cloudguy

yojimbo007 said:

Ahhh how i wish Apple had pulled the trigger and bought Disney few years back,.. 

Except that Disney was never for sale. Neither was Nintendo. Sure there was a time when Disney was troubled but ever since the Eisner era in the late 80s when they started making hit movies again like Who Framed Roger Rabbit and The Little Mermaid, then in the 90s when they bought ABC and ESPN and had even bigger hits like Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and the Lion King Disney has been fine (an understatement). And after the Eisner era ran its course, they got even bigger with Pixar, Pirates of the Caribbean and the Disney Princesses merchandising empire. Next was going stratospheric after buying Marvel, Star Wars, Fox and launching Disney+.

Also, even when Disney troubled in the mid to late 80s, whether Apple would have had the money to buy it is debatable. Sure stuff like "The Black Cauldron" and "The Brave Little Toaster" had then bleeding red ink all over the place, but Disney still had their studio lots, a very valuable film library, a cable network, theme parks and the merchandising empire. Even if Apple had mortgaged themselves to the hilt to buy those assets, what would Apple have done with them anyway? Disney is what they are today because of a string of outstanding people - Eisner, Jeffrey Katzenberg, John Lasseter, Bob Iger, Bob Chapek etc. - made excellent creative and business decisions. Without that, Disney would be MGM/UA (went bankrupt and now only exists on paper), Columbia (owned by Sony), Warner Bros (owned by AT&T), Paramount (owned by Viacom) or Universal (owned by Comcast). All of whom were much bigger entertainment companies than Disney was in the 1980s.

Why is this a headline? I thought it was:

A. common knowledge

and

B. standard business practice

Before people say "but Google" ... when did YouTube, Gmail, Chrome, Google Maps etc. get released on Windows Phone again? Or even in the Windows Store so that they can be installed on Microsoft's various attempts to compete with ChromeOS (Windows Education, Windows 10S and soon Windows 10X)? Microsoft fans to this day grumble that Google's refusing to release Windows Mobile apps for their services killed any chance that it had to survive. (What they leave out was that Microsoft's locking out Google services from their mobile platforms is what caused Google to create Android in the first place. A decision that Microsoft surely regrets to this day.)

avon b7 said:

A potentially intelligent move by Samsung.

The S series phones are typically released around MWC in Barcelona. 

We still don't know if that will even go ahead and its biggest rival has an estimated 10 million new 5nm chips ready to go. That stock could be gone by January leaving Samsung to reap the rewards (potentially) but it would also need something to better the 2020 Huawei P series flagships from around the cancelled MWC this year. 

It would pose a direct challenge to both Apple and Huawei. Apple probably wont have another flagship unti the end of next year and We don't know what Huawei's short term plans are. 

It would make very good sense to release a product in January. There is also a more conservative case against a January release but that is just another option that would have to be weighed up. 

Eh. Consider this. Samsung was once Apple's main CPU manufacturer AND their Exynos line was considered a legit cheaper alternative to Exynos. Now neither is true: Apple has shifted their business to TSMC and Exynos has fallen so far behind Qualcomm that Samsung is pretty much the only one who uses them. Samsung's plan to get back in the game: beat Apple and Qualcomm to 5nm with the Exynos 995, which was supposed to be produced in 2Q 2020 to be used in the foreign Galaxy Note/Fold/Flip/FE phones for 3Q. However, the first run had flawed yields. Samsung corrected the problem, but not in time for their 3Q phones, forcing them to scrap the 5nm Exynos 995 use the 8nm Exynos 992 instead. But they did fix in time for the Exynos 1080 - a midrange CPU to be used in Chinese phones - and lure the 5nm Qualcomm 875 business from TSMC. As stated above, TSMC was swamped with orders for Apple iPhone, iPad and Mac 5nm CPUs for 2020 plus AMD 5 nm CPUs and Intel 7nm CPUs for 2021. They gave Qualcomm a "pay more or experience delays" ultimatum, which allowed Samsung to swoop in and offer "we can make them at the usual rate right now." 

So the S21 will have the Qualcomm 875 made by Samsung for North America and the 5 nm Exynos 2100 for everyone else. Both the 875 and the 2100 are going to do the 1-3-4 thing: 1 Cortex X1 super core, 3 Cortex-A78 cores, and 4 Cortex-A55 cores. Also, both are going to integrate the X60 5G modem. Further, the 875 is rumored to have minimal Qualcomm customization due to the need to adopt the Cortex X1, and Samsung paid ARM to help them design the Exynos 2100. Because of this, rumor states that the Snapdragon and Exynos chips are going to perform similarly again.

