DanielEran

dewme said:

I really (really!) hope that Apple doesn't fall into creating a SDK/API/Platform/Toolkit galaxy of time sucking black holes like the ones that Microsoft created for itself throughout the 90s and 00s. An endless parade of unfinished, ever changing, and unfulfilled promises perched precariously atop fragile SDKs, APIs, Platforms, Toolkits, and fantastical reimagined architectures that kept tens of thousands of engineers very busy for years building technical tidbits that would too often never even see the light of day and constantly keeping customers sitting on their hands year after year waiting for the next big thing that would transform their business and pump up their bottom line. It ends up being an endless chain of pass-along promises and everyone ends up losing - except the company selling the toolkits and technical book publishers.

Apple's success is based on its ability to deliver highly compelling, easy to use, valuable, and reliable products (and to a lesser degree - services). These big geek laden mashups like WWDC are fabulous opportunities (and boondoggles) for those who will be building the pieces and parts too get with the program so they can help bring the next round of products and services to market. But Apple has to be very careful to always be selling this technology to the technologists who "touch the code" and don't try to sell technology to the managers, directors, VPs, SVPs, C-suite residents, and especially end-customers. There's nothing quite as horrifying as seeing your CEO get up at a big customers facing conference and start spewing the virtues of service oriented architecture (SOA) like they're selling Swiss Steak as the daily special at Bob Evans. "You, our most valued customers, you need some SOA (pronounced 'so ahh') and by golly we're the ones who are gonna bring you the best SOA on the planet, with some help from our friends in Redmond no less, and it's going to be totally awesome. You're gonna love it. Maybe with some green beans on the side." 

It's all about the products. Don't forget that.

franklinjackcon said:

I'm not sure I agree with the assumptions that this article is based on. Could Apple have developed something like Voice Match to differentiate between less personal accounts, e.g. News or Apple Music without opening up access to contacts or calling? If the issue was privacy not technology then why wouldn't they at least start with those? This looks very much like retrofitting a privacy excuse that was never the main reason for HomePod's limitations.

Muntz said:

gatorguy said:

Why would anyone ... expectations for their demise have been in the news since 2011, this ain't nuttin' recent. 

I'm starting to think AI pays you to post here to engage readers and drive forum engagement. I cannot imagine a normal person caring this much about Google—an advertising company—to white knight them in the way that you've done for years.

k2kw said:

KITA said:

DanielEran said:

rotateleftbyte said:

rogifan_new said:

Google is not a hardware company.

Not for much longer. They have a team of chip designers working on their versions of the Apple 'A' series.

The question is... Will Aphabet get tired of it and like so many things, the close them down.
Only time will tell.

A primary problem for Google's custom chip development is that it can't sell hardware at any price. Recall that Apple had a lead with PowerPC in the late 90s, but because Macs were the only customer, PPC fell behind. Google is selling about half the Pixels as Apple was selling Macs back then, and developing a chip (or even a function) differentiatingly competitive with Apple's A11 or Qualcomm, etc is a bigger task than pushing the clock speed of a G5 ahead. 

The point of Android was that the crappy PC makers were all supposed to lock arms and take down the big bad Apple in smartphones. Instead, they are competing with each other on price (just like they did in PCs!) and Apple is advancing in ways they can't keep up, while they're forced to spend lots of money to make very little profit. 

The Pixel Visual Core utilized development of Google's own ALU technology that's also used in their Tensor Processing Units. The PVC offered 3 TFLOPS of performance on a mobile power budget, that's 5x more than the Neural Engine in the A11. Developing this type of hardware goes beyond just mobile. Google just announced the 3rd generation TPU today with 8x the performance of the previous generation. So a single 4-chip module should have ~1.5 PFLOPS of performance and a full set of racks (256 chips total) will offer 100 PFLOPS. That's a considerable amount of performance that can be utilized for inference of neural networks.

Is this chip and software being offered to Google’s OEMs like software?  Or is google keeping it for its Pixel phones.   If so they are rats.

gatorguy said:

DanielEran said:

The point of Android was that the crappy PC makers were all supposed to lock arms and take down the big bad Apple in smartphones. I

They were supposed to take Apple down? Really? IMHO they were hoping to compete with them. Who the heck was talking about destroy? Ummm, no one AFAIK. Sounds more than a bit imaginative...
Circle the wagons much?

But regarding your primary point about processors I tend to agree with you. I'm not sure there's going to be enough quantity/demand to get great pricing unless there's something else going on that's not yet apparent.