redstater

blastdoor said:

antonpablo said:

Going 4GB hurts profit margin that's why..

Oh, I dunno.... I think Apple just makes different tradeoffs than the Android guys. Apple has much faster NAND than most Android guys, which reduces the need for more RAM (because terminated apps can be quickly loaded). Faster NAND isn't cheap. 

Except that the same - or very similar - NAND that goes into iPhones also goes into flagship Android phones. And Apple has even bought NAND from Android manufacturers in the past and will do so again in the future: http://www.macrumors.com/2016/04/20/samsung-apple-nand-2017/ Look, the reason why iPhones required less RAM than Android phones was the vertical integration of the hardware and software plus Android's Java Virtual Machine being a resource-hog. That hasn't changed. What has changed is multi-tasking. Doing it - and doing it while retaining the freedom from lag, stutter and crashes that iPhone fans expect - takes a lot of horsepower. Another thing that requires it: large HD displays. Even then, the 3 GB of RAM for the iPhone is half the 6 GB of RAM that the Samsung Galaxy Note 6 will require, with the other Android manufacturers likely to follow suit as they always do. But high-speed RAM is now relatively cheap, so there is no reason not to use it. Asus put 4 GB of RAM in a phone that cost $299 last year. Granted, it was slower RAM that gets used in iPhones and flagship Android phones, but it still performed similar to most good Android phones with 2-3 GB of fast RAM, and that was with the Intel SOC. IF there is a downside to using more RAM, it is the impact on battery life. Big deal: stop making phones paper thin. The ultra-thin thing got a lot of oohs and aaahs and accompanying sales back with the iPhone 5 and iPad Air, but folks are long past it. It is better to give people more performance, more features and a big battery in a package that will still be as thin as the iPhone 5 was.

cropr said:

rogifan_new said:

Original MacBook Air started at $1799. My guess is people are waiting for new MacBook Pros with Skylake.

I did not wait.  3 weeks ago we needed a new developer machine in my company and I bought an Ubuntu based Dell XPS 13 with Skylake processor.  It is difficult to understand why Apple has yet to launch a Macbook Pro with Skylake processor while other vendors have similar systems since end last year in their portfolio

Does this question really need to be asked? Simple: Apple controls the entire stack both hardware AND software. Dell, Lenovo, HP, Acer, Samsung and the rest are able to just get an operating system - Windows, Linux, Android, ChromeOS - and slap it on their hardware. They will actually sell the exact same hardware configurations with different operating systems, and would even sell dual or even triple boot systems with multiple operating systems if the software companies let them. If Microsoft or Google allowed these companies to sell multi-boot devices with Windows 10, Ubuntu 15, ChromeOS and/or even Jide Android on them, that is exactly what they would do, and moreover that is what everyone would buy. Google should have long ago started formally selling dual-boot or dual purpose Ubuntu/ChromeOS devices as that is what a ton of people are informally doing anyway but hey this is Google we are talking about, and other than buying Android - whose success has much more to do with Samsung than Google by the way - and buying YouTube and I suppose Chromecast, isn't very smart. Maybe now that Google has finally decided to go ahead and have a formal hardware division with the former Motorola CEO running it, they will do it. Apple on the other hand actually needs to tune the next version of OS X to fit Skylake. And unlike the other OEMs, they actually have new operating system features of their own to roll out to take advantage of the new hardware. Unlike Lenovo, Dell and the rest, who have to wait for Microsoft to put out the new features, which may or may not even work ideally - if it all - with their cookie cutter hardware. If there is a story here at all, then it may be that the trend of jumping from Windows to Mac after buying an iPhone or iPad and experiencing the Apple ecosystem for the first time has reached its saturation point.

Hmmm. I do not understand the negative reaction to this article. No one is talking about "occupy" or calling it a monopoly. Instead, it is merely pointing out that only a tiny percentage of apps actually earn money. Even though the low barrier of entry allows a lot more people to participate because it no longer requires distributing your software on media to retail outfits or even maintaining a download site for it, the medium still gets dominated by huge entities that have brand recognition, the ability to advertise etc. and plus the occasional small player who gets lucky and strikes gold like Flappy Bird (and those tend to flame out after a game or three). It was probably a gold mine to jump into in the early days when the iPhone and later the iPad were just starting to catch on, just like the Internet and computer gaming made a lot of money for early adopters. But the market was bound to mature - and become corporatized and dominated by big conglomerates - just like all the rest. This is something that we already knew and does not surprise anyone.

It is clear that Google is guilty here, as others took out licensing agreements with Sun Microsystems, and Google themselves negotiated licensing agreements but they fell through. And Google is no longer going with their original argument, which is that Java shouldn't be subject to copyright laws at all. So what Google is trying to do is limit the judgment amount. Which will pretty much work. If Apple only got $550 million from Samsung's more clear and blatant infringement, Oracle is not going to get anywhere near $8.8 billion, if only because even if Google had signed a licensing agreement with them, it would not have paid Oracle anywhere near that much.

Oracle is right to seek payment for their IP, but this action prevents them from making any money off Android going forward, as Google has already switched the offending APIs to a combination of their own code plus OpenJDK. I think that the talk of Google switching to another language like Apple's Swift or their own Golang is overblown: you have millions of apps written in Java that will still need a JVM to run on, and there is no "good" way around that. I think that the main issue is that Oracle bought Sun thinking that they were getting a goldmine, and they are more than a bit peeved that it didn't provide them anywhere near the windfall that they hoped.

Basically this story has almost nothing to do with Apple. Kind of sad to see Avalanche go though. But it happens ... small but successful outfit gets bought out by a bigger company to serve a different purpose, and when the new purpose either fails or is fulfilled they shut it down. Also, casual console type gaming is in decline in favor of mobile though and has been for a long time which is why the market first winnowed from Atari, Sega and Nintendo to just Nintendo, and now finally Nintendo is having problems (the Wii motion controller thing saved them because the GameCube was a disaster, but now it looks like it only delayed the inevitable). Even gaming for "adults" there were three main platforms: PC (including Steam), PlayStation and XBox. PC gaming is in decline even if Steam is included and they are hoping that VR gets that growing again, XBox is a shell of what it used to be, so that just leaves PlayStation, Steam kinda sorta, and everybody else. Sure, there's mobile, but it is hard to maintain consistent profitability on mobile. Example: Rovio. Supercell (Candy Crush) isn't what they used to be either, and neither is Halfbrick.

For all the hype that gaming gets, it really is a tough industry with only a few players that stay in business for very long.