FWIW Google has put a lot of effort in the hardware of their datacenters, and in that sense they're a hardware giant as well. Compared to their datacenter projects, Pixel is a funny hobbby for Google.

Thanks!

- hardware has gotten a lot faster, which helps the second reason.

- Google giving away free GGC nodes to ISPs (if you meet their requirements). The distribution of these nodes has gotten a lot wider since container days.

- Google is building more smaller scale (a dozen racks or so) traditional data centers closer to ISPs.

I don't think shipping container design was never a very good idea, to begin with - it was an interesting experiment that didn't scale as well as they thought it would.

There are also a bunch of papers on the network architecture, https://research.google.com/pubs/Networking.html .

But yes, a lot is closed for the obvious reason that this is really core to the business Google is running.

(I'm a datacenter engineer at Google)

hell, the IS-IS implementation in Quagga is usable because of Google :)

We actually release a decent amount of information, see [0]. I particularly recommend "Jupiter Rising: A Decade of Clos Topologies and Centralized Control in Google's Datacenter Network" [1].

[0] https://research.google.com/pubs/Networking.html [1] https://research.google.com/pubs/archive/46286.pdf

Seems like it but unfortunately it is their product and they are selling it.

Is that really a common belief? I know many people who think the opposite - apple is a hardware company.

In fact Tim Cook went out of his way several times to remind people that apple isn't a hardware company.

But many of us don't buy Apple for the hardware, but because we want to stay in their software ecosystem. I'd rather use a Nexus running iOS than an iPhone X running Android, and I'm even more invested in macOS. That Apple builds nice hardware is a bonus for me (but I'd honestly prefer better software right now).

I mean, on paper Apple is making more money from hardware than from software, but how do you measure hardware sales that only happened because of the software?

I'll never buy a non-Apple laptop anymore after dealing with flaky PC laptops for years, and the only reason I haven't bailed on Android is because of how bought into the ecosystem I am... but I'd buy an iPhone in a heartbeat if I could reliably run Android on it.

https://youtu.be/dEeyaAUCyZs

Linux on the other hand is exclusively Bluez which works fine... but god forbid you want to do something like BLE communications or more complex sound stuff, the docs are horrid.

The OS X BT stack is... well I dont have any issues with it per se but it, too, lacks features like a file explorer or an easy way to send files via BT.

If I turn the key in my car, get the electricity running though the circuit, then the phone gets connected to the car. If I turn the key one more time to ignite the engine the car system lose the bt connection and I have to manually force the connection with the phone.

I just ignite the car as soon as I sit in now.

Windows has a ton of problems.

It was either Apple or the clones, and so the clones got axed.

That's because the clones were cannibalizing Apple's own hardware offerings - the clones were gradually putting Apple out of its own business.

This NYT article from 1996 talked about how the Mac clone strategy was playing out for Apple [0].

[0] https://partners.nytimes.com/library/cyber/week/1230macs.htm...

Afraid I'm completely different. I have an iphone but my computer runs linux. The reason I have an iphone is because the hardware is top-notch, and the OS is rather constricting -- I would much rather have an iphone running android than one running ios.

But I despise Android--I want a real Unix. I feel like Android was architected by complete idiots. Oh how I wish WebOS won instead of Android.

I'd prob still use it on and off if HP didn't take the store down.

I'll always miss webOS.

Anyway, not sure who said what exaclty, but Steve Jobs repeatedly said that Apple is great because of the tight interconnection between sw and hw. So Apple is not a hw company. It is not a sw company either. They do both and the result is greater than just a combination of the two.

I see Apple, and the way they present their products supports it, as an appliance company. It's harder and harder to repair their devices and the software is more and more integrated with the hardware – examples: force touch and feedback, Touch/Face ID, all the camera magic, Apple Pay, MBP Touch Bar etc. So basically the sw and hw are more and more inseparable unless you lose "half" the features.

product: (String, String) = (Hardware, Software)

Android O is light years ahead of iOS.

You can quit e easily watch Plex (can’t remember if Netflix bothered) in the background while doing other shut with the PIP.

> you can’t watch a YouTube video either.

Which is YouTube’s fault ENTITELY. They are pushing YouTube red to allow for this (which isn’t even available in a lot of countries they advertise it in....)

PIP is not available on an iPhone.

2) It is Google's fault that you can't watch YouTube whilst doing something else. Apple provided an API which third party YouTube clients already support.

