Because people should be able to get quality hardware from more than one vendor. I'm tired of chassis that flex and get visible wear spots on their finish, inferior touch pads, crappy keyboards, flimsy chargers and plugs out of the 80s and crumby displays (I mean color/angle/contrast, not useless resolution) - because I *won't* pay the apple tax.
Chassis flex and visible wear spots are hardly a reason to replace a laptop. I'd rater have 5% more performance than a nice-looking chassis that won't make me more productive. Chargers are fine. I just wish they were standardized.
Because you think that those $1 application do not collect your data? The only applications that can really be trusted are either because they are open source or because you wrote it yourself.
It depends what you consider crapware. I consider WinZIP and its infamous "I agree" nag screen to be crapware. There are tons of such examples in the App Store.
I wouldn't use an ad-supported calendar application if the built-in one wasn't good enough. Most quality free applications are either developped by charity/for fun or are part of a larger commercial offering like my banking application.
On my PC Small utilities like file archiver, CD burner, FTP client, media player, email client and even developer tools (IDE, compiler, editor) are all free and without ads. In fact I don't use any ad-supported application on my PC. Why would it be different on my phone?
You could try, but you'd either never get through the app review process
Fake diplomas and pills was a little exagerated, but there are a lot of cappy applications in the App Store, like the thousands of fart applications.
Most non-crap free applications do not intent to directly make money from the application. They don't have ads or in-app purchase. I don't have any ads or in-app purchase in my email, calendar, banking, music player or instant messaging application.
For adware, crapware and other *ware, however, I totally agree with you. Therefore if I were developing a crapware application trying to fool people into buying fake university diplomas or fake pills, I would target iOS first. I would also sell a "pro" version with ads disabled.
Which should never be an argument if you are developing a free application. I guess this is why Android has the lead in the number of free applications, but iOS probably still lead in paid applications. Also this survey is only in the USA. Apple products have far more market share in their home market than worldwide.
From what I've seen in the past, if you're looking to run big "name brand" software, your only real Linux choices are Red Hat and Suse if you want to run on a certified OS. It makes no sense to run software costing $100k+ on uncertified platforms.
No problem. Give me any OS and I will "certify" it. For a mere $1000. That's nothing when you run $100k+ software, right?
Apple had the most closed and locked-down computer platform in the 80s and they now have the most closed and locked-down smartphones. The lock is not the same. In the 80s it was simply a chain. The iPhone is now the equivalent of a maximum security prison.
I don't think the closed ecosystem has anything to do with it : i have an iPhone, and while my teenage kids love it and wouldn't stop dreaming about one, they just CAN NOT AFFORD it. So they jumped ship and bought a cheap 150€ android. While their phone is inferior, it is "good enough" for all they need to do. Now that they bought it, they're stuck in the android world partly because of the apps they bought, partly due to pride in defending their choice, but mostly because they see that their cheap phone can do EVERYTHING my iPhone can do at a quarter of the price.
apple is losing the youth, and doesn't give a shit.
Except that when we look at the most popular Android smartphones, it's always the high end Galaxy S series and such arriving on top. 150 euros phones alone do not explain how Android gets over 80% of world-wide sales during a quarter. High end Android phones certainly get over 13% anyways.
But I agree that when you have the choice between an iPhone 5C or a much cheaper Nexus 5, the decision isn't hard for a teenager. Only, the later is superior in every point despite being cheaper!
The closed ecosystem has everything to do with it. Without licensing their OS to 3rd parties, Apple does not allow competition between handsets manufacturer to push prices down.
Also, who the fuck needs 2GB of RAM on a fucking phone!?
Perhaps you only need a mid-range smartphone. That's fine. Except that it will end up being more expensive than the Nexus 5. I wouldn't say 2GB RAM is overkill when you see the CPU and GPU they include in such device. I would even say they should put 4GB RAM and half the CPU and GPU instead.
With a shorter warranty, the industry has no insensitive in building drives lasting longer. As long as they fail after the first year, they are fine. It's now a duopoly so you can't really vote with your wallet.
