fpgeek

Also, I wouldn't give up on native pen support just yet.

NVIDIA's DirectStylus technology is supposed to be processor-based and, more importantly, uses standard touch sensors (no active digitizer required), though it does seem to require support for a faster-than-normal touch refresh rate (NVIDIA's DirectTouch).

With luck, good pen support on the Pixel C might be just a software update away...

I disagree. I see them as very different value propositions.

Chrome OS is about giving you a baseline (80-90%) computing environment with as little administrative overhead as possible (easy to setup, easy to share device, no driver issues and so on). That's why Chromebooks are doing well in the education sector.

By contrast, an Android convertible like the Pixel C is about giving you a general-purpose Android environment in a different form factor.

There's some blurring around the edges (Android has a Chrome browser missing some desktop features, Chrome OS can run some popular Android apps), but they're nevertheless aiming at very different targets.

> Why is this running Android instead of Chrome OS?

Because you can already get convertible touchscreen Chromebooks (e.g. ASUS Chromebook Flip, ThinkPad Yoga 11e Chromebook). Yes, a Chrome OS Pixel C would add a detachable keyboard, but overall it would be a much smaller step from existing Chrome OS devices than the Android Pixel C is from existing Android tablets.

From what I recall, there was a big price increase for asthma inhalers when they switched from CFCs to other propellants. That being said, I thought the new propellants were going to go generic after a few years.

Has that not happened yet? Or did people / insurance companies adapt to the higher prices so that the new generics can charge more than the old ones?

Sigh.

I was hoping you were going for an analogy with self-checkout. That would have neatly and effectively pointed at the missing piece of the puzzle. Instead you went for the cheap moralizing, which can make you feel good but doesn't get anyone any closer to solving the problem.

> Does Google let you replace default search with Bing if you want ?

Why yes, they do. If you want, you can even replace Google Now with Firefox search (using Yahoo by default, unless you change it).

Not there aren't issues that get through (like this one, I believe), but you forgot:

1a) If the issue can be fixed and/or worked around in Play Services, Google does that and "everyone" gets the fix without even having to explicitly install it.

3b) For each OEM, if the problem can be fixed/worked around by updating the apps and/or frameworks they publish via the Play Store, they do that (if only for the sake of new and upcoming devices) and all of their customers get it once they install those update.

Those cover a large (and growing, because Google and the OEMs are both aligned on this) chunk of your "left hanging" users.

So the Hangouts bit is just about triggering the problem without user intervention? If an attacker can find another way to get you to play a malicious video, there's still a hole? That's clearly more serious.

The update strategy has been rethought and, frankly, I'd be surprised if anyone needs to release an OS update to fix this. Google clearly can and will just update the Hangouts app (if they haven't already). I'd expect most other manufacturers to just put an update for their OEM messaging app on the Play Store (if they don't already have a hook in something like an updateable OEM framework app they can use).

> The amount of cash Apple and now Samaung can throw at their custom designs may be overwhelming.

Not to mention all of the soon-to-be-ex Qualcomm engineers it just got a lot easier for them to hire.

"Owner" is usually an overstatement. Yes, an activist investor has to own some chunk of the company (and it has to be a big enough chunk that management will pay attention to them), but they don't own the whole thing - or even a controlling interest. If they did, they wouldn't need to be activist, they'd just fire the existing board and management and hire people that would do what they want.

Instead, activist investors own a small, but large enough chunk, advocate for what they want and rely on other investors being passive (e.g. because a lot of the company is owned by tiny slivers of much larger portfolios) even if what they're advocating isn't in other investors' interests.

Yes, they had to pay Qualcomm for their LTE patents, but that didn't mean they had to use Qualcomm SoCs.

Other devices (e.g. Galaxy Nexus, Droid Bionic, HTC One X+) married Qualcomm LTE radios with non-Qualcomm SoCs. Even Samsung did this for a few devices (e.g. Galaxy Note and Note 2 LTE, a few S2 and S3 variants), but, until this year, that was a small and shrinking portion of their lineup.

Qualcomm's past engineering success was a big part of the reason why. Samsung/ARM's engineering failures (e.g. big.LITTLE and cache coherency issues with the original Exynos Octa) were the another part of the reason, but I don't think that changes the overall picture.

Um, what? Yes, the ARMv8 transition was a problem, but until then, Qualcomm had been consistently delivering the best combination of power and performance all the way back to the Snapdragon S4. It's not like Samsung was putting Qualcomm chips in their flagships because they wanted to - they had to in order to keep them competitive.

If you believe the article (I'm not sure whether or not I do), the shareholders didn't freak out because of the bad quarter - it was just an opportunity to push their pre-existing agenda of prioritizing returning capital to shareholders instead of investing in the business. If that happens to destroy the company in the long run, these shareholders might not care - nothing stops them from selling their shares well before the long run arrives.

It's not about the money from the app store, it's about the lock-in from apps, which is far more valuable.

Well they did add YouTube Music Key (no ads, background play and offline access for many music videos) pretty recently, but they've done their typical terrible job of publicizing that.

Apple did not become one of the most profitable companies in the world by paying expenses partners can be convinced to eat instead.

All the encryption in the world doesn't make any difference if it's easy to steal your account.

Unlike Facebook or Google, Apple practically had to be shamed into fixing an easily-gamed account reset process and adding two-factor authentication support (and then took their own sweet time rolling it out across their services) and had to be shamed again into adding rate-limiting on logins. Not to mention their spotty track record on other security issues (e.g."goto fail").

