iOS 15 announced

Dave

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So WWDC is over and iOS 15 has been announced. The first item of interest is a new feature called Private Relay, which encrypts all data leaving the iOS device and routes through two servers to anonymise it.

Unfortunately it’s not available in a number of authoritarian regimes and a few others like South Africa.




Alongside iOS 15, Apple introduced an iCloud+ service that adds new features to its paid iCloud plans. One of these features is iCloud Private Relay, which is designed to encrypt all of the traffic leaving your device so no one can intercept it or read it.

Apple did not mention country limitations for the feature when announcing it, but Apple told Reuters that Private Relay will not be launching in China, Belarus, Colombia, Egypt, Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Turkmenistan, Uganda, and the Philippines.

According to Apple, regulatory reasons are preventing the Private Relay feature from launching in those countries.

Private Relay sends web traffic to a server that is maintained by Apple to strip the IP address. Once IP info has been removed, Apple sends the traffic to a second server maintained by a third-party company that assigns a temporary IP address and then sends the traffic to its destination, a process that prevents your IP address, location, and browsing activity from being used to create a profile about you.

Involving an outside party in the relay system is an intentional move that Apple says was designed to prevent anyone, including Apple, from knowing a user's identity and the website the user is visiting.
 

Johnatan56

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The private relay is them using Cloudflare, so it's basically Cloudflare's WARP product.

The A8X vs A9 performance was one of the smallest gains they had at the time (though I could be misremembering), most of the increase there was power efficiency (googling it Apple's numbers were A8 136 GFLOPS, A8X 230 GFLOPS, A9 250 GFLOPS).

They're not going to drop the iPhone 6 soon, the A9 has enough performance, and the iPad 5th gen has just hit 4 years, they usually do 5 for the iPad, so would expect earliest drop next year, but kind of doubt as the iPhone 6, 6S, SE are still super popular as student phones and they'd force people out of the ecosystem if they drop it.

Would expect 2024 drop of it at the earliest, and then it will be A8X, A9 and A10 as all <350GFLOPS. Though technically that might impact the A10 as well at 345 GFLOPS.

Apple has an easier time giving support to older hardware and directly has gains from it, people stay in the Apple ecosystem.

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The most interesting bits to me were notification summary, if you've ever used a modern Android device, it's quite a huge QoL improvement. And then offline Siri, that means performance should improve quite a bit, so will be interesting to see how well it performs now, will probably be the biggest jump for Siri that they've had in a long time.
 

Spizz

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Do you have the real reason?
Look at the string of backwater countries excluded, it's hard to imagine it's anything else.

China, Belarus, Colombia, Egypt, Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Turkmenistan, Uganda, and the Philippines.
 

Dave

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Do you have the real reason?

That is the reason given by Apple. It is mostly authoritarian governments who don’t want encrypted or private internet traffic.

SA may seem the odd one out but recent legislation seems to be pushing SA towards having a more strictly controlled internet, doesn’t it?
 

biometrics

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That is the reason given by Apple. It is mostly authoritarian governments who don’t want encrypted or private internet traffic.

SA may seem the odd one out but recent legislation seems to be pushing SA towards having a more strictly controlled internet, doesn’t it?
Doesn't really make sense, I can use a VPN here.
 

Dave

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That doesn't explain Apple's decision.

Apple has said it can’t offer it in those countries due to regulatory reasons, so there must be something in SA law that prohibits it.

After introducing its new private relay feature at its annual WWDC conference, Apple has announced that it won't be available in China and other restrictive countries due to regulatory reasons.

 

biometrics

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Apple has said it can’t offer it in those countries due to regulatory reasons, so there must be something in SA law that prohibits it.



Yeah no details, I wonder what the real reason is. Our constitution and laws are quite liberal and we have the same type of interception laws as elsewhere. And I can use a VPN as mentioned.
 

GreGorGy

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If I were to guess, it is the current notion that data generated in SA should be the property of SA. When you use the internet, you generate data. With Private Relay, that data is then sent directly out of the country, where it is effectively destroyed.
 
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