> But the fact that they’re not talking about new products or hinting at anything down the line concerns me...
Why would they show their hand? There's little to be gained from it and it would harm their brand when these technologies don't pan out how they would want. See Google Glass - huge fanfare but no real substance.
Besides, we hear of technology that is supposedly being worked on inside Apple. Project Titan, the AR headset that is looking at a 2020 release date.
Given there are auto manufacturers[1] that already exist with self driving cars, I'm going to go ahead and say its not a meme and more just a technology in the process of being fully realised.
Some times, things just take time. Especially when you're trying to create machines capable of not killing the general public.
Tesla's are not self-driving cars in the sense of revolutionizing any driving. You still have to pay attention and be ready to take over all of the time. That means you can't sleep, read emails, etc. on your commute. It's a fancy lane assist that reduces mundane movements you have to make and it improves safety, but it's not resulting in super cheap automated taxis or overnight road trips.
In that case we had self-driving five years ago, I guess OP meant mind-off self-driving. That's the hard part, it could even be an AI-hard problem. Because if you have to pay attention with hands on a wheel, it's not a huge convenience improvement. And there's also the problem that human-take-over situations will be increasingly dangerous as the self-driving software improves.
And by the way, the auto-pilot video is underwhelming. Several companies have more advanced self-driving tech than Tesla, e.g. Waymo is at least 3 years ahead.
>> Devices shouldn’t become outdated every year. They should evolve with you.
I really don't understand this sentiment.
I've still got my iPhone 6 Plus. I haven't seen the need to upgrade yet. It does absolutely everything I want.
At this rate, the only reason I'm going to upgrade is if I destroy my phone somehow (I've yet to even put a major scratch on any of my smartphones over the years) or if a vendor comes out with some feature where I'm like "yeah, I could really see myself getting use out of that"
>> Technology should assist you so that you can get on with enjoying life.
It's a smartphone for crying out loud. It's a platform designed for communication. Bonus points for having a camera in my pocket and some apps which help me for various tasks.
> The first actually open platform phone is the one that will have longevity.
Exactly, I feel that we're kind of getting there with all of the recent phones that have come out in the last couple of years. There's no real killer feature anyone's come out with, just nice things to have.
I got my pair of Nexus 6 dev phones a month after my iPhone 6 Plus.
The Nexus 6 reached it final OS update with N but the 6+ is about to get iOS 11.
The iPhone 5s is about to get iOS 11. If it weren't for the 64-bit transition I wouldn't be surprised if it had gotten on the iPhone 5 as well.
Apple gives about 5 years of iOS updates, which makes keeping the same phone a lot more feasible. Meanwhile my Google sourced Nexus barely makes it two without landing on security patches-only.
I got my iPhone 5S (The 5S replaced my 3GS) when it was released and I'm still using it. The only problems I have are a little bit of yellow tint on the screen and the battery not having full capacity.
Maybe I got really lucky with both of my iPhones but even though I hate to pay this ridiculous premium price for iPhones it kinda evens out in the end considering I use the phone for 4-5 years.
That's still an 6 year old phone, do you consider this long or short? Generally Apple are extremely good at keeping their devices usable.
I used an iPhone 4 up until late last year, my dad is still using it. Now I upgraded to an iPhone 5s.
The annoying part is generally apps that require a higher OS, which is the app developers fault. But even then you don't always necessarily /need/ the absolute newest version of an app.
Up until November last year my youngest daughter was using my old 3GS. She loved that phone and could even still download apps from the App Store. I know this because I installed Lemonade Stand for her last summer. You can't get that now because it only worked on the older OS versions, but there it was in the App Store for her 6 years after I bought it. I'd try and boot it now to check it, but I'm not sure where it is.
The 6 Plus will be 3 years old in a month. The fact that its still a powerful phone, and will receive OS updates for another couple years speaks volumes about iPhone longevity vs. Android.
I have an original ipad and netflix is pretty much the only thing that still works fine on that. You can't use it to browse the web anymore because web pages have gotten so heavy it runs out of memory trying to render them. The app store is also broken to the degree of being unusable, even if you could find apps. If it wasn't so locked down it would still make an excellent linux device, but as it stands it's basically a dedicated netflix viewer.
So in my view it's a bit of both. These devices could have a longer life with manufacturer support, but the app developers are the ones driving the obsolescence.
App developer here. It is impossible to build an app for the original iPad. Apple tools will not allow you to compile backwards compatibility to iOS 6 (or is it 5?).
App developers are only a piece of this equation, though.
From (solo) developing an sms based app in 2017 there was little incentive to target an API level lower than 19 (KitKat), which provided a standard API for SMS.
The majority of devices support it so what's the incentive to support legacy software?
Now if there are breaking changes introduced to telephony in the future I'll probably maintain 4.4 support and add a check for API level. That isn't feasible for every app, though...
I've got a Galaxy S3, an S4 couple first generation Moto Gs, a 2012 and a 2013 Nexus 7, a Note 2, I think? 2 Note 3s, and a One Plus One in various states of: loaned to cousins, used as house phones, backups in a drawer, backups in cars, or lying on my desk.
They were all either broken, at yard sales, given to me my clients / contacts that don't want them, or were <$20 on ebay.
In general four things kill these devices:
* Touchscreen breakage. It is almost never worth trying to replace if the screen cracks.
* Flash burnout. Shitty flash chips don't last forever. I've binned almost every older phone than this crop because the flash memory dies.
