I really wish someone could start a legitimate competitor to Apple. They are so bloated and just squeezing service revenue out of us. The M chips are great but the software is so buggy.
What would a "legitimate competitor" look like to you?
Samsung and LG make high-end phones, and there are plenty of good personal computer vendors. And Windows is certainly a desktop OS that some people choose.
Apple doesn't offer any services unique to itself. It does offer a slick-looking and well-marketed "ecosystem" which is really just a bunch of different things that you could get from other vendors.
That competitor is GrapheneOS. For now, the OS runs on Pixel phones only, but they plan to release their own phone in partnership with an OEM. I expect that this will easily be the most secure and privacy respecting phone out there when it releases. You get more or less 100% Android compatibility except for a handful of apps that enforce the Play Integrity cancer.
Most banking apps run just fine. My experience is limited to a handful of U.S. banks, but the Graphene community maintains an international list of apps tested by the community.
You can't because there is a network monopoly and barrier to entry is sky high. Realistically, your only option is to piggyback on Android by developing an Android-compatible OS like Huawei did. However this will soon become impossible anyway, as Google will abuse Play Integrity to make your device unusable.
The only way out is either regulation or a whole paradigm shift that renders phones irrelevant. I'm not sure the latter will happen any time soon.
Yeah, but it's not really their software that's the moat they rely on. It's a lot more to that. They have incredible branding, Devices may be MID, but at least they make good commercials guys..... Plus, everyone's like sheep. If everyone's getting the latest iPhone, they're going to continue to get the latest iPhone because everyone else is getting the latest iPhone. *Sending dis off of a MacBook with my iPhone 16 in my left pocket btw*
I don't think the devices themselves are mid. My M-series MacBook pro is fantastic. The battery life, suspend resume, the track pad, the audio quality, it's all really good hardware. Name a better laptop; I'll wait.
Yep some of the software is pretty bad, but don't forget that a lot of the track pad/suspend resume/battery quality comes from good drivers and energy management in the kernel.
I used to have an old Thinkpad and after I switched from windows to Linux the battery and track pad experience was noticeably worse, even with tlp and all the power management options enabled. It's just one of those rare aspects of OS development that large companies can do that's superior to open source.
Or people make rational decisions when it comes to thousand dollar purchases and some people can’t admit that others choices can be different from theirs without trying to justify there being an outlier.
It was kind of true a very long time ago except in potato quality. And if you were out of data, but was connected on WiFi instead, you actually couldn't. And you still can't text a large video across the Android / iPhone chasm, can you?
You can send decently sized videos between Android and iOS assuming RCS is enabled. Attachment sizes can now often be up to 100MB, where as with MMS you'd often be limited to maybe a megabyte or two.
I'm regularly sending/receiving gifs and decent quality short videos between iOS and Android these days.
No, it's an old phrase. It came from the question, "Was this filmed on a potato?" when someone posted a video of particularly bad quality, as if their phone was a potato.
It wasn’t too long ago either. I mentioned it before in prior comments but due to how MMS works at one major carrier (verizon) they sent picture quality back to pre-smartphone days for a large % of android users.
The quick explainer is phones send a user agent with the request to fetch a media message, this user agent contains a link to a file that describes what the device can handle. Apple and Blackberry hosted these files themselves, Verizon hosted most of the android ones on its network itself. They decommissioned the server hosting them a few years ago which made it so all affected devices pulled the lowest potato quality image down for compatibility. Huge number of complaints.
It's a phrase that's been around for years to mean "poor quality" (https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/recorded-with-a-potato). One theory behind the term is that the recording device was so bad/low-tech, it could be powered by a potato battery.
The secondary platform verifies you and then you indicate interest. If there’s a seller you may get to buy. Company may ROFR. Priority goes to bigger buyers.
> Cover grid infrastructure costs. We will pay for 100% of the grid upgrades needed to interconnect our data centers, paid through increases to our monthly electricity charges.
How does paying more monthly cover an infrastructure build out that requires up front capital?
Otherwise looks fun!
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