DanielEran

Eric_WVGG said:

This is one of the rare instances where I find myself disagreeing with old DED.

Coincidentally, there is another company that also has aspirations in self-driving vehicles, which likes to talk about the future of AR and VR, which is rapidly expanding its own Deep Learning, Machine Learning and AI initiatives and which invented and open-sourced the first mainstream cross-platform API for GPGPU (OpenCL). That's Apple. 

This only makes sense if most applications of deep learning (to use as a shorthand for all this sort of thing) are consumer based. Much of it will be in markets that Apple either consciously has no aptitude for or simply doesn’t care about — I don't see them resurrecting the Xserve brand for selling Apple GPUs by the rack to Palantir or even IBM.

Furthermore, even in consumer space, nVidia would do just fine. Let's imagine a future where self-driving cars follow the smartphone market, where Apple sells a profitable 30% of vehicles and let's just say Toyota sells an unprofitable 70%. In this analogy, nVidia is not Toyota, it is a combination of Foxconn, Samsung (who sells silicon to both Apple and the entire Android space), and ARM itself. That's not a terrible place to be in!

appex said:

Apple should use standards in the market. Not only ports and connectors, but also unsoldered microprocessors, RAM, SSD, GPU, etc. Otherwise may work in the short term, but not in the long one. Remember the PowerPC fiasco.

Colin O’Scopy said:

IL1 was not built by or for Apple; nor were they the first tenant. 

crosslad said:

"Google  - aimed at hitting an average selling price of less than $300—Android One phones have an aggressive price target of $100." 

Not entirely true nowadays; the Pixel phones were priced the same as the iPhones and the new MotoX4, running Android One is around $400. This has got to be good for Apple. I would not pay the same price for an android phone as an iPhone. Now that Apple has phones at every price point  I can only see Apple sales increasing.

firelock said:

Great article. Having run an imaging and design studio for a major ad agency during the mid-90s, I’ll add that another factor in Apple’s near collapse was its inability to deliver on building a major update to its OS. The biggest issue with the legacy Mac operating system was its lack of dynamic memory management. Raise your hand if you remember having to get info on an app and manually adjust its memory allocation. As a pro it was certainly frustrating to have to be constantly adjusting memory allocation on Photoshop and Quark, and closing one app to free up enough memory to run another. Apps would just crash and sometimes corrupt files because they ran out of memory. But as pros, most (some?) of us at least understood the problem and how to deal with it, but consumers were completely at a loss. I don’t know how many friends and family I had phone calls with trying to explain to them how to manage the memory on their Macs. Worse yet they would run off and take their Mac to get “repaired” because their apps were constantly crashing. What they needed to do was increase the memory allocation for the apps, but the shops would instead sell them more RAM which not only cost them hundreds of dollars, but it wouldn’t solve the problem. The problem was so bad that I stopped recommending Macs to non-professionals in my circle.

Apple had promised year after year to come out with a modern OS that could manage memory dynamically, but they failed to do so year after year and instead just kept issuing minor updates that made small improvements to the user interface (Mac OS 8 & 9). I was very close to switching my entire studio over to PCs over this one issue when the return of Jobs and the promise of OS X convinced me to stick it out. Obviously this paid off and I’m glad because OS X and now iOS are light years ahead of the competition.

Soli said:

longpath said:

saltyzip said:

I thought Google also announced an easy way to update android which includes even down to graphics drivers, did I dream that?

Let's see if we actually start to see more than a tiny sliver of Android handsets using the current version of Android. It's not enough to propose an alleged way of defragmenting the platform. It has to work in actual practice, otherwise, I'd say you just dreamed it or it was just more vaporware from Google.

Vendors and/or Google have been getting better. Version 7.x, which was officially released in late-August 2016, is running on 7.1% of handsets, according to Google.

• https://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html

danvm said:

It would be impossible to cobble a similar platform out of the terrible speakers built into existing Echo and Dot appliances, and neither Amazon, Google, Samsung, Spotify or other speaker makers really have to clout to produce such a sophisticated, premium speaker and sell it to a critical mass of users globally.

Based in many reviews, the HomePod sound quality is very similar to the Google Home Max, and I wouldn't consider neither of them premium speakers.  And to say that Samsung is not capable of doing sophisticated premium speaker is non sense.  They own Harman Audio, which includes companies like Harman-Kardon, AKG, Infinity and Revel, among others.  Those companies have years of experience in the audio market.  We'll have to see the results of the final product, but I wouldn't count them out.