As much of a jerk as jobs was, and i'm still pissed he canceled the Newton just as it was about to take off, he was good for the company as an entity, and gave them focus. And while i was not thrilled with some of his 'lock down' directions that he started, I agree that without him they have lost their way totally and are floundering on where to go next. The are NOT hurting for cash tho.. yet... Moving toward ARM, i guess wasn't a bad direction for the company. Gives them control over the ISA ( for more 3rd party lock-out ), and does give them low power options that Intel just cant yet deliver. Much of the reason they left power PC, while a far better architecture than x86, it was too power hungry for modern portable consumer devices and stay competitive. ( if i remember right the G5 was the line they could not cross, it was just too hungry for a battery powered device )
And yes, while traditionally, ARM has been 'lower performance for the sake of power consumption" that isn't necessarily a requirement of the architecture. There are some pretty powerful ARM chips out there now. Of course they are not as power friendly and produce a bit of heat, but they do exist and are scary fast.
RPI.. ewww they are far overrated in my book. Sure, ill give the foundation credit for introducing SBC dev boards to the unwashed masses and driving costs down for the rest of us dev guys, but there are far better ARM boards out there for not much more $. ( much like Arduino was overrated,. but its wide marketing success made it possible for real hardware to come along at a decent price, like the ExpressIF people. )
Browning out the neighborhood? Heh, i about did that with my ASIC crypto mining setup not long ago. ( now mostly retired, as the margin is too tight for me, with 'value' being too unstable and power slowly creeping up in cost for me to run it on the incoming power lines. Solar only now... )
Sun Nov 15 2020 08:22:45 EST from ParanoidDelusions @ Uncensored
Sun Nov 15 2020 08:10:27 ESTfrom Nurb432 @ UncensoredThey did, and they will. Its apple. Their fan base will take whatever is given to them and ask for another, at a higher price.
The difference is that Apple has faltered traditionally with bad decisions without Steve Jobs at the helm.
A lot of the appeal of Apple has been in a cult of personality. They've actually stumbled fairly consistently since Job's passed on. The iPhone has been seen as iterative and even as a step backwards in the current generation by many longterm iPhone users - iPad has consistently lost share to Android tablets, and the tablet market is really a passing fad at this point - not nearly as hot as it was. I think people found some utility for them, and a lot of people found a LOT of utility for them, but overall, there are a lot of dusty tablets sitting somewhere between a large phone and a nice laptop around the world at this point. Among artists, in particular graphic design artists and CGI artists - Apple has had a significant loss of favor as their GPUs lagged behind those available on WinTel offerings for a long time, Surface aggressively courted this market with devices designed to make a Surface more like an Intuios Cintic, they've made their MBPs impossible to upgrade at all, and the butterfly keyboard was a disaster.I've been hearing more and more very loyal Apple users saying they were either disappointed with the performance of Apple, or that they had walked away completely.
If their vision of this doesn't deliver - Apple could find themselves in big trouble.But I do see a lot of *optimism* among those who drink from the Fountain of Saint Steve, too. More than I expected are *eager* to move from Intel performance based CPUs and GPUs to consumer grade, low power, low performance mobile device chips as their fulltime computing platform.
Of course, with that said, I run my Citadel on a Pi - and a friend of mine were just talking about how you could easily make a home rack and use Pi boards as mini blade servers in a Linux cluster to get some really inexpensive, really powerful home server horsepower that didn't brown-out the neighborhood when you powered it up.
First home PC? Nope. First MP3 player? Nope. First tablet? Nope. First Smart phone? Nope.
But they really did define those things (with the exception of the PC).
Android is only "winning" because the OS is free and the stuff is generally crap. Billions of really bad Android tablets and phones.
There aren't that many major leaps in technology....
I think Apple's biggest miss is in the smart speaker market.
The core OS may be free, but if you want to give your users access to google services ( legally anyway ), there is a fee. And while i agree there are tons of bad products ( but they are cheap, so are readily available to everyone in any economic class ), there are also tons of good ones. Many, better than apple offerings. ( and just as expensive.. )
Sun Nov 15 2020 17:08:04 EST from Ragnar Danneskjold @ UncensoredI've said for a long time - Apple has NEVER been innovative, but they have DEFINED things.
First home PC? Nope. First MP3 player? Nope. First tablet? Nope. First Smart phone? Nope.
But they really did define those things (with the exception of the PC).
Android is only "winning" because the OS is free and the stuff is generally crap. Billions of really bad Android tablets and phones.
There aren't that many major leaps in technology....
I think Apple's biggest miss is in the smart speaker market.
That being said, I've had a couple of Samsung tablets. They were generally nice.
And that's probably what will happen. Instead of being locked into a contract with a carrier, you'll be locked into a contract with the phone manufacturer.