Yes the adresses are 64 bit. And the extra registers of the ARMv8 architecture would be used. The only downside is that array indexes are 32 bit. So you can't have an array with more than 2^32 elements. Pretty reasonable compromise to keep 32 bit compatibility. But longs in java are already 64 bit. So if your program uses long data types, it will get a speed increase by moving to 64 bit.
Google isn't porting an OS to 64 bit from scratch. Linux for ARMv8 probably already exists. So does GCC. They mainly need to make sure their userspace, including java VM, still compiles on 64 bit. Then current Android application will benefit from ARMv8 without the need for a recompile.
Yeah but 1 year warranties are a sign that the manufacturer do not trust its own drive. RAM manufactuers have lifetime warranty. Why? Because those who build it trust it. Also because they know that you are not going to RMA your faulty 64 MB 133 MHz SDRAM from the past millenium.
Because if any other part of my PC breaks I can replace it easily. However if the hard drive breaks, I loose all my data. I don't care about the drive itself but it sucks. We require higher quality drives. A few years ago, hard drives were cheap and had 5 years warranties. Now prices have gone up by 50% and warranty is now 1-2 years.
5 years should be mandatory by law. If you can't support your drive for 5 years, you shouldn't be allowed to manufacture hard drives at all. I don't understand this new trend in making new hard drives with only 1-2 years warranty. The same goes for SSD.
Samsung is already at 3GB RAM with their Note 3. They maxed out the 32 bit potential. They need 64 bit next year to go forward. Nobody denied that we need to move to 64 bit at some point. But with less RAM, Apple would have been good with 32 bits for 1 more year than Samsung. However they wouldn't have been first to 64 bit. Just like Nintendo wanted to be first to 64 bit with their gaming console.
None of these were before Apple started marketing cores and refer to the same type of "core" that Apple invented. Anyway, I was talking about phones and tablets. Apple is the first one use use the word "core" while describing its phone GPU when announcing a new phone.
Apple could easily double their CPU performance because they were already 50% slower than the competition. 64 bit is also more power hungry than 32 bit. A 64 bit register uses twice as much power as a 32 bit register. If you use it to make computation on small integers (which is what 99% of applications in the app store do), you use twice the power for no benefit.
If you've never heard anybody touting the number of cores in their GPU, you haven't been paying attention to marketing of graphics cards. Because graphics calculations are highly parallelizable, and because the parallelizing can be handled by the OS, without requiring extra effort from app developers, GPU performance particularly benefits from a multi-core architecture.
Nobody did market "cores", as in a small number of parts of a GPU. GPU makers marketed shaders pipelines, which is completely different. Recent GPUs have over 2000 shaders pipelines able to work in parallel. They don't call their 2000 shaders model "quad core" and their 1000 shaders "dual core", because it wouldn't mean anything. Apple clearly tried to confuse people when they first talked about their quad core GPU.
Historically, Apple's reports of speed increase over previous generations have proved pretty accurate when people got around to benchmarking them, so it is likely that will prove true once again. A doubling of speed is a quite respectable performance increase over a year. So maybe Apple was not mistaken in thinking that the 64 bit architecture offers real advantages given the design of their phones and iOS.
What about a fallacy. Just because they doubled the performance doesn't mean that it's because of 64 bit. It's more likely a better architecture and increased clock speed.
If Apple just wanted bragging rights, more processor cores would have been much cheaper.
No because they would have needed something like 6 cores to be able to say that they are "first". And 6 cores would have been expensive. Quad core would mean that they finally copied the competition.
Slashdot Mirror
Because people should be able to get quality hardware from more than one vendor. I'm tired of chassis that flex and get visible wear spots on their finish, inferior touch pads, crappy keyboards, flimsy chargers and plugs out of the 80s and crumby displays (I mean color/angle/contrast, not useless resolution) - because I *won't* pay the apple tax.
Chassis flex and visible wear spots are hardly a reason to replace a laptop.
I'd rater have 5% more performance than a nice-looking chassis that won't make me more productive.
