Satya Nadella admits giving up on Windows Phone and mobile was a mistake
theverge.com
theverge.com
The Kinect was really, really cool tech, and I dream about what could have been if MS had not made the Kinect thst came with the XBox One optional pretty much right after it was announced.
It was a cool tech solution in search of a problem.
It is hard, really, really hard, to convince game developers and publishers to make games that require an optional accessory. It's been tried again and again and it is never more than a mild success and usually an abject failure. They want to target the base platform, which will always have a dramatically larger install base.
Thr original Kinect was just such an optional accessory, and yeah, didn't have much in the way of third party support.
The XB1 could have, and would have, encouraged more devs to use and experiment with the Kinect because devs could be assured that every single user would have one hooked up.
Except that Microsoft chickened out instead of sticking to their guns. As usual.
Granted price isn’t the only reason - MS’s self-inflicted bad PRs and slightly lower graphical performance of the XB1 - but it really wasn’t helping.
At the end of the day, their core demographic wasn’t interested in the gimmick that was the Kinect.
It has been tried again and again and again. Optional console accessories and upgrades just never have enough of an install base to attract a critical mass of devs.
Going further back in time, I remember the GameCube/n64 and gameboy game-relevant accessories as largely being limited to a few games each, and always as an optional bonus feature that never really mattered that much
With Kinect, you had to make a game that was entirely designed around it, and not have some random mix where you play with the controller and occasionally use gestures. And there really only are so many types of games you can come up with where it doesn't feel like you made something for the Kinect just for the sake of it..
I think the market tried quite a few things with Kinect on the 360, and the most convincing game to me was dance central, because it didn't entirely feel like a casual game with a bit of tech-demo scent, where you'd lose interest after a week and then maybe only ever pull it out again when you have friends over.
The market did not try quite a few things with Kinect. Most publishers put out a game, one single game, presumably subsidized by MS, and then went back to making games for the base console because there was not a Kinect install base.
I call bs, the original Kinect was a commercial success and around for long enough. The tech was there, casual gamers were there, anyone could've picked it up and release an awesome AAA game with kinect to conquer the existing gaming audience. The price of the Kinect quickly dropped to 100$ after the initial price of 150$, which any serious gamer would've spent without hesitation. How is it Microsoft's fault that nobody did create such a killer app? Again, give me an example of anything that had at least potential. Or if you're that convinced it would've worked, you must have come up with your own ideas over the years, right?
> The market did not try quite a few things with Kinect.
Hit me.
Microsoft actually did try really hard with the Kinect (already in the Xbox 360 generation) but it just didn't work out. I wonder how much money they lost on that whole experiment (or maybe they actually made money, apparently they sold 35 million overall which isn't too shabby actually).
Dance Central 3 and Just Dance 2015 (?) were terrific.
Kinect was great for music/rhythm/dance games in general.
Now I want to go back and try Fruit Ninja, Kinect Adventures, and the Gunstringer.
Force-bundling it with the Xbox one enraged the (hard)core gamers as they had to pay for an addon that the last few years showed they have no need for, and for the casual gamer, it was too expensive. It had success with casual gamers on the 360 because that console was already relatively old and thus affordable when the Kinect appeared.
The Xbox One was then tightly integrated with the Kinect, but that was such an unpopular move that they eventually gave up (first by no longer requiring the Kinect to be connected [1], then by no longer shipping a Kinect with each Xbox [2]) - so it's not for lack of trying. The thing was just unpopular with Xbox users.
...also as an Xbox 360 user at that time I saw Kinect as an expensive toy, and the completely brainless Xbox One marketing (which made very obvious that I'm not their target audience) was one of the main reasons why I gave up on the Xbox and went back to PC gaming.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2013/8/12/4615586/xbox-one-no-longe...
[2] https://kotaku.com/microsoft-announces-xbox-one-without-kine...
> Microsoft is making another Xbox One policy change by allowing gamers to use the upcoming console without Kinect.
> upcoming
They did not try. There was no trying. It was not eventual. They folded before it ever came to market.
And the thing already had worse performance than the PS4, so dropping the Kinect really meant just having an inferior product with no product differentiation.
The thing is simply that Kinect made the Xbox One more expensive than a PS4, and that for a piece of hardware that most Xbox users saw at best as a gimmick. It probably was the first sane decision of the bungled Xbox One launch.
