Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google's $19B Black Box Is Worrying Investors

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–139 of 139 posts

Re: Google's $19B Black Box Is Worrying Investors

#131

Post by davemp »

bitmapbrother wrote: post #129
davemp wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does that battery life test show anything about the A11’s efficiency? - The displays will be drawing a huge majority of the power—diminishing the effect of the processors. - The batteries have massively different capacities.

The A11 is on a smaller die size and yet the battery usage has actually regressed from that of an A10 [1]. Additionally, the displays do draw a lot of power, but so does video processing and games and the A11 doesn't seem to offer that much of an advantage, if any from a battery perspective, than the A10. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-691mHL1to

I'm not going to watch any more 10min hobbyist benchmark videos.

Re: Google's $19B Black Box Is Worrying Investors

#132

Post by mehrdada »

bitmapbrother wrote: post #129
davemp wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does that battery life test show anything about the A11’s efficiency? - The displays will be drawing a huge majority of the power—diminishing the effect of the processors. - The batteries have massively different capacities.

The A11 is on a smaller die size and yet the battery usage has actually regressed from that of an A10 [1]. Additionally, the displays do draw a lot of power, but so does video processing and games and the A11 doesn't seem to offer that much of an advantage, if any from a battery perspective, than the A10. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-691mHL1to

My pencil has lower power consumption than all of them. It also processes zero instructions per second.

The ability to ramp up your speed at the cost of higher power consumption is a feature, not a bug. You finish the workload faster and therefore the total energy consumed will be lower.

It's funny that no serious person from Qualcomm who works on Snapdragon will with straight face support your point of view about the processor comparison. In fact, they would shit their pants looking at A9 in 2017, let alone A11. I know cause I have talked to a couple. :)

Re: Google's $19B Black Box Is Worrying Investors

#133

Post by holtalanm »

msie wrote: post #89
holtalanm wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Yes you can compile and install your own software, but AFAIK, you have to pay a yearly fee for the privilege of doing so Yes. And you have to own one of their overpriced computers too.

Really tired of this argument. Do you really expect to do software development with little to no investment in software and hardware? Even if you are just developing for Android you need to buy a PC and an Android device. If you want to test Android software on a PC be prepared to spend money to get a machine powerful enough to run Android emulators at a tolerable speed.

But guess what? I can still actually _run_ that android development environment on any damn machine I want to.

Why would you be 'really tired of this argument'? It is a verifiable _fact_ that Apple requires you to own one of _their_ PCs in order to develop IOS apps. I can't use a Lenovo. I can't use a Dell. I can't use an iBuyPower gaming laptop that blows the specs of their shiny Macbook Pro out of the water. You see the problem? You have no actual _choice_ with your development machine when developing IOS apps.

There is no 'argument'. That is just how it is. And it keeps vast quantities of people that _might_ develop quality IOS apps out of their ecosystem.

Re: Google's $19B Black Box Is Worrying Investors

#134

Post by bitmapbrother »

mehrdada wrote: post #132
bitmapbrother wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The A11 is on a smaller die size and yet the battery usage has actually regressed from that of an A10 [1]. Additionally, the displays do draw a lot of power, but so does video processing and games and the A11 doesn't seem to offer that much of an advantage, if any from a battery perspective, than the A10. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-691mHL1to

My pencil has lower power consumption than all of them. It also processes zero instructions per second. The ability to ramp up your speed at the cost of higher power consumption is a feature, not a bug. You finish the workload faster and therefore the total energy consumed will be lower. It's funny that no serious person from Qualcomm who works on Snapdragon will with straight face support your point of view about th…

The SD 835 and A11 are sort of out of sequence in release cycles as the SD 835 is over 7-8 months old. A better comparison would be between the A11 and SD 845.

As for Qualcomm, they're really not an innovator in the SoC space as they just take whatever ARM gives them and add their modifications. The ARM A75 cores in the new Q1 2018 SoC's will exceed the multicore of the A11 and be about 25% slower in single core I predict.

