It beats me why anyone still humours Apple by continually updating the OS and buying their latest silly phone. I used to be a huge fan, but lately I detest their snotty superior attitude and their minimalist obsessions that have denuded their laptops of virtually all connectivity.
Don't get me wrong, I still use their gear. But I refuse to be drawn into their ridiculous upgrade vortex. This is a prime example of why.

DJI has already effectively ruined the remote aerial filming industry for many pros that were involved in it before anyone had ever heard of Da-Jiang Innovations. Evidently, in true megalomaniac Chinese world-domination style, they apparently wish own absolutely all of it with yet another of their cheap, crappy airframes and some toady crews.

Note to NFS, must be careful when copy/pasting from 2015 'new iMacs' article to update specs at the end.

So, for example, Trump is an anti-villain - minus the strong character?

As one of Henry Do's shots is taken from an altitude higher than the Eiffel Tower, and therefore at least 200 meters into illegal airspace, it is not unreasonable to then assume that the photo taken whilst hovering over the Arc du Triomphe roundabout is also unauthorised.

If this is indeed the case, I do hope that his publishing them on the internet leads to a conviction.

It is a pretty old stock photo of an early DJI Phantom with a non-stabilised Go-Pro. Nonetheless, it a good choice as a photo, as the Phantom heralded the beginning of the 'scourge of drones'. Before the arrival of the Phantom, multirotor copters were pretty much all kit built, plus home-brewed experiments as modellers sought to understand which combinations of frames, motors, speed controllers and Flight Controls worked best and endless frustrations with analog gimbals, servos, belts, linkages and post stabilisation of wobbly video.

DJI had started off producing Flight stabilisation systems for single rotor r/c helicopters and used their experience to manufacture the Wookong Flight Control system for multi-rotors. The German open source project that became Mikrokopter was the main innovator of multi-rotor drones with rather basic airframes and a complicated but very reliable electronic Flight Control. The DJI Wookong had a much more user friendly interface that made adjustable parameters more understandable.

DJI then expanded their product range with the S800 hexacopter kit and the excellent Zenmuse Z15 brushless gimbal for the Panasonic GH2 and Sony A2 ( I think it was the A2. Was it?). Suddenly it was possible to fly a camera without having to spend hours stabilising all the footage before it could be edited.

The type of people spending all the money on all of this kit were mostly modellers, with many coming from manual flight single rotor helicopters. Even with modern computerised radios, these single rotor helicopters required considerable skill to fly and they demanded very strict maintenance habits and a good deal of technical know how.

Then the awful day arrived and DJI released the Phantom. A fly-out-of-the-box quadcopter designed for idiots ... and eagerly snapped up by idiots in their thousands. Idiots with no grounding in r/c aero-modelling, flight principles, rigorous maintenance or etiquette, whose primary aim appeared to be seeking YouTube Likes with irresponsible feats of daring do, like flying through the clouds.

'Flyaways' became synonymous with Phantoms. Not that the Phantoms were unreliable. It was the stupid operators who did not understand the equipment and how to set it up and use it properly.

Governments and Civil Aviation Authorities freaked and regulations started appearing thick and fast. Nothing wrong with that except that they targeted entirely the wrong group of users, the commercial sector. The sector that was comprised of a fairly small number of experienced operators who had been involved in the single rotor helicopter aerial photography market before the 'drone' arrived and who largely operated in a responsible manner. The authorities completely ignored the hobby sector. And it was the hobby sector that was, and still is, the problem, largely fueled by the inexpensive DJI Phantom.

Of course, it is probably not thrill seeking hobby idiots disrupting Gatwick, but I am only talking about the use of the Phantom photo. It is entirely appropriate and justified. They should be outlawed and banned, along with Mavics and all the other cheap offerings, and made available ONLY to operators who have taken the considerable trouble and expense of attaining recognised competence qualifications through theory and practical exams, have a CAA issued authorisation to operate and who necessarily hold the correct insurances. Regardless of whether they are commercial or hobby operators.

RTF 'Drones', and specifically the DJI Phantom, are responsible for completely ruining regular r/c aero-modelling for thousands of hobbyists, because they will now ALL have to register all of their models and be subjected to overbearing regulation. And all because of some silly little c**ts with their Phantoms.