freeper

Blunt said:

freeper said:

and the $499 Asus ZenFone AR - the best Android device for the money as the thing even has 8 GB of RAM! 

And still iOS runs smoother with 3 GB maybe 16 GB will do the trick.

Arguments from 4 years ago are beneath you. No one talks about stutter and lag on Android devices anymore. Even cheap devices like the Moto G run smooth. Also, Apple's even going to 3 GB of RAM in the first place was a major concession. For years Apple claimed that the only reason why Android needed more than 1 GB of RAM (which the iPhone had as recently as the iPhone 6) and 2 CPU cores was because of bad design, lack of vertical integration and the Java JVM. Android advocates claimed that it was because Android did more ... things that Apple claimed were gimmicks that made the devices more difficult and confusing to use whereas Apple promoted simplicity. But lo and behold ... as Apple began adding features that were previously on Samsung and other Android phones starting with the iPhone 6 (meaning bigger and higher resolution screen, multi-window/multi-tasking etc.) Apple "discovered" that more cores and more RAM was needed also. So Apple is now on 3 GB of RAM, that is the same amount of RAM that the Galaxy S6 and Note 6 had.

"In addition to ditching a physical home button, the S8 also appears to be preempting the "iPhone 8" through its facial scanning and augmented reality support."

Please guys, tell the truth. The Galaxy Note 7 had iris scanning. Further, Android phones have had iris scanning as far back as 2015 when Qualcomm first began building the capability into their chips.

Second, augmented reality support was built into Android thanks to Google and Qualcomm in Android 7. So thank Google's Project Tango for AR support, and Google announced Project Tango in 2014. The first device to fully support Project Tango was the Lenovo Phab 2 Pro released in 2016. And as Project Tango is supported at the hardware layer with the Qualcomm SOC, every Android phone that has the Snapdragon 835 and Android 7 will fully support AR, and also will fully support VR because Android 7 and the Snapdragon 835 support the Daydream VR platform too (although you will not hear Samsung mention that, as Samsung's Gear VR is on the competing Oculus platform). In fact, as the Snapdragon 821 also supports both Tango and Daydream, the LG G6 and the $499 Asus ZenFone AR - the best Android device for the money as the thing even has 8 GB of RAM! - also have AR and VR support.

So please folks, stop claiming that ideas that Samsung - and a host of other Android OEMs - implemented first, and in some cases YEARS FIRST - are attempts to copy Apple. Even the physical home button ... less an attempt to copy Apple than an attempt to maximize the screen to bezel ratio. Physical home button support was never in base Android but was added by Samsung into TouchWiz. Samsung - and LG - are adopting a design similar to 2014's Sharp Aquos Crystal. So, unless Apple emulates Samsung with a curved OLED screen, the iPhone 8 will be a derivative of this guy ... which also does not have a physical home button.

http://www.sharpusa.com/ForHome/Mobile/Models/AQUOSCRYSTAL-306SH.aspx

Yesterday a dubious post claiming that Microsoft's days are numbered ... when in reality their profits and market share are rising. Today an equally dubious post about Google's products and services that 1) are not in competition with any Apple product and are hence irrelevant to an Apple blog and 2) are themselves among the most popular apps and services used by owners of iOS and macOS devices, which would mean that if they do in fact pose the great threat and evil that the author claims, Apple is responsible to block it yet has not for years, does not and will not.

Echoing my comment from yesterday, stuff like this will only increase as Apple's long stretch of exchanging innovation, risk-taking and new ideas for "me too products" (Apple Watch not much different from Samsung Gear and Android Wear; "new" Apple TV not much different from Amazon Fire TV and Android TV and barely superior to Roku; Apple Music basically Spotify/Pandora/Google Play Music; iPad Pro basically Samsung Galaxy Note Pro with a little Microsoft Surface; iPhone 8 is going to be a full on Galaxy Note/S device; Apple Pay a slightly better Google Wallet; attempts to launch TV content service that is similar to what is provided by Netflix/Hulu/YouTube; HealthKit/HomeKit/CarPlay products very similar to what was on the market prior or about the same time, plus they were never adopted in serious numbers anyway, and Apple's push to use security/privacy as differentiators fell on deaf ears also ... and yes when Apple finally does introduce their own VR/AR products they will inevitably be compared to existing Google, Samsung, Sony etc. devices that are already being used by millions of people) goes on as attacks on competing products and the companies that make them will become more vehement and ridiculous and less fact-based. 

