linuxplatform

What about all the other wearable heart rate monitors on the market today and those that pre-existed the Apple Watch? Normally I am suspicious of the "everyone is a lying thieving crook but Apple who can do no wrong" crowd but even if the Apple Watch has "the best" heart rate monitor on the market among wearables there are plenty that are quite good. Garmin, Fitbit, Samsung and even Fossil are reported to have good ones in their watches and bands by the various consumer review sites and a good percentage of them even rate Garmin's as better. It may not be an open standard like, say, bluetooth but it still appears to have been a common and widely implemented technology for years.

anantksundaram said:

Have either Google or Amazon had a single original idea that has been a huge success?

Why yes. For Amazon: online bookselling. Online retailing. Cloud services/AWS. Kindle. For Google, it is a search engine that actually works. The Chrome browser. Gmail. Google Docs. Android. Chromecast. Chrome OS. Seriously, throwing out stuff like that makes you look ... not very serious. In any event, Chromecast Audio and the Google Home speakers use Chromecast. Chromecast was introduced July 2013. (Your Daniel Eran Dilinger initially hinted that it was a ripoff of Apple's AirPlay and that it would be a technological and commercial failure ... and was wrong on both counts.) As for Amazon, their speakers use DLNA, the same protocol that you can use to mirror your Amazon Kindle screen on TV boxes and smart TVs, capability that Fire tablets have had since they were introduced in 2011. Google devices like their Xoom tablet - great hardware and software, but nonexistent app support including from Google who abandoned tablets in favor of rescuing Chromebooks (which eventually proved successful ... and we know they are a success because Apple wasn't bashing them when only 2-5 million Chromebooks were selling a year) - also originally used DLNA but that was also dumped for Chromecast. Samsung's multi-room audio products (Samsung Flow and Samsung Wireless) use a combination of DLNA and bluetooth. Sonos is just desperate and trying to stay in business. Their tech is outdated and their products too expensive. Sonos admitted in their lawsuit that Google sells more speakers in a few months than Sonos sells in a year, and Amazon in turn sells more speakers in a month - or at most two - than Google sells in a year. I would bet that Samsung sells more multi-room speakers than Google does also. They are going after Google first because Google has a bad reputation (over Android, then the Snowden stuff then the monopoly stuff then the 2016 election stuff) as a PR move. In terms of the merits all Google has to say is "we use the same technology in our speakers that we have been using to stream video and audio in Chromecasts since 2013" and the case is over. They would have a better case against Amazon in theory - as Amazon didn't develop their own protocol - but Amazon is still a very popular and well-liked company so a "lawsuit as PR pressure to force a settlement payoff to keep us in business" strategy isn't going to work nearly as well for them.

rob53 said:

FUD from Intel to try and slow down Apple's migration to i's own chips. Intel won't come out with these any time soon.

They will come out before Apple comes out with their own chips which will be ... never. Seriously, I wish people will give this up. It isn't their area of expertise. CPU and SOC design isn't easy. If it was, everyone would do it. Instead there are only two CPU companies on the planet and have been for decades - Intel and AMD both of whom use the same base x86 design - and the number of SOC companies isn't that much bigger (and again they all start from the same base ARM Holdings design). Sun Microsystems, Motorola and IBM, who were all making CPUs or SOCs as recently as the 1990s? RIP. Also there is this whole "application compatibility" thing. Macs run on x86 just like Windows and Linux computers. Result: while you have to tweak for the different OSes and such, all "PC" applications are developed for the x86 instruction set. If Apple wants to use their ARM SOCs for MacBooks or develop a wholly new SOC/CPU, all those developers would have to port, rewrite or create from scratch their x86 applications or Apple would have to emulate x86 (more on this later).

 Consider what Google does with Chromebooks. Nearly all Chromebooks run on x86, nearly all Android apps are ARM. So Chromebooks run the Android apps on am ARM emulator. Were Apple to switch to either their own Ax chips or design completely new ones, they would likely have to offer x86 emulation too. Except this causes a performance hit. Not a big deal for Android apps on Chromebooks as most Android apps are designed to be able to run on dual core CPUs with 512 MB of RAM anyway. But for the desktop and productivity applications that people use on MacBook Pros? Yeah, that's a problem.

And x86 is copyrighted. Where Google can emulate ARM on ChromeOS because they picked up ARM patents when they bought Motorola (plus some ARM stuff is open source anyway) Apple cannot emulate x86 on anything without paying either Intel or AMD a ton of cash. Microsoft is dealing with this right now ... they need to emulate x86 on Qualcomm's chips to get back into the mobile space ... and Intel has responded "fine ... write us a check for every device you sell." They would give Cupertino the same terms that they give Redmond.

