cloudguy

@The_New_tonton and @GeorgeBMac:

Enough of the self-serving narratives from people who don't buy or use Android phones. Here is the truth: LG was a bizarre combination of arrogant and cowardly.

They were cowardly because - similar to Sony - they refused to advertise. It is amazing: both Sony and LG were willing to spend tons advertising their legacy products like video, audio, appliances etc. But the next ad that I see for a Sony or LG smartphone or tablet will be the first. Well I take that back: LG aired a series of weird ads a few years ago that didn't even show their phones.

As for the arrogant part: they were unwilling to go the route of HMD Global (Nokia), Motorola, ZTE and the rest by focusing on compelling midrange and cheap devices. It is simple: offer a basically unmodified version of Android, ditch your custom apps and services (which are costly to make and maintain but only lose money) and better yet get Microsoft, Amazon or someone else to pay you to put their apps and skin (an Android skin is a custom UX/UI to replace the generic one that Google ships that everybody hates) on your device. You can then either put the latest Qualcomm CPU in a device with last year's tech - like OnePlus once did - or put either last year's Qualcomm CPU or the latest MediaTek CPU in a device with this year's tech. You wind up with a very good device that costs half what a Samsung Galaxy S or iPhone costs. 

That - and offering "gaming phones" that actually exceed Samsung flagship specs and performance that are made primarily for the Asian market - are what the other Android companies are doing now. LG refused because "they're a big global brand." Yeah, but what is the point of being "a big global brand" if you aren't going to advertise? If you are going to be like the other bargain brands and not advertise then you need to adopt the bargain strategy that they do. You especially don't try to be a premium brand with flagship devices while shipping your own buggy customized version of Android that makes the hardware perform worse and for which you never push updates. Good grief.

All LG needed to do was cut the side deal with Microsoft that Samsung has now. Of course Samsung retains their own One UI skin - formerly TouchWiz - because people actually like it. (Much of it has been incorporated in Google stock Android.) But Microsoft is paying Samsung hundreds of millions a year to put their apps and services on their devices and they promote/sell Samsung's phones in the Microsoft store right along side their own hardware. (Microsoft fans are ... ambivalent about this.) LG should have beaten Samsung to the punch. They could have given Microsoft the responsibility of designing the skin (Microsoft already has a launcher - a skin as an app - and turning it into a formal skin merely means adding the app code to the default Google code) and providing regular OS and security updates. They could have been the ones to promote Office 365, OneDrive, xCloud etc. and even launched a global advertising campaign with Microsoft declaring their phones and tablets as "work/play devices." 

But they were too proud on one hand and too risk averse on the other to pursue it. While Samsung was taking risks by working on foldable phones - and even put up with getting laughed at when their first gen foldable phone device had to be recalled - LG just added a snapon case that functions as a second screen that didn't even have UI support. (Again, cut a deal with Microsoft and the same excellent second screen support that Microsoft implemented for the Duo could have been on LG phones years ago.) 

Sony is the same. They spend tons of money promoting a PlayStation device that they have admitted loses them money for each they sell. And they only sell about 25 million PlayStations in a good year. They could sell 50-100 million midrange Android phones and tablets a year for what a PlayStation costs and actually make money on them. They could actually take any number of the Android PS2 and PS3 emulators that people already download from the Play Store, fix the bugs and give them cloud features and use them to sell old PlayStation games through their own storefront! Why they didn't do this? Funny story actually ... because Sony didn't want their phones and tablets to compete with their Playstation handhelds. But the handhelds didn't sell anyway - because people were buying iPhones, iPads and Galaxy devices to game on - and Sony wound up pulling them. (Facepalm.)

LG and Sony. So much potential but were killed off by a combination of arrogance, risk aversion and parochialism. The funny thing: LG and Sony were both considered superior brands before the smartphone boom. Samsung was considered a bulk supplier of appliances and generic electronics and not a player in computing or high tech at all. Maybe it was precisely because they were considered second class that they were willing to take the risks and do the things that LG and Sony considered beneath them. Ah well, who needs those hundreds of billions in profits anyway? The worst part is that thanks to the halo of their smartphone business, Samsung's electronics and appliances are now far better regarded also. Just a complete and total disaster. Sony had just better hope that Apple doesn't make a serious move into video gaming. Because if they do, Samsung will copy it and the competition from Apple, Microsoft and Samsung won't leave anything left for PlayStation.

KBuffett said:

Apple really should have dominated the Gaming and Streaming markets by now. They seem to be going things by halves far too often now, rather like Google’s long list of failed offerings.

Please know that no top Apple executive has ever had much of a regard for video gaming. I don't blame them and neither should you. Study the video game industry and its history. Similar to Hollywood, video gaming is an industry that is very difficult to break into, extremely expensive to maintain traction in, yet ultimately isn't very lucrative. At all.

The top video gaming companies? Let's exclude Microsoft, who only gets a very small fraction of their profits from gaming. You have:
Sony (who gets a much bigger slice of their revenue from gaming than Microsoft but it is still a small part of what they do)\
Tencent (I don't like including them ... but no choice really)
Nintendo
Valve
Epic
Electronic Arts
Ubisoft

Don't you realize how comparatively tiny those companies are? Even if you take Sony and Tencent off the board, Apple could gobble the rest of them up with their spare pocket change.