So when you add that to the Google-Samsung CPU that will be released in 2021 and Qualcomm entering the smartphone market with their own branded device (made with assistance by Asus) and next year may be pretty interesting. If Samsung is able to retain Qualcomm's business, the shift to releasing the S21 in January may be permanent.

xbit said:

I wonder how much work was involved - was it a case of Microsoft simply upgrading to Electron 11 or was there additional work that needed doing?

Not a lot of work as Linux ARM versions of VSCode were already available. Unlike Visual Studio, which is 100% Microsoft proprietary software, VSCode was an open source project from the beginning making it an easy port to various architectures. There was also no real rush ... not many programmers are going to be using the entry level devices anyway. They are waiting on devices that have more than 16 GB of RAM and - in particular - support more than 2 screens. So when the 16' MBP, the Mac Mini Pro etc. launch with 32 and 64 GB RAM versions that support up to 4 monitors this year, VSCode will be ready and waiting for them (as will be Javascript, Python and OpenJDK Java.)

sflocal said:

I’m embarrassed to be associated with these entitled crybabies.  If you don’t like the way Apple runs its exclusive platform, leave.

That is, er, not the law. The law requires that marketplaces have clear rules that are evenly enforced as opposed to vague rules that are arbitrarily enforced, and particularly rules that are vague for the express purpose of favoring some entities - such as yourself - over others during enforcement. So while your sentiments are legitimate, they are in fact very illegal.

longfang said:

He doesn’t want to develop for Apple Silicon, fine. But why make such a big deal about not doing something. Very quixotic behavior. 

Because he has:

A. an existing user base of people that have bought his games on macOS
B. some/most/all of those people are going to be migrating from Intel Macs to M1 Macs
C. he has to let those people know that when they migrate those games likely won't be available on their new hardware and new games certainly won't be
D. this prevents these people from complaining when they buy their new M1 Macs and they experience C.
E. It lets them know that if they want to keep playing these games they will need to invest in different hardware

So while it is not a big deal for him at all - quite the contrary it will result in a lot less work and hassle - it is a big deal for his customers that have paid money for his games, whom he addressed repeatedly in his post.

lkrupp said:

I put this right up there with the paranoids who complain that their new iPhone battery health went from 100% to 99% in just a week. And let the journalistic terrorists splash their headlines that M1 Macs ‘die’ in a year. 

'Even so, just an official confirmation that it is examining the issue will probably go a long way to ease concerns -- even if Apple ends up determining there's no ultimate issue.”
 
Online yellow journalism is a cancer. Anybody can say anything and not have accountability. Just consider the Bloomberg bullshit about servers having tiny chips the Chinese military put on them so they can spy on Americans.

For goodness sakes. This isn't driven by the mythical anti-Apple tech journalists that you folks insist exist despite it being long proven that media and other creative professionals strongly prefer Macs - at one point they were practically the only ones using them - as well as iPads and iPhones. When was the last time you even saw a journalist mention Android (for example) that wasn't in the context of A. fragmentation B. malware C. lack of privacy and security D. lack of updates E. lack of apps or F. giving a review unit that was sent to them for free that they would never buy for personal use a midding review because of A-E?

Instead, this story is driven entirely by people who bought this device talking about it on social media. Since they bought this device with their own money you can assume that they are ardent fans of Apple devices. Also, issues like these are inevitable with first generation devices. Which Apple folks don't see too often because Apple 1. generally has a much smaller product lineup than other companies and B. generally only introduces products after the innovators went first, often by several years. But - yeesh - anyone remember the 1st generation iPhone? It was not the device that everyone - well 15% of the market anyway - now knows and loves. 

Right here: ARM-based PCs are a new thing. ARM-based mobile devices? Nope. ARM-based servers? Not really. But ARM-based laptops and desktops? The wilderness. You basically have ARM Chromebooks like the Lenovo Duet who use the same storage that is used in smartphones and tablets and you have Windows-on-ARM devices that A. also often uses mobile device storage like the 64 GB version of the Surface Go 2 and B. no one really buys anyway. These Macs are the first ARM-based PCs where their SSDs are being used for things like programming, data analytics and 8K video editing. By contrast the ARM-based Chromebooks are running PWAs and mobile apps (we haven't seen any Qualcomm 7CX or MediaTek M8195 Chromebooks capable of running anything more demanding than LibreOffice on Linux yet) and the Windows on ARM Chromebooks are running ... well they can't even emulate x86 applications yet so who knows what they are running. We don't even have ARM-based Chromeboxes (the same as a Mac Mini except running ChromeOS) or Windows-on-ARM desktops yet as prior to the M1 Macs that entire market was ChromeOS and Windows on ARM 2-in-1s (and 7 or 8 years ago, ARM-based ChromeOS netbooks that really were only capable of running the Chrome browser and PWAs that had only 16 GB of flash storage).

