DanielEran

j.misir.87 said:

If Samsung is getting law suits for all those devices apple should be as well considering that Samsung SDI manufacturers the batteries for all the iPhone's up till the iPhone 7. People dont really realize that samsung is one of the major suppliers for the components inside the iPhone. Just saying.

The problem with Samsung is not that it builds components that spontaneously burst into flames for random, unknown reasons. 

The problem is that Samsung raced to design and develop phones using shoddy engineering, made design shortcuts and began production without sufficient testing to get the Note 7 to market before iPhone 7.

On top of defective finished products, Galaxy phones are also running Android software with Samsung's own software to manage various aspects of the device, including the "software heat-control algorithm" mentioned in the lawsuit.

This was all done by Samsung Mobile, which is not the same people or even business unit as the Samsung LSI chip fab or its memory, chip, display (and even battery) production groups. 

Samsung LSI fabricated Apple's A4-5-6-7-8 chips while Samsung also developed its own Exynos chip for the Galaxy S4, ending up with a defective memory controller that didn't work correctly and was slower than advertised. That flawed design had no bearing on its ability to build correctly functioning chips to Apple's specification.

 

elijahg said:

AppleInsider said:

It also holds the potential for Apple to lower its prices on hardware and apps overseas, a move that could be expected to induce demand.

Yeah. As if that'd ever happen. It only took them a week or two to raise prices, we'll soon see if they drop too.

As the linked articles on Brexit price hikes show, it took Apple 3-4 months to raise Mac prices and 6 months to raise App Store prices in the UK after the Pound crashed last summer. Lower prices benefit Apple if they help bring in the same $$ on products sold as the Pound begins to appreciate. However, the GBP still isn't anywhere near where it was a few years ago pre-Brexit , so the UK is unlikely to see Apple prices drop right away.

gatorguy said:

Soli, I don't think Apple's claim is a Billion active iOS devices is it? I thought it was a billion active devices period which would include Mac's. Further I believe DED estimated around a half-billion were iPhones which is the potential bottleneck you're referring to if everyone used only cellular data to update?

Apple reported (not really a "claim" is it?) 1 billion active devices at the beginning of 2016, and added that represented 25% growth over the previous year. 

Over a year later there's been ~20m Macs added to the ~100-150m installed base, ~40m iPads and well over 200m iPhones. So likely more than 25% growth in the "1B active devices" cited at the beginning of 2016. 

So yeah, there are now more than 1B iOS devices alone, but I conservatively estimated a lower number from a year and a half ago to compare against the 100M newer Android devices that are capable of running Assistant today. 

Apple sells +40% of all smartphones in the US, and the actual installed base among most carriers is likely higher due to a longer usable lifespan vs Android and WM. If nearly half of your subscribers rush to get 6GB iOS updates ~6 times a year (plus weekly updates of 350mb FB and other apps), that's a tremendous load on their LTE networks that could be avoided by simply limiting updates so they occur off peak on home or office WiFi. 

gatorguy said:

Here's a different take from DED's on what Google IO17 was about. 
http://www.androidcentral.com/when-it-stops-being-about-hardware-googles-way-forward-and-all-new-kind-cloud

Your eyes won't burst into flames when reading it even tho it's an Android fan site, so it's safe. They even give big props to Apple and their hardware. 

Android Central says "Google has never been a hardware maker"

..well except for those years when it owned Motorola Mobility, and paid billions for Nest, and that new Pixel phone and Pixel C (eye rolll). 

The article pivots Android advocacy around in a 180 degree spin, erasing a decade of the giddy hopes for Android that anticipated the "Google Phone," and tells us that all Google really ever wanted to do was mobile services. That's 100% false. 

The entire idea behind Android was first to prevent Microsoft from blocking Google from Windows (in mobile, as it appeared to be threatening with Vista), then to destroy IPhone and replace it with Google's own open version of Windows on mobile devices.

If Google just wanted to build mobile services, it would have continued to partner with Apple as it had been rather than what chose to do: very arrogantly announce that it would take over hardware. 

G1, Honeycomb tablets, Nexus, Chrome, Pixel ...

Google just failed to do that in any area other than the low-end market that Apple doesn't care about, the province of Symbian, Linux and Java ME. 

If that's what Google really intended to do, it could have simply annnounced that it wanted to be the OS for <$300 phones and remained partnered with Apple on iPhones. 

If it had had done that, it would still have its Maps, voice and search on iPhones as the default. Instead it lost out on all of that, and helped turn Apple into a major rival in data services. 

Google not only failed in hardware, but also sparked a major non-hardware competitor in Apple. 

Meanwhile, despite all of its research and good ideas, google is incapable of successfully delivering real products. Even David Pierce of Wired (who crowed praise of Glass, Motorola, etc) has come around on this. 

https://www.wired.com/2017/05/googles-perfect-future-will-always-just-around-corner/

techrules said:

The big weakness for Apple is AI/ML compared to Google.   This is the area that Apple really needs to get a lot more serious and get going.   Look at the new Google Photos feature where you take a photo of your kid at bat with a chain link fence between you and your kid and Google just magically removes.    It is truly incredible.

The depiction of a chainlink fence being removed and the missing details extrapolated was indeed "incredible," but it remains a depiction, not reality. Google hasn't shipped that, so it remains to be seen how well it works in practice. 

Last fall, Apple showed off Portrait mode, which it then actually shipped in beta and then to users and used the feature to market IPhone 7 Plus--which sold in high volumes. 

Google could invent lots of camera/optical ML tricks and it still wouldn't sell any real volume of $600 Pixel phones. 

Google didn't invent the Adobe healing brush, it just showed off some unfinished vaporware to its high credulity audience to make itself look innovative.