Sun Nov 15 2020 05:19:47 PM EST from Ragnar Danneskjold @ UncensoredFrom what I've seen, there's two good Android implementaions, Google's and Samsung's. And neither seems to have great long term support.
That being said, I've had a couple of Samsung tablets. They were generally nice.
I liked my Galaxy S3, everything except for the bloatware they had on it that couldn't be uninstalled. I had that phone for years, long past its EOL.
I've said for a long time - Apple has NEVER been innovative, but they
have DEFINED things.
Saint Steve had a really great head for industrial design, no doubt. I wonder if that will continue to be the case. You do have to worry about these ultrabooks' reliability, be they PC or Mac.
Mon Nov 16 2020 08:39:30 EST from zooer @ Uncensored
Sun Nov 15 2020 05:19:47 PM EST from Ragnar Danneskjold @ UncensoredFrom what I've seen, there's two good Android implementaions, Google's and Samsung's. And neither seems to have great long term support.
That being said, I've had a couple of Samsung tablets. They were generally nice.
I liked my Galaxy S3, everything except for the bloatware they had on it that couldn't be uninstalled. I had that phone for years, long past its EOL.
I had an S7 edge after my Note 7 was recalled. Outside of the warranty, the S7 battery started swelling - they sent me a replacement free - but while it was away, I went back to my Note 4, and THAT worked great, really.
I now have a Note 10+. I'm not sure why anyone would buy a flagship iPhone. I *guess* if you're totally invested in the Apple ecosystem, tablet, PC and phone - the integration is super tight.
To me, that is like basically putting the collar on yourself, though.
But, it is a $1200 phone. It better be good.
I think he's become a fanboy.
He's already about to go buy an Apple watch.
I'll try to grab all of his thoughts, but he said how face ID was always problematic, joining calls together would make things disappear, and how much better dealing with all of our MFA apps is on the Apple.
Now, he's not the average user, he's our head of DevOps and a really bright guy.
Thought it was interesting, especially given these conversations here.
For me, I'm a bit disappointed in the lastest iOS and OS X - they're starting to hide too much.... They always struck a decent balance and now it seems they're more concerned with looks than usability.
Mon Nov 16 2020 15:49:42 EST from Ragnar Danneskjold @ UncensoredI was just talking to one of my employees. After years of being a die-hard Android user, he made the switch to Apple.
I think he's become a fanboy.
He's already about to go buy an Apple watch.
I'll try to grab all of his thoughts, but he said how face ID was always problematic, joining calls together would make things disappear, and how much better dealing with all of our MFA apps is on the Apple.
Now, he's not the average user, he's our head of DevOps and a really bright guy.
Thought it was interesting, especially given these conversations here.
For me, I'm a bit disappointed in the lastest iOS and OS X - they're starting to hide too much.... They always struck a decent balance and now it seems they're more concerned with looks than usability.
Interestingly, my wife has had corporate iPhones for years, and my kid has had one since 8th or 9th grade. When she left this job, she was pretty fed up with the way iPhone tied her into other Apple products and all the hassles of integrating Apple's ecosystem with Windows and Google products that she had to use professionally. I convinced her to give a Note 10 a try - and she loves it. The first week there was a lot of, "This is never going to work, I'm going to have to return it. It doesn't do "this" with my calendar - or my contacts or my notes...
But I walked her through each of those obstacles, and showed her how not only does it do those things, but it actually gives her more POWER over doing it.
Now, she is pretty bought in. She isn't the head of DevOps, but she is a Director level executive who is pretty technically sharp - able to make her own Access databases and have intelligent conversations with the IT staff at her companies.
Once I showed her the value add of Android as a platform - she realized she gave up some convenience for a lot more power and flexibility - a lot more autonomy.
Maybe the DevOps guy just doesn't want to deal with another device with that kind of power. He just wants a user appliance when he gets off work?
My experience has been that most 'android bugs' have have been introduced by the phone manufactures with their crap, or carriers, with their crap. Sure, in a practical matter, its still bugs in your device, but i like to put blame where it deserves, and then work around those issues, if i can.
I quit buying carrier phones a LONG time ago which helped tremendously and once i switched to a Chinese vendor that uses officially blessed and paid for "Android One" ( that about as close as you can get to pure android, other than on a nexus device ) i have had almost no issues. Only problem i have seen so far after several years is with BT signal strength and cutting out due to it. And that is vendor specific, so it falls under the 'device manufacturer' section, not the OS.
Tue Nov 17 2020 12:47:55 EST from Ragnar Danneskjold @ UncensoredNo, I don't think he's looking for the "appliance" experience. I think he's been looking for a less buggy system....
