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My jaw was only the floor anytime the Klingons were on screen. They’re supposed to be these formidable warriors, not lisping fish people who talk at 3/4 speed.

In a sense, we were ministers. And I have heard now so many times from individuals who have been honest enough and brave enough to tell me aspects of their life, of their health, of their mental health. And how it was all saved and improved by watching every week.

Martin: How did that sit with you? That’s an awful lot of responsibility to be that. I mean, you’re an actor in a show and people ascribe to you this wisdom, you’re a moral compass for them.

Stewart: I was proud of it and what we did.

Damn straight! What a weird question.

developers not having a 30% overhead might end up forwarding those savings on to the users

Thanks for my LOL of the day!

demands payment just to have basic access

This isn’t remotely what they do, and I think you know it.

They take a percentage of payment transactions only. You can have “basic access” without paying them a dime. I manage an app with 30 million monthly users and we pay Apple zero. Because we don’t transact inside our app.

So you want to show me a payments platform that doesn’t take a percentage of the business? I’ll wait.

What you’re doing here is shouting down eBay because they won’t let you sell products on their platform without taking a percentage. They’ve assembled a massive buyer market for you to tap into. They’ve given you tools to use. And WHAT??? They want a piece of the profits??? OUTRAGE!

And to answer your question, what makes iOS so special is how much money developers make there. It dwarfs everything else you mentioned combined. You’re cheering on developer greed. They’ve absolutely flocked to this platform with its supposedly prohibitive fees. It’s hard to take your argument seriously.

without using Apple’s infrastructure

This is disingenuous. You can’t deliver an iOS app without Apple infrastructure. You don’t count XCode and iOS itself? You don’t think Apple will need to offer iOS settings and support for 3rd party stores? They absolutely will.

What Epic really want is to profit from Apple’s platform and marketplace without paying anything in return.

I wish I could believe that. But the second other app stores are allowed, apps you use today are going to migrate off of AppStore completely to protect their margins.

There’s no consumer benefit from that. More money goes to developers instead of Apple. Big benefit! At least a single, high quality app store has some consumer benefit.

It works in reverse too. The developers don’t care about competition. They just want to profit from the platform without paying anything. You could say Apple’s claims about platform quality and consistency are weak, but the only thing on the other side of this is boosting developer profit margins.

If only the lawyers and judges deciding this knew the joy of having the Epic launcher on their PC.

Lawyer: “Should anyone be allowed to create a computing platform free from Epic bloatware?”

Judge: “That wouldn’t be fair, would it?”

SMH

If only Apple could develop the technology to distinguish between a light press and a forceful touch.

Thank you!

Could someone help me: what is a MagSafe Wallet? Is it just a credit card pouch that couples to your phone? Do you need to take it off if you want to put your phone on a MagSafe charger?

Device manufactures certainly can optimize certain things for their device

Samsung can’t force Google to optimize it for them.

They don’t need to. The source is open. All they have to do is optimize it for their particular hardware.

I’d imagine a good amount of manufacturers would rather have Google optimize the OS

Of course everyone would rather have someone else do any work. So what? Isn’t Google already giving them a lot for free?

rather than fund a whole team to do what Google should be doing anyways

It’s not Google’s job to optimize Android for every end use hardware profile. That’s for the OEMs to do. And they’re getting a whole OS for free - optimization is literally ALL the OEM has to do

I’m still not seeing any reason why Apple should have an advantage here. Any Android OEM should be able to walk up and make a great hardware pairing with the open source Android OS. But they don’t. Instead they rely on Moore’s Law to keep them afloat.

This is why Android users still care about specs: because performance is only achieved through brute force, never good optimization.

It’s lazy and cheap in the end. It’s how they crank out $200 Android phones. People say Apple phones are too expensive given their hardware specs but they completely miss all of the above, and the point. Work smarter and you don’t have to work harder.

When I said “they” I meant OEMs. Google can’t force them all to optimize. But I don’t see why an OEM can’t do exactly what Apple does.

As open source, I don’t see why Android can’t be optimized for its hardware, or its hardware developed optimally for the software.

They just don’t do this.

Well, call me uninterested, but I have never had to think about my RAM size on my iPhones, and I’ve been with them since the 1.0.

Total storage size, yes, but even that is becoming less important with the air of cloud services.

I think if you want to shop specs, Android may be for you.

It’s not like they issue the absolute limit of the state of the art in each phone, and new scientific breakthroughs drive what’s in the next phone.

There are occasional breakthroughs in technology but they don’t make it into phones until they become cheap and reliable.

So this year manufacturing processes are really scaled up on Perfect Camera iteration 1005. There are also devices out there that already have iteration 1008 but they are niche and expensive and buggy.

In two years, 1008 will be more reliable and manufacturing will be scaled up for it. They will introduce it into a phone in 2026 and you will roll your eyes and say “gee where did they pull that from!”

But it’s a continuous ramp of improvement: mostly driven by how successfully and how quickly small improvements move from lab experiment to full scale manufacturing.

On a PC, more RAM is always better.

In a phone, more RAM taxes the battery more.

There is a right amount of RAM, and more importantly a right way to tune the process management for power savings.

But the only measurement of that is the end user experience. MB of RAM just isn’t a useful number.

“what little I tell it” may be the key to your success. If you’ve only ever set timers and asked it the temperature in Cupertino, you probably think it’s great.

I’ve attempted far more than this. Things that Google search can answer with it’s top result. Things that other voice assistants can do. Things that seem mechanistic to me like “what time will United Flight 1201 from Phoenix to San Francisco arrive?” And it can’t do it. Just returns web results.

Never once has Siri pleasantly surprised me with its answer. Many many times it has disappointed me, even with low expectations.

“Double dumbass on you!”

Right up there with:

“No ma’am. No dipshit.”