danvm

dysamoria said:

"Mandated"... It was adopted by force, not preference. That never works out very well, does it?

jkichline said:

MacBAir said:

canukstorm said:

MacBAir said:

Who in their right mind you:

• Buy a mac with a TN panel;
• Buy a Mac without a SSD;
• Buy a Mac that has components from 2 or 3 years ago?

That basically addresses all Macs on the market besides the rMB and the upgraded riMacs, that are expensive. Clearly this is the cause: Most Macs are crap.

However, Apple can easily mac the best personal computers. Are they waiting for something in particular? They have to be waiting for some special component, otherwise there's no excuse at all, besides milking uninformed users. 

almost five million Macs were sold last quarter & the quarter before that, so somebody's buying them.

And who is buying them? Informed users? Professionals? No. Would you buy a Mac like that crap, at that price? TN panels? Mechanical hard drives? 128GB of storage? Outdated internals? Yeah.

It's the people that would buy 16 GB iPhones until few months ago.

At this point, what is making their Mac sales not falling that fast is the same reason that make Blackberry and Nokia grow after the iPhone, or the S4 after the S3. Inertia of many factors, like mindshare, being locked in, etc. Eventually it will kick in, If Apple doesn't revamp the line-up quickly and cleans that garbage products. Can you guys imagine Dell selling a TN panel and outdated components at more than one thousand dollars? What scammy company would do that?

The average user has no clue what a TN panel is. You really got a bug up your butt. Just buy a PC and move along. The rest of us want a machine that works and doesn't run Windows. The MBA will likely die off soon and I expect Apple to reenvision their lineup with more affordable and better options at the low end and high performance MBP at the upper end. Give them about a month. They haven't been doing nothing... but they also don't want to invest in incremental updates when something bigger is coming.

Herbivore2 said:
You are going to have to back that one up. Apple is building out their own server farms. The real question on my mind is whether Apple is using Intel's Xeons or perhaps waiting on an ARM solution which would be more elegant in meeting Apple's specific needs and likely more efficient. The only service in which Apple does not compete in yet is search. Siri is based on Bing. But so is Alexa and Alexa works quite well maps is rapidly improving. And the most important search queries are being lost to Google as the public moves to mobile devices for most of their computing. Amazon's app is where much of the shopping starts, not on Google search. And the most important demographic, prime members finish their shopping there. Amazon is not sharing that data with Google. And it is far more valuable than search these days from an advertising perspective. I can't stand the Chrome browser. I don't use it at all. It has been deleted from all of my computers and computing devices. Duck duck go is my default search engine. And Google's messages are interesting when I follow a duck duck go link to a YouTube video. They disapprove of my search engine choice. Apple still has the far more valuable data and effectively walling off Google from it. Amazon is doing the same. Google has the data they collected in the past from iOS and Amazon users. They need to act on it quickly because they are losing more and more access to those populations. I am going to add the Amazon Fire to my iPad. It now comes with Alexa. The Echo is an outstanding device. And it ties into the Amazon marketplace. Google has no access to that data and Amazon does. And if anyone thinks AI can function in a vacuum without data, they had better think again. Because my Amazon product searches are far better than ones I make on Google. Amazon knows me far better. And the suggestions are far more "thoughtful" than Google results. It's definitely noticeable to me. And don't think it isn't lost to the CEOs of Amazon and Google. Google has a new threat to worry about also. Verizon just purchased Yahoo. Does anyone really think that Verizon, the largest network carrier won't be using Yahoo for default search? This is a desperation move for Google and likely the reason the device was released in the Verizon network. It still won't sell. The Samsung Exynos processor is better than the snapdragon 821 and Samsung phones are better overall. Google services are getting locked out. That trend will continue to accelerate. Samsung now has Viv, Verizon has Yahoo, the most lucrative shopping demographic is moving to apps, Apple is rapidly upgrading maps, Facebook has a billion users and sights on Google's advertising. This is the only play that Google has. They are playing their poker hand the best they can. It is actually a pretty weak hand. Most of the public care about the quality of pictures, not how well Google assistant works. Apple's position is still far stronger than Google. And there are things happening that could still propel MSFT in the mobile OS space. What gets me is how Google tries to take on ALL of the tech titans at once. Apple with the Pixel and Android. Facebook with Google+ and now Oculus with their own VR, Samsung with the Pixel, Amazon's Echo with Google Home, Internet explorer with Chrome and now they are going after Yelp also. Does the leadership at Google not know that all of these companies are now targeting them specifically? Only Microsoft decided to go after Google with Bing. None of the others did. They picked on the wrong guy with Bezos. He will finish the task that Steve Jobs started. Google still doesn't realize that iOS users aren't going to purchase the pixel just to get Google assistant. Most of the public cares about buying things as inexpensively as they can. Some care about convenience and quality. Amazon has captured many of them with Prime and Apple with iOS. Google assistant won't help much to capture those users. And Google is now using HTC to build their phones. If Samsung is having difficulties competing at the high end, the HYC device is going to get slaughtered. 

Maybe data centers or server farms are new for Apple, and you look excited for it.  MS, Google, Facebook and Amazon have been doing it for years.  And some of them are running with customized CPU/GPU's.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/3072256/google-io/googles-tensor-processing-unit-said-to-advance-moores-law-seven-years-into-the-future.html

https://www.top500.org/news/microsoft-goes-all-in-for-fpgas-to-build-out-cloud-based-ai/

Apple still has the far more valuable data and effectively walling off Google from it.

From what I have seen, most of iOS users have their data in non-Apple services from Google and MS.  So Apple don't have the data, even though people use their devices. 

Most of the public care about the quality of pictures, not how well Google assistant works. 

Looks like Pixel may have a better camera than the iPhone 7+.  And when you add Google Assistant to it, it become a very interesting alternatives to iPhones. 

Apple's position is still far stronger than Google

In mobile devices, yes.  In cloud + AI, no.

foggyhill said:

coolfactor said:

What's interesting is that we typically defend Apple by stating that it's not just the hardware or the software that matters, but the combination of both, resulting in a great user experience. Here we are tearing the Pixel apart for having inferior hardware specs, completely ignoring Google's very vocal message that they've aimed for a great user experience, particularly with the Google Assistant feature built in. Do the specs *really* matter, or is this about Google delivering fewer specs for the same price? Aren't they delivering more *value* through their tight hardware+software approach? I don't think that can be dismissed.

Their assistant isn't that great either, most based functions on a phone are useless except in the car.
See a lot of hype, like most thing google; lets see how the hype bears out

i predict bad results like everything else except search coming out of Google 

silversquonk said:

Still, looks like the growth of 4K TV's is very strong.

I'm ducking before I write this but, you really don't need apostrophes in plurals! Would you write "I like red car's." or "Apple's grow on trees."? TVs are great for watching reruns of the 1980s. Ok, it's picky but grammar has its place!