This article is missing a huge part of the story. Google weren’t scared of just a competing app store but of Samsung replacing Android itself with their own Tizen OS. The Galaxy Store was just the consumer bridge to that possibility. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tizen
If true it makes their smart watch joint venture interesting. Did google force samsung to stop using tizen on their smart watches? Pay them a large sum of money to get wearOS back in the game?
Most of Samsung's seemingly odd back and forth antics can be explained by realizing that:
Samsung is the manufacturer most capable of forking Android and telling Google to shove it, and that most of their product development has been making sure that it's possible to do so (Galaxy Store, Bixby, Tizen watches, etc.)
And that Google, knowing Samsung has the brand loyalty and wide userbase to devastate Android's market share, is in a constant effort to pay Samsung to stop pushing them away.
So they built competitors to Google's product library, and then Google pays them to push a Google product anyways, and then they build a competitor to the next Google product, and wait for the check from Google for them to shelve it... Through this back and forth, Samsung both ends up with a competitive ecosystem to Google ready-to-go if they need it, and an extremely lucrative pile of concessions from Google that Google would've preferred to not have to give them.
I feel that the software products & services that Samsung builds is half-baked. It might be a pressure tactic to ensure Google keeps paying.
Also, I am wonder what happened of Samsung & Microsoft plans of Samsung shelving its app & services for Microsoft. I feel that was the "real motivation" for Google to start paying.
Google needs to be challenged for an improvement in Android space. They should stop rushing in half baked stuff and instead work on releasing reliable & well tested products.
As a person that actively used android, iOS, Linux, Windows & Mac, Apple's stuffs just work and it's high time the competition catches up.
As for Android, we need to have flavour / custom ROMs that is 100% degoogled and with proper alternatives. Ubuntu, Microsoft & LinageOS all need to up their game and get more people involved.
As another person who's used all of those OS's as well, Apple's stuff sadly does not "just work" anymore for me, but it does still work better than other ones
Samsung gets a bad rap when it comes to software imo. There used to be a time when it was perhaps well deserved but that was a LONG time ago. Samsung's browser is hand's down the best Android browser I have used in years and continue to use. It has fantastic built-in dark mode support, ad blocking and is amazingly snappy and responsive. Far superior to Chrome and Firefox as well as anything else I've tried.
I've used my S9+ with their flavor of Android and other integrations for many years now and my phone still feels just as snappy and great as the day I bought it.
apple has an order of magnitude fewer device models to support. I'm not sure android will ever have similar performance and feature support as apple - the business models are so totally different.
Careful taking lawsuit claims seriously. Especially then the claim drops from doing X to "attempting X" by paragraph 2 and by paragraph 6 is just being "willing" to attempt X.
All of the phrasing you take issue with is directly from the linked complaint. The complaint flatly alleges Google “bought off Samsung” (as quoted in the headline) and that Google was both willing to attempt to buy off Samsung and did indeed attempt to do so. They are the logical order of events, no? I can’t have bought someone off without first having attempted to buy them off and before that having been willing to buy them off.
The point I think OP was making is that you can say anything with a reasonable evidentiary basis in a complaint. (And some lawyers don't bother with the evidentiary basis part—see the post-election lawsuits that are being sanctioned for just that.)
It's not about whether the language is in the article or the legal document; the legal document itself is merely a lawyer saying something that is in their client's interest.
What type of response is this? "if there are any inaccuracies send them to the editor rather than make a comment"? Adding a comment to inform other readers seems like the correct thing to do and happens fairly often on other comment sections.
If you manage to herd all the necessary cats and actually amend the Constitution, you don't have to worry about conflicts - that's the whole point of doing an amendment, you're changing the Constitution. Only laws can conflict with the Constitution.
I don't think this suit makes it any less likely that various governments will come after that angle also. There's quite a lot of anti-(Google|Facebook|Amazon) sentiment floating around in various government entities right now. I assume it must resonate with voters.
Most voters care more about things like their salary, healthcare, education, retirement and real estate prices, and in general just making ends meet, not which SV megacorp gets to be the defacto tech monopoly.
Would you consider someone like Microsoft a small entity? Do you think they're just gonna sit back and accept that Apple and Google got to shove them out of the mobile space completely?
Along those lines, the NYT isn't writing their 100th FB hit piece "for the good of the people", they see a competitor with a platform. And NYT has a lot of cultural power.
I'd imagine it's something like iOS where you don't get battery friendly push notifications without using services from the OS vendor and there's no way for the user to select a 3rd party service instead.