Chargers are fine. I just wish they were standardized.
Why don't they call it Gigabit DSL? Now it's G.fast. Before it was "Very high speed" DSL. What's next? G.super-mega-ultra-fast?
That doesn't seem even close from being true:
http://9to5mac.com/2011/03/17/top-10-mac-countries-by-market-share-united-states-is-3/
And which country have more Macs than PCs?
Because you think that those $1 application do not collect your data?
The only applications that can really be trusted are either because they are open source or because you wrote it yourself.
Android has 72% market share in 5 major EU countries (Germany, France, UK, Spain, Italy). Source: http://www.kantarworldpanel.com/dwl.php?sn=news_downloads&id=326
iOS only has 15%.
It depends what you consider crapware. I consider WinZIP and its infamous "I agree" nag screen to be crapware. There are tons of such examples in the App Store.
I wouldn't use an ad-supported calendar application if the built-in one wasn't good enough.
Most quality free applications are either developped by charity/for fun or are part of a larger commercial offering like my banking application.
On my PC Small utilities like file archiver, CD burner, FTP client, media player, email client and even developer tools (IDE, compiler, editor) are all free and without ads. In fact I don't use any ad-supported application on my PC. Why would it be different on my phone?
You could try, but you'd either never get through the app review process
Fake diplomas and pills was a little exagerated, but there are a lot of cappy applications in the App Store, like the thousands of fart applications.
Most non-crap free applications do not intent to directly make money from the application. They don't have ads or in-app purchase.
I don't have any ads or in-app purchase in my email, calendar, banking, music player or instant messaging application.
For adware, crapware and other *ware, however, I totally agree with you. Therefore if I were developing a crapware application trying to fool people into buying fake university diplomas or fake pills, I would target iOS first. I would also sell a "pro" version with ads disabled.
Which should never be an argument if you are developing a free application. I guess this is why Android has the lead in the number of free applications, but iOS probably still lead in paid applications.
Also this survey is only in the USA. Apple products have far more market share in their home market than worldwide.
From what I've seen in the past, if you're looking to run big "name brand" software, your only real Linux choices are Red Hat and Suse if you want to run on a certified OS. It makes no sense to run software costing $100k+ on uncertified platforms.
No problem. Give me any OS and I will "certify" it. For a mere $1000. That's nothing when you run $100k+ software, right?
I hope you were trying to be sarcastic/insightfull.
You know that the Linux kernel is much more used than the iPhone, right?
Apple had the most closed and locked-down computer platform in the 80s and they now have the most closed and locked-down smartphones.
The lock is not the same. In the 80s it was simply a chain. The iPhone is now the equivalent of a maximum security prison.
I don't think the closed ecosystem has anything to do with it : i have an iPhone, and while my teenage kids love it and wouldn't stop dreaming about one, they just CAN NOT AFFORD it. So they jumped ship and bought a cheap 150€ android. While their phone is inferior, it is "good enough" for all they need to do. Now that they bought it, they're stuck in the android world partly because of the apps they bought, partly due to pride in defending their choice, but mostly because they see that their cheap phone can do EVERYTHING my iPhone can do at a quarter of the price.
apple is losing the youth, and doesn't give a shit.
Except that when we look at the most popular Android smartphones, it's always the high end Galaxy S series and such arriving on top. 150 euros phones alone do not explain how Android gets over 80% of world-wide sales during a quarter. High end Android phones certainly get over 13% anyways.
But I agree that when you have the choice between an iPhone 5C or a much cheaper Nexus 5, the decision isn't hard for a teenager. Only, the later is superior in every point despite being cheaper!
The closed ecosystem has everything to do with it. Without licensing their OS to 3rd parties, Apple does not allow competition between handsets manufacturer to push prices down.
Also, who the fuck needs 2GB of RAM on a fucking phone!?
Perhaps you only need a mid-range smartphone. That's fine. Except that it will end up being more expensive than the Nexus 5.
I wouldn't say 2GB RAM is overkill when you see the CPU and GPU they include in such device. I would even say they should put 4GB RAM and half the CPU and GPU instead.
