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ExtraBITS for 12 October 2015

In ExtraBITS this week, Adam Engst talks about electric cars and iTunes on the Tech Night Owl, Verizon plans to share your personal information with AOL, and Apple claims that different iPhone A9 chips have only a minimal impact on battery life.

Adam Ponders the Apple Car and iTunes on The Tech Night Owl Live — Cars are once again the topic of this Tech Night Owl Live podcast discussion between Adam Engst and host Gene Steinberg, with this one focusing on why electric cars are better, infotainment system interfaces, and the challenges Apple would face in the car market. The conversation wrapped up with why the iTunes interface caused Adam to drop Apple Music.

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Verizon to Share Supercookie Data with AOL — You may recall our prior coverage of Verizon’s “supercookie,” which tracks all your Internet activity on the company’s cellular data network (see “How to Say “No Thanks” to Verizon’s Supercookie,” 2 April 2015). Now Verizon has announced that it will be sharing that collected data with AOL, now owned by Verizon, for its ad network, and AOL will be able to see your gender, age range, interests, apps used, and sites visited. Thankfully, you can disable this tracking in Verizon’s
privacy settings, under Relevant Mobile Advertising.

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Apple Says iPhone 6s Battery Life Varies Minimally by A9 Chipmaker — It turns out that Apple has two suppliers for the A9 chip that powers the new iPhone 6s and 6s Plus — Samsung and TSMC — and the chipmakers rely on different process technologies. Some benchmarks have shown that iPhones using the TSMC A9 chip are more efficient than Samsung’s A9 chip, resulting in longer battery life. Apple has now weighed in on the controversy, telling TechCrunch that the difference in real-world use is just 2–3 percent, nothing that anyone would notice in actual
usage and well within the tolerances that Apple would accept for any device.

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