Would Androids be “useless” without google apps?

Fire tablets already proved this. They don’t use Google apps, they have their own app store and their own push. And they sold tons of them. All of this can be done and Android isn’t “useless” without it. It’s just harder.

I love Android, but I am unsure how beneficial these big tech giants are becoming.

The problem becomes that you kind of don’t have a choice. Sure someone else can stand up their own OS/push/store, but unfortunately their monopoly of sorts ends up useful in these cases because it means literally everyone develops against it. You can get your own store working, but it’s only as popular as the number of developers who choose to support it. If you fragment the stores, you make them less useful, so by nature they kinda need to be a monopoly.

I just wish it ended up differently such that the behemoth store was owned by someone different than the manufacturer themselves.

just keep shipping manually faster CPUs once a year, just like they have been for the past 15.

Yeah, exactly. My disagreement is… So fucking what?

I’m much happier with a company that is satisfied with its market, does what it does well, and leaves it at that. I’m not a believer of “more money for the money gods, ever increasing profits, let’s fuck over some more consumers and further line the shareholders pockets”.

By moving into other markets, they’d be competing with people who know those spaces well and probably better than they do. If they push someone else out, that’s more specialties lost.

I’m generally against this monopolistic machine mindset everyone has these days. I’m much happier with a content company continuing to do what it does, instead of taking up market space trying to do something else that someone else does.

Not that Intel is a perfect example here, but I’m much happier that their GPUs have generally flopped, they haven’t made it in mobile, and they aren’t trying to be another ARM manufacturer. That’s not their thing. So I can continue to go to them for a reliable desktop CPU and they can continue being a force in that market instead of trying to wear 17 different hats and losing their way.

Bought my first AMD computer this year, an and 6800 Ryzen 7 with an on proc 680m gpu that is equivalent of ~ Nvidia 2050 discrete card. Game over for Intel.

While the rest of your post is logical, this is insane cope. No one is buying integrated graphics for gaming. 2050s are a joke in terms of power - you’re talking about a 2 year old budget mobile gpu… If anything this is basically a “I need to do some photoshop but don’t want a dedicated gpu on my laptop” type card. Intel has never given a fuck about mobile graphics. Their offerings have always been “serviceable, but get a real gpu if you want one”. Laptops are arguably better with ARM so there’s competition there…

Intel is still selling their bread and butter and still has a huge stranglehold on their core market. Claiming “game over” because of an off case of an offshoot of one of their secondary markets is hugely overreacting.

I’m not up on EU politics all that much, so I hope someone more informed comes along and posts a better answer, but…

My distant view + guess for as to why it’s different is that they have more than one party. Partisanship is at its worse when there are only 2 of you, as demonstrated by the US system - it’s all finger pointing and “us vs them” that just polarized everything.

In the EU there are (at least?) 7ish “major” political parties, and while some are bigger than others, many actual hold seats and power unlike the US Green and Libertarian “parties” that are essentially meaningless.

As such, any “partisanship” seems at least less extreme. It’s a lot harder to crucify one bad guy when your time and attention is split between 6 “bad guys”. And different parties back different things, so even if 3 were anti-abortion, you’d have to split your slander and hate to three different groups with different OTHER ideas. So it gets a bit lost in sauce.

And on the other side, if you take a strong stance on one issue (such as this one), there are likely multiple parties on your side for that issue since there are unlikely to be 7 opinions, and even if they are, the similar ones can “tag team” a little bit since they’re more in line with each other than the opposing sides are.

If you’ve ever played video games, games with more than 2 teams play very differently than ones that are just one or the other. Dynamics are much more complicated and constantly evolving than they are in a simple “team a vs team b”.

As such, my understanding is that all of these extreme takes are severely diluted since there are more shades of gray and more nuance to the conversation and not just a constant “red vs blue”.

Why is the surface even on this list? It’s an actual computer and it’s like 4 years older than the others? It’s not even in the same category.

Strictly for presentation ahead of time I think it’s borderline.

I disagree, I think this is equally as bad. These presentations are still false advertising, just to a different audience.

These presentations are selling investors and press and attention on something that doesn’t exist yet. Sure, sometimes it works out where the product works, but other times, it’s wasted money from investors and attention from the public that wasn’t warranted.

I don’t see this any differently than the current shit show with The Day Before. Both are promising smoke and mirrors. Apple succeeded and is praised and people are here defending it saying it’s okay. The Day Before didn’t, and everyone’s at their throats saying it shouldn’t be allowed and that they should be sued for false advertising and for the amount of time wasted on hype for something that never came.

What? You don’t like a little adventure of “where the fuck did that contact go” or “where the hell is that app icon and why has it changed themes entirely again?”

That… Has nothing to do with what’s going on here.

They claimed their “wifi” was the “fastest” because had the highest “minimum guaranteed speed”. That speed is no where near 1Gbps. It guarantees 30Mbps.

This is not about having a 1-5gbps backbone, it’s about convincing people that basically the same wifi is faster than the competition, which is extremely misleading.

Even if their backbone is faster, that’s not even the argument they’re making. And even if it was, it’s not like people are likely to even notice that difference.

It’s so frustrating seeing so many people repost this shit thinking that repeating the same garbage is helpful.

No one gives a fuck about the “legal” definition of why this is “allowed”. Looking at this with basic common sense, what Apple is getting away with is much worse than what Google is getting pegged for.

