cloudguy

sflocal said:

tylersdad said:

So, in essence, if you don't have the extra funds to pay for additional RAM or drive space and you want to upgrade those at a later time, you're out of luck. 

No thanks. 

As it has been proven and reported countless times before... 99% of all consumers will NEVER upgrade their RAM or SSD after purchase.

Like it or not, that's where it's going.

Think about where it's REALLY going. Remember how brutal the first batch of cloud, web and mobile software and hardware was in the mid-2000s? This includes iPhone which launched with a Samsung CPU, 128 MB of RAM and no app store. Well look at the hardware and software on your iPhone 12 or iPad Pro and compare. Well that is Stadia today versus what services like it are going to be 10 years from now when 5G will be mature and yielding to 6G (which is right now in the "agree on specifications so we can start designing prototype hardware to implement it" stage). Long story short: buying upgrades for your end user client is going to be as much a thing of the past as going to Radio Shack for Christmas shopping and loading up on the gadgets that the iPhone replaced as stocking stuffers (and Radio Shack itself for that matter). 

Nvidia - the king of this current scene - to their credit knows that their business model is going to soon end. It is why they are trying to buy ARM Holdings and pivot to being a company that provides cloud and edge infrastructure and products. Now Intel on the other hand ... not only are they entering the dying discrete GPU market (which will be hammered by the great integrated GPUs and 5nm and below processes will make possible before cloud and edge GPU products kill it off) but they sold the very division that they should have been using to design 5G and 6G radios to integrate into their CPUs to Apple. Meaning that Apple, Qualcomm, Samsung, MediaTek (and soon Google who is beginning the process of splitting from Qualcomm) will all have this capability where Intel and AMD are the only major players who don't. 

So when you stated that Apple was getting out of the upgradeable client game, you might not have been aware of how correct you were. 10 years from now, all upgrades are going to happen in the cloud and edge.  

I've said it a million times. I will believe that an iPad will replace a PC with expandable RAM and hard drive, a discrete GPU, the ability to install applications from third party sources, a UX that supports true multitasking, the abililty to execute arbitrary code (required for entire professions), the ability to create virtual machines, the ability to segment your hard drive, the ability to dual boot multiple operating systems, play AAA video games etc. when Apple fans tell me that an iPad can replace a MacBook Pro.

Since that doesn't happen - for obvious reasons - then the entire "the iPad can replace a PC" has more to do with the low opinion that Apple fans have concerning people who choose not to buy Apple hardware than it actually does the relative capabilities of iPads versus Windows (or Linux) PCs or even Chromebooks (which can do nearly everything that a Windows or Linux PC can do in Linux mode). 

If you want the best tablet that exists for the purposes of doing whatever it is that people do with tablets then buy an iPad Pro. I will never buy another iPad again personally - $80 Walmart (or free from mobile carrier) Android tablets are fine for 1080p streaming and web surfing, ChromeOS 2-in-1s are very good for on to go productivity, foldable phones offer great versatility - but it is still a fact. But if you want actual personal computer functionality then do not buy an iPad or any other tablet. Buy a Linux (yes they do exist ... Dell, Lenovo and small manufacturers sell them) or Windows PC, a MacBook (Air or Pro) or a Chromebook. This is all that this advertising campaign is pointing out and yes it is absolutely 100% true. Just because Apple chooses for their own reasons to be the only manufacturer on the planet not to offer a PC caliber device with a touchscreen is no excuse to pass off an iPad as a device capable of performing a PC workload. It cannot. No matter how fast its CPU runs - much faster than the Intel Core i3 on my Chromebook - the UI and the restrictions don't permit it. I can load the Ubuntu app store and put any software that I need/want on my Chromebook. On the iPad? Nope. My Chromebook supports real multitasking and true filesystem apps with legitimate access to the local filesystem and local storage. An iPad? Nope. I can connect two 4K monitors to my Chromebook. I can program in Python, C++, Java, node.js, Golang etc. on ChromeOS. I can run a database or web server on my Chromebook and connect to it using my Mac Mini or MacBook Pro as a client. With an iPad Pro? Get real. An iPad Pro runs the best mobile apps in the business ... but that is all it can do. 

Microsoft is 100% right for pointing this out and no huffing and puffing from Apple fans is going to change that. What Apple fans need to do is somehow convince Tim Cook to let the next MacBook Air be a 2-in-1 with a touchscreen. (Buying a 5G modem from Qualcomm for it would be a nice touch too. 5G Windows 2-in-1s have been a thing for a couple of years and the first 5G Chromebook launches this year also. Just saying). Do that and it shuts this Microsoft advertising campaign down in its tracks because no Windows 2-in-1 is capable of matching an M1 Mac's CPU power and few are capable of matching its GPU power. (Traditional Windows laptops are another story, but 2-in-1s definitely.) Till then just grin (or cry if you choose) and bear it because it is 100% true.