You are free to pay $100 for gimmicks all you want.
My understanding is it died ~six months after the Xbox one released (early 2014) when they stopped bundling it with that console. They kept selling it for several years after, but it was inconceivable it would do anything but die at that point.
People didn't want to pay a premium price for a motion gimmick. The Wii hit the sweet spot for casual gamers and they didn't care that the fidelity was lousy.
Damn internal corporate politics at Nokia.
It took years for any other mobile platform to catch up to the convenience of my beloved Palm Pre.
I remember some people did have a half-working port to the PinePhone, but I don't know how far did it go.
Nokia had already tried it a couple of years before with the Web runtime for Symbian, and it wasn't great either, nor the failed Firefox OS.
It lives on as TV OS, and actually the experience is much better than Android TV, regarding the UI junk (less of it), hence why I got it.
And yeah, there are people still shipping apps for it to run on TV, if one feels so inclined to do so.
IIRC, WebOS was the first mobile to rely on WebKit for the whole UI presentation layer. Prior to that, nothing was fast enough.
It took something like four years until Apple and Android passed Nokia's market share. They had their chance to fight.
Android wasn't in full swing back then. Linux + Qt could have been built up into an amazing mobile OS. I'd argue Android could have ended up as the 3rd place OS.
Nokia just needed to switch to being the premier Linux + Qt phone maker instead of the only one + trying to lock everything up on top of Linux + Qt.
Much easier sell than random new OS.
I too had an N9, and while I wouldn't describe it as amazing, it was reasonably good for the time and probably the best we've ever had in terms of a functional multitouch "linux phone".
IMO what killed it was the closed off nature of Harmattan and the lack of support from Nokia in encouraging hacking the OS. No reproducible firmware, no trivial flashing of community builds standing on the shoulders of what Nokia shipped on the phone. We'd be in a very different place today had the N9 been where the PinePhone is in terms of ability to easily derive and swap out distros, and the vibrant community this enables.
I use the Nokia N9 alarm clock was an example of a perfect piece of software.
It was the Nokia board that decided to hire him.
It was the Nokia board that gave him a contract with a bonus clause if he managed to sell Nokia Mobiles business unit, as discussed on the Finn press at the time.
Phones, watches, TVs all are slow and battery hungry just because nobody would opt in for a little less functionality (or app selection)
Apple branding isn't too much more inspiring (Mac to iMac to iPhone).
The difference was Apple had a clear vision on what they wanted the technology to be while Nokia was divided between squeezing a bit more out of Symbian or invest in their 'follow up' Linux-based line. They didn't need Elop to screw up, they did that perfectly by themselves. If sales were better and Microsoft had continued with Windows phone it probably would have saved Nokia.
I think you are conveniently ignoring the explicitly bad rep Windows had, even for people who bought and used Windows in their homes. It had none of the draw that Apple had following their iMac/iBook/iPod era.
Zune was building a good customer base, but MS threw that away too of course.
Mac -> iMac -> iPod -> iPhone
Obviously the iPod gives us AirPods and HomePods.
I imagine there are users of *Pod devices that have never seen or used an iPod!
They clearly took many design cues from Zune, which was another excellent product I loved that did not take off.
I think if MS Phone had stuck it out a bit longer hybrid apps may have helped bring some developers in.
It sounds like Nadella still doesn’t get it though. MSFT tried several times to “reinvent the category of computing between PCs, tablets, and phones” and none succeeded. Windows 8 UC targeting tablets and native apps was a disaster and ate up a lot of goodwill. With tablet PCs and netbooks Microsoft had the right idea too early and with poor technical implementation.
I had what I think was the lowest end Lumia at the time, a Lumia 520 maybe? It did what it did really well.
The camera was surprisingly OK. The tiles meant I could see what I needed without tapping around. It was much more responsive than other phones in its price range from what I remember too.
I'm pretty sure there were hundreds of us; but maybe only tens.
I don't think Microsoft understands how constantly churning the development framework impacts potential developers, because Windows is so big that developers will suffer through churn until they realize they should just stick to ancient methods that will continue to work. Windows Phone had no ancient methods, and important new OS features were tied to new frameworks anyway, but there wasn't enough users to encourage most developers to suffer through it. That they couldn't make Windows Mobile 10 work (well) on low end devices like the Lumia 520 is probably a mix of organizational and engineering failure, but either way, the push from Microsoft to build 'universal windows platform' apps that would only run on Windows Mobile 10 prompted developers to cut support for WP7 and WP8 in favor of WM10, even though WM10 never had more users than the earlier versions.
