Herbivore2

I can't stand advertisements. It's the main reason I purchase my music, shows and movies. I would gladly pay for ad free news content. Unfortunately, they don't provide that option. When I purchase news content, it still comes with advertising which I resent.

 Hence paying for news content means that the content producers get to double dip so to speak. They gladly take my money then load up on advertisements anyway. 

If Apple were to adopt the Google approach to advertising, I would abandon the platform. I would just buy a Samsung phone. Why stay on largely inferior hardware when iOS offers nothing of substance over Android? 

Granted, Apple produces a great SOC, but Samsung's DRAM, flash and panel technology is superior to virtually everyone else. If it weren't for the spyware OS known as Android, I would already have left Apple. So too would many of my own family. 

Apple's stance on privacy keeps me on their platform. None of my devices uses anything from Google. And I do a considerable amount of online business. 

As an aside, it makes sense that Google's market valuation is so high and with a fraction of Apple's profits. I am beginning to realize that it isn't all a wallstreet phenomenon. There are a lot of businesses who stand to fail if Google's advertising model comes to ruin. They have to support Google as their very livelihood depends on it. Unfortunately for Google, their model of search driven advertising revenue is coming to an end. 

I use Amazon's app for most of my online shopping. I left the search engine long ago. I did find that a general purpose search engine did a better job at searching eBay than ebay's own but that is no longer the case.  My wife uses the Nordstrom app and even for appleinsider I use the app.

Apple can lock Google out of the most lucrative mobile platform on the market. Without the iOS market, Google loses the most important group of users when attempting to utilize their data analytics software. All of the talk about their artificial intelligence will be meaningless. Google will profile the users that have little meaning to the advertisers. 

I rarely initiate a search on a desktop machine these days. Over 99% of my computing time is now spent on iOS. I don't use a single Google product and abandoned Yahoo search, consequently spending virtually no time on their web portal when Mayer incorporated Google search back into Yahoo. 

Google search, Google play and Google services in general have no marketshare in China either. Android is forked and Apple devices are doing quite well in China. Cook is doing a lot of things right. 

It's time to be patient. Apple is going to mop the floor with Google's carcass. It's only a matter of time. 

Huge contractions in the PC market. Apple's increased sales come nowhere near making up for the losses of the other vendors. It means that Intel is losing some serious chip sales and will be facing major profit losses. 

I will say it again, x86 is a dying platform. It is just a matter of time. It will be following in the footsteps of the PowerPC and 68k platforms. And even before that, the 6502 platform. 

I was sad to see the demise of the PPC as PA Semi was making some serious advancements on that platform. No matter as Apple purchased the company and they are now making some serious advancements on the A series CPUs. It has only taken a decade for a competitor to catch up in performance to x86 whereas the PPC was already there a decade ago. IBM just couldn't see it at the time. Intel couldn't either. Hence Otellini's rejection of Jobs' overture to build the iPhone CPU. 

I for one won't be saddened to see the end of x86. Intel won't be able to bully Apple like they did to AMD either. 

And if Microsoft cannot successfully negotiate a transition of Windows over to Acorn Risc Machine CPUs, they will go the way of Commodore and Atari. 

With TSMC's profits intact, they will continue to invest in advanced manufacturing processes. With Intel's loss of profits, they will not. It is just a matter of time now before Apple is forced to release a laptop and/or desktop based on an A series CPU or seriously upgrade the capabilities of iOS. 

Whatever the case, x86 is now on borrowed time. 

I took delivery on an iPad pro nearly a month ago. Since that time, my MacBook sits on a shelf and my iMac is only used for printing. 

I was looking at picking up an older generation Mac mini as a media server, but with the release of the Apple TV and TV OS, I have decided to wait until Apple puts out a device based on the A9  and 4k capable as I will be purchasing a 4k LG OLED television soon. 

There is nothing coming from MSFT, Intel, or Google that interests me in the slightest. 

I was offered a Surface pro 3 by my employer. I really don't want the machine. It gets terrible battery life, especially when on an LTE network. And for what I do, network connectivity is an absolute necessity. The Surface is a dog with respect to battery life in the first place and far worse when connected. 

Android is spyware and I won't consider using it. Samsung's Tizen is decent, but the software availability is poor. Microsoft's mobile efforts are even worse and Intel is no longer competitive in consumer class CPUs. And the Intel fanboys can go elsewhere to spout their drivel. The GPU in the iPad pro outperforms all Intel integrated units. The A9X chip performs at a low end Core i5 in CPU performance while consuming 1/3 of the power and for far lower cost than the Intel Core M counterpart. Once Apple releases the A10 and A10X with the A9X going into the next generation iPad Air and Apple TV, what then for Microsoft, Google and Intel? 

This game is over. Apple has won. In the words of Michael Dell, "I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders..." Only this time, that advice should be going to Intel, Microsoft and to his own company itself. 

Apple is locking Google out of the iOS ecosystem and doing it legitimately. I rather like Apple maps these days. I like searching by voice with Siri. I love using apps for many of the things I do rather than a search engine of any kind. 

And my iPad pro lasts like 14 hours on battery with that fantastic pencil and great speakers. I doubt I'll ever buy another product from MSFT and INTC. I certainly won't be using any Google service of any kind. I do like Samsung's products and I do hope they can get their act together and build a decent product that can link into Apple's ecosystem, leaving Google behind. 

As of this moment, barring a North Korean attack or Pakistan launching a nuclear strike on India, Apple's momentum is nearing unstoppable. 

While Samsung makes high quality hardware, their devices are hobbled by a junk OS that is better characterized as spyware. 

Nice to see Apple finally change the default search engine in iOS to something besides Google. Unfortunately, Mayer went back to her old friends at Google and many of the Yahoo searches are now routed through Google. As all of my devices are Google free, I changed the search engine to DuckDuckGo. But just the change to Yahoo for the default search will still hurt Google's ad revenues. 

Google hurt their most capable Android device manufacturer. Without Samsung, Android's marketshare is destined to fall. Xiaomi and Huawei are not even in the same class as Samsung. It means far more potential for Apple and iOS to take additional marketshare from Android. 

In the not too distant future, Apple's hardware from 2 generations back will be comparable to the highest end current Android hardware. Apple will have inexpensive hardware running on older technology outperforming the high end Android hardware and for a better price point. It's a bad situation for Google and Android. 

Once the A9X goes into an iPad Air, the Android tablet market is in serious trouble. And without Samsung being able to bring out high end hardware running Android spyware, Google's mobile marketshare will tank.

 Perhaps an inexpensive Huawei device running on Intel's Sophia SOCs might save the day for Android! That's not going to happen.

Apple's destruction of Samsung's high end handset profits means that Google and Android are in deep trouble. The Chinese won't be able to overcome Apple's dominance no matter how much their government subsidizes their own hardware manufacturers. 

The Chinese economy is in trouble and weighing heavily on the market coupled with the first Fed rate hike in years. 

The entire market is a bear market.  At this point, it doesn't really matter what is going on internally at Apple, the market is going to react negatively regardless. 

Samsung's warnings show even greater weakness in the Android market. And China's weakness means that Huawei and Xiaomi are in trouble also. 

Apple is still in the best position and it will become evident going forward.