Firstly, apple doesn’t compete on price. Even if icloud is priced more than google people would always buy apple just for the ecosystem integration. It’s not even a competition to be honest.
Look up “buy or build” which is the industry term for this kind of evaluation: buy product and use it/resell it or build your own.
Apple has gone for different strategies in various areas:
Build own Apple silicon chips, do not buy off the shelf chips from intel or nvidia or amd.
Buy and resell google storage but don’t want to build their own distributed data store for end users.
It’s about what matters more for the company and the core products. Apple’s laptops, cell phones are considered core products. Icloud is a value add.
This is also why apple is making their own cell phone broadband chips. For most companies, this is a “buy from qualcolm” but apple needs to build their own for independence for their number 1 core product: the iphone.
one issue is that modern ransomeware groups are also being hunted themselves - there are many ransomeware orgs that are themselves being ransomed so are not reliable.
even if you pay the ransom to the 1st group, the 2nd group will leak.
waiting for month for a refund (and having lost access to the pro plan immediately but no immediate refund) is definite grounds for chargeback.
there is no human on the other end of the chain, and I bet that chargebacks are how they issue refunds (ie relying on the "nuclear" option as the standard practice of how refunds fundamentally works at their company.
ie "don't need to answer emails about refunds, because if they really wanted their money back, they'd issue a chargeback" as part of the regular procedure.
a lot of companies do this, and it's a common way of minimizing customer support budgets.
Probably that there are already several generations of TPU hardware - the best ones go to internal use, while the older hardware gets rented out to gcp to amortize the development costs.
- you don't need to understand the whole in order to help
the kind of bugs you can start with are like :
- this icon is a bit weird, it's off centre by 2px - how do I add 2 pixels to this icon? either by moving it or by changing the underlying image asset? if I'm moving it, what is the subroutine that paints it? if I'm changing the image asset itself, where is it stored? (is it in a packed store? or is it just a plain file, etc)
- when I click this button, trace the pathway - it's supposed to add to history and turn blue. is it doing that?
etc.
For large projects, start super small and work your way out from there.
It was rough a few years ago, but nowadays it's pretty nice. TI rebuilt their Code Composer Studio using Theia so it does have some larger users. It has LSP support and the same Monaco editor backend - which is all I need.
It's VSCode-with-an-Eclipse-feel to it - which might or might not be your cup of tea, but it's an alternative.
You only need to look at board membership overlap between all companies (all companies, not just tech)
You'll find the same names appearing over and over again.
The reason all companies seem to do the same thing at the same time is that their boards are all the same people giving the same order to all their companies' ceo's at the same time.