DanielEran

gatorguy said:

DanielEran said:

gatorguy said:

As for you personally I suspect some Apple ad contributed to your interest unless you simply knee-jerk purchase anything with the Apple logo on it. 

If Google’s ads are effective, why can’t it see its own Nexus/Pixel products despite incessant advertising for them all over its sites for years? 

Huh? Do you think even every Apple user buys every Apple thing they see in an ad. If you don't want something you don't want something, even tho the very best ads might make you believe you do. Apple believes ads are effective since they use Google too among other providers, and I suspect they know more about the effectiveness of them than you wouldn't you agree? Little different than armchair execs coming in to say what Apple should do, or how they'd run things.  

So Google just doesn't have anyone looking at their ads? 

Or Google isn't good at advertising?

Or is nobody interested in Google's brand, or their pitch for what makes a good TV player, headset, tablet, watch, phone? 

Keep spinning those wheels and come up with an explanation! 

What's your "armchair exec" understanding for why Google has totally failed at hardware after spending massive billions to acquire hardware talent and spending years promoting its annual brands? Was that all to help Samsung and Chinese companies understand how to build something that Google could put its Maps and Assistant on?

gatorguy said:

adm1 said:

I wonder when the day will come that the people PAYING for the advertisements realise it's not working? Do ads really work on anyone, I may be in a minority but other than rarely making me aware of something new I didn't know about, adverts (TV, radio, internet, magazine etc.) have never directly resulted in me making a purchase, big nor small.

Apparently they work since nearly every retailer, product maker, car dealer, technology company (yup Apple), restaurant, movie and TV producer and service provider uses them. Ads have proven their value over centuries.

As for you personally I suspect some Apple ad contributed to your interest unless you simply knee-jerk purchase anything with the Apple logo on it. 

gatorguy said:

adm1 said:

I wonder when the day will come that the people PAYING for the advertisements realise it's not working? Do ads really work on anyone, I may be in a minority but other than rarely making me aware of something new I didn't know about, adverts (TV, radio, internet, magazine etc.) have never directly resulted in me making a purchase, big nor small.

Apparently they work since nearly every retailer, product maker, car dealer, technology company (yup Apple), restaurant, movie and TV producer and service provider uses them. Ads have proven their value over centuries.

As for you personally I suspect some Apple ad contributed to your interest unless you simply knee-jerk purchase anything with the Apple logo on it. 

If Google’s ads are effective, why can’t it sell its own Nexus/Pixel products despite incessant advertising for them all over its sites for years?

Display ads work for awareness, not so valuable for branding. Nobody really knows how valuable google ads are because google sets the prices without much direct competition. 

Its like shopping under communism. 

sfolax said:

Stopped reading at the first sentence, factually wrong as can always expect from a DED piece.
The data was not obtained without permission
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/03/18/facebook_confirms_cambridge_analytica_stole_its_data_its_a_plot_claims_former_director/

“Approximately 270,000 people downloaded the app. In so doing, they gave their consent for Kogan to access information such as the city they set on their profile, or content they had liked, as well as more limited information about friends who had their privacy settings set to allow it,” the statement reads.

The kicker’s in the last bit of that. Unless users had their Facebook privacy settings locked down the app slurped not only the 270,000 consenting users but all their friends as well - over 50 million people according to Christopher Wylie, a former researcher director at CA, who had a copy of the data set.

Facebook is peeved that the data was collected under an academic license and then sold commercially.

If they had a commercial license, nothing would have been said about this.

Lastly, why don't you care about this as well - https://www.rt.com/usa/421808-obama-facebook-mine-data/

270k people unwitting gave access to their data, which allowed the data of 50 million other people to be stolen. 

How do you not get the words you are typing?

jasenj1 said:

Why? CA real estate is crazy expensive. The cost of housing in CA in insane. There have been several stories about people leaving CA for cheaper & better places to live (I knew people who did it way back in the 80s). In this age of Slack, Skype, discord, and all the other online meeting & collaboration tools, why build a big office with a high concentration of people in a very expensive place?

As a shareholder, that almost borders on poor use of Apple's money. High real estate cost + high housing costs = higher salaries = less profit. Put a campus somewhere nice, but cheaper to live like NC or Atlanta.

Companies operate where talent is. People making the most noise about "leaving California" are often retired investors going to live in a big house somewhere cheap. They don't contribute toward the workforce. 

If it were more efficient and productive to have teams of people working at their homes in cheap places to live, successful companies would be doing that.

Instead, Apple (and lots of other companies) set up offices in places where there is already activity going on, and work to recruit competing talent away to join their company. That's why Apple has offices in Canada next to Blackberry, etc.

sakamura said:

Created account to post here. Long long time Apple user, never had an Android, only bought 1 PC in my life (for work at a time Bootcamp was impossible). Am a developer and do create products for Android.

