The dream of Ara: Inside the rise and fall of Google’s most revolutionary phone

Post by euyyn » Wed, Jan 11, 2017, 9:20 AM UTC

mst wrote: post #87

euyyn wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> letting Lenovo have ATAP along with the rest of the company, where it might've had a chance. Who says Lenovo wanted ATAP, or would have given it a chance? And Google bought Motorola almost 5 years ago. If you don't call that a chance, I don't know what is.

I think the point is that if you believe both (a) it had zero chance at google (b) it might have had non-zero chance at Lenovo - then it would've been preferable for it to go to Lenovo, since a possibility of >0 is still better than a flat 0. Personally, I'm reasonably sure the chances of Ara succeeding were infinitesimal anywhere, but I think your "who says" isn't a counterargument to ocdtrekkie's point.

Post by WalterBright » Wed, Jan 11, 2017, 10:43 AM UTC

p1mrx wrote: post #85

WalterBright wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Did the upgradeable PC ever really work, It did in the early days (the first 10 years). These days, the mobo, CPU, ram, power supply, graphics card all seem to need to be a matched set.

For the mobo, CPU, and RAM, I would agree, but power supplies and graphics cards have been forwards and backwards compatible for roughly a decade.

Post by AstralStorm » Wed, Jan 11, 2017, 1:35 PM UTC

digi_owl wrote: post #82

femto wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did the upgradeable PC ever really work, or did the vast majority of PCs sold go to the dump with exactly the same configuration as sold? After a few years, it becomes a cascade of dependencies: Can't upgrade memory because the old motherboard won't support state of the art DIMMs, the bus used by current cards (ISA, PCI, AGP, PCIx) doesn't match the motherboard, power supply connector has different number of pins, an…

It did, until it no longer did. With DOS and Win9x one could effectively replace everything underfoot of the OS and it would hardly blink. Yes it would fall back to 640x480 and 16 colors, and demand you install some new drivers, but beyond that you could do just about anything and it would still boot. Come NT and you would just be greeted with a error screen and a demand that you did a recovery (that would effectivel…

Post by Traubenfuchs » Wed, Jan 11, 2017, 2:00 PM UTC

general_ai wrote: post #25

Even at Google most people knew this project was stillborn. It's a combination of two factors: no one but a few geeks actually has any need for this, and the overwhelming majority of profits in the industry is taken by a company that builds the opposite of Ara, further underscoring the former point. It terms of flushing money down the drain it ranks way up there with Google Glass and Project Loon.

Post by onedognight » Wed, Jan 11, 2017, 2:36 PM UTC

bsder wrote: post #58

grizzles wrote: post #5

Google mgmt fake releases and then subsequently cancels unlaunched products all the time. They do it to assess market viability and also to stymie competitors. Ara is notable because of the breadth of the project, but it was really just about protecting the android cash cow's flank. The strategy has worked pretty well. Android was released as open source almost 10 years ago, and you still can't run it on any semi ope…

> To this day, it still boggles my mind that Intel won't sell an open handset. Because you would be asking Intel to trade the enormous margins of x86 for the minuscule margins of ARM. Seriously. Intel fabs already operate at almost 100% capacity. There is zero incentive to play in the ARM space if you are Intel.