Indian iPhone production has begun with Wistron looking to hire 10,000 staff, as Apple looks to reduce its reliance on Chinese manufacturing. 9to5 Mac has a nice roundup of the current situation.

India’s importance to Apple as a manufacturing center has grown considerably since the first Foxconn plant back in 2016. The goal at that stage was simply to make older and lower-end iPhone models for local sale. Apple’s primary production capabilities remained firmly centered in China. Things have changed rather dramatically since then. Apple’s increasingly uneasy relationship with China has highlighted the risks of being overly dependent on a single country for the vast majority of production. The substantial tariffs imposed by the Trump administration on Chinese-manufactured products made diversification of manufacturing a much more urgent matter. Apple reportedly responded by asking suppliers to price up the cost of moving 15-30% of production out of China. That seemed an ambitious goal at the time, with one reported failed attempt to manufacture the current flagship models in the country. However, the importance of having iPhone production much more widely dispersed around the globe was underlined when the coronavirus hit China, shutting down iPhone production in the country.

Verizon updated its Mix & Match Unlimited wireless plans on Monday. A company announcement said that  Disney+, Hulu and ESPN+ will be available alongside Apple Music.

While there are some benefits to the WFH, let’s be honest, endless video meetings and Zoom calls are not one of them. CNet’s Jesse Orrall decided to see if he could prerecord himself  and fool his colleagues for a whole week.

Ecamm Live lets me prerecord various “Scenes” to play on demand. The audio and video from those scenes were routed through the virtual camera and microphone and into whatever video conferencing application we were using for a particular meeting (Zoom, Hangouts, etc.). Ideally, it would be a step up from the dummy and audio system used in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. For one whole week I used my prerecorded videos in video meetings instead of my live feed

Attacking Apple’s App Store policies and Google’s equivalent is relatively easy. Over on Pando, Aimee Pearcy takes the counterview – that while the model is not perfect,  changing it drastically would be to the benefit of hackers and fraudsters, not users.

While Apple and Google have wildly inconsistent policies for their stores — Netflix got a free pass from paying Apple Tax on its $853 million U.S. annual iOS revenue back in 2018 — their payment features are a major asset for developers. Credit card-stealing malware is already a huge problem. If anyone could link to their own third-party checkout page, Hacker groups like Magecart would shit themselves with excitement. Every checkout page would have to be manually checked. It would be a huge ask for users to unknown developers with side payments. And Epic certainly isn’t a shining example. Its game Fortnite has been described as a ‘money laundering paradise’, with money launderers using stolen credit cards to buy V-bucks.If third-party side payments were allowed and credit card fraud became a problem –and make no mistake, it would become a problem — Apple and Google would have zero transparency.