> When you buy an Android phone you sign in to your Google account. Behind the scenes, Google starts recording a huge amount of data about you as a user, your preferences, your routine.
Some would say not accessing customer data is a feature. I am very careful who I share my data with and appreciate Apple's approach.
1. All of the hardware offerings Google made are subpar copies of other products. They did the minimum viable thing to get your data. Google's Assistant, with all the data and cloud processing power in the world, is equivalent to Siri. Assistant is not a leap forward, just a rebranded OK Google.
I'd had the same feeling in the past about Google's Social efforts. It's more blatant that Google's mining my data when their product offering is just a copy.
Contrast that with Search, Maps and GMail. When those came out, it mattered less that Google was scanning my data because the products were leaps and bounds above the competition.
2. Google has taken over enough of your daily lives with Android, GMail, Search and Maps that it's really hard to opt out.
We've vilified Apple for its closed ecosystem but we ended up with an alternative much worse in Android, one where all of the data you've generated is available for everyone to harvest.
This is where it ends with Google and I, enough is enough.
I have to be honest the direction Google is heading in lately feels like dangerous territory, either people are going to like the invasive approach or be scared off by it, time will tell. I get the feeling people care less about search these days, Facebook etc is the Internet for a lot of people and Adblockers have to be doing some damage.
- Virtual Reality - still hasn't demonstrated mainstream appeal. I'm pretty bearish on it being the next 3d TV's
- Resolution - Does anything north of 300dpi really matter at this point? Maybe for VR, but see above
- Privacy - as data breaches become the norm, where/how do you want your data stored?
I'm actually pretty bullish on that, considering 3D TVs fizzled out pretty quickly.
Edit because I think I wasn't clear: I think setting the bar for VR as what 3D TVs accomplished is very pessimistic. VR seems vastly more promising, both moreso than 3D TVs did at their peak, and also on their own right as a very interesting and wide open medium.
Augmented Reality has plenty of use cases - in more areas than the consumer space. For example, the demo that Microsoft showed off yesterday with testing out how furniture looks before you buy it could be huge. Or how about an app that has you stand in front of a mirror and try on clothes - online?
AR is life++; VR is reinventing life. The former will almost inevitably come easier and find more success, at least initially.
We'll see how personal they can make Play With Your Grand-Kids on the Other Side of the Country™, before I make that call.
I actually think VR telepresence is a lot more intriguing to me than just playing cooler looking video games. I mean...the game stuff is the easiest thing to do first because you've already got established frameworks in place for the creation and rendering of complex 3d environments. But when you start getting into depth cams or light field cams combines with more advanced and ergonomic display hardware and high speed networks, you're moving toward having the pieces in place to allow people to virtually be someplace else and communicate with others in a way a webcam can't replicate.
Definitely interested to see how that field looks in 10-15 years.
This is a bold statement. On what measure? Last that I've seen is that almost 87% of the smartphone market is dominated by Android.
It might be true for app monetization, but definitely not as a whole.
Good read though.
How much money does the iPhone versus the Android phones make?
Do we count the money lost by Samsung in this last flub? Do we count Xiomei even though their economics are quite different from Apple?
Everyone is so eager to justify the idea that Apple "won" a war of some sort. Jaded tech writers on their throne of paper and blood pronouncing it "done" because they're bored, while the stuff we've seen in Microsoft and Google's R&D demos suggest it's just getting started.
So no data to back that up? Did this become a topic of opinion rather than fact? YoY sales and market dominance would suggest the opposite is true (http://www.theverge.com/2016/6/1/11836816/iphone-vs-android-...)
Also (and I know this is anecdotal evidence), in the past 3-4 years anyone I know who jumped ship went from iPhone to Android and never went back. Not a single person switched away from Android.
In my opinion (which is mostly backed by fact, but I'll keep it as an opinion) iPhone is quickly becoming a niche product, and there's nothing Apple can do to change that.
And just look at those ridiculous comparison "info graphics"...
I do not understand how anyone reads this article and comes away with the impression it is even remotely correct.
I could barely finish it, it was so poorly written, full of questionable ideas deliberately glossed over, and ideas that just do not add up to the conclusion.
Nope. Google is and always has been an advertising company.
It affects how they implement search, Android, and everything they do.
All knowing AI, however clever, from an advertising company may start to move some more onto Apple. That Apple isn't putting personalised data into everything is becoming a marketing feature that they should be shouting about.
Edit: Not sure what's controversial to cause lots of up and down votes, I guess some don't believe Google are an advertising company. I wonder where they get their revenue from.
Besides a bit faster hardware, some more DPI and "assistants" it is mostly the same. My gen 1 Moto G which I got for $170 a while back is still mostly ok. The hardware still looks the same. Anyone remember the jump from flip phones to smart phones? That was a huge difference. Something completely new. The upgrade felt like I was buying something completely different.
I guess I was expecting something more by now. Modular hardware, can plug more memory or more hardware into it. A different shape. A ridiculous battery life.
The only exciting thing I saw is made by a Chinese company I never heard of: Xiaomi (don't even know how to pronounce it). It is this phone: https://www.engadget.com/2016/10/25/xiaomi-mi-mix/ it doesn't have a bazel, looks square and slick, 256GB memory. I can see buying that. I don't see shelling $700 for a Pixel or for an iPhone.
