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

Apple has a decade-long lead in wearables

aboveavalon.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 237 posts

Re: Apple has a decade-long lead in wearables

#221

Post by fomine3 »

whynotminot wrote: post #123
least wrote: post #17

I'm pretty skeptical that Apple has a decade-long lead on any of the other big players in the market. Any innovations that one company can make can be more quickly adopted than new innovations occur and there's nothing as far as software goes that Apple is uniquely positioned to create. The other factors mentioned such as silicon tech being years ahead of the competition is one that is hardly a factor for the smart w…

> 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…

What I'm not satisfied is why Apple won't make their Watch to make battery life longer. It still just enough for a day even though they have most advanced technologies.

Re: Apple has a decade-long lead in wearables

#222

Post by scarface74 »

fomine3 wrote: post #220
scarface74 wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happens to their services if they can’t procure hardware?

Services could be sold to existing customer with existing hardware at a moment.

Because hardware never fails and needs to be replaced…

You do remember the disruption when the earthquake in Japan caused hard drive failures? Can you imagine what would happen if the entire supply chain gets disrupted?

Re: Apple has a decade-long lead in wearables

#223

Post by fomine3 »

scarface74 wrote: post #222
fomine3 wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Services could be sold to existing customer with existing hardware at a moment.

Because hardware never fails and needs to be replaced… You do remember the disruption when the earthquake in Japan caused hard drive failures? Can you imagine what would happen if the entire supply chain gets disrupted?

Of course finally service companies (or all companies) need hardware but the situation isn't too bad compared to company profited by selling hardware. BTW the HDD disaster was flooding in Thailand

Re: Apple has a decade-long lead in wearables

#224

Post by nradov »

fomine3 wrote: post #221
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…

What I'm not satisfied is why Apple won't make their Watch to make battery life longer. It still just enough for a day even though they have most advanced technologies.

The high-resolution always-on OLED display is a major power drain. In order to get significantly longer battery life Apple would have to downgrade the display, or make the device thicker to fit a larger battery.

Re: Apple has a decade-long lead in wearables

#225

Post by scarface74 »

fomine3 wrote: post #223
scarface74 wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because hardware never fails and needs to be replaced… You do remember the disruption when the earthquake in Japan caused hard drive failures? Can you imagine what would happen if the entire supply chain gets disrupted?

Of course finally service companies (or all companies) need hardware but the situation isn't too bad compared to company profited by selling hardware. BTW the HDD disaster was flooding in Thailand

As Werner Vogels says “everything fails all the time.” How long can Amazon Retail/AWS, Google/GCP/YouTube, or Microsoft survive without continuously replacing hardware? How much degradation of their service can they withstand as they are unable to replace hardware?

If hard drives fail at YouTube and they can’t replace them and keep up with demand, does YouTube start deleting old videos to make room for new ones? Does AWS stop promising 6 way redundancy across three data centers? When a server goes south in us-east-1 and they don’t have a replacement, then what?

Re: Apple has a decade-long lead in wearables

#226

Post by fomine3 »

scarface74 wrote: post #225
fomine3 wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course finally service companies (or all companies) need hardware but the situation isn't too bad compared to company profited by selling hardware. BTW the HDD disaster was flooding in Thailand

As Werner Vogels says “everything fails all the time.” How long can Amazon Retail/AWS, Google/GCP/YouTube, or Microsoft survive without continuously replacing hardware? How much degradation of their service can they withstand as they are unable to replace hardware? If hard drives fail at YouTube and they can’t replace them and keep up with demand, does YouTube start deleting old videos to make room for new ones? Does…

In emergency situation, I can come up with mitigation something like: YouTube could reduce available video quality options only for 144p/480p/1080p/2160p for some rarely watched videos and remove other quality converted videos (but keep original file internally). Such mitigation will work for consumer oriented services, but not work for AWS/GCP. Possibly they can also stop internal analysis/research project that consumes a lot of resources.

They can also delay replacing hardware by accepting higher power usage and failure rate.

Yes it's serious problem but not critical as much as hardware company for immediately.

Re: Apple has a decade-long lead in wearables

#227

Post by tornadofart »

Apple wearables are terrible, sorry. What use is a watch that I have to reload every night and can't be used decently on it's own?

Anyone who has worn a decent, say, polar or garmin, sports watch for more than a day will be amazed and terrified to discover how bad apple wearables are. A good touchscreen is all they have to offer.

Re: Apple has a decade-long lead in wearables

#228

Post by amatecha »

GcVmvNhBsU wrote: post #216
amatecha wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

driving in my car and listening to music playing from my phone via bluetooth :)

Can you not use the button on your steering wheel in that scenario?

No, my car is kinda old - I use a Bluetooth FM Transmitter to broadcast the music to my car stereo! hahah :)

Re: Apple has a decade-long lead in wearables

#229

Post by xwolfi »

amelius wrote: post #121
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's weakness is now their precarious position in bed with China, which will take decades to undo. But this holds for the entire world economy.

It's also in bed with the US, a huge flaw for us in China.

I mean, there are dark forces at the top here, which probably will misuse any kind of dominant position, but it's not like the US has our best interests at heart either.

As for Apple, now they have to play nice with a 300+ M people direct market in the US + all the allies they can sort of bully into segregation against us, vs a 1.3bn (and trending down) direct market in China + very few allies who'd be rich enough to afford Apple products.

I wouldn't blame Apple for cutting itself in half to work with both side of this artificial competition both our rulers decided they should have to defend our respective precious "national security" (which I'd rather call national distraction but heh).

Re: Apple has a decade-long lead in wearables

#230

Post by yoz-y »

coldtea wrote: post #201
user-the-name wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Towards truth, or?

Bias "against X" (here: Apple). Whether the fact is true or false makes no difference. The person with the bias will cherish both true and false statements if they are against X, and reject them if they are in favor of X.

If you read the post from the bottom you would start with:

> I don't own any Apple products, and I don't endorse their labor practices,

would you have stopped reading it because of anti-Apple bias?

Post reply on HN