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How many arms and legs does it cost?
Please don't say $49.99/month.

rezwits said:

Dude the Apple Watch is so ridiculously great it's not even, no it IS FUNNY. Why? Because so many Android and Windows "fan boys" resist and tell themselves they don't want to wear a watch! If they had something EVEN CLOSE to an Watch they would be wearing them. The Watch is amazing in the areas of development, design, manufacturing, and distribution, hands down. And honestly now that there were or still are models that are $199 and even $99 for Gen 1 sales, I see so many...KEEP DOMINATING!!!

Funny that I have yet to see one Apple watch in the wild. I saw one Android thing once but that is it. You obviously live in what Apple haters call 'Fanboi heaven'.
Here in France (where I am travelling at the moment) it is rare to see an iPhone. I saw one about 5 days ago. One member of a Dutch family on holiday had an old 5S. The rest all had Samsung or Sony devices. Samsung seems to rule here in the middle of France (near Valence). Last night at the Hotel bar, my phone rang and I got some looks from the others. After the call ended, I was asked why I used such an odd phone. One person hadn't seen an iPhone in years. Yet they all admired my 2015 15in MBP. Apple it seems has more brand recognition with MacBooks here than phones..
Not a scientific study by any means but personal experience.

jason98 said:

Wonder why he simply did not turn off devices right after picking. Find My iPhone simply does not work while device is shut down.
Would be REALLY nice feature to have in iPhone if it could continue sending GPS location to iCloud using some kind of ultra-low power mode, ideally powered by a small spare battery or an ultra-capacitor.

Of course that would allow the spooks to track you even with the phone off. I guess that is where my tinfoil hat would come in useful. Wrap the phone in it to stop even that tracking.
Yay!

{for the phone to send the GPS Data, a network connection would be needed. This would be all that is needed to track you, not the actual data in iCloud.}

muthuk_vanalingam said:

"Beginning to pull ahead"??? I guess you are underestimating Apple's achievement here. Apple is already ahead of the rest of the industry, by about more than 1 year!!! What the benchmarks do NOT show is - the sustainable performance. If there are benchmarks created to show "sustainable performance", instead of just "peak performance", everyone will know how much Apple is ahead in the mobile SOCs.

If Apple is ahead (and many will say that they are not) then it is only in some areas. For example, the iPhone 7 and the Galaxy S8 are pretty evenly matched when it comes to getting stuff done. the iPhone is streets ahead of the Galaxy in rendering Video. Samsung will want to correct that but will find it a struggle especially with their externally supplied SOC devices. But, they will catch up (eventually).

However, for most people, all this performance stuff really does not matter. So what if GeekBench says that the S8 is 1% faster than the iPhone 7 in multi-core operations. They just won't care as long as it works.

What they do care about and I see it becoming more important year on year and that is the price. I know a good few people who will just say 'nope not going there' when it comes to paying more than $1K (+ tax) for a phone. I'm one of them. I get my iPhone from places like pawn shops. There are enough vain people around who simply have to have the latest bit of bling. I picked up a hardly used iPhone 7 last week for 40% under Apple's retail price. Lots of them are being traded in as people switch to the S8/S8+.

If incorporating their own GPU can give not only a speed boost but help keep the price below that all important $1K mark while retaining their margins then good, go for it.

Why oh why would anyone want to do this?

Microsoft's latest trick is to force updates to Windows 10 users even if they have 'disabled' their internet connection for updates by making is appear as a metered connection.
They are really sinking to the lowest rung possible with their plan to get all users to run their spyware.