It’s really not free. Piracy is still a bit of a chore. It’s just less of a chore than juggling a dozen streaming services, shitty and inconsistent apps and playing the whole “what major corporation’s subscription service has the rights for this show?” game.

They ought to try sucking less.

The big media corporations have been pushing legislation and legal crackdowns since the 90s and it hasn’t made a dent in piracy. They’ll keep trying of course, but it still won’t work.

If they design the process efficiently it shouldn’t burn too much battery to update the system image. The phone just needs to power up, connect to store wifi, apply the image and shut down. Doesn’t even need to power up the screen.

He didn’t fail. He did what the board asked of him which proved to be more unpopular than they all had expected. So they gave him an obscenely generous severance package and sent him on his merry way.

He’s been rewarded and they’re just trying to position it so it looks like the company leadership gives a shit and won’t try the exact same thing at a later date.

Apple deliberately makes it appear that way so the competition looks bad.

They don’t really advertise the fact that they’re quietly intercepting all of their customers messages to other customers and routing them through a proprietary network.

And if you dare leave, messages from your old iPhone friends mysteriously won’t arrive unless you proactively deregister your number from iMessage or it eventually expires out.