ericthehalfbee

avon b7 said:

ericthehalfbee said:

rogifan_new said:

Apple is transitioning from a premium products company to a services everywhere company. And with this and Apple Music on Echo devices they’re admitting Apple TV and HomePod are overpriced. I fully expect to see a cheap Apple TV dongle this spring, I also wouldn’t be surprised if the HomePod goes the way of the iPod HiFi and we never see a second generation. I do wonder what these moves mean for Siri. Apple Music doesn’t use Siri on Echo devices and I’m guessing this new Samsung iTunes app won’t have it either. So is Apple treating Siri as just a feature of Apple’s OSes instead of a service itself? Honestly if the company is moving to a services model and making those services cross platform they might as well do it with Siri as well. Treat Siri as it’s own product/service instead of an OS feature.

Apple TV isn't overpriced for what you get. If you only stream content it's overkill. But if you want to play games or run other Apps it's far more powerful than anything else on the market.

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I'm curious. Is it better than a three year old Shield TV which is also cheaper and has a good game controller available for it?

The A10X runs circles around a Shield TV. The best part about the Shield is the GPU, but even then the A10X is superior. Anywhere from 30% (worst case) to a full 100% (best case) faster.

On the CPU side an A10X slaughters the Shield, not surprising since it runs A57 cores. The A10X is literally more than 2X as fast single or multi core.

This doesn’t even take into account that the Shield runs Android and thus has an inferior selection of Apps to use to take advantage of a fast processor.

asdasd said:

k2kw said:

asdasd said:

It looks like the number of active devices is now 1.4B. 

More interesting would be active users. 

Is this truly active devices or sold devices as I have half a dozen in active old devices like iPodTouch, iPhone 4S, iPhone5S, SE, and a couple iPads? That's not to imply their is only 200 Million Active users. I'm sure there are at least 500 Million active users but maybe less than 1 Billion.

In general active users and active devices does mean devices being still used. I’m not sure on Apple’s criteria but on a website it’s generally one login per month for an active user. If you keep the iPhone in a drawer it isn’t counted. Active users are of course fewer than active devices for the reasons you mentioned. I doubt , however, if on average iPhone users have another active device - ie that the average number of active devices per user is 2 or more. It might be for people on this site. So 1.4B devices is I suspect 700-1B users. 

Apples criteria is when a device visits The App Store. There's a very specific reason for this and it has to do with Google.

Google USED to count a device that was turned on and "checked in to their servers" which is a fancy way of saying login. Unfortunately this tracked ALL Android devices including the really cheap/old devices running older versions of Android. This had the effect of showing a disproportionate number of users on older devices and made their Android Version pie chart look really bad (yes, even worse than now).

So Google changed their method to only show visits to the Google Play Store. Their reasoning (which does make sense) was that developers would be more interested in knowing the number of devices where people are actively looking at getting Apps (the more valuable customers). But this had an added side benefit. Literally overnight Android distribution numbers changed and the number of people using older versions dropped while newer versions went up. Did a large number of users stop using their old device and upgrade to new ones? Nope. The distribution of users never changed, just how Google counted them.

Apple never used to report users vs iOS version until much later than Google. And when they did they used the SAME method as Google - visits to The App Store.

gatorguy said:

Philip Elmer-DeWitt today on 4 things he learned from Apple's guidance update:

• Don't trust Apple's guidance. Sure, Steve Jobs used to sandbag investors, guiding low, coming in high. I thought I could take Tim Cook's numbers (or his silence) to the bank. Now I know better.

• Don't be too quick to call FUD. Not all negative reports are created equal. Sometimes there's good reason to have fear, uncertainty and doubt.

• Case in point: Lumentum's revised guidance. When Lumentum's announced in November that a major supplier (almost certainly Apple) had sharply reduced orders for 3D imaging components, I posted several items about analysts reducing estimates. "Could be a bad sign," I wrote. But then I gave more than equal weight to the possibility that Apple had simply switched suppliers.

• Stick to the facts; don't sugar-coat. Apple investors may prefer reading good news about the company, but I'm not doing anyone any favors by putting my thumb on the scale.

https://www.ped30.com/2019/01/06/apple-warning-lessons-learned/

More BS.

Apple has never missed guidance in the previous 24 quarters. Except for the few times they earned MORE than their guidance. That’s 6 years, and is as far back as I bothered to go. So one quarter in the midst of a “trade war” is enough to throw out all that history of being correct? Give me a break.

Too quick to call FUD? Sorry, but when literally hundreds of reports (that’s 24 quarters times multiple reports each time) are wrong you think people should stop calling BS on negative rumors (reports)?

Lumentum clearly stated “a large industrial/commercial customer”. Not multiple customers, just one. I didn’t know Apple was considered an “industrial” customer. Since Lumentum is a key supplier to telecommunications companies, it’s doubtful they were even talking about Apple. Further, Apple buys their components ahead of manufacture, which is why suppliers usually have lower component orders in the Oct-Dec quarter because Apple is ordering for the Jan-Mar quarter. This has happened numerous times in the past where suppliers reported lower sales for the Oct-Dec quarter only to have Apple set record sales numbers.

Edited: Forgot to mention. Apple suppliers have also reported record quarters in the months leading up to an iPhone launch. Further proof that component orders are often placed months in advance of when they're used.

Stick to the facts? That’s hilarious coming from a group of people who don’t really report facts, but mostly reports rumors as facts.

Initially thought to be limited to Intel silicon, Meltdown and Spectre were found to affect all modern processors, including ARM-based chips like Apple's A-series SoCs.

Only the most recent ARM based processors were affected (the A75 and up). Earlier ARM designs were basically unaffected simply because they weren't advanced enough. Apple A Series going way back to the A7 were far more advanced than anything ARM, Samsung and Qualcomm produced and were years ahead in the areas of speculative execution, branch prediction and similar technologies. Anandtech famously said the A7 had more in common with Intel desktop processors than other mobile ARM processors.

So in one way, having a highly advanced processor has made a higher number of iOS devices susceptible compared to their Android counterparts.

What did they steal? The only thing I could think of would be something related to their A Series processors, as most other components in iPhones are purchased from suppliers and not designed specifically by Apple.

And given how far behind their processors are, I don't think they did a very good job of stealing anything.