But the Nexus 5 will probably be half the price of the G2. And run stock Android and receive updates.
With a shorter warranty, the industry has no insensitive in building drives lasting longer. As long as they fail after the first year, they are fine. It's now a duopoly so you can't really vote with your wallet.
Yes the adresses are 64 bit. And the extra registers of the ARMv8 architecture would be used. The only downside is that array indexes are 32 bit. So you can't have an array with more than 2^32 elements. Pretty reasonable compromise to keep 32 bit compatibility. But longs in java are already 64 bit. So if your program uses long data types, it will get a speed increase by moving to 64 bit.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/64-bit_computing#32-bit_vs_64-bit
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/hotspotfaq-138619.html#64bit_description
Google isn't porting an OS to 64 bit from scratch. Linux for ARMv8 probably already exists. So does GCC.
They mainly need to make sure their userspace, including java VM, still compiles on 64 bit. Then current Android application will benefit from ARMv8 without the need for a recompile.
Yeah but 1 year warranties are a sign that the manufacturer do not trust its own drive.
RAM manufactuers have lifetime warranty. Why? Because those who build it trust it. Also because they know that you are not going to RMA your faulty 64 MB 133 MHz SDRAM from the past millenium.
Because if any other part of my PC breaks I can replace it easily. However if the hard drive breaks, I loose all my data. I don't care about the drive itself but it sucks.
We require higher quality drives. A few years ago, hard drives were cheap and had 5 years warranties. Now prices have gone up by 50% and warranty is now 1-2 years.
5 years should be mandatory by law. If you can't support your drive for 5 years, you shouldn't be allowed to manufacture hard drives at all.
I don't understand this new trend in making new hard drives with only 1-2 years warranty. The same goes for SSD.
Samsung is already at 3GB RAM with their Note 3. They maxed out the 32 bit potential. They need 64 bit next year to go forward. Nobody denied that we need to move to 64 bit at some point. But with less RAM, Apple would have been good with 32 bits for 1 more year than Samsung. However they wouldn't have been first to 64 bit. Just like Nintendo wanted to be first to 64 bit with their gaming console.
Nobody did market "cores", as in a small number of parts of a GPU.
Here's one example
Here's another.
Here's another
None of these were before Apple started marketing cores and refer to the same type of "core" that Apple invented.
Anyway, I was talking about phones and tablets. Apple is the first one use use the word "core" while describing its phone GPU when announcing a new phone.
Apple could easily double their CPU performance because they were already 50% slower than the competition.
64 bit is also more power hungry than 32 bit. A 64 bit register uses twice as much power as a 32 bit register. If you use it to make computation on small integers (which is what 99% of applications in the app store do), you use twice the power for no benefit.
If you've never heard anybody touting the number of cores in their GPU, you haven't been paying attention to marketing of graphics cards. Because graphics calculations are highly parallelizable, and because the parallelizing can be handled by the OS, without requiring extra effort from app developers, GPU performance particularly benefits from a multi-core architecture.
Nobody did market "cores", as in a small number of parts of a GPU.
GPU makers marketed shaders pipelines, which is completely different. Recent GPUs have over 2000 shaders pipelines able to work in parallel. They don't call their 2000 shaders model "quad core" and their 1000 shaders "dual core", because it wouldn't mean anything.
Apple clearly tried to confuse people when they first talked about their quad core GPU.
Historically, Apple's reports of speed increase over previous generations have proved pretty accurate when people got around to benchmarking them, so it is likely that will prove true once again. A doubling of speed is a quite respectable performance increase over a year. So maybe Apple was not mistaken in thinking that the 64 bit architecture offers real advantages given the design of their phones and iOS.
What about a fallacy. Just because they doubled the performance doesn't mean that it's because of 64 bit. It's more likely a better architecture and increased clock speed.
If Apple just wanted bragging rights, more processor cores would have been much cheaper.
No because they would have needed something like 6 cores to be able to say that they are "first". And 6 cores would have been expensive.
Quad core would mean that they finally copied the competition.