The problem is in implementation, not idea (no surprise being that it wasn't their idea, but was their implementation) Adding extra screen space in the dead areas beside the sensors is a great idea, but only if you use it right. It would be great for displaying things like time, battery level, etc that usually take up part of the "main" screen and leaving the most possible real estate for normal apps to use. Unfortunately it sounds like that's not how Apple wants to use it, but that's a separate issue.
Remember, the notch isn't extra stuff protruding in to the screen, it's extra screen reaching up around the other stuff that has to be there anyway.
Android has the market because their phones are cheap.
And yet the best selling Android devices cost as much, or more than, and iPhone
Funny how they have 80% of the market, but not the profits to back that up. Crazy how 1 company makes more than the android manufacturers combined.
Yes, it is crazy, and it goes to show you how much marketing can do. They take an inferior product, with a higher profit margin, call it premium, and rake in the profits.
There's no statistical correlation between the best product, and the most profitable.
If I make my purchasing decisions right, the companies I buy from are only just profitable enough to stay in business, if they're making the biggest profit margin on the planet then I know I'm overpaying.
It's great that it's faster, but go poll a random sample of friends and see if "too slow" is their primary complaint about their phone. It isn't, phones in general became "fast enough" a few years ago. That's not what people need any more.
Meanwhile the iPhone still lacks much basic functionality that has been available on cheap Android phones for years.
Hardware drivers are an obvious one. I have an excellent scanner that was given to me because my relatives simply couldn't get it to work on newer versions of windows (the manufacturer doesn't make drivers for anything newer than windows 98), I plugged it in on my Mint box and it just worked, no fancy setup or messing with drivers required.
Every time I connect anything to windows it takes forever to configure, usually needs massive proprietary blobs that slow the entire system down, and still may or may not function properly.
I've also had much better experiences with things like video playback formats on Linux than on Windows.
So in other words people over pay because of marketing.
That's great for Apple. Not for the end users.
If I make the right purchasing decisions, all my purchases come from companies making the minimum possible profit to stay in business, if they're the most profitable on the planet, then I paid too much. That's how the free market works.
Many Android phones are cheap, the overall user interface more confusing/lacking/questionable to the average user than an equivalent iPhone,
ROFL really? How can you seriously say that while claiming not to be an apple fanboi? The user interface is one of the iPhones absolute weakest points. It's extremely unintuitive, confusing, and limited in it's functionality by comparison to Android phones. The fact that they still haven't figured out a consistent and useable interface for returning to whence you came is proof enough of that.
and most models are completely non-maintainable and non-upgradable crap
Unlike the iPhone which you can upgrade all the components of... right.... In fact, NONE of Apple's phones are user serviceable in any way, and in fact even going to a reputable 3rd party repair shop may get your phone bricked. In contrast, some Android phones still have user replaceable batteries (the most common part to fail) most have expandable storage (no iPhone does), and almost all can be repaired by 3rd party shops with no risk of your phone being bricked afterwards. So which one are you calling "non-maintainable" and "non-upgadable"?
If Android does have the larger market share,
if? you're still qualifying that statement? that just proves how much of an Apple fanboi you are. The numbers aren't even close, at last count Android had well over 80% of the market.
then it is because those cheap models are CHEAPER TO BUY. That is all.
So why is it that the best selling Android phones are just as expensive, or even more so, than the iPhone?
Point in case, if Apple lowered the price of an iPhone to cost the same as those cheapo Android phones that are flooding the market, which one would be the most popular in less than a year? Thought so.
Most likely if Apple did that their remaining volume would disappear instantly. People buy Apple because of the illusion of paying a premium for a premium product. They haven't compared it to the competition, because if they had, they'd see that the product is only premium priced, and not premium in any other way. If the price dropped, they'd start wondering why, and might look and see that the phone has none of the features available on other phones half the price.
People don't choose Android because it's cheaper (if they did, the S8, Note 8, etc wouldn't sell at all, let alone be among the most popular Android devices on the planet) They choose Android over iPhone because Android devices are better devices in every single possible way.
Signed, A user of one of the more pricey Android phone models.
Funny, you seem to think Androids are so inferior, why don't you go buy an iPhone?
So in other words, a notch can be good (as evidenced by other phones doing it well) but Apple has (as usual) taken an otherwise good feature, and broken it.