You can debate whether Android O is better or not. But I would hardly call iOS a toy just because it doesn't allow for rich notifications.

This is a feature, not a bug.

They're intrusive, they're obnoxious, they cause performance hiccups on occasion. They're not a superior version of anything.

I'm talking about an iPhone obviously.

Notification aggregation and priority is table stakes for serious office work.

Apple zealots are the fucking worst. Your phone makers are too incompetent to implement notifications properly, so your solution is to find a new job.

At least I wasn't enough of an idiot to use iMessage and get locked into the Apple ecosystem.

And yet Android dominates the market share. I don't think iOS is the best mobile OS, let alone the best by far.

Someone above concluded they are a product company and I was thinking 'appliance.' That's not a negative, they make devices fit for function and they, Apple, are remarkably good at it.

I can't think of an Apple product, and I type this on an iPad, that is truly the best in every aspect. However, they surely aren't the worst and the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, I think.

Apple targets only the top end of the market. I’m a mobile developer and that’s why native apps are almost always iOS first. We know our iOS sales will be higher, and these are proprietary apps, not system features.

It was in the pre-iphone era.

Have you seen the tear down of the old MacBook power bricks? Check it out if you haven’t. There’s a lot of tech in there to improve efficiency (ie keep that tiny brick from melting)

The main issue with Apple's power brick is that people wind the cord too tightly and don't leave slack. HP/Dell's main problem is that the female power adapter inside the laptop takes a lot of stress. In college, I had two roommates that broke their laptops due to the power connector.

Now, maybe that bear needed killin. Who am I to judge? But maybe there are better tools for the job.

Dell's three year failure rate is almost 20%. Apple's is 10.

fwiw, I use Dell XPS boxes.

They're awful. There are a LOT of teardowns of those. It's scary.

Don't assume that because 90% of the charger is well designed, the rest of the 10% is.

There is no or insufficient inrush protection in the charger. This results in a hefty current flowing the charge the primary DC cap in the switching power supply when you plug it into the wall (step response of a capacitor at DC is high instantaneous current if the source impedance is low such as rectified AC - derived from I=C(dV/dt), dv=350, dt -> 0, C~10mF, I->infinity in an idea model ignoring parasitics and series resistance of capacitor). This damages the pins and stresses the diodes terribly reducing the time to failure. Google inrush current protection.

You do NOT get this on decent industrial switching power supplies that actually cost less. They either have NTCs or pre-charge.

The Chinese ones are a whole different story. Some of those are absolutely abysmal and are in no way even comparable to the Apple ones.

The Apple ones certainly don't rank that high really in the scale of things, regardless of all the love spread over the Internet. If you're comparing them to a lowest bidding turd from China, then of course they're going to look good.

Here's a picture of the burn marks on the pins: https://i.imgur.com/aaHV1kX.jpg

I'm not going to even go into the three left IO boards I've replaced on MBP's where the magsafe connector has burned out.

It did sound a lot like you were describing the common issues with the knock offs though - however with the extra detail it really cleared it up, thanks for that.

There's at least a PFC chopper and fuse. I'd be surprised if there were no series inductors, though I can't spot them on http://www.righto.com/2015/11/macbook-charger-teardown-surpr...

It's a reasonably complex pre-rectification stage for a consumer device. It's certainly not AC->rectifier->DC cap.

I can't explain the burn marks in the image -- stunning for a British plug. None of mine with Australian or European plugs show any significant burns. I see sparking when I plug it in, but that's standard for pretty much any SMPS.

There’s sparking when you plug it in and there’s this which is like a small explosion. Either way the sparking is entirely avoidable as well with a trivial. Little startup circuit or a couple of NTCs.

I’ve tried it on a sample of three chargers now (we have three MBPs in the house of differing ages and original chargers) and they all have it.

I’ve got a Lamba 12v 5A unit here as well which isn’t much bigger with a chopped off IEC lead on it. Nothing when you plug it in at all.

We have confirmed reports that Pixel 2's build quality is... questionable:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/10/google-is-investigat...

edit: keep downvoting. You can't change the facts :)

The regular Pixel 2 does seem pretty solid.

It's not that hard, I'm sure somebody's done this on video, do the test yourself if you're not convinced, I don't have an iPhone 7 Plus and 20 hours of time on my hands.

iOS is a hog, and the A series chips are clearly not competitive in idle power consumption as configured by iOS.