Which is fine for most users. I don't want every app doing its own inefficient push/pull notifications and tanking my battery, and I am as pro open source/etc/etc as most here.
Well, it doesn't have to be a binary choice between that and google offering it. There could be an OS API where you can hotswap who actually delivers those notifications. Right now I believe the google server actually gets hardcoded into the apps using it.
The result of this is that every app does do inefficient notifications because in many cases it has no access to an external (to the app) notification service on the phone.
Just another crappy smartphone OS feature that works fine on OSes where the developers don't want to control every aspect of the device.
> [...] which Samsung did in 2018 when it partnered with Epic to launch Fortnite exclusively on the Galaxy Store. [...] Samsung apparently pursued other exclusives with “popular” app developers [...]
So an alternative app store provided by the largest maker of Android phones, which pursues exclusive apps that will then only be available for Samsung phones, is supposed to be good for competition?
You lost me at Samsung/Apple/Jeep/Nintendo. I’d definitely put Apple in the top tier of phone and laptop quality. Especially w.r.t laptops, the majority of Windows devices seem comparatively low quality. I’m not sure about their other products but I also don’t see them advertised as much.
Similarly with Nintendo, they seem to deliver consistently higher quality than competitors. They may not be as fast but they last for years and deliver equal or more enjoyment at a lower price point.
> I’d definitely put Apple in the top tier of phone and laptop quality. Especially w.r.t laptops, the majority of Windows devices seem comparatively low quality. I’m not sure about their other products but I also don’t see them advertised as much.
Every MBP/MBA/MB had design flaws. From butterfly keyboard to discrete GPU, only 1 port (USB-C, for battery), etc. They fixed the keyboard problem finally, but from 2016-2019 it was terrible.
Aside from the keyboard issues, you're talking about design choices you don't like, not design flaws. They made the choices they made, and by and large executed on them at a high degree of quality.
There's been other issues. MacBook Pros have had issues with the screen ribbon cable causing problems with the backlight (a.k.a Flexgate). Then there's been issues with batteries swelling in 2015 MBPs which impacts the trackpad too. Plus there has been countless models with GPU failures being commonplace stretching allll the way back to to iBook G3.
I would personally consider the 2018 Mac Mini to have a design flaw as the case design doesn't allow for good Bluetooth reception and using USB 3 so it would lose connection to my Magic keyboard and trackpad at least once a day which I personally found extremely frustrating. I've also had 2 iPad Pro smart keyboards fail within a year with the 2nd one only seeing light usage. It seems like whatever conductive tape Apple uses doesn't handle humidity well and corrodes quickly where I live. I'm concerned about my 2018 MBP's long term longevity keyboard aside just from the awful awful thermals that shoot the machine to T-junction in about a minute of actually pushing it but we will see. Probably the keyboard will wear out before that.
I think too many people confuse quality and metal construction. Yes, Apple builds nice aluminum enclosures but they neglect other details to achieve that.
Do you still use Apple laptops? If not what do you use?
Are Apple laptops higher quality, compared to competitors (despite design issues)? My current Macbook had the screen laminate peel off after a few years. To Apple's credit, they promptly repaired the machine at no cost. But I've had friends with similarly priced laptops (XPS, Razor, ...) who encountered similar build-quality issues, but did not receive the same level of support. Granted, all this evidence is anecdotal. I am curious to see across the board comparisons.
Plus, I'm in the market for a new laptop anyway, so this would be a valuable data point. :)
I replaced two of these screens (MBP 2015 13" and 15") under the program (ie. for free), but they refused to fix a MBP 2014 13" for free. It'd cost me 600 EUR to repair. This was in 2018. At some point they start the repair program, and some point they stop it, and IIRC the limit was 4 years for consumers here in NL. I keep using these machines (replaced some hardware on it such as keyboard, battery, screws, and my wife uses one too), though they each got their flaws. I'd consider a M1 (but my boss ain't buying me one :). Mac is still a superb UI and workflow with Unix under the hood. I think the later models are even worse for gaming, with the ones before M1 you could maybe use TB + eGPU. I just stick to a Linux machine for gaming, with Steam, all kind of emulators, and Wine.
I currently use a 2018 MBP still. I didn't personally pay for it so I don't think I could just get rid of it. Next time I think I'll go back to a Thinkpad. I don't feel like Macbooks are higher quality for the price than a comparably priced Windows laptop with some exception. Gaming laptops tend to cut build quality corners to give more specs for the money basically.
And did you have Applecare when they repaired your machine? I couldn't get them to replace my 2nd iPad Pro smart keyboard when it died since it was out of warranty.