What needs to happen is for Apple to get back to new ideas that are compelling, original and successful in the marketplace. Attacking Apple's competitors for merely existing - when competition is not only inevitable in a market economy but desirable and necessary - only reveals the frustration over this not happening. Not saying that the competitor's products are great or even very good - they aren't - but something always beats nothing and generally beats more of the same. 

Why is this comparison even being made? Apple = electronics hardware company. Google = Internet software and services company. Their only areas of overlap: Apple produces the minimal amount of software and services required to sell their hardware. Before you retort macOS, iOS, tvOS and watchOS please note that a lot of computer science/architecture types consider the operating system to be a virtual hardware layer, which is why hardware companies tend to be the ones who make operating systems. And Google got into hardware - including Android and ChromeOS - in order to protect their Internet software and services business from being overtaken by Microsoft. And by the way ... Google didn't actually create Android or ChromeOS. Google BOUGHT Android, originally a company who wanted to use the OS as firmware for cameras and robots. ChromeOS meanwhile is basically Debian Linux with everything not necessary to run the Chrome browser stripped out. So a better point of comparison for Apple would be IBM - their original competitor - or HP. But I guess since IBM and HP are shells of their former selves - as is the American electronics and computer industry as a whole save Apple - there would have been no point. Ditto with Dell, who never was really that much for R&D but was just a Wintel clone company even in their heyday. AT&T was an R&D powerhouse (creator of the UNIX OS and the C programming language ... which means that Apple's revival with OS X and iOS owes a whole lot to AT&T I guess!) but they were never a consumer or even enterprise computer hardware company per se and they are also a shell of the companies that used to sit at or near the top of the Fortune 500. And Samsung? Their prowess is more due to having their hands in a lot of jars - components, appliances, Wintel (and ChromeOS) PCs, "dumb" electronics like TVs and radios, even shipbuilding - instead of innovating or excelling in any one area (save for components). They would have never even had the idea to join their appliances, dumb electronics and "smart" computer products together had Apple and Google not given them the idea first. A better point of comparison for Google? Yahoo no longer exists in any meaningful form, and they were more of an entertainment/media company than a software/services company anyway. (Note that Google wisely never attempted to directly compete with either Yahoo or Microsoft in entertainment, content, media or even being a web portal. That is, except for buying YouTube, whose reach and revenue crushes Yahoo and Microsoft combined in content and media. And that does not even count Google Play Movies, TV, Books and Music, which were actually created to compete with iTunes and not anything that Microsoft and Yahoo were doing.) Microsoft? Google did to them what Apple did to IBM and HP by crushing them in search, mobile and even web browsers. Likely because Microsoft saw Yahoo and Apple as their real competition and did not acknowledge Google until it was too late. (Thanks Ballmer!) And Google merely wants to believe that they are a threat to Microsoft in enterprise and cloud, but that is a delusion. Amazon? Tried to take on Google in mobile using Google's own operating system and lost badly. Despite what people believe, Amazon is not a direct threat to Google in search because Amazon does not do ads, and Amazon search is only relevant for things bought on Amazon's site. So that leaves cloud, where Microsoft is a bigger competitor to AWS and ACS than Google. Facebook? Similar to Amazon, the "Google is doomed" crowd claims that they pose some sort of threat in ads and apps, but the Facebook app revenue dried up and blowed away with no one mentioning how wrong they were to ever claim that it was a threat to Google Play in the first place (when was the last time you heard anyone speak of Facebook sensation Farmville ... exactly ... those folks moved onto Clash of Clans and Minecraft on iOS and Android ages ago) and the ad market is more than big enough to support both Google and Facebook. Not to mention only a tiny fraction of the population actually spends all their time immersed in Facebook all day as opposed to merely checking it from time to time ... and often doing so from the Chrome browser and/or their Android apps in the process. So I guess the reasons to compare them are their both being #1 in their respective realms with no real competition, and being #1 and #2 overall. But they still truly honestly have nothing to do with each other. Beyond the fact