For tax strategies that hadn't been ruled on by court, and are ambigious based on the law as written, are they tax avoidance, evasion, or are they just untested tax strategies?
At some point in the depreciation curve of the iPhone, it will not make sense for certain types of users (students?) to pay $120 for Apple to replace the battery, since $30 battery is not available, and instead would make more sense to buy a newer used iPhone. The price sensitive user themselves would not drop $1k on a new phone, but someone else in the upgrade treadmill will.
Sure, at a certain point in every product's lifespan there's a certain point where it doesn't make sense for certain buyers of used products to pay higher prices for replacement parts if lower prices were available. But the claim made was: "the products are destined to become e-waste faster than necessary due to inevitable battery degradation and intentionally difficult battery replacement."
So in order for iPhones to "become e-waste faster than necessary" and also for Apple to be doing this "[because] they want to sell entire $1000+ phone/$3000+ laptop upgrades, not replacement batteries", is the assertion that the market for users who would buy a used iPhone, for which it is not economical for them to spend $90 more on a battery replacement are generating enough extra disposal of used iPhones that Apple has intentionally chosen this design in order to maximize the sale of new phones to people that are selling their phones to this contingent of buyers?
Is there even any evidence to suggest that the number of used iPhones that would otherwise be sold to someone for whom a $30 battery replacement is economical, but not a $120 replacement is significantly routed instead to the trash instead of being sold to other users who are not as price sensitive? Even just a study of the average used market lifespan of iPhones compared to other cell phones might be instructive here.
The charge definitely has an impact on the market lifespan of the phone. It makes an older phone less attractive.
Let's do a thought experiment: The cost of an iPhone 16 is $800 brand new in 2024. The year is now 2028 and someone is giving a student the phone for free (and they need a phone), but warn that the battery is glitchy and worn out. Let's say there is no third party replacement. At what price will the student accept the phone and replace the battery? At what price would the student just get a brand new iPhone 20 at $800? Assume the following replacement charges: $700/$480/$240/$120.
Yes, the price is relevant compared to the price of a new phone. And for what it's worth, the $120 price point only applies to the pro models, so your entry price is $900. But that aside, again I ask who are these people that are forgoing a $120 battery for a phone (one they'd be perfectly happy with if they could get a $30 replacement battery) in favor of a new $800 phone instead?
Yes in a hypothetical world where Apple charges $700 for a new battery, and a brand new iPhone can be had for $800, it's reasonable to think a good chunk of phones with degraded batteries would be discarded in favor of new phones. Likewise if we imagined a hypothetical world where iPhones randomly explode, killing the owner but only after it has been sold second hand, we'd also see a decline in the lifespan of used iPhones. But we don't live in such a world, and the batter replacement cost is not $700, or $480, or $240. It's $120 for two models and $99 for most others. And this $120 battery replacement world is the world the original commenter suggests that iPhones are becoming e-waste at a rate much more rapidly than they otherwise would if only they had $30 amazon replacements and sliding battery doors. It's the world where the original commenter implies that the only (or at least a significant) reason Apple designs the iPhone batteries the way they do is to drive sales of $1k+ phones. So in this world, who are the people rejecting $120 battery replacements for $1k+ phones?
I really doubt any significant number of people would be buying $1k phones repeatedly if the cost wasn't amortized like they are. People don't feel like they're preserving a luxury item that costs that much, they feel like they're preserving something for the price of $120 that costs 1000/24 or whatever. When I go and actually spend $600 straight up for my non-iPhone (more than I'd prefer for the value it offers me) it hurts, and I'm going to do what I can within reason to keep it running.
We need purely functional nanomachinery to create every embrionic molecule from element atoms, and a declarative physical language to combine them in the right way to create a zygote.
What if, as human consciousness is an emergent property of complexity, so too are humans and DNA itself? Could it be that, just as consciousness arises from the intricate networks within the brain, life and its fundamental components—like DNA—emerge from an even deeper layer of complexity in the universe, suggesting that our very existence is a product of systems far beyond our current understanding?
