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Huawei Manages to Make Smartphones Without American Chips

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Re: Huawei Manages to Make Smartphones Without American Chips

#71
post #4

I checked out a Huawei store - they're the same asthetic as an apple store with a ton more useful tech then an ipod, macbook and imac. The phones were impressive and very affordable. We're talking $200-300 for 6gb ram devices, 128gb storage, etc. Google, Apple are right to be worried.

> I checked out a Huawei store - they're the same asthetic as an apple store with a ton more useful tech then an ipod, macbook and imac. If you cannot tell the difference between the design aesthetic of an Apple store and a Huawei one I will heavily discount your taste as a guide to my I own. I’ve only been to Huawei stores in China, perhaps it’s different elsewhere. The tables are plastic fake wood. The stores smell…

> I assume the same kind of care for aesthetics and design goes into their products so if you want a bad cheap copy of the surface level of good design go with Huawei.

If you've been to Huawei stores then you should be familiar with the build quality of Huawei products, otherwise your opinion is incredibly hard to square. And the insinuation that current crop of Huawei devices are copy cat designs is out of touch. The exception being the MateBook line, which if anything, has superior derivative design given Apples poor track record in notebooks these last few years.

Re: Huawei Manages to Make Smartphones Without American Chips

#72
post #66
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>And obviously it's not so great for the US. There's a lot of confusion, I think, about how you "win" a trade war; as far as I can tell, autarchy is pretty bad for all involved; trade wars seem like a thing where everyone loses and the 'win' comes from winding down the trade war and trading again.

I would say that the "winner" is the one who got hurt less and can recover faster/better but it is all relative. While 2 sides are busy killing each other the third one might get the benefits

I'm just saying, from where I stand (and I'm first to recognize I'm not an expert here) it sure looks like my country is trying to make things harder for China, and is paying the price of making things harder for workers in my own country. Even if the Chinese worker is hurt more than the American worker, the American worker is still being hurt, and as far as I can tell, all involved would be better off if we traded in a more free way.

Re: Huawei Manages to Make Smartphones Without American Chips

#73
post #48
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google and Apple are just milking it. Smart phones were introduced a decade ago. Flagship phones costed then around $500, now we got to the point that they costing $1,000+ like if mass producing wouldn't cut the cost down. On top of that making a battery be non removable and constantly over-volting the batteries to reduce their life. Ultimately phones become useless after 2 years, unless you replace batteries yoursel…

Another way of looking at things: Today’s phones are quite a bit more capable than the first generation of smartphones, and they only cost twice as much.

So tomorrow's smartphone will be 20 times faster and only cost 10 times as much?

Re: Huawei Manages to Make Smartphones Without American Chips

#74
post #66
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>And obviously it's not so great for the US. There's a lot of confusion, I think, about how you "win" a trade war; as far as I can tell, autarchy is pretty bad for all involved; trade wars seem like a thing where everyone loses and the 'win' comes from winding down the trade war and trading again.

I would say that the "winner" is the one who got hurt less and can recover faster/better but it is all relative. While 2 sides are busy killing each other the third one might get the benefits

A pyrrhic victory if you will.

Re: Huawei Manages to Make Smartphones Without American Chips

#75
post #58
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that electronics/computers by itself do not have much to do with with the fall of soviet union. USSR fell because: 1. its economic model was dysfunctional and a failure 2. Its moderate leaders (aka Gorbachev and his allies), decided to dismantle it, as they realized the model was a failure, and their only other option was to become extremely repressive, roll out tanks and kill people. (north korea is an examp…

When there was a referendum asking the people in all reoublics whether to keep the Soviet Union or dismantle it, the overwhelming majority, 70+ percent, voted to keep it. The leadership dismantled it anyway. When asking why, it usually is useful to ask cui bono.

We're apparently just far enough away from the Berlin wall falling that now people want to re-litigate that the Soviet Union was bad and it was a good thing it collapsed.

Re: Huawei Manages to Make Smartphones Without American Chips

#76
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't actually have any idea what you are saying.

