The typical Apple customer is forking over thousands of dollars. They have substantial control. This isn't like a government where you need a plurality of voters to agree before anything starts to happen.
Apple is running software on their phone that will either (a) do nothing or (b) call the police on them. The situation is questionable even for a normal consumer, let alone a nervous one. Maybe most people will weigh up the situation and keep buying Apple. But they are making a choice, they aren't powerless. And some will start asking how important smartphones really are.
My question is, who has funded this feature all the way from PoC to product? How did Apple calculate the ROI on this feature?
It’s not like end users are tripping over themselves to have all their photos scanned. Does Apple just have gobs of money to burn on things like this that will not increase its bottom line by even one penny?
There is probably funded from somewhere, and I’d like to know who is paying for it.
Probably, as other commenters have said, a mix of behind-the-scenes political pressure to give feds access to phone data for people they’re interested in and an effort to get them to back down on anti-trust and other things that governments are realizing they can milk tech companies for more money on.
The typical Apple customer is forking over thousands of dollars. They have substantial control. This isn't like a government where you need a plurality of voters to agree before anything starts to happen.
Apple is running software on their phone that will either (a) do nothing or (b) call the police on them. The situation is questionable even for a normal consumer, let alone a nervous one. Maybe most people will weigh up the situation and keep buying Apple. But they are making a choice, they aren't powerless. And some will start asking how important smartphones really are.