mpantone

The iPhone's cameras are perfectly fine for WWDC.

The challenge is the handset's audio recording capabilities.

I live in a suburban Silicon Valley community just like many Apple engineers. Weekday daytimes at my condo complex are NOISY. The landscapers are here at least twice a week, mowing lawns, running gas-powered leaf blowers. Today, they also did hedge trimming with gas-powered devices which also included leaf blowing for the debris after the trimming was done. And that's just my place. There's also landscape maintenance noise from the complex next door.

Garbage trucks, recycling trucks. Then there is the nearly constant construction noises from both private units as well as work being done for the complex. Tree trimming, roof cleaning, metalwork. Monday through Friday there is usually some sort of noisy activity within earshot from 8am to 7pm, quiet times are rare.

Assuming many Apple engineers live in similar Silicon Valley neighborhoods, the acoustical interruptions will be a major challenge. And that doesn't include screaming kids, barking dogs, beeping from commercial trucks backing up, etc.

Heck, there are even more screaming kid noises from the neighbors because everyone is still "sheltering in place" when normally both parents would be at work and the kids would be in offsite daycare.

The world is noisy as hell and that will be the big challenge for WWDC remote presenters.

beowulfschmidt said:

Virtually every single entry on that list above Apple is either a full-focus gaming developer, distributor, or publisher (e.g. Valve), or has a major division devoted to gaming (e.g. Microsoft), while Apple is primarily a general computing product and services company.  While Apple does pay attention to mobile gaming, I've posted before that I think they don't really care about gaming on Mac OS, and I don't see much evidence that they'd be heartbroken if even mobile gaming weren't a runaway record shattering thing.

Not sure this is an apples to apples, or even oranges, comparison.

You are correct.

This is even less surprising when one takes into account the platforms and marketshare.

Apple Arcade only runs on Apple devices running the latest version of the operating system. My iPhone XS is on iOS 12.4.1; no Apple Arcade for me. My two Macs are both running Mojave 10.14; no Arcade games there. And I have a third generation Apple TV. So no Apple Arcade in my home.

Game publishers like Activision Blizzard have titles that run on multiple platforms, almost all of them with more marketshare and penetration than Apple products. iPhones don't dominate the smartphone market, Macs comprise less than 10% of the PC market, and Apple TV is not the dominant force for set-top TV streamers. Plus Activision Blizzard has titles that run on consoles and likely handheld units. There is no Apple console hardware. Only the most recent iPod touch is supported by Apple Arcade. The previous generation iPod touches (like mine) is stuck at iOS 12.4.6, no Arcade there either.

You add all of this together and there's no plausible argument for Apple to have a dominant stance.

I don't even play videogames but this analysis is pretty short-sighted.

ravnorodom said:

My son's school uses Zoom. My work colleges use Zoom. My wife's company uses Zoom. College virtual tours also use Zoom. Funny how Zoom becomes the standard out of no where. Zoom is great only for local conference. For oversea conference, Microsoft Teams work the best without flaws.

The de facto overseas corporate standard still remains Skype to this day.

There's no surprise why Zoom became so popular. It is really easy to use and doesn't require registration unlike Skype, WebEx, Facebook/Google/whatever. If you're on a computer, if you don't want to install any software, you can connect via your web browser.

GeorgeBMac said:

T-Mobile has been the only U.S. carrier capable of going head to head with other world telecoms -- including China's.

T-Mobile is a GERMAN company brand of Deutsche Telekom AG.

T-Mobile US is the American subsidiary carrier whose ownership is: 43% Deutsche Telekom, 24% SoftBank Group (the Japanese parent company of Sprint) and about 33% publicly held shares.

Legere was an effective CEO who increased TMUS shareholder value during his tenure. However, he had bosses and his bosses have bosses who aren't American.

sirozha said:

For example, Fidelity's Active Trader Pro taxes it so much that it never turns off its fans.

That's not a particularly good example. 

Active Trader Pro is a Windows executable. On a Mac, it is running in a customized version of CrossOver (commercial Wine). ATP isn't particularly snappy on a typical consumer Windows machine either. At home I usually run ATP on a Wintel box connected to a flat-screen 1080p HDTV.

On my MacBook Air 2019, I run ATP pretty well. If I'm on battery I will generally use Turbo Boost Switcher to disable Turbo Boost. That might dock the performance slightly but at least the fans don't spin up much.

I would attribute ATP's poor performance between the application's inherent sluggishness itself and the virtualization layer's mediocre power management capabilities.