People complaining don’t care that there’s a stupid loophole in the legal definitions as to why Apple is allowed to do this. If the laws and definitions make that OK, and Google’s actions are held to be more “anti competitive” then the laws and definitions need to change.

That’s what people are complaining about. Not that “oh what’s the legal loophole that allows this”. No one cares about the legal shit that allows this. That’s why they keep complaining “even after this has been answered”.

Even if that is true and the system is perfect at doing so…

This does nothing to refute his point. It’s still giving a reason not to pay attention while requiring that you pay attention.

Even if it is accurately able to assess whether you are, and act accordingly, it is still giving you a reason not to pay attention. All your statement does is reinforce that it’s requiring you to pay attention, which was part of his point.

There are multiple entities with their own payment processing mechanisms running on Android. Epic was definitely able to run their own if they wanted to.

ITC: Someone not understanding the difference between not understanding and not agreeing.

Yeah… How the fuck is Google action here “monopolistic” and Apple literally refusing to let anyone in at all somehow isn’t? What a joke.

YouTube purchases also don’t work beyond 480p on any desktop except for Mac Safari. These companies are fucking insane.

Unfortunately this is one of those things that you can’t significantly develop/test on closed private streets.

Even if we hold this to be true (and I disagree in large part), the point is that Tesla’s systems aren’t at that stage yet. Failing to recognize lights correctly during live demos and such are absolutely things you can test and develop on closed streets or in a lab. Tesla’s shouldn’t be allowed on roads until they’re actually at a point where there are no glaring flaws. And then they should be allowed in smaller numbers.

or other expensive setups

As much as I lost trust in his bullshittery a long time ago, his need to mention the cost of critical safety systems is what stuck out to me the most here. That’s how you know the priorities are backwards.

Source?

I’ve read a lot on this and never saw any conclusive claim here.

There were claims many years ago by Mozilla about this, and it had to do with slow APIs in Mozilla that YouTube was using…

There’s also been many known performance issues in a lot of the APIs/libraries Google/YouTube use on Mozilla for many years. And Mozilla just hasn’t been able to keep up.

I don’t see anything about this in recent history, because everything is just floods of people complaining about this round, with still no conclusive evidence that this is happening intentionally. YouTube is currently on a ad-block-blocker crusade and their code keeps changing and there’s nothing to conclusively indicate that this is malice and not just a bug in the way Mozilla performs.

So as much as everyone seems happy to burn the witch because of poor performance, I’m not ready to jump to that conclusion until there’s actually evidence of this being intentional. Especially when this smells a lot like a long standing different problem. “Someone said they are” is not going to convince me. Especially if you can’t even point to that someone saying that thing.

Yeah, I don’t think people understand quite how astronomical an undertaking it is to replace this shit. People like to quote things like AWS, but AWS is a) expensive and b) general purpose. As such, it might be able to solve the problem, but not nearly as efficiently. It would cost you proportionally WAY MORE than Google is paying to keep YT alive, so that gives you an extra giant hurdle on top of the other complexity.

Web hosting with low latency is hard. Huge data storage is hard. Transcodinf is hard. Constant uptime is hard. Search is hard. Recommendations are hard. Making it profitable is hard. Starting an ad service that isn’t googles is hard. Convincing content creators to move there is hard. Convincing consumers to look there is hard. Sure, any of these problems have remotely comparable analogs. But you have to solve all of them simultaneously to get anywhere near competing with YouTube. And since Google owns the whole “stack”, it’s much cheaper for them then it’ll be for you.

Kick probably makes a decent comparison here. But they’re A) solving a subset of the problem B) fighting against a company that has extremely clear problems (arguably much worse than YouTube) C) is in a tech savvy-er demographic D) is funded by mega-casinos with tons of money and a vested interest in the product E) fighting in a market with less inertia so viewers and creators can move easier F) fighting twitch instead if YT which is smaller and younger.

And they’re still not really all that much competition.

There’s been multiple posts pointing to some possibly “wait for ads to finish loading” type code. It’s quite possible that it’s just bugged in Firefox etc since browsers are horrendously inconsistent etc.

But that doesn’t make a cool headline so instead the “it’s Google being evil” story is the popular one.

It’s cold and has really shitty “inter item” contrast. I don’t get how they think this is an improvement.

Sure, it screenshots better. It makes a “nicer” picture in isolation.

Problem is, maps is a tool not a piece of art. I don’t care how “good” it looks. I care how effective it is at being a tool. If you can make it look better while still functioning, sure, no gripes here.

But the road contrast with the background has been severely increased. Problem is, roads are a step to getting somewhere. I’m not looking for roads. I’m looking for POIs. And when navigating, I’m looking for which road to take. Giving every road contrast against the background means everything else has less contrast against the roads.

I find it much harder to sift through seas of pins. But more importantly, the navigation “path” highlight has such little contrast to roads it’s even harder to discern where I’m supposed to be going at a glance. Previously there was a high contrast blue line against literally everything else so I could look away from the road and in a split second know which way it wants me to head.

Now I have to try to pick the deeper slightly contrasted line out of a sea of lines which are all in high contrast against the background. And they’re all even tinted blue. This removes two of your brains subconscious cues for picking these things out and it makes it significantly harder to discern without really paying more attention to the map. Which is literally not how navigation should work. Navigation is meant to be glanceable.

Honestly, this pushes me more to look for alternatives. But every other competing product is a joke and Google Maps still has the biggest feature set by miles so it’s pretty futile.