I know, you are asking: "if video gaming is so unimportant why did Microsoft invest so much in it"? That goes back to the "learn video game history" part: Bill Gates got it into his head that consumers might start buying PlayStations instead of Windows PCs. I know, it makes absolutely no sense, but in his defense, it helps to remember that Sony was a huge deal back then - the world's leading consumer electronics company - and that PCs were way more expensive back then (where now a decent Chromebook costs less than a PS5). The more technical people at Microsoft had more legitimate concerns: that developers were going to abandon DirectX for the PS2 platform - which Sony originally intended to be used for more than gaming consoles - so Gates' paranoia was actually beneficial for their own purposes. But please note that neither Gates or the Microsoft tech architects ever cared about video gaming for its own sake. Why? Because there isn't a whole lot of money in it, and the money that does exist in it is extremely hard to make.

Google came to the same decision when they killed their Stadia studio: they would have needed to invest hundreds of millions in order to maybe make $1 billion years down the line. They'd make much more money easier and faster by expanding YouTube TV and making a Pixel phone that's actually decent (positive developments on towards both were announced this week). 

dk49 said:

If ARM has its own AI engine now, what does it mean for Apple's Neural engine? Is it possible for Apple to completely discard ARMs AI engine in their processors or they will have to build theirs on top of ARMs? If yes then will it not break ARM's licence? 

See above. Apple is an ARM Holdings co-founder. They have a perpetual architectural license. This allows them to design ARM cores and other IP that are completely different and separate from what ARM does. While they use the same general tech, they have as little to do with each other as does - say - Microsoft's Visual C++ and Apple's Objective C.

rob53 said:

Is Apple required to push their Apple developed ARM designs back to the main ARM design architecture? It appears v9 will include many of the ideas Apple has developed. 

As for Nvidia buying Arm Ltd there better be a whole lot more investigation into how Nvidia will be allowed to control the architecture and its users before they’re allowed to buy them. 

You are wrong on both counts.

1. The v9 contains things that ARM developed independently that are inferior to Apple's tech.
2. Apple WILL NOT be required to push their ARM designs back. First off, as a co-founder with a permanent architectural license, Apple is for all intents and purposes an independent entity here. Second, even if they weren't, the other ARM licensees like MediaTek, Huawei, Qualcomm and Samsung don't either. This is a real issue because for awhile both Samsung and Qualcomm were able to develop custom CPU cores that were significantly better tham ARM's generic CPU cores. (Samsung fell behind and gave up; Qualcomm's are only slightly better.) And Qualcomm's Adreno GPU design is MUCH BETTER than ARM Holdings' Mali. (The bad ARM GPUs are a major reason why Google uses Intel for Chromebooks. Samsung ditched Mali for an AMD GPU design. Nvidia's mobile GPU design - hardware and software - is much better also.) So if generic licensees like Qualcomm, Samsung and Nvidia aren't required to give up their IP to ARM Holdings there is no way that Apple - whose license is on far better terms - won't.

Basically Nvidia buying ARM has nothing to do with Apple. Nvidia doesn't even want in on the CPU game anyway. They tried that already: they made CPUs for the original batch of Android devices. When companies abandoned them for the Qualcomm/Samsung/MediaTek trio they tried to manufacture and sell their own devices - the Nvidia Shield tablet and the Nvidia Shield set top box - but that failed also. Even the Nintendo Switch uses Nvidia CPU designs that are like 4 years old because Nvidia exited that market and never updated them. The Nintendo Switch Pro will have a slightly updated Tegra CPU, but it still won't use the latest ARM cores or the latest process. Nvidia buying ARM is all about cloud, edge and IoT stuff plus ML/AI stuff, and those are areas that an end user consumer hardware company like Apple only dabbles in.

Wait what? I thought Apple was an ARM Holdings co-founder, had a permanent architectural license and their own custom design for PCs that was radically different from - and better than - the small core design for embedded systems that the ARM pushes for Cortex-A for smartphones and the somewhat better (but still not very good) Marvell and N1 core designs that are used on servers (which again aren't very good as they constitute 3% of the market, forcing Amazon, Microsoft, Google etc. to also make their own core designs and causing Marvell, HP and most other ARM server vendors to drop out of the market leaving Ampere as the only player)? Even Fujitsu, who makes ARM supercomputers, relies on a custom design (a combination of the RISC license based on SPARC that they bought from Sun back in the day and things they licensed from ARM). 

While the M1 chip has a single core score that rivals Intel Core i7 and i9, the best Cortex Core for PCs and mobile barely surpasses the Intel Pentium. (Qualcomm is hyping up the multicore score, but even there it takes 8 performance cores to merely rival the Geekbench 5 score for the quad core Intel i5). I thought that Apple having their own big core design that ARM Holdings can't come close to was why Nvidia's purchase of ARM Holdings is like "meh" for Apple as their custom CPU and GPU designs are much better - by several times - than Cortex, Mali (the ARM Holdings GPU) and even Nvidia (either their old GPU architecture or their new Ampere one) anyway.