As for "full screen content" on other phones it's not an issue, because phones are now 2:1 instead of 16:9 meaning that you have black bars beside your "full screen" content anyway (for video) so you don't see the notch, and for other applications they can find innovative ways of using the new extra real estate (the "fingers"). (As for why phones are now 2:1 instead of 16:9... that's a whole different marketing rant... look at us, we now have a 6" screen! (never mind that it's smaller than the previous 5.7" screen))
"they are making lots of money" is the only think Apple fans have left to brag about. iPhones are a small fraction of the smartphone market compared to Android, Samsung sells more phones than Apple every year (and has for quite a while now) The newest iPhones still haven't reached feature parity with 2-3 year old Android devices
But they can still feel good about themselves because they pay Apple lots of money, and Apple makes more profit than anyone else, so hey, it's got to be good right?
It's not a horrible idea really, there's nothing saying that the screen has to be perfectly rectangular, and there's no reason that you can't display information in the unused area beside the sensors at the top of the screen. I haven't yet seen the iPhone notch in person, but the one on the Essential phone (though admittedly much narrower than the Apple one) looks quite useful and really makes that screen stand out.
Now up until recently most smartphones had an aspect ratio of 16:9, just as almost all video content has, so a notch would be very annoying. However recently phones have been switching to a 2:1 aspect ratio (no, I won't call it 16:8 like some reviewers!) which means you'll have black bars on the sides of your video content anyway, so the notch will never interfere with that, and any other app that is using the full screen should also be able to account for it. (Now why we now have 2:1 instead of 16:9 is another rant, it's all about marketing, you can now have less total screen, but a larger number on your marketing!)
I think the main key is to "think different" about it. don't think of the notch as subtracting from the screen, think of the screen on the sides of the notch being expansions to the screen. You end up with more total screen, not less, and programmed well, you can get some good benefits from it.
For not having any competition they've still managed to have only a small fraction of the smartphone market. Android dominates with over 80% market share. Samsung alone sells more phones than Apple.
As for the rest "Best Hardware" hasn't been true of any Apple device is over a decade, "best privacy" wow... someone's been drinking the kool-aid (I'm not saying that the competition is any better, but if you really believe Apple isn't just as bad you're delusional) "best longevity of support, best ease of maintenance for idiots" unless you do something silly like have someone replace your screen and have Apple brick your phone for you to take revenge on you for not using their repair service at exorbitant rates. Longevity is questionable too. It's long been suspected that the main reason that Apple pushes it's newest updates to it's oldest phones is specifically to make them too slow to use so as to cause people to upgrade. That's not really "support".
Considering that modern Apple products (from the early iPods on up) have had horrific user interfaces that are extremely hard to use by comparison to their competition, I think you're attributing the wrong skillset to Jobs.
His skill was in marketing, not UI. If he was focused on anything it was how good the item would look on a store shelf, not how easy it would be to use.
That's because Steve Jobs was an absolute genius. No, not at any part of product development (technical or otherwise). He was a genius at MARKETING. Steve could take any piece of half baked garbage and make the world want it (and he frequently did)
Apple has survived the past decade or so exclusively on marketing, they haven't had a superior product since the early mac days. They've just had the best marketed one. And yet, despite their amazing marketing, they still only cling to a small fraction of the smartphone market (less than 20% compared to over 80% Android) because marketing and hype can only take you so far. If your usability and feature set is that far behind the competition, only the most rabidly loyal fans will still buy your products.
Considering that they're generally last to market with every single feature, only after every low end android phone already has it... Apparently the 10 Billion is either not enough, or being spent in the wrong places.
The bias in your comment is hilarious. "feature parity". Lol... Apple hasn't had feature parity with Android since, well, actually, never.
The issue is that smartphone processors became "powerfull enough" several years ago, and in real-world usage the newer ones aren't noticeably different than the ones made 3-4 years ago. Meanwhile, Apple still hasn't caught up to Android's feature set from that same 3-4 years ago, so it's no wonder that Android makes up over 80% of the market.
If terrain is in the way, no single transmitter, no matter how powerful (within reason), is enough. If terrain is not in the way, you don't really need all that much power
From what I gather, there is a terrain problem that makes it very difficult for a single transmitter to cover the entire territory, hence the "booster" stations strategically located to get around that issue.