I'm not really sure what you mean. Complex biological molecules are emergent from the laws of physics and an environment containing the right precursors.
We do, but it’s messy and usually involves a few years of courtship, followed by one to three decades of raising & educating the resulting human to anything resembling a useful model for comparison.
No, the claim is much stronger than that: that the zygote itself encodes necessary information that isn’t captured in DNA. Put another way, long after humans are extinct, the claim is that if aliens could download our DNA source code somehow, they still wouldn’t be able to build humans without replicating the zygote’s internal structures exactly. We’d come out as super deformed or something.
Perhaps the first generation would be deformed but second-gen (if they hypothetically get that far) should be much closer. You still need the mitochondrial DNA as well.
Well, first of all, they wouldn't be able to build a single functioning cell if all they had was DNA (and even if they had mitochondrial DNA too). Most organelles divide independently of the nucleus, and there is no reason to think that DNA encodes anything about their fundamental structure. Even if some changes in genes can effect some changes in the organelles, that doesn't mean that the genes specify every detail of the organelle.
Also, even if we accepted that DNA fully specifies how a cell can create an identical copy of the cell that contains it, that doesn't mean that it specifies how to create a cell from scratch. The "instructions" in DNA could very well depend critically on details of the current cell. For example, the DNA could specify se thing like "take 1% of the substance secreted in organelle A and mix it with 90% water and 9% the substance secreted by organelle B". This instruction is perfectly good for specifying a copy of the current cell, and perfectly useless if you don't have the original cell for which it is meant.
This sort of thing could very well apply at the level of the whole fetus. Details of the uterus and other parts of the mother organism may well be critical parts of the "program" described by the DNA. For example, it's easy to imagine that the early fetus follows instructions like "let this much fluid pass through the umbilical chord", or "grow horizontally until you find this much pH difference between the extremeties" or whatever other instructions that are only useful in the context of an existing functioning mother organism.
And even beyond the individual, you would have a big problem recreating the species to allow for a second generation to exist at all. In particular, even if you had a whole living healthy female mammal, you would have no information at all for how to create a male of the species, so no way to create sperm cells, so no way to perpetuate the species. So the DNA of a female mammal doesn't contain information for how to make more of the species. And if all you had was a male organism, you would lack the information probably encoded in the living female that I was discussing earlier.
As a side note, this problem would not exist for birds, where the female bird does have both male and female DNA.
Not only that, but you're not even given the compiler. If all you have is the DNA (even if you had the mitochondrial DNA too), you have source code for a language no one knows with no compiler.
Or, more accurately, it's like having binary machine code for an unknown ISA with no information about the CPU, and no example CPU.
Well based on compiler bootstrapping techniques, it seems the solution is simple: Start by hand-assembling the most basic RNA life, then run each step of evolution in sequence. All you need is the DNA (and know the living conditions) of every single organism between single-celled organisms and a modern human.
Mathematically it's true. Anything that can be enumerated (that is, has an ontological mapping with the set of whole numbers) can be interpreted as input to some function which can be evaluated to some result also with an ontological mapping with the set of whole numbers. In other words, the entire human population could be a part of some program calculating the answer to some universal question, which may be about life, the universe, and everything. In fact, the answer may already be known. We're just one big server with massively parallel operation.
What we don't know is what that function is. Put differently, what is the question?
There was also that instance where Siri was gated from the iPhone 4. It was later shown that it was possible to install the Siri interface on the iPhone 4 through a Jailbreak - the only thing that prevented full functionality was a device serial number embedded in the request to the Siri server.
I would get the customer to create (and own) the API endpoint that talks to their database, and we talk to that API endpoint instead. Then it is up to them to test and maintain that endpoint.
This avoids a situation where we get an email out of the blue explaining that there is a database change and we need to dedicate engineering resources to make sure it is compatible by a certain date, or even worse and more likely, an urgent email explaining that the integration has broke and we need it back running last week.