that Google makes a ton of money by having their software and services on iOS and macOS devices, and Apple benefited greatly by Android keeping Windows Mobile from becoming viable. A final word: yes the cultures are different. Apple is a legacy tech company from the 70s, meaning their approach to R&D is totally different. If you are a programmer, think "waterfall method" or structured design method where the emphasis is on building the product from bottom up, designing and fine tuning each piece, and finally coming out with a fully developed end product. Google is a newer tech company with a "rapid development" culture (again, think "agile" for programmers) where the emphasis is on getting a viable product out as quickly as possible, often by (haphazardly) mashing together and reusing components from other products and projects along the way. Which approach is better? Apple's is for Apple and Google's is for Google. If you make consumer hardware, well-thought, designed and engineered products that "just work" - as well as products that are legitimately new ways to do things such as a music player with permanent storage and downloadable content or a mobile phone with touchscreen interface and downloadable applications - is as good as it gets for most of the population. By contrast, Google's approach helped them A) win the search engine wars against Yahoo and Lycos then win the browser wars against Firefox and Microsoft then C) win the mobile OS race against Microsoft, Nokia, Blackberry and Sun/Oracle. The last one was key. Microsoft, Nokia, Blackberry and Sun already had their own mobile device platforms either on the market or in development and had been FOR YEARS. Google meanwhile was able to buy Android, use it to create a Blackberry OS clone in 2 years AND THEN react to the introduction of the iPhone by launching their own iPhone OS clone AND app store in less than 12 months! Microsoft, by comparison, didn't shift from Microsoft CE (the guts of Windows Phone 7 ... Windows Phone 7 was just Windows CE with the Zune Tiles UI) to a true mobile OS until 2012, by which time Google was on Android Jellybean, and Samsung had made Android a success with the Galaxy S3 - which sold 70 million units - and Galaxy Note 2. So while it is easy to laugh at Google's many failures and half-baked ideas in comparison with Apple's superior end user products and much lower failure rate, the reality is that if it were not for Google breaking all those eggs, Microsoft would have swallowed them up 10 years ago and Yahoo - whose existence Microsoft would have tolerated for antitrust reasons - would have inherited the scraps ... Yahoo would have eventually bought YouTube for instance. And a Microsoft that combines their own market share position in PC OS and enterprise software and cloud with Google's prowess in search and mobile would be truly monstrous. Especially when you consider that their partners Intel, IBM, HP and Dell would still be as powerful as ever ... IBM, HP and Dell would be making and selling Windows 8 phones and tablets by the truckload - viable in the marketplace by selling them at half the cost of the Apple equivalent just as they did during their PC dominance era, and just as Samsung does with Android devices now - all with Intel inside and bundled with Microsoft software, services and apps. It would be terrible for the market, terrible for innovation, horrible for the consumer, and it is chilling to ponder the economic, cultural and POLITICAL power that the colossus that Microsoft would have become. Apple and Google - though working separately and as enemies - had their cultures of innovation that tamed the Wintel beast and resulted in a tech landscape with 5 major players - Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft and Google - instead of one where it really would have been Microsoft and everyone else, because Microsoft would have been just that big had they been able to combine PC, enterprise, search and mobile. Think about it ... Microsoft never really did try to get into social networking, but they likely would have done that too, and may have even been successful if they had found a way to use Microsoft Office and their other enterprise platforms as a launching pad for a social network for professionals. And students. And everyone who uses Microsoft Office products, which back then WAS basically everybody, even if they used a Mac. So yes, such an effort would have been the rival for Facebook that Google's failed Google+ never was. That is just one example ... there are many more.

Calling Apple and Google competitors is a bit much. Scratch that ... it is a whole much.

Apple: hardware company. Yes, they offer services, but with the exception of iTunes and iCloud for Windows and Apple Music for Android, the services are proprietary to their hardware. Google: software and services company. Yes, they offer hardware, but only as necessary for the sake of the viability of their software and services.