Now it appears that the owner of the stations has been trying to use the wrong licensing for those stations, and therefore got shut down. Maybe had he applied for the right type of licensing (as it appears the FCC instructed him to do) he would have been able to operate, however it really looks like he was just trying to circumvent the rules in the first place.
For those that don't think there's a place for an agency regulating the airwaves, I'd be curious as to what you propose as an alternative. The usable radio spectrum is quite limited, and a setup where anyone can use any frequency for any use would very quickly become unworkable. We can quibble over the details of exactly how spectrum is allocated and to whom, but the fact that there is a need for an agency to regulate it should be pretty well uncontroversial to anyone with a basic understanding of how radio transmissions work.
If they could launch from the manufacturing plant, they wouldn't need a separate launch pad. What you're proposing is co-locating the 2, and then mysteriously launching to a different site before your real launch. Why not just skip the second step?
If you don't want to transport before launch, build at a launch pad.
Humans run the economy, not horses. If all the humans are put out of work, we won't just shrug and stop breeding humans. Instead we'll change how the world economy works.
Equating humans and horses is the shockingly dumb part.
I'm not saying there won't be short term pain, that's quite possible, but imagining a long term future where we all still need to work, but can't, and haven't figured out a different way to run the world is just insane.
There is no alternative. Sure there may be some apps that they aren't blocking yet, but that's not truly a long term solution.
You can't solve an oppressive regime by building better encryption. If enough people are getting around the firewall the regime will just crack down on whatever method they're using. If there are too many methods, they might switch to a whitelist instead of a blacklist, or they could take the approach of some governments and just ban internet access altogether.
The government of a country has effectively unlimited resources when being compared to the individual citizens of that country. And if they don't have enough resources, they'll just take the resources they need from those same citizens.
When your government is working against you, there is no safe and sustainable way to work around them.
If EMTs spent any large percentage of their time dealing with vehicle related incidents, I'd be worried AI would put me out of a job. But in reality we deal with very few as a percentage of actual calls. It is difficult to imagine how an AI could drive much worse than your average human, and in fact we're already seeing that with even partially autonomous solutions.
Ranking jobs by number of people performing them is ridiculous when the total number of types of jobs is much larger. The bigger question is what percent of the workforce is in a job that existed before, or didn't, and that's something they didn't even address.
e.g. letter jobs have "always" existed, number jobs are new: JobX=35 JobY=35 JobZ=30 Job1= 25 Job2= 25 Job3= 25 Job4= 25 Job5= 25 Job6= 25 Job7= 25 Job8= 25 Job9= 25 Job10= 25 Job11= 25 Job12= 25 Panic! the top 3 job types are the same as they were for the last hundred years, you don't even find a new one until number 4! but the number of people doing the new jobs dwarfs the number doing the old ones. (100 vs 300)
The roman empire does not exist any more, but humanity still does, and we are objectively better off in every way.
Predicting that we'll be better off in the future is easy, and almost (though not quite) guaranteed. Predicting exactly what that will look like, or what we'll have to go through in the mean time is the hard part.
I think the author is 100% right that we'll be better off in the future. Unfortunately I also think that the transition period will be painful and messy. But that too is completely consistent with history.
Many people focus on the messy and painful part and think there's no possible way forward. To some extent they're right to worry about that part, but it would be stupid to assume that we'll get stuck at that stage and not get to the better society at the end of it.
The workforce will change, we know that, but we also know that it has been constantly changing ever since the first cave dweller employed someone else to go hunting in exchange for them gathering fruits and vegetables. Will the same jobs exist? of course not! will other jobs exist? probably. But in the end, it doesn't even matter if any jobs exist because we'll adapt either way. People are worried that it will just push all the wealth to the top and make everyone else dirt poor, but remember that is not a sustainable long term situation either. People at the top don't stay there with nobody able to buy their wares, and nobody stays at the top for long if 99% of the population is horribly miserable beneath them.
The transition might be difficult, but the end result will be better than today. Just as has happened many, many, times in the past.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is in implementation, not idea (no surprise being that it wasn't their idea, but was their implementation) Adding extra screen space in the dead areas beside the sensors is a great idea, but only if you use it right. It would be great for displaying things like time, battery level, etc that usually take up part of the "main" screen and leaving the most possible real estate for normal apps to use. Unfortunately it sounds like that's not how Apple wants to use it, but that's a separate issue.