Tue Nov 17 2020 12:47:55 EST from Ragnar Danneskjold @ UncensoredNo, I don't think he's looking for the "appliance" experience. I think he's been looking for a less buggy system....
It is easy to not have bugs, when you don't do complex things.
"This doesn't crash your system, because the system doesn't DO this."
The less buggy system is largely the result of a Most Restrictive appliance computing approach to userland experience.
So, tomato tomahto. But if he is happy with it... it doesn't matter how he gets there.
once i switched to a Chinese vendor that uses
officially blessed and paid for "Android One" ( that about as close
as you can get to pure android, other than on a nexus device ) i have
had almost no issues.
Tell me more. This is exactly what I want for my next phone. Works with US carriers? Able to delete ANY app (gmail, chrome) if I want to? I'm tired of "this is a system app and cannot be deleted" simply because Google or Samsung decided they don't *want* you deleting their favorites.
Its still a google centric device, so you cant easily get rid of the google stuff. ( tho its a minimal set, even hangouts i had to manually install ) what it does do is get rid of carrier and vendor garbage. I have bought into the google ecosystem, so it works for me. Android one is basically the same as a nexus device, just from a 3rd party, and couple hundred instead of several hundred dollars. Xiaomi ( one of the biggest Chinese tech companies. Often called the Apple of china" ) sells at least 2 models running Android One. They also sell phones with their own version of android too. Not as bad as something like Samsung, but still bloat. And yes, US market options. Might be other vendors still pushing android one too, but most of the ones i saw in the past were low end models, and i wasn't interested in that. xiaomi's were mid range, and i had been buying their regular phones for a while anyway so i jumped on the chance when they offered it.
If you want out of the google ecosystem, i think your best bet is a pinephone.. its basically running generic Linux, not android. its also repairable and up-gradable as they release new modules and such. Even the battery can be replaced easily :) While i dont need it, its tempting anyway. I have a pinebook pro, and while not perfect its more than 'good enough' to be able to get out of the x86 world.
Thu Nov 19 2020 15:31:00 EST from IGnatius T Foobar @ Uncensoredonce i switched to a Chinese vendor that uses
officially blessed and paid for "Android One" ( that about as close
as you can get to pure android, other than on a nexus device ) i have
had almost no issues.
Tell me more. This is exactly what I want for my next phone. Works with US carriers? Able to delete ANY app (gmail, chrome) if I want to? I'm tired of "this is a system app and cannot be deleted" simply because Google or Samsung decided they don't *want* you deleting their favorites.
Fri Nov 20 2020 09:14:38 EST from Nurb432 @ Uncensored
If you want out of the google ecosystem, i think your best bet is a pinephone.. its basically running generic Linux, not android. its also repairable and up-gradable as they release new modules and such. Even the battery can be replaced easily :) While i dont need it, its tempting anyway. I have a pinebook pro, and while not perfect its more than 'good enough' to be able to get out of the x86 world.
Well, and off to DuckDuckGo I am...
Its still a google centric device, so you cant easily get rid of the google stuff. ( tho its a minimal set, even hangouts i had to manually install ) what it does do is get rid of carrier and vendor garbage. I have bought into the google ecosystem, so it works for me. Android one is basically the same as a nexus device, just from a 3rd party, and couple hundred instead of several hundred dollars. Xiaomi ( one of the biggest Chinese tech companies. Often called the Apple of china" ) sells at least 2 models running Android One. They also sell phones with their own version of android too. Not as bad as something like Samsung, but still bloat. And yes, US market options. Might be other vendors still pushing android one too, but most of the ones i saw in the past were low end models, and i wasn't interested in that. xiaomi's were mid range, and i had been buying their regular phones for a while anyway so i jumped on the chance when they offered it.
If you want out of the google ecosystem, i think your best bet is a pinephone.. its basically running generic Linux, not android. its also repairable and up-gradable as they release new modules and such. Even the battery can be replaced easily :) While i dont need it, its tempting anyway. I have a pinebook pro, and while not perfect its more than 'good enough' to be able to get out of the x86 world.
Thu Nov 19 2020 15:31:00 EST from IGnatius T Foobar @ Uncensoredonce i switched to a Chinese vendor that uses
officially blessed and paid for "Android One" ( that about as close
as you can get to pure android, other than on a nexus device ) i have
had almost no issues.
Tell me more. This is exactly what I want for my next phone. Works with US carriers? Able to delete ANY app (gmail, chrome) if I want to? I'm tired of "this is a system app and cannot be deleted" simply because Google or Samsung decided they don't *want* you deleting their favorites.
https://www.pine64.org/pinephone/
Fri Nov 20 2020 10:32:29 EST from ParanoidDelusions @ Uncensored
Fri Nov 20 2020 09:14:38 EST from Nurb432 @ Uncensored
Well, and off to DuckDuckGo I am...