__sr__

While the article is written as a rant, which hurts the author's credibility, the points, IMO, are valid.

Did you actually try doing the math? $11 billion divided over 650k employees is roughly $17k which amounts to $75 per day assuming the employee works around 225 days a year which in turn amounts to less than $10 an hour assuming the employee works for 8 hours a day.

> On an unrelated note, I am pretty upset that my Samsung ~$1200 TV has ads built into it.

On a lighter note, don’t TVs have ads anyway?

I was burnt by a third party application using mmap over NFS recently. Definitely not fun by any definition of it.

And it gets a SIGSEGV and segfaults.

> Those services being tied RIGHT INTO the OS is a huge advantage.

That is a disadvantage to me. I prefer not to keep all my eggs in one basket.

Sorry, reading on a phone. Really didn’t see the responses before responding. It was not my intention to pile on.

Maybe that will kill the trend? I certainly hope so! :-)

You might want to check the reason for the limitation before making such comments. A display can be stretched to the three edges of the phone —- it is the fourth edge that is the problem — as Xiaomi demonstrated with Mi Mix 2. At least some space is needed to house the display driver, camera, sensors etc.

Xiaomi got rid of the forehead entirely by moving everything to the (relatively small) chin on Mi Mix 2. While that is not great for the front facing camera usage since many (most?) apps don’t support 180 degree rotation, I don’t see why the design can’t be flipped. Just build a phone with a reasonable sized forehead. Although I don’t particularly mind the design choice for Galaxy Note 9 or Nokia 7 Plus — a narrow forehead and chin.

Hedging their bets? Since iPhone XS devices are are a rather large risk and they need something to fall back on in case they don’t do well. If they do, we may not see a successor.

iPhone SE was probably a similar bet since a lot of people were complaining about the large iPhone 6/6S — not to mention the Plus variants.

> The phones work fine out of the box.

Do they? Is there a one touch full device backup solution for Android that doesn’t involve rooting the phone or flashing custom ROM? Is there a way to easily sync my sessages to other devices[1]?

The two billion people do no flash custom ROMs or root their devices. They do not even get sucurity patches on time. But they try to use their device just the way one would use an iPhone — with almost zero customisation. So they end up with a phone which doesn’t do everything it should straight out of the box and is vulnerable for most of its lifetime, for the sake of choices/cusomizability they would never use.

I you are talking about the choice of OEMs, I agree. It is not ideal that Apple is the only iOS vendor[2]. But the benefits, IMO, outweigh the problems.

[1] Messages for web is a recent advancement.

[2] While we are on the subject of multiple OEMs, I’d prefer if OEMs followed the Windows model where they can install a few apps and tweak things a bit, but can’t (do not?) make drastic changes to the OS. I’d prefer to live in a world where I don’t have to worry about whether the Android Phone I am looking at is more vulnerable than the others.

It does — the Pixel 2 XL screen that is. The Samsung manufactured Pixel 2 screen, on the other hand, is pretty good.

You are not the only one.