Also, mobile Edge was soooooo much worse than mobile IE, woof.
#totallynotstillbitter
I think you were far from alone in your disappointment watching it wither on the vine.
I will say, they do need to get their heads out of their asses for MAUI.
The snappiness of apps was also hindered by network I/O in the UI thread (I mean wtf Microsoft).
WP8 did some things better but it was too little, too late. Nokia at some point bitterly complained about Microsoft's inertia in getting important features implemented that Nokia needed in order to sell phones (besides the apps, but that is another whole can of worms). https://www.techspot.com/news/53405-microsofts-slow-developm...
And it is not that the WP8 release fixed everything that was wrong. Rather, it added to developer churn by switching to yet another API, it upset users because no WP7 phone could be upgraded to WP8 (except for the HTC HD2 which originally came with WM6.1), and it still didn't support any modern mobile web browsers.
Then there was this strange limitation to only 720p screens and dual-core CPUs until WP8 GDR3. Or that you could not disable automatic screen rotation until that update. VPN support and the notification center came only with WP8.1.
Zune, Phone, Surface, Windows 8, Windows RT, Bing, Cortana, Continuum, Project Astoria, I'm sure I'm forgetting. Apple and Google execs must have been amused.
No wonder that Windows developer community decided to ignore whatever is related to WinUI, and focus on the stable technologies from the past.
At least Native AOT might support WinUI in .NET 9, something to look forward to, for anyone that still cares outside Redmond.
iOS: UIKit -> SwiftUI
MacOS: AppKit -> Catalyst -> SwiftUI
there was definitely some churn within each one of those from version to version, but no complete rewrite needed afaik.
Apparently, Microsoft couldn’t even setup the project template, need to manually edit the project file adding WindowsAppSDKSelfContained setting. After that it launches, but the binaries are now 151MB in 386 files, for a single AMD64 architecture.
By comparison, an empty WPF application compiles into 171 KB of binaries in 5 files, and the binary is CPU-agnostic, it runs on all CPU architectures. It depends on the .NET 7 runtime, but the runtime for my processor only takes 55MB to download. And if you’re unhappy about the runtime, you can instead target the older .NET framework 4.8 which comes preinstalled on Windows 10 and 11.
For C++, you're better off with Qt, wxWidgets.
You can use Visual Studio Community if the licence still fits your work, or in the case of Qt, Qt Creator alongside a recent VS or MinGW.
Only if you need cross platform.
On the Microsoft tooling stack even MFC offers better development experience on Visual Studio.
I left it out on purpose, because I doubt the OP would like to use MFC, and I wouldn't even recomend XAML C++ development experience to my enemies.
If you want to dabble in desktop with C#, Avalonia is the best way to go nowadays. I'm having a blast with it working on a couple of projects for my assigned client, and in a couple of personal toy projects.
But, that has taken a long time, during which it was mostly the butt of jokes.
So, not saying all of these were abject failures and a few are still around and doing OK (Surface) or better (Bing). But, I'd argue that the projects were so rushed and reactionary that they were delivered compromised, embarrassed, and with too little direction and advocacy.
Oh, and I'd like to add Microsoft Store to the list.
Quite unpleasant to use compared to just vanilla ChatGPT, which offers a zen-like experience in comparison.
A little more than a month later MS decided to cancel it. And to be fair, it wasn't that great of a product, but the fact that they burned through all of that development and a massive marketing rollout only to throw it in the trash a few weeks later.... just peak late-00s Microsoft.
It was a fun project, and the live tiles and flat style provided a lot of inspiration that resulted in the next version of our app for iOS and Android.
Instead of being scrappy and trying to do whatever it took to gain marketshare in an area they were behind in they put a ton of limitations on their platform and it tanked adoption because the people who were willing to switch and try something new were by definition people who were going to be frustrated with this behavior.
Things like not supporting multitasking or apps running in the background, blocking all exes from even being downloaded, not giving access to the underlaying file system, categorically blocking applications like video game emulators, restricting the ability to tether your phone, etc.