Then I noticed Project Fi by Google. That would save me money every month. However given Google Fiber winding down, I am worried as soon as I jump on Project Fi, it will be shut down as Google does with many of its products. So the initial excitement there has kind of waned.
Apple will continue to make incredible profits on hardware, while google will do the same with advertising on the mobile platform.
IBM was the "diversified" company particularly after it acquired Lotus which was suppose to make IBM compete with Microsoft directly on the office front.
I'm not saying the same thing will happen but I bet Apple will have another revolution in the next 20 years much like Microsoft did.
This claim is made, but it's not very specific. In what way did Apple win the smartphone wars ?
Motorola
In addition, doesn't Google's track record of dalliances make the Pixel something to be discarded and forgotten at the inscrutable whims of higher-ups?
With smartphones, sure, there are other companies that are pushing technology forward (Sumsung's Galaxy phones are often beyond what an iPhone can offer), but with Apple, I don't have to worry about hardware failing (walk into the neares Apple store, get it fixed/replaced), and I don't need to worry about the software not being updated anytime soon (I can't trust Samsung any more with their updates, and even Nexus 4, Google's flagship phone released in 2012, stopped receiving updates more than a year ago - compared with iPhone 5, also released in 2012, that's still updated today).
In Q4 of 2015, Apple generated about 63% of it's revenues from iPhone sales [1]. That's almost 2/3rds of revenues for a $605B company. Google is nearly as large in terms of market cap (~$550B) but revenues from Android don't even come close (never-mind hardware sales, which are negligible). It's estimated that Android has brought in around $31B _total_ revenue [2] since it was launched in 2008. The numbers by year aren't publicly available, but even if we're being very generous, it's unlikely that Android accounts for more than 10% of Google's revenues in any given year.
So yeah, in terms of smartphones, one company (Apple) is basically a smartphone manufacturer with a few things it does on the side (laptops, etc.) and the other is a search engine with smartphones as a side business.
Personally, I prefer Android. I've been an Android user for years and I can't bring myself to switch. I broke my Nexus 5x phone recently and I've been using my wife's old iPhone for a few weeks now and I can't wait to go back. But I roll my eyes every time I read an article about how Google is on the verge of taking over the market from Apple. Sure, if you look worldwide, the number of Android phones out there exceeds the number of iPhones, but if you look at the high end of the market--which seems to be where all the money is made--iPhone are still quite dominant. When I start to see Google's numbers get into the same _ballpark_ as Apple's for Pixel sales vs. iPhone sales, then I'll be intrigued.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/253649/iphone-revenue-as... [2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-21/google-s-...
In addition to your comment: iOS was THE platform for mobile gaming during years. Some people on NeoGAF have spent $100, $200 or more in games. I personally have several Square Enix titles (games at $15-$20) and dozens of games at $5. You don't even think to move to Android when you have invested so much.
For those interested to learn about iOS gaming:
- Phones blowing up. - Stealing data (might matter more in the coming era of distrust in big gov and big corp) - Major improvements in camera quality
I believe you mean that Android has dominated iOS in terms of market share. But when one company gives their OS away for free to everyone and the other restricts their OS only to their own devices, that's the only result you could ever reasonably expect.
Google as a company has had little to no involvement in the creation of specific phones. And when they have had involvement, they've outsourced much of the work. That's actually partially why this article exists -- the Pixel phone represents their first foray into making their own phone, software and hardware together, like Apple does.
So to me the statement that Google has crushed Apple makes little to no sense because until now Google hasn't even attempted to compete with Apple directly, and Apple has intentionally limited the scope of iOS's distribution.
If we're going to compare Google-created phones to Apple-created phones, how many Pixel phones do you see daily vs. iPhones?
but even if you want to look at the market share by operating system, I think you should then look at revenue. Seems like Apple makes a lot more money from it's market share compared to Google.
When people think about buying a phone, it's always between an iPhone and something else. Something else is the entire rest of the world, iPhone being the reference for the consumer.
Not really. When my dad wanted to buy a phone, it was either a Samsung or something else. iPhone never entered the conversation. When my mom wanted to buy a phone, she just got the same thing as my dad so they could help each other. Same thing with my sister and her husband.
My wife used a Samsung Galaxy S3 and then an S5 for the last five years or so. She never even thought about getting an iPhone until recently when I convinced her to do an experiment with me.
You know what every single one of those people that I just mentioned cared about most in their phone? "Having a big screen." And when they first started looking, iPhones all had tiny screens, so they didn't even consider them.
I personally also never even considered an iPhone until very recently when I decided to just try it out for kicks. It's a decent phone. I miss that back button though. Navigating back in iOS is tedious and I think iOS is total shit in a lot of ways, like not letting me absolutely position the home icons or even letting me replace the home screen.
Fast forward to now, market share of the iPhone is in decline worldwide due to the proliferation of the multiple brands offering Android OS on their "Smart" handsets. [1] The author is merely painting a portrait of things to come.
[1] http://www.macrumors.com/2016/04/27/iphone-15-percent-market...
Android market share is somewhere around 85%, ios under 15%.
It doesn't matter who manufactures the hardware if you control the software and this is true especially if profit from the phone hardware manufactured by you is not really that important part of your profit stream.
I've got no interest in VR that costs any serious amount of money, but hell, I'd go buy a VR headset and high-end video card tonight if it could offer me that. Maybe they'll come up with a way to stitch it together from old Polaroids.
The way the writers even notice the technology compared to it's transparency/ubiquity today is quaint.