Non-competes are not enforced in California.

Well, they might be other reasons then. You don't normally haul a poached top tier employee from a first world country to China.

My speculation is maybe their talks with Huawei were more fruitful than known to the public.

To begin with, work on physical layer of 5G NR is to big extend Huawei's and ZTE's effort as part of 3gpp

Who will be your first option for supplier of 5G PHY chips other than standard's original authors?

Qualcomm, I suppose. I personally think it's more likely that Apple wants to make its own. One thing it does do well is custom fabrication and optimization, which is why iPhones run better with less RAM than Androids and can have good battery life. I think they may be sick of the trouble caused by 3rd-party suppliers in this department.

Maybe soon Apple could drop the "Designed in California", and just go 100% "Made in PRC".

True story: I was born in a opressive communist dictatorship, escaped with my family to freedom and democracy. It's very hard to observe the vanguard of democratic capitalism, become 99% communist, with a couple guys in California rounding the corners and painting the boxes...

Hello!

I used to working on the AMS self-service advertising team as a developer.

Note all opinions are my own.

When I first joined the advertising team, I was unsure about a product that can have a seedy sort of reputation on the web. But I was very pleasantly surprised how much we care about the customer experience in regards to ads at Amazon.

The end goal is always to show the customer the best item for purchase, and Retail would always set a high bar for the Ads team. This has in-turn caused us to invest a lot into ensuring the relevancy of our ads is top notch, we do not want to display ads which are ineffective - this hurts both the retail customer and the advertiser.

Nothing would get approved without vigorous testing to ensure the ads had a neutral or positive impact on the retail customer.

While I don't doubt your personal integrity, I am sure a Google or Facebook employee would claim the same. After a while, organizational incentives start nudging you in a direction optimal for the company and not necessarily optimal for the user. It starts in slow imperceptible increments and before you know, your product is ad-infested sub-optimal UX.

Except ads aren't Amazon's primary business or revenue stream. They're incentivized to do exactly what the OP stated.

Or so one would think. But you can try for yourself and see how ad-infested Amazon has become.

To throw a few random examples, I just tried (from Mac / Chrome / Incognito / Signed-out mode), I searched for "sensodyne toothpase". Entire page is full of ads and I have to do a full scroll to see organic non-ads results. Same for "biodegradable trash bags". Almost the same situation for "qtips" though there were 2 partial images of organic search results. Its almost as if I am searching on Google (and no, thats not a compliment).

Not to demean you, personally, but you sound like every other bright eyed ad-team member I've ever spoken with. Have you worked at other "top-tier" advertising platforms like AdWords, or Facebook, or Yelp?

Do you think anyone on the AdWords team feels differently about their product? That's why their public statements are so convincing, because they believe them.

Maybe Amazon's situation is different. Alls I'm saying is that I have no way of knowing.

It is about the increased risk fellow users will have due to this style of disclosure. Who cares about the vendor, but they are best situated to resolve the issue quickly for everyone.

thanks!!

While in terms of metrics bots might help Twitter's numbers look better I would say Twitter has a large incentive to do something about bots.

1. Bots degrade the experience for the regular user. The site feels less authentic with bots, and the quality of the content overall goes down. If you're trying to get eyes on Twitter, bot content does not help you.

2. Bots are not helpful when looking at your ad metrics. Bots are not actually viewing ads and are not interacting with them. If you're goal is to get actual eyeballs on ads, and showing those ads have impact then bots make your site look weaker.

Re-IPO twitter was all about growth. There 1.0 API made making a spambot ridiculously easy. 1.1 is only a slight improvement. One problem is that line between real and bot has been blurred. There are many real accounts out there whose owner have attach bots to them. I frequently get bot follows only to see that I have been unfollowed in short order. The obvious hope is that I will reciprocate the follow and not notice the unfollow. But often these are coming from real accounts. One of the downsides of being a programmer and being interested in CS type things is that a the twitter circles I would be interested are loaded with these semi-faux/semi-real accounts. The result is that the spam to signal ratio is much too high.

I'm just using a simple tactic: if the user follows more than 10k users, that means that he has no interest in my tweets and will probably never interact with me.

So, if I like what he is really doing, sure, I might follow him back. Otherwise, no way.

You can unlink your phone number from iMessages, and even deactivate iMessages totally avoiding this problem...

He did this, I have done this. It doesn't work. He may have updated the blog since you wrote this.

There is a difference between default apps and apps for which the manufacturer was paid to put on the phone in order to advertise to the purchaser.

Apple does not get paid by another company to load its default apps onto the phone.

What do you call newsstand? It's a purely magazine advertising service. Would PizzaHut app be acceptable if it was called PizzaStand and allowed you to select from multiple pizza vendors?

Call it FoodStand, let if fill with food vendors in my neighbourhood (preferably those who offer delivery), and I'm all for it.

That would transform PizzaHut from an obnoxious ad ("seller oriented") to a genuinely useful option I would probably use on occasion ("customer oriented").

I dislike intrusive ads (and spending good money on a physical gadget just to be met by "congratulations, and incidentally you've also bought into a lifelong relationship with this pizza vendor" is intrusive).

But I don't mind being told that "newspapers are here, food is over there"; I might even find it useful at some point.

I still think it would be nice if Apple would let me hide the non-deletable apps I don't use: Let me hide the newsstand icon, pop it up again if I ever decide to subcribe to a newspaper.

But the newsstand doesn't grate me the way a permanent link to any particular magazine would. Any particular magazine is unlikely to be my favorite, it might even be one I hate. That doesn't imply that I hate magazines, newsstands, pizza or food in general.

... but still allow me to delete it if I prefer using another food ordering app instead like GrubHub.

The only apps that should not be deletable are core apps like settings and the app store.

Even those should be deletable if it asks you to designate another app on your phone as the replacement for that core service. That replacement app should be API compatible with the data store of the phone itself.

I should be able to replace Apple Maps with Google Maps. Camera with any number of other Camera apps. Photos with any other local photo browsing app. Calendar with something like Fantastical. Weather with something like Yahoo Weather. etc. etc.

A proper analogy on the Apple side would be "ShittyHut" where you can buy only magazines from Shitty Magazine Inc and nothing else.

E.g, a "Cosmopolitan App" that you can't delete and can use to only buy Cosmopolitan.

That is the proper analogy here.

I think there would be a lot less dissatisfaction with a generic Pizza app.

It's a default app. It doesn't come with any content, nor any branding on it's icon. You're analogy does not hold.

The author blames a company which is able to take advantage of laws rather than blaming the lawmakers for creating such laws.

1. Tesla is able to sell carbon credits it earns from selling its cars. Due to California law, other car companies must buy these credits to offset the sale of their fossil fuel burning cars. 2. Its customers get a lower price on their vehicles due to tax-credits for electric vehicles.

These are the laws in place which help a company like Tesla grow.

I would imagine these laws are designed to do exactly what they are doing, which is helping an electric car manufacture grow and compete in a world dominated by vehicles using fossil fuels.

The hidden argument he is making is that fossil fuels and climate change surely cost us nothing and should not be included at all in the cost of items which generate a third of CO2 emissions.