That doesn't mean that Apple hasn't done some things that are good for personal privacy. But their broader track record makes it clear that Apple only takes the appearance of personal privacy seriously. The reality, on the other hand, easily takes a back seat to things like UI simplicity unless that missing reality starts creating appearance problems.

Comcast also makes most of its money from users directly. Yet, somehow, the incentives are not aligned. Why is that? How might that apply to Apple?

I think the strong reaction is because the distinction between Apple and Google is much fuzzier and weaker than Tim Cook (and some commenters here) are trying to make it sound.

Apple makes money from device sales. Apple can make more money by using private information (to improve their cloud services, selling the search default to Google, for iAds and so on) - as long as they don't do something with it that makes people reconsider their next device purchase.

Google makes money from advertising. Google can make more money using private information with their advertising - as long as they don't do something with it that makes people reconsider using Google services.

There's a difference here but it's a difference of degree, not kind. At bottom, Apple and Google are both companies with incentives for collecting and using private information and risks that encourage them not to misuse it. You can try to squeeze a moral distinction out of the details, but it is spin, not substance.

> if every time Amazon added a new major product they took the ENTIRE STORE DOWN FOR HOURS.

In that case, would Amazon ever be up?

> 2. Not sure why you are comparing App Store with Amazon when Apple has an equivalent: the Apple Online Store. It does have physical products and has to deal with figuring out shipping across multiple regions. It's actually comparable to Amazon since they both use the microtransactions approach to billing.

Are you serious? The idea that Apple's online store is even vaguely comparable to Amazon in terms of complexity is just laughable. To start with, Amazon sells essentially everything Apple's store does - plus millions of other products too. And unlike Apple, they're tracking a wide variety of promotions and offers over those millions of products. Then we can talk about all the third-party providers that also sell via Amazon. And how many orders of magnitude more difficult Amazon's search problem is. Not to mention Amazon's recommendation engine. Or the order of magnitude more online users and transactions (Apple's user base is in the same ballpark, but how many of them buy online vs in-store or via a retailer or carrier?). And on and on.

How about Apple has admitting they do exactly that?

http://www.imore.com/yosemite-ios-8-spotlight-and-privacy-wh...

Yes, they say they properly anonymize and location-scrub this personal information before they store, aggregate and analyze it (and I have no reason to doubt that they're doing that, at least for their own use), but they are clearly collecting it. And if you're going to talk about things like vulnerability to government surveillance, just collecting it in the first place is more than enough to open that door.

How, exactly, has Google's collection of personal information contributed to identity theft?

I suppose, on paper, you're more vulnerable to Google employees or contractors using internal access to steal identities, but is that a problem in practice (if so, I'd love pointers)? Or are Google's internal security measures and controls effective in preventing it?

Meanwhile, Google's done more than most companies to protect the information they have from third-party attacks (HTTPS, two-factor authentication, certificate pinning, and so on), probably partly because it is so important to their business model. Apple, on the other hand, has often been slow to implement new security features out of concerns it will compromise the user experience, leading to well-known breaches like this one: http://www.wired.com/2012/08/apple-amazon-mat-honan-hacking/

> I know exactly the criteria google uses to show the ad to someone, because that's what I buy when I buy keywords.

No, you know exactly the criteria Google requests from you when you buy the ad. That's most likely a subset of the criteria Google uses to display the ad (which can include things like the past performance of your ads / of similar ads, in different contexts, for different kinds of users and probably all sorts of stuff I'm not thinking of).

Not necessarily. Android has an option (which is on by default) where Wi-Fi off really means off except for location assistance. If iOS has something similar and the issue even affects that passive scanning, it could be a deeper problem. I wouldn't say that's likely, but it is possible.

There's this thing called the home button...

While there are plenty of mediocre aspects of the Kindle ecosystem, there are plenty of excellent ones as well. For example:

1. Return policy. Amazon has the best ebook return policy in the business. It seems essentially the same as their physical book policy. The last time I checked, Google Play was next-best (7 days no-questions-asked, regardless of jurisdiction) and everyone else grudgingly had a return policy where it was required by law (i.e. Europe) and none otherwise.

2. Sideloaded books. AFAIK, of the major ebook retailers, only Amazon and Google will let you sync books you didn't purchase from them to your cloud library. Other retailers might let you read sideloaded books in their clients, but you have to use Dropbox or an equivalent for backup and syncing across devices.

3. Client support. If it supports third-party applications, Amazon makes a Kindle client for almost anything you might want to read an ebook on, plus they have a web-based reader. Meanwhile, Google and Apple are busy paying "strategy taxes" for platforms it isn't in their interest to support, and B&N and Kobo don't quite have the resources to keep up.

While you're right about Amazon's bundling advantages (with both Audible and MatchBook), there are other audiobook alternatives (e.g. Downpour, which sells many DRM-free audiobooks).

I think you have the causality backwards. It's not that Google doesn't care about getting indies on Google Play (though, to be fair, not enough to deal with the havoc their automatic discounting creates for indies, last I heard), it's that indies often don't really care about being anywhere but Amazon (largest market, extra perks for titles that are exclusive, less to manage and so on). For obvious reasons, this may not be a great long-run choice for them, but it can be very attractive in the short-run.