Re: Google's $19B Black Box Is Worrying Investors

#136

Post by Veratyr »

prklmn wrote: post #130
Veratyr wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The situation you describe is a little different because people aren't locked in to a supermarket. If you don't want to pay the premium, you can go to a deli, another supermarket or have it delivered by Amazon. If you don't want to pay Apple a premium, you don't have a choice. You either do it or ditch iOS and lose all your purchases on the platform.

Maybe the situation is more analogous to joining Costco or Sam's Club where you pay a membership fee, i.e. buying the phone. Your point about losing all your purchases is a good one. I guess you could say you still own your purchases after you ditch iOS, you just can't use them with other platforms - but since all the food you buy gets consumed, it's a unique scenario.

The problem is that Sam's Club and CostCo still have alternatives, even with their membership fees.

Imagine that you paid $1000 for a 1 year CostCo (iOS) membership which gives you access to CostCo but only on the condition that you live in CostCo Village, where you can only buy Certified Approved™ products from CostCo (which have a 30% markup) and if you choose to leave, you'll lose everything you bought while you were there. Home, furniture, electronics, everything. CostCo Village is a nice place to live and the products sure are nice but imagine 50% of the population living like this. From a consumer perspective it's shitty because you have no choice and from a vendor perspective it's shitty because you either play ball or lose out on half the population.

Sure there are Sam's Club (Android) Villages where you can still buy from other chains or independent grocers but it's just stupid that you have to make this choice.

Re: Google's $19B Black Box Is Worrying Investors

#137

Post by sli »

futhey wrote: post #120
simonh wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh for goodness sake, go and get yourself a GNU Stallmanphone or whatever along with the other five or six owners and leave the rest of the world alone. What the heck did Apple ever do to you?

Sorry you're getting downvoted to oblivion.

These types of comments belong on reddit, not HN.

Re: Google's $19B Black Box Is Worrying Investors

#138

Post by prklmn »

Veratyr wrote: post #136
prklmn wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe the situation is more analogous to joining Costco or Sam's Club where you pay a membership fee, i.e. buying the phone. Your point about losing all your purchases is a good one. I guess you could say you still own your purchases after you ditch iOS, you just can't use them with other platforms - but since all the food you buy gets consumed, it's a unique scenario.

The problem is that Sam's Club and CostCo still have alternatives, even with their membership fees. Imagine that you paid $1000 for a 1 year CostCo (iOS) membership which gives you access to CostCo but only on the condition that you live in CostCo Village, where you can only buy Certified Approved™ products from CostCo (which have a 30% markup) and if you choose to leave, you'll lose everything you bought while you w…

Here’s one, you buy a Mac and use it for 5 years with all your Mac software you bought and then you decide to switch to a pc. None of the software can be used on the pc, and you have to buy it all again for the new machine. Consumer hates it, developer loves it. The intangibility of software makes for a bad comparison to using/buying physical goods. Switching does suck for consumers, but I think you’re very wrong about it being shitty for developers. They have a new opportunity to sell their product! Also, there’s a reason why vendors pay a huge premium for Costco shelf space - it’s worth it. To have instant access to Costco members for vendors is a big deal, otherwise they wouldn’t be there.

Another thought...we live in a capitalist society (assuming you live in the US). With the customer base that Costco has, you can’t realistically expect them to give away the most valuable thing they have to vendors, can you? Sure if you run a single convenience store you can’t charge for shelf space, but if you run 1000 of them you probably can. So if you’re Microsoft for example, you need to beg developers to build apps for your mobile OS because the value proposition i.e. paying users just aren’t there. Flip that story on its head and you have Apple.

Also, I don’t quite understand what you mean in your last point....

Re: Google's $19B Black Box Is Worrying Investors

#139

Post by mercer »

lvillani wrote: post #127
valine wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is only true if you're fine with reinstalling the side-loaded app every week. This is a pretty major caveat imo. If you want the app to stay on your device past a week you need to buy the paid Apple Developer subscription.

I keep reading this but my experience is different: I have built and installed two applications on my iPhone more than a month ago and they still run just fine. I didn't have to re-install them every week. My paid developer subscription expired two years ago. I suffer from all restrictions of the free tier (can't publish to App Store, can't use StoreKit, SiriKit, etc) except for the need to re-install the app every w…

Could other people confirm/deny the claims in this comment thread?
Post reply on HN