4 ms·
The whole phone industry for years has been a "me too" Android industry following in Apple's footsteps and by that I mean phone manufacturers doing half-assed v
by cletus 7y ago
The whole phone industry for years has been a "me too" Android industry following in Apple's footsteps and by that I mean phone manufacturers doing half-assed versions of what Apple had.
There was a great talk at Google about how the Nexus 5X was the worst phone they ever made. It was a postmortem and actually really informative. Like the thermals were bad (eg hot components together) such that the CPU had to go in low power mode when using the camera or the thing would overheat. Part of it was they just happened to use a bad die process (20nm IIRC).
The interesting part was how Apple's announcement of a 64 bit CPU totally shook the industry. Roadmaps were thrown out and half-assed 64 bit CPUs were put into the market essentially for marketing purposes (the "64 bit" bullet point).
Apple's ARM chips are actually pretty amazing and have mostly been at a sweet spot for performance vs battery life.
To be fair, I think Apple has gone off the rails in the last few years. The examples are numerous:
- The 2015 MBP butterfly keyboard (rumour has it this only happened to shave 0.5mm off the laptop height)
- The loss of Magsafe
- USB-C
- Force Touch (from a company that famously once eschewed the right mouse button for lack of discoverability)
- Face ID (what I'd give for Touch ID on the back of the phone). This was purely to make a bigger screen. As much as they talked about the false positive rate of Touch ID being too high the false negative rate of Face ID is way too high, particularly on an iPad.
- The Touch Bar
I really do think where Apple design went wrong was when there was no longer a Steve Jobs to say "no" to Johnny Ive. A lot of the more ridiculous design fails seem to come directly from Ive (like the 12" Macbook).
But the CPU part of Apple is cutting edge.
- tgv 7y agoI think USB-C isn't just negative, and I do like the touchbar, even though I have to admit that it's rarely helpful in practice. For the rest, I think you're right: Apple has lost its way forward. I fear the day the accountants will see a lucrative deal and split macOS from the phones, app and music biz is closer than ever.
- merpnderp 7y agoI’m with you on every single point except Face ID. I just got my first Face ID device and it is so much handier than Touch ID. It has worked instantly every single time, and I love not having to move my fingers to the button to sign in somewhere or unlock the phone. Although MagSafe 2 was garbage and USB-C is an upgrade. The original MagSafe was indeed something to morn.
- Betelgeuse90 7y agoLikewise was skeptical about FaceID, but it is really much nicer to have than TouchID. I'm not a sweaty person at all, but whenever I picked up a DualShock controller for a minute and put it down, my hands were too moist for TouchID to work.
- zozbot234 7y ago> The interesting part was how Apple's announcement of a 64 bit CPU totally shook the industry. I don't think so. The move to 64-bit compute on mobile platforms was inevitable and hardly surprising; Apple's announcement might have pushed it forward by a few years at most.
- scarface74 7y agoSo now people are complaining that Apple is using an industry standard port - USB-C - instead of something proprietary?