MerlinDE

This move has nothing to do with usability or device capabilities or software support. The only reason for turning them off is to remove a hole in their DRM. These old devices allowed you to remove the copy protection from their books (hardly anyone else uses DRM these days anymore). Removing the old devices makes freeing your books from DRM just much harder.

There are several useful apps available for iOS that work as Safari extensions handling that kind of stuff. Banish is very useful, as well as Hush. In addition Opener allows you to chose if links shall open the respective app or just stay in the browser.

I have tried it and must say it just doesn’t work well enough. Too high latency, video calls are impossible and you regularly run into arbitrary issues. I ended up buying a standalone monitor again.

Anti child abuse measures are regularly utilized to push for measures you otherwise can‘t establish. Most of the time surveillance and censorship. Just look back 10+ years to Germany, where „Zensursula“ tried to establish DNS blocking for the media industry by arguing for child safety. The approach is always the same. Just this time, Apple has so many devices in the market, that if this succeeds we‘ll all be headed for surveillance disaster.

Given that fact that Snowden’s revelations didn’t generate ANY actions within the public, I doubt to see any actions this time.

Most of the points in this article are just wrong (e.g. font size asked for and configured during initial setup; WiFi alerts are not enabled by default).

Apart from that, I agree that iOS has too many hidden features and — first and foremost — too many interactions that you must know exist and you can’t find by just glancing at the screen (which is defined as mandatory in Apple‘s User Interface Guidelines).

So, yes, their products get worse. But, no, not like described in this article.

Why not just revolutionize patent laws? Make it only applicable if the patent is used for a real product available on the market. That would make patent trolling unattractive.

Would be great, if you could include whole articles in the RSS feed. Making it easier to read it offline, on the go.

Also a more flexible layout, better suiting devices with limited screen sizes (read mobile, aka iPod/Pad/Phone) would be great.