A bad design choice is exactly what a design flaw is though. There's no other definition. If you make bad choices, that's a flaw in your design.
End users have to live with these choices, so we get to decide what is a flaw and what is not. Focusing on thin instead of useful is a design flaw. Requiring dongles for everything is a design flaw.
You don't seem to understand the difference between a design choice you don't like, versus an objectively bad design.
When Apple removed the headphone jack from iPhones, (supposedly) in favor of making them waterproof, that was a design choice that many people rightfully disliked. However, we can imagine there was also a population of people who preferred such a tradeoff. For instance: lifeguards, sea-world trainers, deaf people. It's not a 'flaw' simply because you don't prefer it.
If you are someone who buys a diving watch, but isn't a deep sea diver, you aren't justified in complaining that the watch isn't solar powered. There are people who require (or at least prefer) such a watch, and if you aren't among them, don't buy it.
You don't get to decide what is and isn't a flaw based on your arbitrary use cases. An actual flaw is an implementation detail that is not consistent with the design specs. If Apple set out to make a phone with a working headphone jack, and the resulting product didn't have one, thats a flaw. If they set out to make a phone without a headphone jack, then it isn't a design flaw if the resulting phone doesn't have one.
You don't seem to understand that there is no arbiter of objectivity that we can rely on and that deciding what is a flawed design and what is not is completely subjective.
Removing the headphone jack "for waterproofing" is obviously defective for me because other phones that are waterproof didn't have to remove the jack and I had to buy new headphones. It wasn't for Apple though - they designed it that way so they could sell more headphones. That's how subjectivity works.
Who complained about deep sea watches not being solar powered? I don't have to make up situations to prove my point like a weasel. I just point them out as I see them and the examples I've referenced have been widely held as flaws in Apple's designs.
I do get to decide what is a flaw based on intended use cases as stated by Apple. Nobody made up any arbitrary use cases here.
"Flawed" does not simply mean "bad". It means "defective" or "broken" or "blemished" or the like. A poor design is merely unappealing to certain consumers. A flawed design fails to fully function in the manner intended.
Ah yeah, "certain users". These "certain users" who like to charge their laptop while using one peripheral. These "certain users" who use a USB hub on their only USB port. Come on. Its a flat out downgrade to what was possible in the past. We all know why they made the terrible design choice. Upselling to a non-broken device. They do the same with GB storage on their iDevices. And, all of their devices had design flaws.
I have yet to see a better laptop for 90% of people who want a laptop than a MacBook Air. Battery life, portability, weight, heat production, reliability, adequate performance, price, ports.
That is possible, but a new Air was $900 for the longest time. $700 cheaper is a laptop starting at $200, and I don’t believe any laptop even $500 or less would have been made with components likely to last for many years.
It’s like that story about a poor person having to spend more in the long run buying boots every year than being able to spend a little more to buy ones that lasted many years.
For most people who just want basic spreadsheet, web browsing, photo managing, email, word processing, or other similar purposes where a graphics card makes no difference, yes.
We are long past the times where the average person needs to even think about laptop specs other than whether or not it has a sufficient size SSD, the battery life is long, and it does not get hot.
Here you are arguing people don't need any power because all they do is "basic spreadsheet, web browsing, photo managing, email, word processing, or other similar purposes" in which case they can get 3-4 windows laptops for $199-$299 for the price of one air. If you have 3 teens that all need a laptop to do "basic spreadsheet, web browsing, photo managing, email, word processing, or other similar purposes" you can cover them all for $900 if you go non Mac or you can spend nearly $3k if you go mac.
I'm posting this from a Mac but my sister is unlikely to ever decide she's willing to spend 3x to 40% more for a laptop. She can get 2 Dells with 8gig of ram and 256gig of storage, same as the Air for under half the price of the Air. I'm not saying the Dell is as good as the Air and neither is a Kia as good as a BMW (probably) but a Kia costs 1/2 the price and will still get you from point A to point B and a $300-$500 Windows PC will also still do "basic spreadsheet, web browsing, photo managing, email, word processing, or other similar purposes"
Is the probability of the $300 windows laptop performing 5+ years the same? Will it run hot in your lap? Will you have to recharge it 3x as often? Will you have to spend time uninstalling malware first? Will it have a screen comparable to a retina screen? Will you be able to shut the lid and walk away at a moments notice?
Going back to my very first comment:
> They seem to have made all the right compromises.
Yes, a MacBook Air is not the cheapest. It doesn’t have a GPU. But my point is what it does have provides more utility overall to the average buyer per dollar spent.