* Charger port wear. Microusb sucks, replacement parts vary wildly depending on model - I can get an S series charger for <$5 most of the time, but trying to replace a Droid phone charger once was impossible because the charger harness was soldered to the pcb.
* Software. I generally outright ignore devices without a ROM scene and an unlocked bootloader, but even then it is entirely volunteer how long Cyanogen/Lineage/Paranoid/etc are willing to keep supporting these fossil kernels. The S3, Note 2-3, and original Nexus 7 are all on their deathbeds because of lagging community support for these devices. It is worth mentioning, however, for the Samsung devices they have gone community supported far longer at this point than their official support periods lasted. Great job Samsung.
Batteries are usually a non-issue. You can buy shitty Chinese knockoff batteries (or if you are lucky Anker) that don't hold a charge and don't last long, but you can keep these devices running on bootleg parts for a while.
The software is the ultimate killer. What should be the easiest to maintain is the hardest, because corporate greed and hunger for control trumps customer respect. All my mobile devices are cheap, used, or broken when I get them because none of these exploitative abusers are worth giving a direct cent to.
> * Flash burnout. Shitty flash chips don't last forever. I've binned almost every older phone than this crop because the flash memory dies.
I have never experienced this before, what are the signs that the flash chip is going sour? Slow to load? Losing information? Is there anything you can do about it ?
Sadly mobile flash doesn't support smart monitoring. There are three indicators, but your flash can randomly fail without any of them being observable:
* Sector reallocations. As flash stops writing or reading the package will reallocate data. This process is intensive and usually lags out the phone. If when moving large amounts of data into / off the flash the whole phone is freezing, it can be due to this.
* Stunted read / write speeds. As the flash degrades and more sectors go bad, your read and write performance suffer. Fragmentation gets worse as working sectors dry up. If your phone was benching ~80MB/s read or write speeds the day you got it and is down to ~20 5 years later, it is likely nearing a failure point. This is usually a gradual aging thing, but you do often see a steep slope of sudden performance crash before the whole chip becomes unusable.
* Crippled access times. The former was data rate, this is data latency. The latency should always be consistent and not age much throughout the life of the chip - the ability to access flash almost always stays near-constant over the lifetime of the chip. If this starts going, for very small data sizes, the chips controller can be dying. Which happens, because in phones a lot of corners are cut, and flash mmus are often really, really cheap.
There is also the really rare chance you find a corrupted file you cannot open that used to work, which can in extremely rare circumstances mean that your phone has ran out of unallocated sectors and is now losing capacity including written data, but that is highly unlikely - flash almost always becomes unwritable way before becoming unreadable, and your phone will fail before unreadability starts manifesting en masse.
It would be useful if we could get A. lifetime write averages for the flash chips in popular phones and B. trace such a number throughout the lifetime of the device, but we don't have those, so you are almost always flying in the dark on when your phones memory will die.
A year or so ago my iPhone 6 was constantly freezing up and was practically unusable. I tried changing literally every setting available in an attempt to resolve it. Wiping it clean and restoring from a backup solved it.
I was almost convinced it was a problem with the flash chip as symptoms were exactly what you describe here.
My vision isn't great, so I upgraded from my iPhone 4 to the 5 because of the larger screen, and the 5 to the 6+ due to a larger screen.
Really, the screen size has been the main driving factor in my phone purchase decisions.
My 4 & 5 have been passed down to my mother, so they're still in use. Hell, I was still using my 1st gen iPad until just over a year ago when the screen just failed.
Besides, they don't give any more software update guarantee then Google's flagships are giving (previously Nexus phones, and now Pixel) - i.e. 2 years.
To be honest, I think catchall solutions work best. I'm more likely to pay for content, if I can just pay 1 or 2 places.
When I heard that Disney was leaving Netflix, I'm not inclined to sign up to Disney as well. To be honest, unless they give me a unique value proposition (like having their feature films available on site weeks after theatrical release) I'm unlikely to want to fork out extra bucks for the one studio.
If they give me something that is a better experience than the competition, I'll throw my money at them. Other than that, meh
Disney's deal with Netflix was estimated to have netted them $300M (per year, I'm guessing, but I'm not sure), and Netflix is estimated to have 100M users. Assume that Disney would only take home half their revenues from running their own streaming service. That puts their financial break-even point at 300M / (5*12) = 5 million people signing up.
5 million US families attracted to this as an easy way to keep their kids entertained? Doesn't seem a huge stretch to me.
Assuming you don’t have a 4 year old that collects over surprisingly deep conversations about motivations of random minor characters in animated Disney films?
Looking at some of the pictures supplied in the article, it looks like they're probably expecting packaging and food service consumption to go up, which you can't digitise.
> I don't really understand why one should look down and search for what to press instead of simply using a keyboard shortcut via muscle memory.
From a personal perspective, I agree. I think we generally forget though, we are vastly in the minority and this technology is designed for the layman
Basically my litmus test for this stuff is "would my technologically illiterate mum use and understand this. Will it enrich her computing experience". If yes, it's not a dumb idea. We'll see how the market reacts though
Someone really needs to create a patent that defines methods of patent trolling, so every time one of these scumbags starts a lawsuit you can sue them.
Why would they show their hand? There's little to be gained from it and it would harm their brand when these technologies don't pan out how they would want. See Google Glass - huge fanfare but no real substance.
Besides, we hear of technology that is supposedly being worked on inside Apple. Project Titan, the AR headset that is looking at a 2020 release date.