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Apple has a decade-long lead in wearables

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Re: Apple has a decade-long lead in wearables

#171

Post by pjmlp »

MichaEiler wrote: post #167
pjmlp wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what concerns Microsoft, if they had doubled down on WP7 model (Silverlight + XNA) and just opened the C and C++ toolchain to app developers (NDK style), instead of rebooting the ecosystem multiple times, their stuff would probably still be around.

Thank you. I was wondering about this too. Breaking app compatibility between WP7 and WP8 was IMHO the death sentence for the platform...

Except that doing it once wasn't enough.

8.0 had separate models for phone, tablet and desktop.

Then 8.1 unified tablet and desktop, while keeping phone apart for view code, so UAP was born.

With Win10 everything got merged together as UWP and the whole One Core marketing happened.

Then since the WinDev team had some score to settle, C++/CX was deprecated and replaced by C++/WinRT, which to this day after 4 years in development, still expects developers to manually edit IDL files and the generated code without any kind of Visual Studio tooling support.

Now they have WinUI 3.0 with 1700+ issues on Github, with Project Reunion just hitting 0.8, with the very long term roadmap of unifying everything, assuming it doesn't get canned as well.

So most of us that believed on the ideas behind WinRT just gave up, and went back to classical Forms/WPF/Win32.

Re: Apple has a decade-long lead in wearables

#172

Post by GeorgeTirebiter »

aphextron wrote: post #149
whynotminot wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> silicon tech being years ahead of the competition is one that is hardly a factor for the smart watch category. What? This doesn't even make sense. This is by far the most important lead Apple has. Their ability to put performant and efficient chips into tiny devices is why they have such a software edge. Other Android wearables suck because the underlying hardware is not able to power the experience without signifi…

"People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware"

what folks don't seem to grasp is that hardware is (conceptually) software, except it much harder to change...

And it works the other way, too, c.f. Lisp Machine.

And then there were mainframes B6700 had loadable microcode that 'swapped in' different instructions depending on the higher-level language being run: http://www.retrocomputingtasmania.com/home/projects/burrough...

Re: Apple has a decade-long lead in wearables

#173

Post by nradov »

makecheck wrote: post #156

Apple’s lead seems to be more in tangential things that are very hard to replicate: Apple Pay, supporting the highly popular iMessage, etc. These can never work with any other device. There are definite flaws in the device. I find buttons unnecessarily hard to tap for instance (they should offer more vertical space), and the face is so sensitive that it routinely triggers unwanted actions. It is really annoying to st…

Apple Pay isn't much of an advantage. Samsung and Garmin have the same thing.

Re: Apple has a decade-long lead in wearables

#174

Post by user-the-name »

smoldesu wrote: post #160
sQL_inject wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm have to sort of disagree, not a decade but easily half a decade lead. Source: I worked in this space years ago with what was, at the time, the leader in the space, and remember how many of my coworkers laughed at the Apple Watch unveil. Now Apple is the one laughing with a girthy, multibillion dollar schadenfreude. Apple has leads in silicon and cross-platform integration which is inarguably led to a better user…

> Apple has leads in silicon and cross-platform integration I stopped reading after this part.

Both are simple, factual and true statements? Why does that make you stop reading?

Re: Apple has a decade-long lead in wearables

#175

Post by nradov »

snowwrestler wrote: post #134
gnu8 wrote: post #124

The article seems to be saying that Apple has a decade-long lead in wearables over a list of companies that don't even make wearables. That is a clever trick for giving the article a bold title, but the result is a fairly uninteresting and uninformative Apple jerk-off piece. It is akin to saying "Quaker Oats has a 150-year lead in edibles" where Apple doesn't even make food.

So who are the most capable competitors to Apple in wearables? Among my friends and colleagues, those who don’t buy Apple Watch often buy Garmin watches instead. In the area of fitness tracking watches, Garmin seems to be serious competition. It’s missing the full app ecosystem of Apple Watch but I think you can send messages and email to some Garmin watches over 4G, for example.

Garmin is now #2 in smartwatch market share. Fitness tracking features are generally superior to Apple but there are few useful 3rd-party apps. Currently only one Garmin watch has some limited LTE support so they generally need a smartphone Bluetooth connection for messages. Rumors say they'll be launching additional LTE models soon.

Re: Apple has a decade-long lead in wearables

#176

Post by dna_polymerase »

nradov wrote: post #173
makecheck wrote: post #156

Apple’s lead seems to be more in tangential things that are very hard to replicate: Apple Pay, supporting the highly popular iMessage, etc. These can never work with any other device. There are definite flaws in the device. I find buttons unnecessarily hard to tap for instance (they should offer more vertical space), and the face is so sensitive that it routinely triggers unwanted actions. It is really annoying to st…

Apple Pay isn't much of an advantage. Samsung and Garmin have the same thing.

Can't speak for U.S. banks, but in Europe more banks seem to support Apple Pay than Garmin.

Re: Apple has a decade-long lead in wearables

#177

Post by setBoolean »

defaultname wrote: post #133
krrrh wrote: post #38

I think people underestimate how big of a factor weight is going to be when it comes to face wearables. Apple’s lead in terms of performance/watt is so massive at this point, they’re going to have a few years where no other AR solution can even compete.

I work in the AR space and it is incredible how much Apple is preparing their entire platform for a massive push into AR. For years they have been laying a very robust groundwork with their APIs (ARKit, RealityKit, SceneKit), the inclusion of LIDAR on their iPhone 12 Pro / iPad Pro, and likely the entire iPhone 13 line. These are all things that are effectively gimmicky and seem like failures with little uptake, but…

That baffles me sometimes. A lot of people see some features that they think of as gimmicky on their own. But then all of the sudden Apple releases something new that utilizes all those little features and combines them to something groundbreaking.

Re: Apple has a decade-long lead in wearables

#178

Post by s3r3nity »

nradov wrote: post #173
makecheck wrote: post #156

Apple’s lead seems to be more in tangential things that are very hard to replicate: Apple Pay, supporting the highly popular iMessage, etc. These can never work with any other device. There are definite flaws in the device. I find buttons unnecessarily hard to tap for instance (they should offer more vertical space), and the face is so sensitive that it routinely triggers unwanted actions. It is really annoying to st…

Apple Pay isn't much of an advantage. Samsung and Garmin have the same thing.

Can't use Garmin pay to pay for train / bus fare, or at least not as widely as Apple Pay.

Re: Apple has a decade-long lead in wearables

#180

Post by Doctor_Fegg »

908B64B197 wrote: post #94
jiggawatts wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the Apple Watch health features are blocked in Australia because they were literally too lazy to submit the paperwork to the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA)! All a competitor has to do is submit their paperwork and they won't get any competition from Apple. Easy!

> Most of the Apple Watch health features are blocked in Australia because they were literally too lazy to submit the paperwork to the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA)! Why duplicate all the work done by the FDA? Just use their certificate. Save the taxpayer some money.

If you believe unthinkingly following American regulatory authorities is a good thing, I have a few hundred 737 Max planes to sell you.
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