minisu1980

dewme said:

It would be nice if Qualcomm and Apple would focus on resolving their business relationships through negotiation at the CEO level. Constantly resorting to using the legal system as a club to attack those you can not or will not talk to is a sign of weakness and ineffectual leadership. What the hell are these so-called leaders being paid for if they cannot solve fundamental business problems on their own? When did so-called leaders of industry become nothing more than utterly pathetic hood ornaments? 

This is not a fundamental business problem. Qualcomm wants to be allowed to continue in its illegal and anti competitive pricing scheme. When they got investigated over this, Apple provided factual information that they are breaking the law. They decided to punish Apple for not lying, covering up or supporting their scheme. Qualcomm figured, bet the farm really, that Apple would kowtow like so many other companies had before. When Apple didn’t and it became clear that Qualcomm’s usual bullying tactics of threats and fear of legal fees/adverse outcome (Apple can outlast them and more importantly it can afford to lose) were not going to work they collectively shit themselves (oh to be a fly on the wall in that boardroom). They have no way out; there are really only two outcomes.

1) Most likely. The case is taken to its conclusion and they lose. In this case its game over for them. They have already lost Apple’s future business. Government penalties, civil suits from their other clients who have been similarly fleeced and, critically, being forced to offer terms that are compliant with the law going forward. While they may not necessarily go out of business, Qualcomm will be a mere shadow of it’s former self. Stock price will plummet and it’s shareholders will come seeking blood. They could have left well enough a lone, but sadly hubris and blind greed will have done in the company.

2) They get Apple to drop it’s suit and parlay that into a successful defense against the government suit. It stands to reason they could pull this off especially if Apple were to stand down as it would give validation to their licensing scheme. This outcome would represent the closest return to the status quo which is going to save the executives their jobs as the bulk of Qualcomm’s income will be preserved (the fleecing continues). They might even increase in value as they would be unlikely to be challenged again. Qualcomm really wants this outcome, but realistically the only way this happens is a sweeping ban that is so catastrophic to Apple’s bottom line it would be forced to comply.

How do you deal with a company that takes the stance “I will do what I want because I can, even if it is illegal”. Answer is you can’t, behavior like this only exists because the people who engage in it are not held accountable. The parallels to current political situation in the US is uncanny.

zroger73 said:

I'm on my second HomePod since launch. The first one had a problem where Siri became hard of hearing after hours/days of use. Apple refunded my money and I bought another one at a retail store. Unfortunately, it does exactly the same thing. When Siri starts going deaf, all I have to do is unplug the HomePod and plug it back in and the operation returns to "perfection"...for hours or days. Apple couldn't solve my problem with the first one, so they refunded my money. They haven't been able to figure out why the second one does the same thing, either. All I get is escalations to another department who calls back a few days later and I go through the same "infinite loop". I had hopes the 11.3 update would resolve this issue, but it didn't. I also don't like how Siri answers me too loudly at times and too softly at others independent of the volume setting. The sound quality is impressive, but the voice control makes the product too frustrating for me. My "workaround"? I plugged the HP into a digital timer that turns off the power for one minute each day.

When it works, it's well worth the $349 I paid for it. However, having to cycle the power to get it to work is unacceptable. I find myself using my Amazon Echo devices more often. Even though the sound quality is much lower, Alexa doesn't have a hearing problem.

I can confirm that I have had exactly zero of the problems you are describing, maybe check your power/wiring situation occasionally electronics can act funny if the power to them fluctuates.

mike1 said:

racerhomie3 said:

I have used the iPhone X & it does feel like the future.
But I just like the home button so much. I feel like buying a 256GB iPhone 8 rather than a 10.
Any opinions ?

I stopped looking for the Home button about 30 minutes into ownership of the X.

My experience mirrors the above comment. One thing I found myself doing for a bit after that initial period was trying to activate the readability feature and therefore looking for the home button. Turns out I really didn't need it given the dimensions of the X. FWIW the iPhone X is hands down the best phone I have owned.

bigmushroom said:

DanielEran said:

gatorguy said:

Of course you wouldn't want to code around the agreement. You'd code around the patented part of the technology to try and avoid infringing if you don't want to pay the inventor, and I'm sure that's what you've done before if you've been at it very long. No matter how you get there you're building on someone else's hard work while refusing the originator profit for it.

How many times have you seen some good, inventive and hopefully profitable 3rd party feature "copied" in essence by Apple or whoever and integrated into their own software while the person/company with the original idea withers away on the vine? All quite legal as long as the surgery is good.

Your whataboutism and both-sidesing are phony distractions from the fact that:

Google stole significant Java code available under the GPL, then distributed it in violation of that license to make money without paying a licensing fee for Java, without following Suns' licensing rules for Java (stealing control of Sun's platform), and also without respect for the GPL. 