Remember, the notch isn't extra stuff protruding in to the screen, it's extra screen reaching up around the other stuff that has to be there anyway.
Android has the market because their phones are cheap.
And yet the best selling Android devices cost as much, or more than, and iPhone
Funny how they have 80% of the market, but not the profits to back that up. Crazy how 1 company makes more than the android manufacturers combined.
Yes, it is crazy, and it goes to show you how much marketing can do. They take an inferior product, with a higher profit margin, call it premium, and rake in the profits.
There's no statistical correlation between the best product, and the most profitable.
If I make my purchasing decisions right, the companies I buy from are only just profitable enough to stay in business, if they're making the biggest profit margin on the planet then I know I'm overpaying.
It's great that it's faster, but go poll a random sample of friends and see if "too slow" is their primary complaint about their phone. It isn't, phones in general became "fast enough" a few years ago. That's not what people need any more.
Meanwhile the iPhone still lacks much basic functionality that has been available on cheap Android phones for years.
Hardware drivers are an obvious one. I have an excellent scanner that was given to me because my relatives simply couldn't get it to work on newer versions of windows (the manufacturer doesn't make drivers for anything newer than windows 98), I plugged it in on my Mint box and it just worked, no fancy setup or messing with drivers required.
Every time I connect anything to windows it takes forever to configure, usually needs massive proprietary blobs that slow the entire system down, and still may or may not function properly.
I've also had much better experiences with things like video playback formats on Linux than on Windows.
Such a substantial and well thought out reply. Thank you for your participation in this thread.
So in other words people over pay because of marketing.
That's great for Apple. Not for the end users.
If I make the right purchasing decisions, all my purchases come from companies making the minimum possible profit to stay in business, if they're the most profitable on the planet, then I paid too much. That's how the free market works.
Many Android phones are cheap, the overall user interface more confusing/lacking/questionable to the average user than an equivalent iPhone,
ROFL really? How can you seriously say that while claiming not to be an apple fanboi? The user interface is one of the iPhones absolute weakest points. It's extremely unintuitive, confusing, and limited in it's functionality by comparison to Android phones. The fact that they still haven't figured out a consistent and useable interface for returning to whence you came is proof enough of that.
and most models are completely non-maintainable and non-upgradable crap
Unlike the iPhone which you can upgrade all the components of... right.... In fact, NONE of Apple's phones are user serviceable in any way, and in fact even going to a reputable 3rd party repair shop may get your phone bricked. In contrast, some Android phones still have user replaceable batteries (the most common part to fail) most have expandable storage (no iPhone does), and almost all can be repaired by 3rd party shops with no risk of your phone being bricked afterwards. So which one are you calling "non-maintainable" and "non-upgadable"?
If Android does have the larger market share,
if? you're still qualifying that statement? that just proves how much of an Apple fanboi you are. The numbers aren't even close, at last count Android had well over 80% of the market.
then it is because those cheap models are CHEAPER TO BUY. That is all.
So why is it that the best selling Android phones are just as expensive, or even more so, than the iPhone?
Point in case, if Apple lowered the price of an iPhone to cost the same as those cheapo Android phones that are flooding the market, which one would be the most popular in less than a year? Thought so.
Most likely if Apple did that their remaining volume would disappear instantly. People buy Apple because of the illusion of paying a premium for a premium product. They haven't compared it to the competition, because if they had, they'd see that the product is only premium priced, and not premium in any other way. If the price dropped, they'd start wondering why, and might look and see that the phone has none of the features available on other phones half the price.
People don't choose Android because it's cheaper (if they did, the S8, Note 8, etc wouldn't sell at all, let alone be among the most popular Android devices on the planet) They choose Android over iPhone because Android devices are better devices in every single possible way.
Signed,
A user of one of the more pricey Android phone models.
Funny, you seem to think Androids are so inferior, why don't you go buy an iPhone?
So in other words, a notch can be good (as evidenced by other phones doing it well) but Apple has (as usual) taken an otherwise good feature, and broken it.
As for "full screen content" on other phones it's not an issue, because phones are now 2:1 instead of 16:9 meaning that you have black bars beside your "full screen" content anyway (for video) so you don't see the notch, and for other applications they can find innovative ways of using the new extra real estate (the "fingers").
