Sounds like a reasonable method to ensure you focus on the 5% that's most imortant. http://venturebeat.com/2016/01/05/evernotes-5-problem-offers...
(i guess itunes is privilaged if you're still syncing files back and forth from comp to phone, but who does that anymore?)
(itunes is terrible, by the way; very heartily agreed on that point.)
Except for the customers who bet their livelihood on you and now have to turn their entire workflow upside down to accommodate your lack of interest.
Any other company that we see remove features and not support the ones they created would get absolutely castigated, not referred to as a win/win/win.
Apple is a bad actor for letting iTunes become a bloated piece of shit. They'd be a good actor if they cut all the crap and released a new product, or products, with fewer features but more focus.
You're reframing the argument in an Apple-friendly way. Screaming isn't a sign of a win, it's a sign that Apple doesn't know what to trim ahead of time - that is in no way a win for the customer.
Not saying you're wrong about Google, though. I'm sure the Pixel-C problems are quite real: I encountered all of them myself, when my Moto-G was essentially bricked by the update to Android 5 (think 10-to-30-second lag on every keypress).
These frustrations with my Apple computer and Google phone are almost bad enough to push me into the arms of Microsoft... or would be, if every interaction I had with Microsoft products didn't immediately show them to be even less competently executed than Apple or Google.
The proof is the amount of ChromeOS devices one sees on sale here in Germany. Almost zero and the ones that do sell, tend to get discounted almost all the way to zero before anyone buys them, just to replace ChromeOS with a standard GNU/Linux distribution.
As for Oracle's suing them, Google should have played by the rules all JVM vendors follow instead of playing dirty on Sun.
Go read some sysadmin posts about Chromebooks, they are highly loved by schools. They are cheap, interchangeable between students with little issue (since it is all cloud based), and have great admin tools when you have a fleet of them.
The Pixel C had the potential to be a very nice open machine. It's even shipped with the Nouveau driver. And it runs Coreboot. But sadly Coreboot is locked down in this particular case.
Also, I don't get why they mess up with the keyboard layout. Many useful keys have been removed like tilde or backslash. Yes, they are accesible via a sort-of-compose-key labeled "...". But then I need to retrain my muscle memory.
It's otherwise a fantastic machine, so I'm a bit sad for the missed opportunities.
Likewise, your expectations for long term support on Apple stuff is probably going to be different than Microsoft and Google stuff. I don't think Apple customers are happy with the behavior your describing, they're just way more willing to tolerate it because it's not unexpected.
The thing is, I don't think Google could get away with doing the same things. I think Apple's strategy works for Apple, but I don't think it generalizes.
As an Android user, I am positively revolted - outraged, really - when an Android hardware manufacturer locks the bootloader making custom ROMs mostly impossible. And yet it doesn't bother me that much when Apple does this?
As an Apple user, I'm upset when my Apple device doesn't behave smoothly and responsively. Really, it needs to be like butter. And yet as a Note 4 user, I overlook all sorts of bad Android behavior - slow app startup, poor battery life, not being able to hold more than 3 apps in memory on a 3GB RAM device, dog-slow task button. Not terrible at all, but certainly not like an iphone.
It's a 10" Android Tablet. Looks nice enough I guess. Don't really see what it has to do with ChromeOS or the Chrome Books other than the reuse of the name.
And re: the Apple point, this is pretty much exactly as "incremental" over a ChromeOS device as an iPad is with over a MacBook.
Link: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/12/the-pixel-cs-bumpy-ro... Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10713384
According to Google [1], "Pixel is Google designed hardware; Nexus is hardware we work closely with partners to design".
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3w3x7p/hi_im_andrew_h...
I have a feeling that the code in Android to render a ChromeOS-like UX is sitting nascent on the Pixel-C, just waiting to be patched a few times to smooth out bugs, before being flipped on.
This is a really low bar. Enough Android device makers never provide updates. Got a Nexus One a few years ago, Google updated it for a grand total of 13 months before deciding it was "too old". Of course I didn't get the Nexus One until most of the way through that time period so my Google phone was updated for perhaps six months, not exactly a great user experiance.
> "Galaxy Nexus, which first launched two years ago, falls outside of the 18-month update window when Google and others traditionally update devices."
18 months is far too little, especially if you do not buy a phone on day one.
I don't think Android TV has ever gotten much love either.
Glass went from monthly updates to completely unsupported, practically overnight. That actually was being openly sold on the Play Store for a while too.
I'm not saying they haven't been on the ball with most of their mainstream products, I'm just saying you should bear in mind that they've let plenty of their failures just die on the table too.
They don't strike me as an Apple type company that strategizes obsessively around a few products.
One of the things they are especially good at is to never introduce hardware which isnt followed by a serious piece of software. So I think it comes down to a kind of culture Apple have honed over the years.
1. Pick a product. (Pages, for example, or Logic Pro. Or the entire platform -- OSX.)
2. Create a new version with significant feature regressions (e.g. Pages 5, iOS in the early years, Logic Pro X).
3. Keep an eye on what features the customers are screaming about losing, and re-implement them (but not the bits nobody cares about).
4. Screams subside, product reaches parity again -- but is a lot less crufty, easier to maintain on new platforms.
Google hasn't mastered this art, and they're unsure what their operating strategy is. First there was Chrome the browser, then ChromeOS (a thin client platform), and Android because they needed a phone OS, then running Android apps on ChromeOS, then this idea of giving ChromeOS touch support so it could replace Android, then the flagship touch-ChromeOS platform (the Pixel-C) has to ship before the OS is ready and it all falls apart. With much wheel-spinning, Google ends up falling behind an in-some-ways-inferior Apple competitor because they don't focus on iterative design.
(Am I barking up the wrong tree here? TL:DR is the Pixel-C hardware looks gorgeous but the software is clearly a case of "dammit, we have to ship now, what OS can we dump on it?" rather than any strategic planning.)