> people buying iPhones because of hype and not because they were meaningfully better than the competition in ways that many people valued. Is that not what you meant?
No, hype and demand are not exclusive to each other. You can create hype around good or bad products. The key aspect is that hype is not entirely grounded on quantifiable practical values of a product but a demand which is amplified by an emotional desire.
Which is exactly what Apple did, and this move allowed them to make demands towards carriers no other company could.
That's the point, the dimension is "yeah, the ODM also offers a 2 USD cheaper hub that uses a USB2.0 controller for 7 of the 8 ports", and now you're browsing a list of equally looking products spanning 5 to 15 USD without a clue which of the straws you're going to pull...
The headline "Oppo stops sale under OnePlus brand in US and Europe" would be more appropriate.
OnePlus products were mostly slightly redesigned Oppo products for the past years, built on the same hardware and running the same OS.
Early-on it was an impressive corporate experiment to observe: The giant company Oppo gave one of its members Carl Pei the chance to create an agile sub-brand with an own OS and access to Oppo's supply chain.
Carl Pei succeeded and OnePlus became a disruptive force in many markets for several years.
But Carl Pei already left (to start the UK-based tech company 'Nothing'), the OnePlus OS was discontinued and product development was largely folded into Oppo many years ago already...
> Apple explained that it found a bug while investigating internal messages between a then-current employee, Yu-Ting “Alyssa” Peng, and an engineer [..] Chang Liu.
> Liu left Apple for OpenAI in January 2026. However, on February 9, Liu discovered an “authentication bug” that was unknown to Apple at the time.
Liu discovered the bug after leaving Apple, in Feb '26, but talked about it using an internal messaging-system?, while still at Apple?
But he exploited it AFTER leaving Apple, and Apple discovered and fixed the bug "after they found Liu’s messages"?
My first thought whenever I come across such a badly-engineered no-name device is "oh great, another bad reference design which will poison the pool of all the available devices out there"
It helps a bit to spot and avoid that exact exterior design, but often those devices are designed to reuse the same mold as more-expensive ones and/or keep changing the design based on the purchasing customer.
So you end up on AliExpress looking at 5 identical hubs, but the cheapest one may have a different PCB inside.
Or you look at 5 different hubs, with all of them having the same PCB inside...
I like the hilarious commitment to art, by Paramount/WB committing to "make at least 30 films annually".
Who says anyone will want to see one of those "we had to release 15 more, so we had to rush, here they are" productions?
Society and industry would be better served if both companies would each put their weight on creating 10 COMPETITIVE films a year instead of having LESS competition and just releasing 30 in total...
I don't know why you're coming to the rescue of the iPhone here. Everyone knows it was a successful product, no one said that the iPhone was "unappealing in the market".
Quite the opposite, the demand was so high that Apple could set requirements to carriers that were impossible before AND after...
> Microsoft paid $7.2 billion for Nokia's loss making phone division in 2013.
There's no way anybody would have paid that much for just another Android OEM.
They paid for a fully operating Windows Phone company with competitive devices and an established brand, at a time when Microsoft had a strong hardware-strategy.
It was the perfect move for both Microsoft and Nokia.
Microsoft even tried to bargain that Nokia had no alternative to sell because of their dependency on Windows Phone OS, so Nokia demonstrated that this is not true by announcing the "Nokia X", a device with skinned fork of Android without Google and Nokia's own App-store in Feb'2014, JUST to close the acquisition deal with Microsoft.
> As much as Nokia fans hated it, the Windows Phone strategy actually extracted the best value out of the rotting assets of Nokia Mobile Phones.
Not to forget, Nokia kept almost ALL of their patents AND ownership of the brand in that deal.
For YEARS to come, carriers refused to rectify this skewed market, so while Nokia, Motorola, Ericsson, Samsung, LG had to continue jumping through hoops and could only earn money at the point of sale, while Apple's monthly income accumulated based on the total amount of active devices.
In the end, it also wasn't the carriers who rectified that situation either. After Apple was technically ready to support more carriers, they moved away from their "one carrier per country" exclusivity-model, so they also had to concede on revenue-share compensation.
But by that time Apple already had the search-deal with Google, so revenue-share continued to from the search-traffic generated in Safari.
All of those were genius moves, disrupting the economy of an industry which separated the product from provided services, ultimately gaining total control over the user and all services provided, degrading the carrier to a mere ISP (who was even happy about it because the average revenue per user was higher).
Nonetheless, it destroyed the entire mobile phone ecosystem (especially outside of US, where market-forces were less in control of the carriers)
> Partanen was also at Nokia’s post-iPhone launch meeting, and recalls that there was little concern in the room. “We felt okay,” he says.
Which is a perfectly reasonable reaction, the first iPhone was an iPod with a sub-par Browser and a bad mobile phone, in a device which barely managed to last one day on a charge.
Others also had sub-par browsers, comparable/more versatile Media Players and MUCH better phones, running a week or longer on a single charge.
The way Apple destroyed the competition was by creating so much hype around their product that they could demand concessions from carriers, most of all revenue-share (and a scheme where the ~1000USD device-price included marketing budget the carrier could then "consume" from Apple), two moves which decoupled Apple from Market-pressure and created an incredible influx of money into their R&D.
“This is yet another competitor launching a great product. But we had no doubt that, if it’s successful, we would do the same. We will launch similar products.”
In November 2008, Nokia released the 5800 Xpress Music, a year and a half after Apple had launched its iPhone.
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Weird article, between those two paragraphs lies the MOST IMPORTANT period of the whole story. It was Nokia scrambling to adapt to the change in the market.
Their strategic move was to beat the iPhone with a Smartphone OS (the iPhone wasn't a Smartphone yet), expanding their (huge) existing ecosystem to a touch device.
But for that (Project Tube), Nokia had to upgrade their Series60 OS to include Touch-support while preserving backwards compatibility. They had severe troubles on all layers, because touch requires a low-latency feedback-architecture and Series60 was not designed for this.
For quite some time, all their weight was put into that device, they even went ahead and signed a sponsoring deal with WB to have the device featured in Batman The Dark Knight, a movie which finally ended up in cinemas BEFORE the product was even launched.
Searching for "waydroid_x86_64 LineageOS 20.0" leads to a sourceforge page [0] of waydroid with LineageOS builds that have 70-80k downloads per month.
It seems to be popular to be installed on CachyOS, which in turn is the 2nd most popular distro to use Steam (after SteamOS itself), so my guess is that it's a popular setup for gaming...
Everybody, get up, we're leaving. Jailbreak your kindles and move to epub. It's not that difficult.
Buy books at Kobo or bookshop.org
There are so many functional kindles out there, this could be the event that changes the power dynamic and puts the author-reader relationship back in the center instead of the publisher/distributor.
It's what's slowly happening in the Movie industry now: The studios learn that they can't create sustainable value by just spending money and adding stars to a production. But directors create value. So they are suddenly put front and center and actively promoted.
(was already confident, then there's suddenly a screenshot mentioning display components)