misa

You know it's OK for google to manufacture it's own devices, I just don't see them building anything compelling unless they take the whole Android ecosystem with it.

As for "omg Google is the most valuable company in the world" nonsense... Their stock price is LOWER than it was at the end of December, and they don't payout dividends. Apple's stock price pretty much remains in a tight trading range ever since they started doing dividends. The only people who care about the stock price are those who rob retail investors by high speed trading their money out of the stock.

tenly said:

1983 said:

This article was bound to trigger a bit of a shit storm in the comments section and lo and behold it has. Still a nasty but also sad subject to tackle.

But it shouldn't.  These organizations exist and it's a map products job to help you find and get to the place you need to go.  It's ridiculous for a maps product to apply filters or censorship tied to the author or owners morals, values or ethics.

People don't use "maps" to research their options for making important life choices - they use search engines like Google and Bing.  Only after they've done their research and made their decision will they turn to maps to help them get to the place at which they already have an appointment.

I actually think it was appropriate to "indicate adoption" as an option, but I think the real problem was that one of their data providers had mapped queries for Abortion directly to adoption agencies as a political motivation and Apple likely had to figure out where the bad data was coming from and purge it from Siri's learning. The other possibility is that "Siri learned" Abortion and Adoption were the same thing from that data and that had to be forgotten after the data source was scrubbed for that filtering.

And if this is happening for one key word, imagine what it's doing for other political terms. What does "Obamacare" bring up?

I'm someone that's firmly in the "VR is going to fail (again)" camp, since I was around for the first round of it.

AR, yes I see definite applications for it, but so far all we've seen are a few demos, first with Nokia with the N95, then Nintendo with the 3DS (both products I own) and largely people aren't interested in using it on these devices because of one practical problem... you have to hold the damn thing up to your line of sight, and that tends to erode usefulness of the GPS, and the accelerometers when you're constantly wobbling. Not to mention your hands get tired.

VR, no I see this being a definite flop on the same level of 3DTV's. People don't see any value in a 3DTV any more than they see value in a 4K one, but the latter doesn't require additional hardware to actually use. There's just no 4K content. VR has a worse problem. If I put on a VR helmet, do I get 4K resolution to each eye and it looks as good as being there? Doubtful. All the first generation of this new generation VR kit is going to be terrible because they rely on the computer to have sufficient GPU power, and the vast majority of computers, including all of Apple's do not meet this requirement. (The requirement was a Geforce GTX 970 or AMD R9 290, both are an order of magnitude more than what comes in the 5K Retina iMac ( R9 M395 = GTX 950 or R9 285, at MOST)

Everyone who thinks about buying "cheap" VR kit needs to actually look at the requirements to not induce motion sickness, and they are pretty strict
https://developer.oculus.com/blog/optimizing-vr-graphics-with-late-latching/

At best, we'll probably see Nintendo come out with the first compelling VR kit, but it will only be after Sony, Samsung and Oculus release their half-baked versions that require a powerful GPU. What I expect Apple to do is actually put the GPU into the headset, thus requiring a connection to thunderbolt (PCIe lanes.) This will result in a 1600$ headset that can be used with a much less expensive desktop. However since it's Apple, game support will be non-existant, and that's the largest problem here. If Apple came up with something and made it as compelling as the iPhone, then yes Apple will succeed. I just don't think it's going to happen because a VR Kit at the minimum only solves one problem: "How do get a 120 inch 3DTV into the space envelope of a 24 inch monitor space" , which is something that nobody actually needs. Like, think about it. If you put on a VR helmet, in theory you can have the theatrical experience of film without the super-expensive Dolby Atmos sound system and 48fps 8K IMAX screen that you just can't get at home. But these early VR kits aren't even 4K, they're half a HD screen sent to each eye (1080x1200 each.)

So the most likely thing we will see in the near future is purpose-built VR systems much like purpose-built tablets. The CPU and GPU parts will be like those of a game console and not be upgradable. As much as I'd love to believe Sony might pull it off, the PS4 is not powerful enough to give a comfortable experience, so I'm expecting a compromise in lower resolution.

cali said:

rogifan_old said:

Is there anything under Eddy that isn't? An article just came out about merchants not signing on to Pay. Apple took for granted that merchants would just sign on and they haven't. Whole Foods is the only merchant that has Pay in every one of its stores. I love it but I've got maybe 2 or 3 stores where I can use it. And they're all grocery stores.

http://www.pymnts.com/news/2016/apple-pays-merchant-problem/

"Cut their losses"? Did they not make money? I doubt they were losing money.

RE:Eddy
I'm thinking he just has too much on his plate. He's a good employee but has way too many chores.

This news makes no sense to me. I'm thinking they've found a better advertisement strategy and are abandoning this one. I wanna see Giggle start hurting bad.

Ads are kinda on a "on the way out" phase right now. They'll be back once the glut of inventory and lack of quality advertisers dies down. And no, ad blockers are not to blame here.

To give you an idea, If your site generates one million impressions per DAY, and is making only 10$ per day (CPM of 0.01) You're better off just removing the ads and save the visitors the annoyance. Google Adwords is CPC (paid only when clicked on), Google DoubleClick has CPM. Effective CPM from Google on most sites is well under 0.05 CPM, that's why you set a floor rate so that advertisers looking for "nearly free" advertising on sites with "max fill" selected don't lower your CPM.

And CPC ads are garbage-tier for most sites anyway. You never want Google in your ad chain if you can avoid it because it drives down paying ads. The only thing worse than Google are some tiny in-house solutions, and all the malware-laced piracy/porn websites (because, who is going to report a bad ad on a piracy site? nobody otherwise that site goes bye-bye)

Newspaper sites and clickbait sites have driven down ad prices to the point that many of these sites only exist because their hosting is cheap and they are getting the bandwidth for free. There their are sites that are just nothing but auto-refresh ads every 30 seconds with a tiny piece of content on them. The owners of those sites probably just keep the web browser window open all day on all their devices.

sog35 said:

rogifan_old said:

Ha, in 2010 Yahoo CEO predicted iAd would fail.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-yahoo-idUSTRE68E42R20100916

"That's going to fall apart for them," Bartz said about Apple's iAd service. "Advertisers are not going to have that type of control over them. Apple wants total control over those ads."

The only reason why it failed is because Apple was not willing to sacrifice user privacy. To be sucessful at ads you need to be willing to make the customer the product like Google does.

Unfortunately, the backlash against ads is starting to snowball.

Websites that are mostly ads and very little content (eg your average newspaper site) have been diluting the value of advertisements, and it's hitting a point where google-style generic advertisement isn't worth the effort to setup. If I have a site that gets 1 million users per day, I still only make 20$ from Google. I may as well just take the ads off the site, and partner with a few content sites and run their content ads in those spaces for 100X the value.