So Apple is doing something truly new here instead of trailing Samsung in smart watches and truly wireless earbuds, or training Amazon and Google in smart TV boxes and smart speakers. (Even there, the HomePod needed quite a few updates AND a second generation device to become competitive and relevant.) Even the iPod: preceding devices got the basics (storage, playback/pause, audio out) right and Apple's success was more of the first to nail the software/business model with iTunes. And when you do that, bugs like this on devices that have barely been commercially available for 3 months are going to happen.

auxio said:

There is no doubt that Google's copying of Java without paying licensing fees gave them an unfair advantage over competitors who were paying those same licensing fees at the time.  It essentially gained them a mature app development platform and community of developers which Sun had invested a lot of money to build, without them paying a cent.  Which, in turn, made it easy for those developers to port their existing apps to Android and build a rich app ecosystem to compete with Apple (who had actually invested in their own app development platform).

The fact that there aren't laws to protect companies which invest heavily in R&D against those which simply look for ways to work around licensing agreements is a sad state of affairs.

1. No one was paying Sun licensing fees. Sun was giving Java away for free to anyone and everyone who wanted it because they wanted Java to be the basis of an open Internet platform that Microsoft was desperately trying to use IIS and .Net to lock down for themselves. 
2. There are laws to protect companies. Sun didn't avail themselves of those laws because they didn't want to. Sun actually had an OpenJDK version of Java the whole time. Had Google copied the practically identical OpenJDK APIs instead of the "licensed but everyone uses for free anyway" Sun JDK APIs there never would have been a case. Google switched from the Sun JDK APIs to the OpenJDK ones as soon as Oracle filed their ridiculous suit, and it took 6 months tops.
3. Didn't you pay attention to the trial? Sun's own CEO got on the stand and said the exact same thing. Oracle's counterargument was that they weren't obliged to heed Sun's FOSS stance retroactively. Which is actually true from a legal standpoint by the way. But that is totally different from what you are claiming. 
4. Sun's own mobile platform was a failure. The only big customer they got for it was Amazon to make the original Kindle e-readers, plus a couple of companies who used it to make feature phones. Oracle's claim that Google stole Android and destroyed Java's mobile platform was false to begin with.

Had Java not been free and open from day one, no one would have used it. Everyone would have used .NET instead, which is exactly what Sun didn't want. Good grief ...

As usual, this article ignores that Samsung created a very similar product for a third party company years ago. And they launched their own version of that product months ago. This is the third iteration of the same idea by Samsung, with the only difference is that 3.0 uses UWB where 1.0 and 2.0 used bluetooth.

But you folks are going to believe what you choose to anyway.

oberpongo said:

These statements from VW CEO are very similar to what the CEOs of Nokia, Blackberry and Microsoft said about the iPhone when it was unveiled in 2007. time will tell if VW will be as forgotten as Nokia and Blackberry. 

Unlike Blackberry, Volkswagen isn't a tiny company with a niche product. And it wasn't the iPhone's 15% market share that killed off Blackberry, Nokia or Windows Phone in the first place: it was Android. Had any of those three just swallowed their pride and adopted Android sooner - which they all wound up doing anyway! - they would have been fine with their share of the other 85%. 

Also, please note that the only thing that you are able to do this with is the iPhone (even though it is FALSE). Why? Because Apple hasn't allegedly driven anyone out of business with anything else.
PCs? Dell, HP, Lenovo, Acer and Asus are still around. Had record years last year.
Smartwatches? Samsung, Garmin, FitBit and Fossil are still around.
Headphones? Sony, Bose, Samsung, JBL etc. still doing great despite competition from AirPods AND Beats.booksApple TV? Roku, Fire TV and - when smart TVs are included - Android TV crush it in market share.
Apple TV+? Has fewer free signups in a year than Disney+ gets PAID signups in a month.
Apple Arcade? Even if you argue that Stadia is a failure - due to Google being Google - Nvidia GeForce now is doing good and xCloud is doing great.
iPad? Samsung sells more of them a year than Apple sells Macs. Despite claims otherwise, Apple has only 35% of the tablet market, and that doesn't even count 2-in-1 Chromebooks - which also outsold MacBooks last year - that people buy to use as tablets. 

There has never been any evidence of Apple driving anyone out of markets because - apart from smartwatches - Apple never gets anywhere near the market share required to. Again, even with the iPhone, it was ANDROID that got the market share that drove everyone else out of business. Nokia had a 30% market share as late as 2010! But in 2011 when Samsung introduced the Galaxy Note - the device that the iPhone and all other modern smartphones copied - and the LeBron James ad campaign shortly after, it was all over.