Apple has fallen to #4 in smartphone sales. Blames COVID and raises prices. Bonus: iClown Mail collapses. 2FA code proliferation. More fake privacy.

Apple has fallen to #4 in smartphone sales according to AppleInsider, citing a study by Trendforce, which now has Samsung, Oppo, and Xiami ahead of the iPhone-maker.

Apple blames COVID and the upcoming iPhone 13 launch, which they admit will be a “continuation of the 12 series”. Of course, anyone who knows Apple knows that they’ve barely improved their phones at all in the past several years, and aside from messages popping up saying your apps will no longer work because reasons and raising the price of the phone another $100 every time you go to replace it, Apple’s revenues would be in the toilet.

As it stands, they have Consumertards buying a $1,749 iPhone that can’t do much more than the $400 model.

It’s anyone’s guess how long this sad company that jumped the shark years ago and which has cheated off of Android except to remove the occasional Android feature that does something useful, can convince the market to accept its incessant price hikes for its vapid products.

In just the latest example of what happens to people who believe in Clown Computing, iClown email is down this morning and people can’t do anything with it at all.

If they had been using a proper IMAP email client with a local mailbox, they could respond to what was in it at least, from a different account, but they had their choice between that and an “app” that doesn’t work at all when it can’t ping a server, and they chose apps.

Now on to 2FA codes. AppleInsider posted an article on how to port over your codes from Google Authenticator to an iPhone. Google really doesn’t want you doing this. There are some open source authenticator apps that save the token you used to seed the generator, but mostly, if you use secure passwords that Firefox can generate on the fly, 2FA is rubbish in order to sell more phones and make it hard (if you use SMS) to change your phone number or carrier, or give up on using smartphones.

What’s more, is it’s almost impossible to keep track of it all and make sure you can log into everything important when you upgrade to a newer phone or switch carriers.

Finally, Apple is now popping up notifications that every iPhone has a unique advertising ID that follows you around and associates itself with you to help them sell personalized ads. If I was cynical, I’d say that blocking Facebook from doing essentially the same thing was a ploy to plow the road for this.