And there are other manufacturers that have come out with similarly good machines at similar prices, but whether it is because of Windows’ shortcomings or now M1, the Air seems to be the ideal.
The price is poor and the performance is worse(compared to anything with a GPU). Reliability is questionable given the numerous hardware issues Apple denied over the years.
And I'm shocked you thought to mention Ports. I've been at parties where someone couldn't present a PowerPoint because of the ports on the Air.
They started at $900, had 2 USB 3.0 ports, a headphone jack, an SD card slot, and a thunderbolt 2 port for many years.
Again, note the nuance in my statement that it serves the purpose for the vast majority of laptop users and its amortized cost over many years is certainly less than other consumer laptops, as evidenced by the used market.
Nowadays, they are $1k, and they have Retina screen, 2 USB4/Thunderbolt3 ports. While the port situation may have worsened, its performance due to M1 is surely unmatched. Unless you are bothered by the port situation, it's still probably the best bet you can make for a laptop that will be a good to go for 5+ years.
They don’t have lighted logos, as far as I know. Mine doesn’t from a few years ago. I’ve already replied a bunch of times showing why I think the laptop is ideal for most people.
Yes, I would easily bet the average person values not worrying about battery and heat. Coffee shops, lecture halls, airplanes, or even just around the house. It is amazingly liberating to almost never have to worry about charging it, and just be able to close the lid at a moments notice and not worry about Windows’ problems hibernating or standby or whatever.
And it’s not $450 more for just that. It’s $450 more for a higher quality product with higher quality components that have a higher probability of lasting many years (based on the track record of MacBook Airs).
No, I did not. Higher quality components is not the same as higher specs. For example, I would bet that Apple is using components binned for higher survival rates, than a $500 discount laptop. And I am sure other company's premium products use higher quality components too, it's not an Apple thing. But for this specific product, the all around package of an Air is very competitive.
I think you might be neglecting to include people that like high performance dedicated GPUs - (A) scientists, (B) engineers, (C) developers, (D) artists, (E)motion graphics types, (F) gamers.
Professionally speaking, my work is full of A-E, so, an Air is a big nope.
Nintendo is arguably a weird example though -- in that they're a stellar game studio, a decent hardware vendor, and an awful business.
They can survive on less powerful consoles, and historically have especially in the era before indies blew up, in large part because they sell them pretty much entirely off first-party titles anyway. Even as of this year (Wikipedia's stats on this were last updated 3/31), the top-selling third-party release for Switch is ranked 15 overall. [0] That game, Monster Hunter Rise, sold less than a remake of Pokemon Yellow, ports of multiple Wii U titles -- namely New Super Mario Bros. U and Mario Kart 8 (which is incidentally at the top of the list), Ring Fit Adventure -- a game that's only available via physical copies because it requires specialized hardware and has still repeatedly sold out, and whatever the hell you want to call the travesty that was Super Mario 3D All-Stars. (I'll get back to that one.)
As a hardware company, they're all over the place. They experiment a lot, particularly with control schemes, but some (Wii, DS) execute better than others (Wii U) and not all of them are the best quality. The Switch is a marvel, conceptually, but the Joy-Cons have well-documented drift issues, and the Pro Controller has the worst D-Pad I've ever used despite being from the company that invented those. Its heyday included a pad that seemed to be built for comic book characters (6-arm Spider-Man and Professor X both come to mind), and while the GameCube pad is one of their better-designed ones overall, I started to understand Smash players' hand issues the moment I tried using it for Tetris. Meanwhile it took a literal plague for them to stop being the only vendor since Microsoft, with the original X-Box, not to include Ethernet.
Which brings me to Nintendo as a company. The kind whose stated solution for online when demoing Smash Ultimate was "lol hope you've bought our $30 wired adapter!" (And let's note, refusing to ship with this has made their already-dodgy online worse, at scale.) The one that would shut down Smash tournaments for using emulators on a 20-year-old game to enable online play during a plague, as if that same crowd wouldn't 100% just buy Super Smash Bros. Melee for the Nintendo GameCube again if they just gave it an actual re-release on a modern console. The company that, when it does port older titles, typically just ships lightly-retooled versions of them and proceeds to charge the full price of a modern AAA. The publisher that took Super Mario 64, one of the most iconic games it's ever released, for its 25th anniversary, and not only shipped a barebones port (of this and two other titles), but actively enabled scalpers by giving it a release so limited that they de-listed the digital version after six months.
As someone who enjoys a number of their games I totally see what you mean, but getting legitimate access to those titles involves a bunch of compromises I wouldn't generally have to make with other platforms and/or studios. As much as I don't exactly wish for consoles to become a duopoly again, a part of me really wonders what it would be like if Nintendo had gone the way of Sega.