Yes there wasn't third-party app support and yes their maps sucked but I think both of those would have been fixed over time if they didn't take a super arrogant big brother approach to the operating system.
Example of what I'm talking about: http://i.imgur.com/JfFiuO4.png
Mobile games at the time were all OpenGL ES, which Microsoft refused to support in favor of Direct3D.
Then there was Microsoft's perpetual need to start over. WM6.5 to WP7 broke app compatibility. WP7 to WP8, entirely new APIs. WP8 to WM10 there was UWP and Continuum, again forcing major rewrites if you wanted the new features.
And finally how Microsoft treated the devs themselves. Ad-supported apps depended on Microsoft's ad network which was artificially kept alive by Microsoft injecting money for Xbox and Office ads. Once Microsoft stopped, the whole thing folded, leaving developers with a sudden loss of income.
Developers from countries in Microsoft's 2nd tier additionally reported poor treatment and Kafka'esque bureaucracy preventing them from publishing apps: https://toshl.com/blog/why-publishing-on-the-windows-phone-m...
This is why I think the app situation would not have fixed itself over time, and MS efforts to ease transition like Project Islandwood were doomed from the start, because those fixed a problem but not the problem.
The rewrites across multiple versions, that is what killed the desire to target the devices.
I don't understand what you write about Valve, the Steam Deck supports unmodified Win32 games which use DirectX.
The effort to port between Windows and Windows Phone was way less than between Windows and XBox.
Besides that, porting wasn't easy even for apps which worked on Windows already. The API was quite different, and not in a good way. For example none of the standard Windows file I/O API was available. There was DirectX but it was DX11 FL9_3 which is not how you access GPUs on desktop Windows (you would either use DX9 or DX11 FL11_x).
It was still DirectX and Win32 for the most part.
Only FOSS indie devs make such an uproar of OpenGL and friends.
Walk around GDC, PAX, GDCE to see how much professional game developers care.
And obviously the lack of all the Google apps. Again there was obviously some manager on crack thinking that that'll get everyone to switch to the according Microsoft offerings, and maybe people just stop using YouTube. But surprise, it didn't work out!
Also the aggressive power saving which meant every time you were sending some photos on WhatsApp or other messenger, you had to make sure to keep the screen on and the app in the foreground until it's done uploading, otherwise there was a 90% chance it would get aborted and restarted next time you turned on the screen.
windows phone come back :(
I think the team behind 8 had just a lot of freedom and could work on their vision, but then with 10 everyone had to leave their mark somewhere because they knew how to "fix" it and get it to succeed.
Low-end Android phones used to suck. Hell, even high-end ones. There was a lot of jank, battery life was mediocre, software looked and felt patched together.
Windows Phone delivered a really good experience even on the bottom-of-the-line hardware, Things were smooth, and most stuff (because it was either first-party or from committed devs) was built to fit the design language.
It wasn’t until later than Windows Phones came out but the association with Windows was just too strong. I owned a Nokia Lumia and to be honest it was an ok experience with the tiles and everything but the iPhone just felt so much more polished as a consumer device. The Windows branding was a liability to be honest.
Microsoft’s design language felt too corporate and if you look at any of their OS interfaces today they’re just so uncool. Smart phones are lifestyle devices and being too corporate is a liability. (Unless you’re BlackBerry but somehow there’s a coolness to the BlackBerry branding — even Obama used one. I doubt he would have used a Windows phone. )
If they tried to market it as a third party alternative to Android, why would manufactures give up an OS they can customize and not have to pay to license (Do you have to pay of the play store?).
Locking down Windows Mobile in the iPhone way is counter to how Microsoft runs Windows right now and would be a major uphill battle. The iPhone kinda lucked out being able to pull this off due to when it came out I think.
All of this leads to them needing a healthy enough install base to get developers to make apps.
Personally I don't think they gave up too soon, I think they were fighting an uphill battle that they were likely never going to Win. It didn't really matter how many good ideas they had when they were up against 2 very entrenched platforms.
The problem was, they were too late.
> In retrospect, I think there could have been ways we could have made it work by perhaps reinventing the category of computing between PCs, tablets, and phones.
Why does that quote give me Windows 8 vibes? The idea of a single platform and UI for everything? That worked super well.