(As for why phones are now 2:1 instead of 16:9... that's a whole different marketing rant... look at us, we now have a 6" screen! (never mind that it's smaller than the previous 5.7" screen))
"they are making lots of money" is the only think Apple fans have left to brag about.
iPhones are a small fraction of the smartphone market compared to Android,
Samsung sells more phones than Apple every year (and has for quite a while now)
The newest iPhones still haven't reached feature parity with 2-3 year old Android devices
But they can still feel good about themselves because they pay Apple lots of money, and Apple makes more profit than anyone else, so hey, it's got to be good right?
On the other hand, in the past 15 years Linux has massively improved... well, for the first 10 or so of those years anyway.
Linux is now the "it just works" OS, doing things out of the box that just don't work on the other major platforms.
Are you really saying that there are no designers under 40 working for any major corporation?
I don't think it's only those under 40 that have the problem.
The "notch" is apparently polarizing.
It's not a horrible idea really, there's nothing saying that the screen has to be perfectly rectangular, and there's no reason that you can't display information in the unused area beside the sensors at the top of the screen. I haven't yet seen the iPhone notch in person, but the one on the Essential phone (though admittedly much narrower than the Apple one) looks quite useful and really makes that screen stand out.
Now up until recently most smartphones had an aspect ratio of 16:9, just as almost all video content has, so a notch would be very annoying. However recently phones have been switching to a 2:1 aspect ratio (no, I won't call it 16:8 like some reviewers!) which means you'll have black bars on the sides of your video content anyway, so the notch will never interfere with that, and any other app that is using the full screen should also be able to account for it. (Now why we now have 2:1 instead of 16:9 is another rant, it's all about marketing, you can now have less total screen, but a larger number on your marketing!)
I think the main key is to "think different" about it. don't think of the notch as subtracting from the screen, think of the screen on the sides of the notch being expansions to the screen. You end up with more total screen, not less, and programmed well, you can get some good benefits from it.
For not having any competition they've still managed to have only a small fraction of the smartphone market. Android dominates with over 80% market share.
Samsung alone sells more phones than Apple.
As for the rest "Best Hardware" hasn't been true of any Apple device is over a decade, "best privacy" wow... someone's been drinking the kool-aid (I'm not saying that the competition is any better, but if you really believe Apple isn't just as bad you're delusional) "best longevity of support, best ease of maintenance for idiots" unless you do something silly like have someone replace your screen and have Apple brick your phone for you to take revenge on you for not using their repair service at exorbitant rates. Longevity is questionable too. It's long been suspected that the main reason that Apple pushes it's newest updates to it's oldest phones is specifically to make them too slow to use so as to cause people to upgrade. That's not really "support".
You're surprised an Apple product is 5 years behind the competition? have you been asleep for the past decade or so?
Considering that modern Apple products (from the early iPods on up) have had horrific user interfaces that are extremely hard to use by comparison to their competition, I think you're attributing the wrong skillset to Jobs.
His skill was in marketing, not UI. If he was focused on anything it was how good the item would look on a store shelf, not how easy it would be to use.
That's because Steve Jobs was an absolute genius. No, not at any part of product development (technical or otherwise). He was a genius at MARKETING. Steve could take any piece of half baked garbage and make the world want it (and he frequently did)
Apple has survived the past decade or so exclusively on marketing, they haven't had a superior product since the early mac days. They've just had the best marketed one. And yet, despite their amazing marketing, they still only cling to a small fraction of the smartphone market (less than 20% compared to over 80% Android) because marketing and hype can only take you so far. If your usability and feature set is that far behind the competition, only the most rabidly loyal fans will still buy your products.
Considering that they're generally last to market with every single feature, only after every low end android phone already has it... Apparently the 10 Billion is either not enough, or being spent in the wrong places.
The bias in your comment is hilarious. "feature parity". Lol... Apple hasn't had feature parity with Android since, well, actually, never.
The issue is that smartphone processors became "powerfull enough" several years ago, and in real-world usage the newer ones aren't noticeably different than the ones made 3-4 years ago.
Meanwhile, Apple still hasn't caught up to Android's feature set from that same 3-4 years ago, so it's no wonder that Android makes up over 80% of the market.