I could see where you were coming from because Apple doesn't offer budget hardware and it's easy to mistakenly compare a $1000 laptop with a $500 laptop that doesn't have a video card.
But Nintendo is notorious for releasing low quality stuff with their IP skinned on it.
A product isn't more than it's quality metrics, if you believe so, I highly recommend taking a marketing class.
> But Nintendo is notorious for releasing low quality stuff with their IP skinned on it.
Nintendo is also widely praised for consistently releasing innovative gaming platforms at fair prices. And that's what they tend to market and invest in heavily - I've never seen an advertisement for any of their low-quality cash-grab toys (which, yeah, they do exist, and they do suck...).
> A product isn't more than it's quality metrics, if you believe so, I highly recommend taking a marketing class.
OP's claim was that nintendo's product are low-quality, sold at high-price, thanks to relentless marketing. But the products being heavily marketed by Nintendo do tend to be high-quality (for instance, The Switch, a portable console that can be used comfortably enough as a home console, with several innovative input methods and a fairly wide range of high-quality games).
If you purely look at the hardware specs, it may seem like a low-quality product, but that's not the correct quality metric to use in this case.
Yep, but that's pretty much it. Every company—even the best of companies—have poor products. The analog sticks on the Switch are Nintendo's worst hardware in decades.
Take a marketing class to defend yourself from corporate brainwashing.
Nintendo has been literally brainwashing us since we were babies and had no concept of marketing.
I'm not even talking about hardware specs. The switch has joycon issues, expensive games that are mediocre, and for some reason you confuse investment and innovation with quality.
Wasting money and bad ideas are not qualities.
I used to be a Nintendo fanatic, but their systems and flagship games since N64 have woken me up to their quality issues. The fact that people suggested BOTW was a greatest game of all time despite having only 1 temple theme and 3 enemies (with various skins), shows you that we are under mind control.
Or, perhaps, you are not in touch with how people evaluate and experience products, unless your intent is dry humour.
People love the Switch and loved games like BOTW , Mario Odyssey, etc. because they were the best products Nintendo had shipped in 20 years.
I hadn’t owned a Nintendo console since the SNES, thought the Wii was “meh”. They knocked this one out of the park - they managed to make a portable gaming device relevant in a world where everyone has a smartphone. Part of the challenge is that the completion largely do not build portable gaming devices.
Apple and Samsung also consistently rank very high in tech support and customer satisfaction indexes. Let’s look at the main alternatives in the smartphone space: Pixel, LG, Motorola, Xiaomi, Huawei. Are these paragons of quality? Or are you comparing against an imaginary standard of quality?
Nintendo might not release cutting edge hardware, but they're pretty much the only big video game company left that doesn't openly release half finished games with the intention to maybe fix them a few months later.
they also seem to be the least guilty of adding microtransactions to everything. Although I haven't kept up with nintendo devices, so I'm not sure if this is still as true on the switch.
Super Mario Party was not up to their content standards—the minigames were good, but there were only 4 boards, and they were both tiny and dull. Animal Crossing is a mixed bag—it has stuff previous entries don't, and is missing a lot that previous entries contained. But that might have gotten derailed due to Covid. The Mario Golf game that just came out supposedly has minimal content too, but I haven't played it.
On the other hand, it's not universal—New Pokémon Snap is a sequel to a game that could be completed in ~5 hours, and is absolutely filled with content.
. . . That's not what people mean when they say "half finished". It's when a game with a defined scope fails to meet that scope. You might not like the dearth of content with those titles but there is no indication that they were ever meant to go beyond what was provided on release.
I certainly can't speak to what their defined scope was—generally Nintendo doesn't specify, and when they do say something—like saying Animal Crossing was designed to have "two or three years worth of content"—there's no indication what that actually means. All I can speak to is, when playing a game, does this game feel complete and finished? Traditionally Nintendo has been pretty good about that. Recently, not so much. I've been playing Mario Party since the late 90s, you develop a feel for what Nintendo considers a complete release. Whether that's changed intentionally not, is pretty immaterial.
Samsung SSD prices are in line with other vendors. The Galaxy Note II was a very high-quality smartphone. Can't say anything about Samsung TVs, never owned one.
Any company that does major OS updates more than twice? Apple? Then again, Samsung doesn't try to deliberately slow my phone down or drain the battery. So no company I guess. Everyone is churning out pretty-looking garbage.
More than 30 states sue Google over 'extravagant' fees in Play store - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27768127 - July 2021 (105 comments)