One thing Google is doing really well is Chrome updates, on all platforms, by default and without even having to ask for updates. If and when there is an update, It gets rolled out. Internal engine for HTML gets pushed all the time, any time, without reboot or even asking. Your Chrome is latest version, or penultimate. And it will be latest next time it can close a window.

This is the same for most Google-provided applications and services, and it doesn’t stop after 5 years. It’s ubiquitous and simply gets updated.

Obviously, not all phones have default browsers, no internal major version OS updates for core OS services, especially not vendor-specific, but a great lot of the outside contact points are being automatically patched out.

This is also the single biggest request I got from Apple, to actually support that. My kids have the previous gen iPads (3, Mini 3), I’ve had an iPad 1 for years without software update. At least keep on patching Safari, Mail, Security even if we’re not at latest official OS.

Similarly, I find it a blurry line between major version upgrade and minor version update. There are simply no more minor version upgrade once a newer major version is available. This leaves in the dark (and unpatched) millions of devices that cannot (or will not) upgrade. Maybe my company requres a x32 app to run and haven’t got a x64 version. But because once the mandatory latest major version is out, older users are left in the dark. Something Android users will simply not experience because of micro non-« wait for 30 minutes with a dead weight and a progress bar » updates.

In essence, I agree with the article and analysis as usual, but with a major caveat, which doesn’t seem to be addressed in the article: Android doesn’t care anymore on changing their OSes. You have a phone, it stays with the same core features, it zips as efficiently as 5 years ago (no bulky upgrade that has more features, true, but with a .0.0 version that’s much slower than the last upgrade) and it’s patched.

Yes the Android update problem isn't that Google doesn't want to issue updates; it already pushes out regular Android updates and has long been trying hard in various ways to get its licensees to roll out its patches and feature/framework updates to users.

The problem for Android is that Google doesn't control it. Google has lots of new code that will never make it to the 2B devices that run "Android." The largest barrier is hardware makers and mobile providers who don't see the benefit of distributing Google's OS updates because it requires effort on their end, with no clear payback.

Even Google has decided it's not worth it to update its own house-branded hardware. The last Nexus phones and Pixel C were barely 2 years old. Apple supports mobile hardware that's 4-5 years old, because allowing iOS to fragment like Android would mean that the addressable base for developers related to new technologies  (like ARKit, or new Siri Intents, Maps support, iCloud features, etc) would shrink dramatically.

Google keeps telling everyone else to adopt and deploy its latest APIs because this is in the interest of Google. Yet even Google itself doesn't bother to do this because its few million Nexus users are a drop in the bucket compared to Android overall, and the work of getting them Android P would not help expand its ecosystem much at all. Even new Pixel hardware is doing very little. Initial analyst estimates called for 8-9 million Pixel phones over its first two years, but Google only managed to sell around 4.5. Samsung doesn't share Google's dire need to promote Assistant and Lens and other new APIs because it's trying to differentiate itself with Bixby and Bixby Vision, etc.

Google fans see Android as a collective force attacking Apple, but the reality is that Google and Samsung are working at cross purposes, and doing more damage to each other than they are to Apple. China is a third faction fighting both Google and Samsung. And Amazon is a fourth. They're all repressing the advantages of each other and blending into a commodity identity that is not valuable, even as Apple stands apart as secure, updated, leading in useful new tech and design, and privacy-centric.

Android has also been useful in helping to derail Windows Mobile from gaining any traction, something that also hurt Nokia, HTC, Samsung and anyone else that could have benefitted from a better alternative to Android.

Essentially, Android is like the Vietnamese, China and Russia all fighting over what it means to be Communist, while the West basked in unchallenged productivity and wealth. It was supposed to be a Cold War between the US and the Red Menace, but really the various communists all fought amongst themselves and allowed the west to achieve prosperity without much challenge. @gatorguy is our resident intellectual that keeps reminding us that Dear Android Leader has our interests in mind and that Androidism controls more of the world's soil, and it's only a matter of time until everyone decides to join the glorious revolution that promises to do all sorts of things it somehow doesn't seem to actually be able of achieving. Freedom! 

Note the circular argument that Nexus is old hardware in 2 years so it "can't be updated" and we're all so dumb for not knowing why. Yet somehow Apple manages to keep its phones up to date for twice as many years, even across major changes in CPU architecture, different GPUs, different modem vendors etc. 

Apple currently supports 8 major iPhone models sold since 2013 and 10 iPad models. But Google's flexible, modular and now Really Modular OS can't support more than 4 of its phones and 0 of its tablets, because ["we're all too stupid to even know why"].