1. Take the files and figure out what to do with them so they can be read. This isn't a hard problem.
2. Ask everyone affected to email you the photo or a new photo of the documents. We'll just take it on trust that you do so honestly because there's no way you would've seen this coming.
That's not what happened at all. The college board admitted their fault and are letting students take the test again. Even without that, they mentioned in their FAQ that JPEGs and PNGs are the only file types acceptable and even sent out a tweet (which should have been an email) a week before especially for iPhone users to let them know how to take pictures as JPEGs.
I agree with the people blaming the board for not having a standard image input field that lets the OS know when to convert images to JPEG but that is their only fault and I wouldn't have thought of that as a bug deal if not for this issue. While I'm all for open source media formats replacing what we have, HEIC certainly isn't big enough to be considered as among standard input options. Also, isn't Apple themselves infamous for not supporting certain formats throughout their devices?
Emails, tweets, texts are no excuse for broken products. The iPhone is the best selling model in the United States. It is on College Board to support its default image format.
Good product design is owning your users' success. It is not sending people workaround emails.
The bare minimum would have to be to do a warning before every single AP test about this and giving students a few minutes to change their default image format. Sending a tweet (!!!) out does not count as doing any work.
This is a failure. An abysmal failure.
Seriously, fuck Apple. It took legal changes in the EU to force them to the "Just f'ing support USB-C like the rest of the world instead of making half your money selling dongles".
Before then iPhones used the 30-pin connector, backwards compatible with 5-year-old iPod accessories. At that time other manufactures seemed to be shipping different barrel-plug chargers and proprietary cables for every model.
So that's 2 connectors introduced over a span of 18 years supported by dozens of product models that sold billions of units. Cables have been available from third parties for most of that time. The only dongles that might apply are 30-pin to Lightning or USB-A to USB-C.
The 30-pin's raison d'être was to provide features you couldn't get out of USB, like analog audio and video out. And Lightning was a much better designed connector than Micro USB due to being reversible, which informed the design of the Type C connector.
I'd agree that the Mac now has a dongle problem, but it's precisely _because_ it switched to USB-C, as you suggested.
A USB accessory will work on any device, but a lightning accessory only works on an iPhone, to nobody's benefit but Apple. Apple's hate of standards is anti-consumer, and that's why the EU ruled against them.
What particularly ircs me is that Apple has acknowledged that USB-C is the superior plug by going all in on their laptops. But they can't let go of all the money they make selling licenses for third party cables on iPhones.
Lightning was a huge win for consumers because it was years ahead of the incompetently designed clusterfuck that micro-USB was.
> Apple's hate of standards is anti-consumer, and that's why the EU ruled against them.
Apple’s “hate of standards” is in part the reason the USB-C ecosystem exists today. They contributed quite a bit to its development.
The EU ruled against Apple because the EU is full of bureaucratic idiots that care more about looking good than actually knowing what they’re doing. The circlejerk that the EU is always correct needs to end.
If the EU ruling happened a few years ago we’d never have had Lightning and we’d have been stuck with the piece of shit known as micro-USB. Thankfully, Apple was allowed to innovate independently as any remotely reasonable government would allow, and created a connector that would later inspire USB-C.
> What particularly ircs me is that Apple has acknowledged that USB-C is the superior plug by going all in on their laptops. But they can't let go of all the money they make selling licenses for third party cables on iPhones.
Catch-22; if they change the cable people like you complain that they’re trying to obsolete accessories, and if they don’t change the cable people like you complain that they’re trying to profiteer off of accessories.