Do you mean you think that the same people within Apple are working on both hardware and software, and are focusing more on hardware? Or that you think many people who write software have been re-educated, re-assigned, and are now working on hardware?

I assume that the size of Apple's teams working on iPhone are limited by more than resources, and the recruitment pools are totally separate, so it's not like they're spending too much on hardware engineers and can't afford enough software engineers, right?

I just don't really know how you can conceive of such a massive company as having an obviously zero-sum "focus" like a person has.

IMO it’s less “focus” and more having to rely on third party manufacturers who will push back due to liability.

iOS 11 is a beta quality product. One org that I’m familiar with has a 5x increase in help desk calls and replacements, mostly around the voice phone components failing.

But the fact is, you can ship glitchy software and fix it later, so they do. Hardware is much more expensive to do that with, so they don’t.

You really think that with unlimited money they couldn't have better software? They could, but they don't because it does not have enough of a return on investment. They 'focus' their resources on areas that will return them profit.

Ascribing the bugs to malice or carelessness rather than the fact that this shit is difficult is very unkind. Source: know many people who have spent last few months feverishly working nights and weekends.

I am a developer on a team, too, and I know that sometimes you can't do everything you want because you simply don't have enough time, money, and developers to get it done.

I know it is hard, that is why I was saying it is a company resource issue, not a 'bad developers' issue. Even the best developer in the world can't complete a huge project by themselves in a short amount of time. You need company support, which means ample developers, QA, support, and time.

Not sure where you ever got 'malice' or 'carelessness' from.

It felt insulting because people I know personally do deeply care, and do spend a lot of effort for things that do not necessarily have a lot of return on investment (just for one example, iOS accessibility features for visually and hearing impaired are designed deep into the system and still have no equal). Aside from that, fixing bugs and improving stability does offer return on investment by building customer loyalty (case in point, after each major release I still see people mentioning Snow Leopard, an OS release dedicated exclusively to stability and performance improvements).

I’m not saying that things couldn’t be better, they always could, but I don’t think that all problems are as easily solved as you think. To take a classic counter example, Microsoft employs at conservative estimate twice the number of engineers compared to Apple, but still has not yet made a product twice as good or with half the bugs, imho. At a certain point, the system complexity just gets too great, and we need better architectures, tools and processes to get beyond that level.

Again, I am not saying you were intending to insult anyone, and apologies if I misunderstood something in your post. It’s just how it came across to me.

[1] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/08/24/nodejs_forks_ayo_co...

This bug has been annoying me, my family and friends for several days now. Nearly everyone I️ know with an iPhone. And the suggestion is to break predictive text to fix it. I️ really wish I️ would have bought an Android.

But yes I'd agree with that this is what iOS 11.0 should've been.

On the other hand Google seems to be more of a software company, which reflects in their general culture and hiring practices.

That's just word redefining. And I have an old iMac 20 that has all its USB ports on the back and every time I have to twist my wrist to plug something I am reminded how Apple isn't that good at functional design. The thing is pretty though.

I disagree with both.

Apple is a design company that builds hardware and software together so the design works as intended.

I buy Apple products because they run Apple software. I like the Apple hardware I have, but if it ran easily and bug free on other hardware, I suspect I’d end up with cheaper knock offs for the hardware itself.

What does Apple have to do to impress people? Do all this then give the phones away for free?

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

The low end doesn’t understand why people pay so much more for fit and finish.

Except automobiles. Everyone seems to accept and even approve of the high end for cars.

The dashes split apart, all the clear coat on the carbon elements falls off, the paint oxidizes.

Park a 2003 Murcielago next to a 98 Lexus or Toyota (of any kind). You'll be real surprised which one weathered better.

Anyway, I digress, but I can agree with the point that 'high end car' is a lot different than 'high quality car' or 'long lasting car'.

Edit: That was overly sarcastic but it went from talking about italian cars, to Ferrari specifically, to implying that the Italian brand is fine as long as it has Italian owners. Discussions are pointless if everyone's going to be arguing different points

It seemed like either you knew what the other poster meant by Italian high end cars, the Ferrari brand, and chose to defend it despite knowing that it was bad for other reasons. Or you thought he was discussing Italian owned Italian brands when it turns out some famous Italian brands are not Italian owned.

Either way that looks like you two were using different definitions for the same words to my third party view

As for FaceID, I am not convinced yet. I would be more impressed with an under the screen fingerprint sensor.