So while an A12 can certainly match the performance of the Intel CPUs in most MacBooks in theory - iMacs and Mac Pros not so much! - the x86 emulation would take a decent bite out of that performance. Add to that Apple needing to pay significant licensing fees to Intel - let's see you call THEM a patent troll! - PLUS the little issue that Apple would need to ensure their x86 on ARM emulation isn't too similar to Microsoft's - Redmond will sue too if it does - and it doesn't make sense from a technology or business sense.
 
Which is why Apple is never going to do it. And is why the people who keep claiming that they will have never taken so much as a high school computer architecture class.

mtlion2020 said:

my iphone hates my dell XPS, maybe this app will solve.....solve who knows?

Your iPhone hates the Windows 10 on your Dell XPS you mean and for good reason ... and BTW doesn't a MacBook Pro and a Dell XPS cost basically the same?

dysamoria said:

StrangeDays said:

dysamoria said:

Mike Wuerthele said:

rain22 said:

It's overpriced. Let me explain...

100% of professionals are looking for a powerful computer that they can upgrade/expand over time. 
99.99% of professionals did not ask for this extremely expensive specific video editing computer. 
99.99% of professionals will not buy this extremely expensive specific video editing computer. 
Therefore - the Mac Pro is in every way overpriced for the professional market. 

Pointing to the .02% of professionals who might want this and making an argument in their support while ignoring pretty much the entire market... that's a stretch.

Nope.

It is overpriced for you, and that's fine. It is not overpriced when compared to equivalent Windows Workstation machines, which is what this article is all about.

This article is about missing the point in Apple’s PR favor. The upset isn’t about Apple selling a corporate-only monster workstation. The upset is that Apple have abandoned a significant percentage of their own customers by making a machine that is only affordable for big business.

You’re just creating distraction by finding similar Windows workstations to compare against (while making illogical commentary about wheels vs Windows licensing, and acting like those of us angry at Apple for this aren’t also angry at Microsoft for their insane pricing: creating straw man arguments!).

In doing that, you’re utterly ignoring the real issue: prosumers, hobbyists, small businesses, etc CAN BUY a NON-Apple machine that is scaled for their needs and their financial situation. Apple has NO SUCH PRODUCT, and has rebranded the “pro” labeling to excise their own customers (and to useless inconsistency, when seeing what else gets the “pro” word thrown on it). Apple has left people with NO OPTION but to either abandon Mac OS or build hackintoshes. THAT IS THE ISSUE.

Also, you’ve completely missed the point of the wheels vs OS license. The wheels are a $400 optional piece of added hardware, which outrages you. The license is a $300 mandatory add-on, which doesn’t outrage you,

What are you talking about??? YES that OS licensing price outrages me!! I said as much in other comments!! Instead of trying to find ways of talking down to me, or dismissing me as an irrelevance, maybe you should pay more attention to the content of my comments.

So ... how else is a software company going to make money other than by charging licenses for the use of its software? Apple is a hardware company. It sees the operating system as a virtual extension or component of the hardware ... you have to buy them both or buy neither because they're a package deal. Even the services that they offer are primarily for the purpose of getting people to buy their hardware. So that business model works with Apple, Samsung, Sony etc. Microsoft is the opposite. So is Google. To the extent that those companies sell hardware at all, it is to be a "demo" for their software and services, which truthfully they could care less whose hardware you buy it on. Microsoft LIKES it when Lenovo, Huawei, HP etc. makes blatant copies of their Surface devices and sells them for 1/2 price because Microsoft knows they'll make 100% more money off their software that's on those Surface knockoffs than they will ever make on hardware anyway. The same deal with XBox. The original purpose of the DirectX Box - its original name - was to keep video game developers from abandoning the Windows platform in favor of the PlayStation (which had a real chance of happening during the peak PlayStation era). Sure they sold a few XBox 360s (original XBox and XBox One not so much) but the real purpose was to promote DirectX to developers and gamers on PCs and considering that Steam alone has 90 million active users - far more than bought the XBox One and XBox combined - and Fortnite has 85 million PC players (again much more than the original and current XBox) the strategy was a huge success, taking serious gaming on the Windows platform from endangered to thriving. And since Microsoft famously failed on mobile, it was basically why Windows gaming is still a thing for all but educational and very cheap flash-type games. 

But folks, if you think that the Windows Pro or Server license costs a lot, you need to look at how much the software that runs on top of Windows Server does. Oracle can go from $5800 to $47000. AND THAT IS PER MACHINE! Which means that you can't pay the $47,000 and use it to deploy it on every server that you have. That is $47,000 for each server that you need to deploy Oracle on! (Which is why Oracle bought its #3 competitor, the formerly free and open source MySQL, though it was forked into a similar FOSS RDBMS.) So bashing software companies for, well, selling software is akin to the Google fans - of which I am one - ignorantly bashing Apple for not copying Google's (original but later QUIETLY abandoned but is currently still Amazon's) strategy of selling its hardware at cost in order to make money on services. If Microsoft isn't going to make money on selling Windows Pro and Server licenses, why on earth should they sell Windows Pro and Server in the first place?