I don’t fully get what he thinks the issue is and how it relates to Google Jibe (which apparently is the RCS-as-a-service platform the US carriers use).
Has Jibe somehow blacklisted his phone? In that case, Apple might technically be right — it’s a carrier issue, but with all major carriers, since he says they’re all using Jibe on the backend.
Anyway, I doubt he’d sound crazy, as he puts it, to the Apple Store people making this case. They might even be sympathetic, but this is probably the best he’ll get, since Apple’s whole protocol is to get you on one centrally preauthorized track or another to having a working phone.
>Has Jibe somehow blacklisted his phone? In that case, Apple might technically be right — it’s a carrier issue, but with all major carriers, since he says they’re all using Jibe on the backend.
That's my guess, yeah. The only unrelated carrier I haven't tried yet is Boost/DISH. I can hop networks on US Mobile but I don't think it'll help. So far I've tried 3 T-Mobile lines on this phone, the US Mobile line on AT&T's network, and my mom's Verizon Wireless line.
> Anyway, I doubt he’d sound crazy, as he puts it, to the Apple Store people making this case.
It's difficult: I probably should have had a write-up before going in, my list in the blog is not complete of steps I tried to get this going. Understand though that all the user facing and employee facing documentation says if it's RCS it must be the carrier.
Had an awesome senior support agent a few calls ago that knew what he was talking about. Actually described previous issues where RCS would not activate early in iOS 26 with a single sim user that had an inactive but not deleted eSIM. I believe the store also repeated a similar mention today.
The senior support agent on the phone just hadn't gotten to the point of fully ruling out an on-phone software state issue. What I mean is I restored a backup from iTunes that their diagnostics reported as incompletely restored. So after our call he wanted me to either try that again or do an iCloud backup. I did the latter, since it seemed to be described as a different restore process that's less likely to copy back a broken state to the device.
They must mean unique customers, not customer transactions.
They have about 878 stores, according to Wikipedia, so if it was transactions, each store would only see about 62 transactions per day, which is way too low.
It’s interesting how those watches are both objectively expensive for something nobody really needs and at $1,000 or less, dirt cheap by the standard of expensive watches.
> debating the headline
> not even talking about the article
Both typical around these parts.
I suspect the author or publisher may have chosen the name of the book for that attention-drawing controversiality. RLS was not the healthiest author and partly 'wandered' in search of better prospects than those of Old Blighty.
It seems to me that "peak sensitivity" with regards to potentially offensive words and ideas was reached in 2020-1 and the US seems to be on the downward trajectory since then, with the slope of that trajectory vastly increasing in 2025.
So this editorial decision might be just part of this overall trend.
Yeah, this can lead to awkward small talk between people who like doing the big name tourist stuff and people who like doing things off the beaten path when they discover they both visited the same place and have surprisingly little experience in common.
Sure! But you could treat it as an emergency and staff up. It could even be through a mutual aid system the way utilities team up to do repairs after disasters, borrowing permitting experts from other jurisdictions.
>borrowing permitting experts from other jurisdictions.
I don't think those people exist... State/City budgets have already been cut lean on this stuff and most places that aren't in the middle of a disaster are many months behind as it is.
Yeah, I think letting HOAs regulate too much is actually bad public policy because it encourages petty conflict that does more harm than any good that could from houses having RVs in their driveways or whatever.
This isn't a company though, it's the government, and it's generally considered unprofessional if not illegal for federal employees to make partisan statements on the job. There's also the fact that, in my experience, out-of-office autoreplies are generally drafted by the employee while footers are often standardized by the employer.
Additionally, there are strict rules on what federal civil servants can do during a shutdown that don't really apply in private industry, which means whatever official channels would exist to complain probably aren't available. I don't think furloughed employees are supposed to send official email, either, which means they can't clarify who provided this message even if someone is confused by it.
> Today, the U.S. Office of Special Counsel (OSC) announces a new advisory rescinding the Hatch Act advisory opinion dated May 20, 2024, and a related advisory opinion dated October 15, 2024. The Hatch Act, a federal law passed in 1939, limits certain political activity of federal employees while they are on duty, in the federal workplace, or acting in their official capacity. The new Hatch Act advisory opinion (the “April 25 Advisory") supersedes the May 20, 2024, and October 15, 2024, opinions in three ways.
> First, OSC will return to its traditional practice of referring Hatch Act violations by White House Commissioned officers to the President for appropriate action.
> Second, OSC is pausing the referral of cases against former employees to the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) until the legal question concerning jurisdiction is resolved.
> Third, OSC is discarding the “year-round workplace political item prohibition" on wearing or displaying of political candidate or political party items in the workplace related to the campaigns of “current or contemporaneous political figures (CCPFs)." In practice, the blanket prohibition created too great a burden on First Amendment interests.
So not judicial nor legislative. The Hatch Act has not changed, the president's OSC appointee has unsurprisingly decided that executive will investigate itself.
While you can grasp the barest of threads that your original statement was true because the OSC is "official" and anyone is afforded an interpretation, it's really goddamn deceptive. If anything is "the" intepretation it's derived from statute and/or common law, not one side's lawyers.
I mean, the OSC isn't some bunch of randoms who call themselves "official" for funsies. Violations of the Hatch Act fall under their jurisdiction. They're the ones that investigate violations. They put out a statement that says political messages (of a certain kind) are totally fine.
This means, to me, that claiming "The official interpretation of the Hatch act was changed" isn't at all a stretch. The officials,
the ones in charge of interpreting it, put out a statement saying they've changed how they're interpreting it. How is that deceptive? What words would you use instead?
The judiciary interprets the law. As I said, you can narrowly say OSC is "official" and "interprets" the law, but it's a deceptive way to describe the situation. Hopefully we'll see another group successully claim standing for being harmed by Hatch Act violations.
An honest way to describe the situation is "the Trump OSC has decided that Trump should investigate Trump and it is unclear if anyone else can sue for relief from a politicized civil service". At the very least "they've put out a statement saying they've changed their interpretation" is far better than the passive voice.
It feels off to frame this as a routine legal question when the branches themselves aren’t behaving routinely. The current executive has reduced the other branches to handmaidens of its will.
Has Jibe somehow blacklisted his phone? In that case, Apple might technically be right — it’s a carrier issue, but with all major carriers, since he says they’re all using Jibe on the backend.
Anyway, I doubt he’d sound crazy, as he puts it, to the Apple Store people making this case. They might even be sympathetic, but this is probably the best he’ll get, since Apple’s whole protocol is to get you on one centrally preauthorized track or another to having a working phone.
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