Google “bought off Samsung” to limit app store competition, 36 states allege
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
More than 30 states sue Google over 'extravagant' fees in Play store - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27768127 - July 2021 (105 comments)
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_of_attainder#Constitution...
They wouldn’t have nearly as much agreement if each was presented as a constitutional amendment, of course.
It would be so much better for consumers if they had instead looked into googles firebase and play services shenanigans.
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.
Just another crappy smartphone OS feature that works fine on OSes where the developers don't want to control every aspect of the device.
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?
Any company that needs to advertise as much as Samsung/Apple/Jeep/Nintendo should be cause for skepticism.
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.
A product is more than it’s specs.
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.
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.
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. :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is true, but it isn't some collective decision. Something you consider a design flaw others might see as a design win.
They seem to have made all the right compromises.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
And M1 still is inferior to having a gpu.
I would be very surprised if even 10% of people connect their laptops to TVs. For those that do, thunderbolt to hdmi adapters are cheap.
> And M1 still is inferior to having a gpu.
I am sure it is, but average person sees no utility from a GPU, but they do utilize long battery life and less heat from reduced energy usage of M1.
So why would a consumer who isn't a power user spend more money on less?
Lighted logo?
I can see 90% of people buying a logo. "I say 123 take your hand and come with me bc you look so fine that I really want to make you mine"
Look at the comments in this thread:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27784640
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).
Yikes.
You go to fun parties.
Professionally speaking, my work is full of A-E, so, an Air is a big nope.
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.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_Nintendo_...
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.
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.
Didn't they have a few hardware related scandals. Like the famous joy control drift.
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.
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.
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?
Lol, come on dude. "Yeah I can see where you're coming from, if you're an idiot it's easy to think Apple is good."
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.
Which companies produce better phones?