Earlier this year, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook commented on the importance of health to the company. In a statement that has been widely quoted, he said, “I believe, if you zoom out into the future, and you look back, and you ask the question, 'What was Apple's greatest contribution to mankind?', it will be about health.”
Although he only said it some months ago, it’s been a direction the company has been taking for years.
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I meet the Apple executives, appropriately enough, at the Wellness Centre in the company’s Cupertino headquarters, Apple Park, and ask exactly where the focus for health and fitness came from, especially for the Apple Watch.
As modest at these two announcements were, then, it's clear that both Amazon and Apple have embarked on similar missions to extend their control of their customers' connectivity in and around the home. Amazon's Sidewalk, which operates on the 900MHz band typically used for amateur radio and emergency services, and Apple's close-range, ultra-wideband positioning with the U1 are designed to get Amazon out of the home and Apple inside it. Or at least give each company more power in their respective weak areas.
All this said, in short, a user has to either specifically want to do this procedure to their iPhone and take the steps to execute them, or be careless with device physical security and be specifically targeted by an assailant for it to be of any real concern.
If you're really worried about it, it's time to ditch the iPhone 5c or older that you may be hanging on to. And, you can always completely shut down your iPhone after you've left it unattended for any period of time.
A reboot will not just flush out the exploit, but also break any software that may have been installed in your absence.
“If you look at our corporate carbon footprint, over 70% is in the supply chain,” says Lisa Jackson, Apple’s vice president of environmental, social, and policy initiatives, who previously served as head of the Obama-era EPA. “And, of course, those aren’t facilities that we own or operate. But we wanted them to have this access to the same high-quality clean energy that we did.”
Thanks to Hollywood, every time I listen to Louis Armstrong singing What a Wonderful World, what's in my mind is the world ending with all humans being wiped out by virus, zombies, or time-travelling shenanigans.
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Thanks for reading.