Apple didn't steal code, it didn't steal somebody else's platform, and it didn't violate the GPL just because it might have been convenient for a large company wanting to run things without doing the work to earn or acquire ownership. 

Google also stole content from Yelp, stole content from authors, stole content from news sites, etc and then repressed lawsuits until it achieved monopolistic control over advertising on the web, and everyone just had to agree that it was okay Google scraped their work because they were being given traffic by Google. 

Google also helped its licensees steal clearly patented ideas from iOS, and only escaped there because it was giving away the support of its theft. 

When Apple acquired former Palm talent to build its notification system (which Google had simply ripped off for Android), Android fans accused Apple of taking Google's (unprotected) ideas. But that wasn't true, Google had no ownership, and Apple had been working on it for just as long.

Apple didn't steal code from Android. It didn't steal Unix code, and it worked to make sure its implementation of BSD was legitimate. Apple has had IP disagreements with Nokia, Qualcomm and many others, but those didn't result from Apple deciding to steal their work and just not pay for it because it was a larger company. Further, Apple has shown a willingness to pay the licensing costs of agreements, even when they are not exactly fair. 

Google's culture is all about stealing. It stole its first business model, stole its primary platform, attempted to steal iPhone and iPad, and it steals content with abandon. That's because it's made up largely of Microsoft people, which shared the same steal first, pay later ethos. 

Your consistent, slavish support for Google reflects the same sort of amorality that often takes the shape of hypocrisy as you try to paint Google as perfectly righteous and (at the same time) the rest of the world as "just as criminal." 

This is fanboy propaganda in the same way that the article deliberately blurred the distinction between Apis and implementing code.

Google didn't use the Java API to save time developing Android (they could have easily renamed function names and changed them slightly) but in order to make it easy for third party to develop for the platform. It's not clear why an API developer should own the human capital that stored in form of muscle memory in the heads of thousands of developers if they profited handsomely already from these developers writing code for them.

Finally, Apple stands on the shoulder of Giants like anyone else. Objective c is based on c and it's standard is heavily influenced by the c library. Swift's library is also obviously based on the countless libraries that came before. This is taken for granted: I have never seen the creators of C go around and Sue anyone I sight for repurpursing their libraries.

Sure, Google "only steals". I guess that's why these hadoop companies reimplemented MapReduce and the Google file system from the seminal 2005 paper and created Hadoop out of it. That's the reason why kubernetes (developed by Google) has become the container orchestrator of choice. That's why tensor flow is opensourced by google and the tool of choice for deep learning. That's why Node uses the V8 JavaScript engine to develop a huge ecosystem around it. That's why countless academics use syntaxnet (Google too) for creating syntactic parse trees. Etc. Etc.

Bending your mind like a pretzel to write stuff that fits your anti Google crusade isn't healthy.

There was significant value in keeping this easy for developers already familiar with Sun’s platform ... hence the theft. Google was not being magnanimous towards third parties here, they knew if they took the other route (did the whole thing themselves) they would lose the support of all the developers for the platform Sun spent hundreads of millions and years and years developing. I like Googles search product and will continue to use it, but at the end of the day they are in fact an evil, or at best amoral company, who feel free to abuse their market position against anyone would cannot afford to defend themselves. 

GG1 said:

I don't upgrade my iPhones too often, but when I do, I either sell or give away my old ones to people new to iPhones (there is one less Android owner and one less Blackberry owner out there).

Apple may disappoint analysts with very slightly less sales volume year-on-year (negligible, IMO), but the pool of perfectly usable second-hand iPhones in-use must be growing substantially, posing a big threat to new Android sales. This article is spot-on.

This is an often overlooked point. iPhones function longer, stay in active use longer (don’t end up collecting dust in a drawer), have higher resale value, and trickle down to more price sensitive consumers or those who see little value in technology (think grandma).

My wife and I upgrade every year or two and always give away our iPhones. We used to give them away to family, however all of them now either have a functioning iPhone from us or are now upgrading to newer iPhones on their own accord. The vast majority of these iPhones replaced their junk Android phone they first got sold on from their carrier. Now we have run out of family so we have started giving them away to close friends. Not sure what to do when we runout of friends. Once these out live their use as smartphones (too old or battery no longer holds a charge) they almost always end up repurposed in a dock as a music player or other such scenario where they are always plugged in. This represents a lot of people being indoctrinated into the Apple ecosystem even if this would not have been their choice due to: cost concerns, ignorance of the experience differential, believing technology to be too difficult to use. I think once the smartphone market stops growing Apples going to be just fine, Android not so much.