Hacker News Reader

Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

> On the contrary, Apple's ecosystem is completely closed

Their App Store is a monopoly, but I have friends who use iPhones and use Google's Inbox, Google's search app, Chrome browser, Google Maps and Waze etc and don't use the built-in defaults. I guess they like the hardware. So maybe I'm not interpreting "completely closed" correctly.

> ... In the name of user centricity, their platform places arbitrary restrictions on code execution and access.

As a software but non-iOS developer I like these restrictions. Yes they can be annoying (you can't use your iPhone as certain kinds of portable network scanner because they restrict access to the MAC) but they also stop shitty and malign developers from screwing me in certain ways (jerks were using the MAC as an illicit user tracking device).

I see it like various sorts of regulation: everyone us better off if the paint factory can't simply dump its waste into the river, even the paint company.

View on HN

I'm one of those people who gladly use an iPhone with mostly Google apps (namely Chrome, Gmail and Maps). My little experience with Android has always been negative.

The only real annoyance with iOS is you can't set Chrome nor Maps as default applications.

I'm in the same boat. My dream device would be iPhone HW with Android software. I like Android's flexibility, the replaceable home screen instead of the list of apps, the Intents system that lets you replace an app handler with another (Chrome & Maps for example), the much better notification system...

I have an iPhone now (because work), and it took a few months to stop grumbling, but I definitely appreciated the overall better hardware compared to my friend's Android phones, most significantly the excellent (and immediately available!) camera.

> compared to my friend's Android phones

One universal fallacy I've noted since the beginning of Android and iOS is seeing people compare $30 Android phones with iPhones, which target only the premium part of the market. I've used primarily the Galaxy S line but my friends have had Nexuses etc, and the hardware quality (screen, camera, compute speed,build quality) has been about as good (with variance in both directions) as contemporary iPhones for many years now (helped along by the fact that the galaxy S6 aped iPhone's design pretty aggressively).

On Android 6 at least, double tapping the home button brings up the camera immediately.

I'm thinking more of the hardware lag, especially the horror stories of the Nexus 6 and to a lesser extent Nexus 5X.

Is this FUD? I have a Nexus and it's still working wonderfully.

>My dream device would be iPhone HW with Android software

It's called the Pixel 2.

Nah, sorry to break it for you, but the Qualcomm chip is nowhere close to A11.

Yeah, sorry to break this to you, but that A11 isn't fairing too well against Android phones.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kpD3XCp49o

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2G669OgskM0

Let's see how that A11 is on battery efficiency:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbSjUq_kvSM

How does that battery life test show anything about the A11’s efficiency?

- The displays will be drawing a huge majority of the power—diminishing the effect of the processors.

- The batteries have massively different capacities.

The A11 is on a smaller die size and yet the battery usage has actually regressed from that of an A10 [1]. Additionally, the displays do draw a lot of power, but so does video processing and games and the A11 doesn't seem to offer that much of an advantage, if any from a battery perspective, than the A10.

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-691mHL1to

My pencil has lower power consumption than all of them. It also processes zero instructions per second.

The ability to ramp up your speed at the cost of higher power consumption is a feature, not a bug. You finish the workload faster and therefore the total energy consumed will be lower.

It's funny that no serious person from Qualcomm who works on Snapdragon will with straight face support your point of view about the processor comparison. In fact, they would shit their pants looking at A9 in 2017, let alone A11. I know cause I have talked to a couple. :)

The SD 835 and A11 are sort of out of sequence in release cycles as the SD 835 is over 7-8 months old. A better comparison would be between the A11 and SD 845.

As for Qualcomm, they're really not an innovator in the SoC space as they just take whatever ARM gives them and add their modifications. The ARM A75 cores in the new Q1 2018 SoC's will exceed the multicore of the A11 and be about 25% slower in single core I predict.

I'm not going to watch any more 10min hobbyist benchmark videos.

One of the issues is that running Android software on an iPhone inherently breaks a lot of the things that you love about iPhone. The reason is because of Apple’s verticals integration. Running Android would negate this and likely result in a not-so-great experience compared to native iOS.

Samsung hardware has blown Apple out of the water for the last 3-4 years. I want Samsung screens and form factors with iOS. iOS is what makes iPhones great!

Android is a giant tracking/ad/malware machine. It’s far too permissive to applications you install on it. My most recent negative experience were pop up ads that the Peel Remote started showing on my home screen. Peel remote is one of the force installed applications that Samsung’s touchwiz installs. It’s like Windows 95 with OEM bloatware, but worse.

> Samsung hardware has blown Apple out of the water for the last 3-4 years

No one familiar with the impressive lead in mobile CPU design Apple has carved the past few years would ever make this claim. It's far more than just iOS making Apple's iOS devices great today.

You're wish for a better display is definitely valid though, and arguably gets granted at the end of this month.

Aren't the A chips Apple make really good?

And are the cameras really inferior?

Don't worry, your default browser is safari and will always be safari. The chrome browser isn't really chrome, just a reskinned safari. Apple doesn't permit any real browsers except safari.

    > The only real annoyance with
    > iOS is you can't set Chrome nor
    > Maps as default applications.

Or indeed Gmail. Apple Fanboi that I am, I'd love to see them hit with an anti-competition suit in the UK that forced them to publish APIs to allow other apps to replace the core suite.

Or inbox/gmail. All mailto links are hardwired to the shitty built-in imap client.

> Chrome browser

It's really Safari, but with Google services. Apple forbids other HTML rendering engines.

Isn't it only other JavaScript interpreters/JITs specifically it forbids?

I mostly agree with you except

> Their App Store is a monopoly

That word gets thrown around too liberally. Does anyone expect the Apple App Store to be able to serve apps to the Android, Windows, or Linux ecosystems? Arguing that "Apple's App Store is a monopoly" is like arguing that "JCPenny is a monopoly of all goods sold at JCPenny stores". If you want to sell goods in a store, you must abide by the stipulations of a contract with that company.

You have it backwards. Their App Store has a monopoly on distribution of apps for iPhones. I can't publish my app somewhere else, which means I have to get Apple's permission for anything I want to publish (to non jail-broken phones).

”...I like these restrictions.”

Yup. I will only do tech supp (for friends, family) for macOS, iOS. Bought both gf and mom Apple gear. My life is now much easier.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com