Apple has no true competitor in hardware. They also have none in software and services since their software and services are mostly limited to their hardware, and they are also essential for the hardware to operate. And no, Apple's software and services do not truly compete with Google's, even on Apple hardware. Apple has no equivalent to Google Search, while only a fraction if iOS and Mac OS X users heavily utilize the likes of Google Play Music and/or Google Play Movies and TV as opposed to iTunes. So that leaves minor skirmishes such as Google Maps versus Apple Maps.

Google is really not even trying to compete with Apple in hardware either. They publicly, loudly claim that the Pixel phone is aimed at iPhone users, but that is mainly for the purposes of keeping good relations with Android manufacturers, especially those other than Samsung that try to have a large presence in the west but exist on tight margins i.e. LG, HTC, Motorola and increasingly Huawei. Their Chromebook is not a competitor with either the iPad or any MacBook, and their other hardware products are in categories that Apple has not entered (VR/AR, smart home) or they entered before Apple (smartwatches).

Google's actual competitors are Microsoft, Amazon and some say Facebook. All 3 compete with Google in search to a degree. All 3 compete directly with them in Internet advertising. The former 2 compete with them directly in cloud, and the last one is Google's biggest threat in search and their biggest competitor in providing Internet services in developing countries. (SpaceX accidentally helped Google in that regards by blowing up Facebook's satellite, and the Indian government did so also by rejecting Facebook's free Internet access initiative ... that would have funneled users directly to Facebook.) 10-12 years ago, Google was terrified that Microsoft was going to use Bing to crush them in mobile search, and then use that to get mobile users to use Bing in desktop search as well. Remember: at the time Microsoft was indeed a leader of sorts in the very fragmented mobile landscape, and they had also beaten out Google for the Yahoo back-end search contract. THAT was why Google developed Android. Had they not done so, Google would probably be out of business by now, Microsoft Mobile would have succeeded and have huge global marketshare, Microsoft would be a crushing goliath in desktop, enterprise and mobile, plus Yahoo and Nokia would be vital and powerful too. Samsung, LG, HTC, Sony, Motorola and the rest would be fighting each other for whatever remaining scraps of the Windows Phone market that Nokia left over.

As it is, Google and Apple are enjoying their respective slices of the mobile market that have basically settled into a 50/50 share domestic and 80/20 share global, with Microsoft and the rest of the competitors having given up. And Google's mobile success also allows them to keep the advantage over Microsoft on desktop search to the point where more Windows users rely on the Chrome browser than IE or Edge. Mission accomplished and Microsoft threat neutralized, as Microsoft is focusing less and less on their consumer business and more and more on their enterprise business. Microsoft's biggest consumer strategy right now: getting 32 bit Windows apps to run on ARM CPUs so they can compete with Android on the low end of the tablet market. Seriously. Google has been trying for years to come up with an alternative to Facebook and losing. Right now, their plan to counteract Facebook is to add more social features to YouTube. That has a better chance of succeeding than Hangouts and Google+ ever did. Still, Facebook never really turned into the direct threat to Google that a lot of analysts spent years predicting that it would. There is plenty of ad revenue to go around for both, plus only 42% of the U.S. population is even on Facebook to begin with.

That leaves Amazon. Google right now is a little bit concerned that Alexa can threaten them by shifting people from mobile search to voice search. Still, even there you have at most 20 million Alexa units in the wild versus 2 billion Android devices, and that does not count the regular Google searchers on Windows (billions), iOS (again billions) and Mac OS X. Also, Google now has a competitor to Alexa - though it is now inferior - that they can release to their Android devices whenever they have to. So Alexa is a much smaller threat to Google than the analysts choose to believe: much tinier than Facebook and miniscule to the real existential threat posed by by the Microsoft/Yahoo partnership.

So while Google and Apple have (small) areas of overlap, they are not competitors by any means. Instead, they almost certainly make far more money due to the other's existence than they take away from each other. Especially considering that the existence of both iOS and Android crushed Microsoft in mobile.