They're saying that your comment is irrelevant because you're comparing current issues between the USA and China with issues between the USA and Native Americans in a completely different time period. Today's morals aren't the same as they were hundreds of years ago, so it doesn't make sense to excuse current IP theft in China by pointing out historical theft of land by the USA.

If A criticizes B's behavior on moral grounds, with the hope of, say, "making the world a better place", then it would be logical mistake to respond to the criticism by pointing to bad behavior on A's own part.

If, however, A's criticism of B is not an attempt to "make the world a better place" but to prove one's own relative moral superiority, then not only is it highly pertinent to point out A's own moral failings, but also there need be nothing relativistic about it, since ex hypothesi the conversation no longer concerns the morality of this or that action but only whether one party has a legitimate claim to feel superior to the other.

It's not always easy to tell whether one is in the one or the other situation.

Re: Huawei Manages to Make Smartphones Without American Chips

#77
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that electronics/computers by itself do not have much to do with with the fall of soviet union. USSR fell because: 1. its economic model was dysfunctional and a failure 2. Its moderate leaders (aka Gorbachev and his allies), decided to dismantle it, as they realized the model was a failure, and their only other option was to become extremely repressive, roll out tanks and kill people. (north korea is an examp…

It’s amazing to me, and deeply concerning, that you’re being downvoted for this. Those of us who work in tech are so firmly ensconced in that bubble that we actually think microchips defeated the USSR.

My point was that the microchip industry is a critical part for the developing economy. Today the Bay Area (not California) has 1/2 the GDP of all of Russia! I realize there are lots of industries in the Bay Area besides hardware and software engineering, but that's a pretty stark contrast.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Jose%E2%80%93San_Francisco...

https://tradingeconomics.com/russia/gdp

Obviously there were lots of reasons the Soviet Union collapsed (Chernobyl, for instance). But ignoring the importance of the computer industry in the information era seems like a big oversight.

Re: Huawei Manages to Make Smartphones Without American Chips

#78
post #36

This is really impressive for Huawei. I do not mean to say that the trade war between China and the US is the same as the Cold War from before, but I have a fun tidbit to share. One of the more interesting theories I heard for why the US won the Cold War is because Russia struggled to develop IC technology. The Russians were masters of espionage, and I would even give them the edge in mechanical engineering, but the…

>And obviously it's not so great for the US. There's a lot of confusion, I think, about how you "win" a trade war; as far as I can tell, autarchy is pretty bad for all involved; trade wars seem like a thing where everyone loses and the 'win' comes from winding down the trade war and trading again.

The winner is decided in the details. It’s not obvious at 30,000 feet, but changing tariffs before and after a war can make a clear winner in these situations. At the extreme end involving actual fighting, the opium wars where actually about trade with China.

Re: Huawei Manages to Make Smartphones Without American Chips

#79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I checked out a Huawei store - they're the same asthetic as an apple store with a ton more useful tech then an ipod, macbook and imac. If you cannot tell the difference between the design aesthetic of an Apple store and a Huawei one I will heavily discount your taste as a guide to my I own. I’ve only been to Huawei stores in China, perhaps it’s different elsewhere. The tables are plastic fake wood. The stores smell…

Offgasing is common in brand new stores, even Apple ones.

If the floors are tile rather than vinyl and all the furniture is solid wood rather than veneered chipboard they almost the only outgasing will be from the products sold in store. Even in a new Apple store outgasing should generally be minimal. If you’ve been in a new store that stinks of formaldehyde I bow to your experience.

Re: Huawei Manages to Make Smartphones Without American Chips

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really doubt that the EDA software is really that much of an investment these days. It's the lithography tech that's the real crown jewel, and it is being protected.

The two are quite linked. You can't make a good open EDA package without knowing current design rules and the like, and if you want design rules that aren't old enough to drink you'll be bound by NDAs, as fabs strive to 'protect' every bit of knowledge about their 'crown jewels'.

Sure, the implication though is that if you've got the fab design rules it's not that hard to make the EDA tools. It's not 1982 anymore where the DoD is spending obscene amounts of money to run this on a 10Mhz mainframe.
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