But I guess I will try it in a couple of weeks, when I get mine, and form a better opinion.

IMHO component costs are not the reason Apple increased the price; they increased it because they could.

You haven’t used faceid yet are not convinced... Maybe wait until you’ve used it? I am using it right now, and so far there are very few times I’ve missed touchid, and I’ve been reminded of all the times that Touch ID would fail, like getting out of the shower etc...

I don’t understand the longing for an underscreen finger print scanner, does the computer in Star Trek require thumb print? Does the UI in minority report? If you imagine futuristic computer interfaces the computers just know who is using them, this is one of the first steps along that road...

As to the price, Apple price there phones where they want to price them to make sure they have high profit margins. I’m not sure why people complain about this. If they don’t do this they don’t make as much money. I do believe this phone costs significantly more to make than others, and the price fairly reflects that, though it is only £200 premium over the 8+...

How do you think Apple should price there products? A lower overall cost?

That was happening every year and marginal at best.

The Phone feels like it is from the future.

FaceID is a huge leap and affects how people use their phones. The phone can behave differently if you are looking at it. For example: showing sensitive info only if you're looking at it, and not playing notification sounds as loud (or at all) if you see the notification as it comes in.

https://www.wired.com/story/tried-to-beat-face-id-and-failed...

I'm wondering when Apple will start making their own camera sensors.

1. Samsung was a semiconductor maker, that successfully moved up to make phones. Apple was a integrator of third party chips that successfully went down to own many of the chips.

2. Apple's chips are significantly better than the competition. Partly because the chip division has a captive customer whose requirements are more apparent, plus no middlemen thanks to the vertical integration

3. Samsung's components need to serve multiple segments of the phone market, and other external customers. Apple only builds for Apple's specs

4. Every new breakthrough on the iPhone has been because of a chip that Apple alone had. From the very first iPhone's capacitive touch sensors to the new IR sensor system, no one else has the access for a couple phone cycles. Apple put out a 64 bit ARM processor even before arm had finalized the instruction set

Capacitive touch screen:

  iPhone: June 29, 2007
  HTC Dream/G1: October 20, 2008 (479 days later)

  iPhone 5s: September 20, 2013
  Galaxy S5: April 11, 2014 (203 days later)

  iPhone 5s: September 10, 2013
  Galaxy Note 4: October 17, 2014 (402 days later)

  Galaxy S6 Edge: April 10, 2015
  iPhone X: November 3, 2017 (938 days later)

  Samsung Galaxy: June 29, 2009
  iPhone X: November 3, 2017 (3049 days later)

For instance, from the NY Times review of the Galaxy Note 8:

>Some of the biometrics, including the ability to unlock your phone by scanning your face or irises, are so poorly executed that they feel like marketing gimmicks as opposed to actual security features.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/05/technology/personaltech/s...

I don't know how true this is, but I've heard that the Samsung OLED screen on the iPhone X is significantly better than the ones Samsung puts on it's flagship phones, in color fidelity especially. Partly because of Apple's attention to detail, but also because Samsung's flagship phones ship in much higher volume than the X is expected to.

I can't believe that. I just can't.

All iPhone X reviews mention the screen tech difference, all of them say how they don't notice a difference.

It's not about "appreciating". It's that it doesn't matter. Everyone talked about retina resolution, then about "true colors".

Today we have Samsung making all the screens.

The point is, nobody except professionals care.

The colour reproduction on Samsung phones is just awful after spending so much time on MacBooks and iPhones. Over saturated and as you increase brightness it washes everything out.

What makes the screen different is that the colours aren't oversaturated like Android phones. It was identical to the iPhone 8 screen (LED) only significantly brighter.

From what I've read what makes it better are things like the reduced blue-shift that occurs when moving the phone and the significant reduction in burn-in effect. But what most people will think is that it is the colours that make it better. Even though that could largely be software.

(Speaking as the owner of the Plus, who has his first replaced and the second is somewhat better but not perfect. Wife's S8 is also affected but she doesn't see it or doesn't care. I would still take that slight imperfection over the horrid notch though).

Samsung makes 5 processors and puts them on the open market.

The another part of Samsung buys those chips off the shelf and used them in their phones.

My understanding is the two units don’t work together hand in hand like Apples teams do, they work together the way Samsung and HTC do.

I'm sold. I'll take it.