Ironically, they were in the phone OS space before Apple and Google, so arguably, they were too early, inasmuch as the experience they acquired blinded them to the possibilities of smartphones just as the category truly took off.
They did give up, because hardware development and support costs a ton of money, and they preferred the margins from selling Excel licenses.
They could have done what Apple did and invested heavily in hardware development for 10 years. They even had Microsoft stores rolled out, with clean Windows computers without malware installed by default.
But there was no stomach for lower profit margins and a longer term play.
Microsoft hasn't just given up on mobile, they've given up on the desktop. At this rate Windows will eventually just become a fork of ChromeOS that uses Wine to run apps.
Imagine a new Windows Phone....that runs Android apps.
https://seekingalpha.com/article/3447036-microsoft-android-a...
https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-officially-cancels-...
Forked Android with a Metro launcher and maybe they skinned the rest of the UI. I think I remember WhatsApp doing work to support them while I was there (anything Nokia made and didn't cancel before launching would have and sell enough units to matter), but I don't remember how hard we had to work; I'm guessing it didn't have google play services, but I don't remember if it had its own push services or if it just used long connections. I think maps/locations was weird because Nokia didn't hook the Google apis, so that was a bit tricky. I don't know if it could use the website distributed apk or if Nokia had an appstore, etc.
That's misleading as the article correctly states, that it was admission the company made some serious mobile mistakes (in strategy / approach).
Not that "mobile was a mistake".
“Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella admits giving up on (Windows Phone and mobile) was a mistake”
Windows Phone == Nokia?
Or was Windows Phone not Nokia?
Off the top of my head: Zune (belittling Apple), Search (remember they started name-calling Google), CompuServe (paid shills brutally attacking people online), Operating Systems (attacks on Linux (FUD Advertising), BeOS (Licensing)). So much more.
What they don't do is create a product out of love or passion or belief, usually...
I was surprised when the surface lineup of tablet/laptops... surfaced. They seemed to actually care about what they were doing and really put some thought behind it. I was impressed with the hardware and I very much dislike Microsoft.
I'm glad they got owned on mobile by Google and Apple. I feel comfortable in saying they would not have brought anything positive to this market. A villain was defeated and we are better off.
Mozilla's Firefox OS, however... that's a different story. We all lost when they pulled out.
I think I found someone who dislikes Microsoft more than I do. Nice to meet you:-) LOL
Seriously... you are mostly correct about the hardware deficiencies, I won't argue this. The surface line started off very badly but... it engaged. To this date, I don't think you can even get Linux running on any of them w/o some effort.
Mine's was a quick comment and had more to do with Microsoft redefining the hybrid Tablet/Laptop market. It was, I think the only time that I could recall, when they finally took the lead on something. Some hiccups, of course, but overall an industry defining success. It was odd - for me - to see Microsoft leading the field in anything.
I always saw MS as a company that envied someone else's innovation and tried to replicate that success. From Office Programs early on, AOL competitor, VisiCalc/Lotus 1-2-3 competitor, Gaming, Browsers... the list is nearly exhaustive.
Even small things like sound formats, image formats... they needed to upend someone else's established format and replace it with their own. Even their original OS - DOS - wasn't theirs but a hacked version of someone else's effort.
I'm certain you know their history (comment meant for some others reading this).
Finally with Surface, they designed and helped re/define the Tablet/Laptop market in a design pleasing way. They also added Surface Studio - which I thought was very effective. I remember seeing videos on their thought processes, who they consulted when they created Surface Studio. After years of envisioning brutes, they presented themselves as polished professionals during these formative 'Surface' years.
Just wanted to expand on my previous quick comment for clarification.
With Windows you have Phone Link which allows access to messages and notifications, but it is a far cry from Apple Continuity. For things like access to the phone camera you still need 3rd party software.
Also in my experience the integration is not always as smooth as advertised (and hard to troubleshoot when it’s not)
They just improved the performance too.
But if you want to take this particular example, it’s very simple to just download Acrobat Reader or some alternative.
My point is Windows has a known malware problem, editing PDFs is a common need these days, and Microsoft has the resources to provide a built in non malware PDF editor.
Yet they do not bother to fulfill a simple need for their customers.
Windows has a built-in PDF reader with basic editing functionality in the form of Microsoft Edge actually (although I've never used it for that purpose to be honest).
