buy FAANG/FAGMAN stocks with all your disposable income. Then you, too, will be contributing to the leading cause of the next "Great Depression", plus, you'll come out of it having become quite Rich.

You're welcome.

I came into these comments and one guy said "The machine I spec'ced out only costs $4300" and another guy said "They just put back the ports and features they should have kept in 2011" and I noped out of these comments. Your mileage may vary.

So, Council Bluffs Iowa GOOGLE data center, disguised as the Gable Corporation. Got it.

You may be one of the only ones, yes.

I have never signed up for Facebook but if my family members have ever "uploaded their phone contacts to find more Facebook Friends" or if my relatives have ever uploaded pictures with me in the picture ((Facebook has detected a face we don't recognize. Please tag the person in this picture)), or if I have a US Government Name and/or Social Security Number, there's a company that is building a DATABASE DOSSIER with information about me. I cannot ask them to please DELETE information they have about me because those Shadow Profiles are SECRET, I'm not even supposed to KNOW that these creepy data-scrapers have a file on me.

Facebook is just the front end for the NSA / surveillance state backend, and at this point it's frightening how Too Big to Fail they have become.

When you're designing a Big Brother dystopia in which everyone is tracked and surveilled, step one is to create something like Facebook. "All your friends are doing it! You should too!"