If terrain is in the way, no single transmitter, no matter how powerful (within reason), is enough.
If terrain is not in the way, you don't really need all that much power
From what I gather, there is a terrain problem that makes it very difficult for a single transmitter to cover the entire territory, hence the "booster" stations strategically located to get around that issue.
Now it appears that the owner of the stations has been trying to use the wrong licensing for those stations, and therefore got shut down. Maybe had he applied for the right type of licensing (as it appears the FCC instructed him to do) he would have been able to operate, however it really looks like he was just trying to circumvent the rules in the first place.
For those that don't think there's a place for an agency regulating the airwaves, I'd be curious as to what you propose as an alternative. The usable radio spectrum is quite limited, and a setup where anyone can use any frequency for any use would very quickly become unworkable. We can quibble over the details of exactly how spectrum is allocated and to whom, but the fact that there is a need for an agency to regulate it should be pretty well uncontroversial to anyone with a basic understanding of how radio transmissions work.
If they could launch from the manufacturing plant, they wouldn't need a separate launch pad. What you're proposing is co-locating the 2, and then mysteriously launching to a different site before your real launch. Why not just skip the second step?
If you don't want to transport before launch, build at a launch pad.
Humans run the economy, not horses. If all the humans are put out of work, we won't just shrug and stop breeding humans. Instead we'll change how the world economy works.
Equating humans and horses is the shockingly dumb part.
I'm not saying there won't be short term pain, that's quite possible, but imagining a long term future where we all still need to work, but can't, and haven't figured out a different way to run the world is just insane.
There is no alternative. Sure there may be some apps that they aren't blocking yet, but that's not truly a long term solution.
You can't solve an oppressive regime by building better encryption. If enough people are getting around the firewall the regime will just crack down on whatever method they're using. If there are too many methods, they might switch to a whitelist instead of a blacklist, or they could take the approach of some governments and just ban internet access altogether.
The government of a country has effectively unlimited resources when being compared to the individual citizens of that country. And if they don't have enough resources, they'll just take the resources they need from those same citizens.
When your government is working against you, there is no safe and sustainable way to work around them.
If EMTs spent any large percentage of their time dealing with vehicle related incidents, I'd be worried AI would put me out of a job. But in reality we deal with very few as a percentage of actual calls.
It is difficult to imagine how an AI could drive much worse than your average human, and in fact we're already seeing that with even partially autonomous solutions.
Ranking jobs by number of people performing them is ridiculous when the total number of types of jobs is much larger. The bigger question is what percent of the workforce is in a job that existed before, or didn't, and that's something they didn't even address.
e.g.
letter jobs have "always" existed, number jobs are new:
JobX=35
JobY=35
JobZ=30
Job1= 25
Job2= 25
Job3= 25
Job4= 25
Job5= 25
Job6= 25
Job7= 25
Job8= 25
Job9= 25
Job10= 25
Job11= 25
Job12= 25
Panic! the top 3 job types are the same as they were for the last hundred years, you don't even find a new one until number 4! but the number of people doing the new jobs dwarfs the number doing the old ones. (100 vs 300)
The roman empire does not exist any more, but humanity still does, and we are objectively better off in every way.
Predicting that we'll be better off in the future is easy, and almost (though not quite) guaranteed. Predicting exactly what that will look like, or what we'll have to go through in the mean time is the hard part.
I think the author is 100% right that we'll be better off in the future. Unfortunately I also think that the transition period will be painful and messy. But that too is completely consistent with history.
Many people focus on the messy and painful part and think there's no possible way forward. To some extent they're right to worry about that part, but it would be stupid to assume that we'll get stuck at that stage and not get to the better society at the end of it.
The workforce will change, we know that, but we also know that it has been constantly changing ever since the first cave dweller employed someone else to go hunting in exchange for them gathering fruits and vegetables. Will the same jobs exist? of course not! will other jobs exist? probably. But in the end, it doesn't even matter if any jobs exist because we'll adapt either way. People are worried that it will just push all the wealth to the top and make everyone else dirt poor, but remember that is not a sustainable long term situation either. People at the top don't stay there with nobody able to buy their wares, and nobody stays at the top for long if 99% of the population is horribly miserable beneath them.
The transition might be difficult, but the end result will be better than today. Just as has happened many, many, times in the past.