[sandworm101]

>>> ... I first attempted to stay in contact with US friends via Facebook Twitter, Instagram, via VPN of course. But every US service was slow — gmail, google cal were barely working. So half way through, I decided to fully embrace what China has to offer and disappeared from US Social networking sites.

A choice? I think not. Soft censorship. The degrading of one communication pathway to shift the target onto another is espionage 101 stuff.

[TeMPOraL]

In US and Europe you're subject to the US espionage. In China, you're subject to the Chinese espionage. What's so surprising there? You've just moved from one superpower to another, so your "surveillance provider" has to change. Or should they offer "roaming" services? :).

[qb45]

"Surveillance roaming" is called VPN. Unless your VPN provider uses backdoored gear, when the visited agency may get a peek at your traffic as well.

[sametmax]

Yeah unfortunatly this happens a lot everywhere : apple make it hard to go out of it's buggle, FB does the same, and in China, the entire coutry does the same. And it's scary people don't notice they are slowly but surely locked in. It's not a choice, it's a malicious strategy.

[ftwinnovations]

This is simply not an accurate response, and you are comparing apples to napalm.

Apple/FB/etc do in fact make it difficult to switch - by adding value to their offerings. Users become more and more entrenched as they enjoy the benefits of new features. Oppressive governments, such as China, or any group committing espionage, promote specific paths by degrading opposing services. These are not related, and should not be confused.

One adds value (promoting healthy competition), the other uses coercive force.

[vikiomega9]

Well, I get the the idea of what you're trying to say but really healthy competition is not something that gets turned on and off in an instant. I've noticed, for example, osx "seems" less reliable than what it was say with snow leopard and I don't see any healthy competition that tries to address this. It will take ages before a lot of people realize this and shift away causing healthy competition. At least with an ideal democratic government this cycle is some four long and can be quantitatively measured.

[tdkl]

There's apparently value in buying overpriced adapters.

[qb45]

Not sure who downvoted that. I've seen lots of Apple folks carrying these expensive DP to HDMI or VGA dongles when Apple went DP-only before DP even became common. Think Different, I suppose.

[csydas]

Define expensive, I guess. At my work and in my personal life, always just ordered whatever display port adapters are on sale at various tech stores. Even early on in the era of Apple with mini display ports, the form factor attainable via the mini display port is worth the extra $30 (from apple) or $10 (from else where).

So yeah, I guess there is value in spending $10-$30 for an adapter you use as occasionally as you might use a full DVI or HDMI port.

[qb45]

HDMI is not much bigger than mDP and doesn't add thickness over USB ports which already exist on those laptops. OTOH, it was more commonly supported by non-Apple monitors in that time and very easily adapted to the ubiquitous DVI-D (same protocol and cabling, different plug).

If Apple cared about interoperability and user convenience (no silly dongles, yay) they would have used that.