Andy.Hardwake said:

A very, very bad precedent opening the door to stealing code from anyone by anyone. Just my humble opinion.

Let me guess ... you have never been a Java programmer or anyone who has ever been involved in supporting, administering or maintaining a Java-based application. Correct? Because if you were, you would know that Java has always been free and that Sun - and now Oracle - only charges for support.

You are also someone who has never been involved on the FOSS programming scene. If you were, you would know that APIs have always been treated as fair use. Just my humble facts. Which the Supreme Court agreed with. As with practically everyone else in the tech world who signed friend of the court briefs in favor of Google. The only tech companies who backed Oracle in this case were ... Google's competitors (big shock there). And even some of Google's competitors backed Google. Microsoft, who was successfully sued by Sun over Java in the past, even backed Google.

auxio said:

There is no doubt that Google's copying of Java without paying licensing fees gave them an unfair advantage over competitors who were paying those same licensing fees at the time.  It essentially gained them a mature app development platform and community of developers which Sun had invested a lot of money to build, without them paying a cent.  Which, in turn, made it easy for those developers to port their existing apps to Android and build a rich app ecosystem to compete with Apple (who had actually invested in their own app development platform).

The fact that there aren't laws to protect companies which invest heavily in R&D against those which simply look for ways to work around licensing agreements is a sad state of affairs.

1. No one was paying Sun licensing fees. Sun was giving Java away for free to anyone and everyone who wanted it because they wanted Java to be the basis of an open Internet platform that Microsoft was desperately trying to use IIS and .Net to lock down for themselves. 
2. There are laws to protect companies. Sun didn't avail themselves of those laws because they didn't want to. Sun actually had an OpenJDK version of Java the whole time. Had Google copied the practically identical OpenJDK APIs instead of the "licensed but everyone uses for free anyway" Sun JDK APIs there never would have been a case. Google switched from the Sun JDK APIs to the OpenJDK ones as soon as Oracle filed their ridiculous suit, and it took 6 months tops.
3. Didn't you pay attention to the trial? Sun's own CEO got on the stand and said the exact same thing. Oracle's counterargument was that they weren't obliged to heed Sun's FOSS stance retroactively. Which is actually true from a legal standpoint by the way. But that is totally different from what you are claiming. 
4. Sun's own mobile platform was a failure. The only big customer they got for it was Amazon to make the original Kindle e-readers, plus a couple of companies who used it to make feature phones. Oracle's claim that Google stole Android and destroyed Java's mobile platform was false to begin with.

Had Java not been free and open from day one, no one would have used it. Everyone would have used .NET instead, which is exactly what Sun didn't want. Good grief ...

Please recall that the original judge to rule on this case was a former programmer - as a hobby - and he called out Oracle's nonsense for what it was. Had the subsequent judges, juries etc. been required to take an online programming course Oracle's years long attempt to profit off Google's hard work would have been avoided. Keep in mind: Oracle was the same company who spent years claiming that the cloud would fail. Now Azure and Amazon both are making a mint on tools that will convert Oracle's byzantine legacy database into a much more modern cloud database for free. 

Oracle bought Sun - who agreed to let Google use the APIs and stated so in the trial - because they thought that they could make hundreds of billions of Java licenses. They didn't know - because I guess all their programmers were still using PL/1 and COBOL - that virtually none of the people who used Java paid for it. Sun gave Java away to nearly everyone for free because they wanted to create a standard Internet programming platform for front end, middleware and backend. Legacy companies like Microsoft, Oracle and Apple couldn't wrap their heads around the need for such a thing at the time. Even though they wanted to get paid and licensed, they were fine with Google not paying them because Sun wanted Android to succeed too. Yes, Sun wanted Android to succeed as an open mobile platform because their alternative as an open mobile platform had already failed. If Android wasn't going to succeed then mobile would have been split between proprietary incompatible platforms by Apple, Microsoft and Nokia. 

Oracle made a bad purchase and tried to sue Google in order to recoup some of their bad investment. Didn't work. Plus, software development has moved on anyway. Java is now a legacy platform. The MEAN stack - MongoDB and Javascript frameworks Express, Angular and NodeJS - has replaced the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MongoDB and Python/Perl) stack. Also the people who would have been learning Java 10 years ago are now learning Python, Golang and Rust. Even Google has essentially replaced Java on Android with Kotlin (Javascript that compiles to the JVM). 

Google delayed ARM on ChromeOS because they didn't want Oracle to cite it as a talking point. Now they are moving full steam ahead, licensing ChromeOS on Qualcomm (before it was only available on MediaTek) and also designing their own ARM SOC for use with ChromeOS and Android. They knew after the Supreme Court argument that Oracle was going to lose. All Oracle did with this nonsense was enrich their lawyers. Instead of wasting 8 years suing Google they should have spent that time and money developing their own next generation cloud database and programming language platform. Instead they bought formerly open source MySQL instead, resulting in pretty much everyone who used MySQL dumping it for any alternative they could find.