As for a non-malware PDF editor, I'm not sure if Preview.app is such a great example in light of the recent image processing zero-days ;)
How did this shitshow get past hundreds of developersc, testers, and product managers?
I've been an Android user for over a decade but haven't bought a phone for myself for a while. Samsung won't update the Galaxy S8 any more and my bank decided it was too old to run their app.
The others in my family are iPhone users and I dragged an iPhone 7 out of the drawer to give it a go. Now that google's apps and Chrome are native on the platform you can set up an iPhone as almost completely a google experience.
Embarrassingly all the google services work better on an iPhone than they do on Android. I used it for a day and liked it so much I picked up a newer iPhone and transferred to that.
It will take something really bad to send me back to Android - you end up being a 2nd class citizen running Android especially around security and the amazing face recognition unlock that Apple have implemented.
However, it's pretty troubling in terms of competition - the iPhone will hit a critical mass where choosing Android will be wilfully silly.
Just had a similar problem. My bank's iOS app didn't react for "confirm" button so I removed it which resulted with completely locking me out of online banking. Now I'm waiting for a bloody letter. The stale mobile duopoly, mobile as a first class citizen and web as a second class, plus "securitay" practices of banking are an infuriating experience.
I believe Windows CE 7 also had its source available.
FWIW CE7 was an amazing operating system that had a minimal OS image of around 8MB on disk. (Numbers are from memory, might be horribly wrong, it was a long time ago that I worked on it.)
It was also incredibly power, CPU, and memory efficient. Windows Phones could run at a rock solid 60FPS with 1/2 the RAM of an Android phone that was dropping frames all the time.
The entire CE operating system is an example of a huge "could have been". Microsoft really never knew what to do with it, and the Windows org obviously wanted it dead, and they eventually got their way. Of course that involved stopping all Windows Phone development for years while they rewrote all APIs, lost functionality, and lost customer trust, in the transition from WP7 to WP8. WP8 eventually became a good OS, but moving to the Windows kernel means the resource usage advantage was lost, and of course app developers got fed up when a new OS came out that had less API features than the previous version.
Not only that, it was a brand new OS written from the ground up that was designed to be modular and battery efficient.
Sadly it never got a chance to shine, as internal politics killed it.
In a world where Apple just stripped down their desktop OS to make a phone OS, there is no future for something like CE. This is why Microsoft just moved to using their desktop kernel for future versions of Windows Phone -- it makes porting software so much easier.
CE6 and 7 were a complete ground up rewrite from the CE5 and earlier versions. They didn't have any of the limitations that previous CE versions did.
> In a world where Apple just stripped down their desktop OS to make a phone OS,
My understanding is that iOS is so seriously stripped down compared to macOS that while the kernel is the same, the entire runtime is so different that it may as well be a different OS.
And I don't think Apple hasn't tried to keep releases between the two synced up (maybe they have? No idea honestly), compared to Windows Phone which was merged closely with desktop Windows.
In all honesty, Microsoft had so many resources to throw at the problem, that keeping the teeny tiny kernel team for WinCE employed was not worth losing the entire mobile market by forcing the OS teams to merge and then rewrite everything, poorly at times, from the ground up.
Of course lots of Microsoft politics got involved, including killing Silverlight (which tl;dr is why corporate web apps are written in React now, killing Silverlight basically lost MS the entire internal LOB app market), and forcing a brand new API to be designed.
On that note, by the time WP8 released, the OS was missing key APIs, was hard to write code for, and would only fall further behind Android and iOS.
Eventually the WP platform team did get into a good release cadence, but by then the market had been lost.
IMHO at that time Microsoft didn't understand the importance of regular timely releases to keep them in the news. Apple released a new phone, and a new OS version, yearly. Around 2010 MS was still doing "big bang" OS releases with multiple year gaps in-between.
I worked at Microsoft at the time (started my career in Windows Mobile, then Windows Phone), and people kept asking me "is Windows Phone still around? I haven't heard anything about it in forever", with "forever" being more than a year.
Everyone complains about how new phones come out every year, but if a manufacturer skips a release year, everyone assumes that the phone line is going to be discontinued. Developers stop writing apps for it, and no one wants to buy a phone that was released 16 months ago. Heck after about 8 or 9 months people know that it is time to either "wait for the next model" or "wait for the big discounts".