There is no in the EU here. I had unlimited SMS in a sub 20€ plan more than a decade ago in France. I now have unlimited sms, unlimited calls and unlimited data in a sub 15€ plan.
I still only use WhatsApp because it’s a lot better than sms.
Google pays content creators so little they have all started including ads in their videos. Si technically as long as you are counted they get paid. Meanwhile, Google is more and more aggressive with their own ads interrupting videos and pushing you to subscribe to their expensive offer.
Some people, like me, have just stopped watching YouTube. Other are turning to blocking ads.
It's the usual tug of war between revenues and UX but I don't think consumers have to feel bad about not playing by Google's rules.
Well no, Chinese phones are above Apple material-wise (better battery, better cameras, better cooling) and on par SoC-wise since last year. That's what makes Google's strategy so baffling.
> Apple has better app selection (for most people).
It's entirely the same. I have gone back and forth regularly for the past 10 years. Android is completely on par app-wise. Apple has the iMessage lock-in in the US obviously but not in the rest of the world. Apple might have a slight advantage on the pro segment with the iPad but I don't think it has a huge impact on phones.
The really baffling thing to me is that while they lock down Android, they pay to put Gemini on iOS. Google has a real competitive advantage with IA and they just gave it to Apple.
It's clear to me that they are two companies fighting each other inside Google: the ex-Motorola who wants to be Apple and the service side who wants to be Microsoft.
I personally fear that they are making the bed of the regulators who will probably come for Play Protect at some point to open the door for alternative OS providers at least in Europe. But maybe they think it's coming anyway and are strengthening their position and trying to milk what they can in the meantime.
Both Qualcomm and Mediatek have caught up on the phone SoC market.
The Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 has a slightly better CPU than the A19 Pro but a slightly worse GPU. Apple has a very slight advantage in watt usage but that's more than offset by the battery gap. Same thing with the Dimensity 9500.
One, you are entirely moving the goal post. Nothing was said of winning. The discussion was about catching up and catching up they did. As I said, the market is competitive.
Two, because the actual power consumption is not 65% higher - that's peak - and high end Chinese phones have batteries significantly bigger than the iPhone so you still get better screen time between charges in the end.
I think it’s fair to say that a SoC should perform better at higher wattages, so my comment is definitely relevant.
Regardless, I don’t understand how you can say that I’m moving goalposts when I mention performance per watt, which is absolutely relevant when talking about smartphone SoC performance, and then you bring up battery capacity, which is not.
Your initial question was "How are they on par SoC-wise?"
They are on par because they now sometimes beat Apple top of the line A-chips on performance be it single core, multicores or GPU and do so within a power budget which allows the phone they ship in to be competitive screen-on time wise.
Apple doesn't have a one generation lead anymore which is a huge change compared to only three years ago.
You are moving the goalposts because the discussion was always about the gap between Apple and its competitors and you have entirely shifted to peak consumption when it was clear the conclusion would not be the one you want/expect.
The whole claim that Qualcomm is on par with Apple predicates upon results from benchmarking tools, which stress CPU and GPU and thus induce peak power consumption.
If we were to look at more thorough reviews, e.g. Geekerwan, they always include TDP and power consumption, because that gives the necessary context to understand the results.
And obviously I’m not denying that Mediatek and Qualcomm have massively improved their designs, but they aren’t on par when we account all the things that matter.
Your argument is that, since manufacturers are putting larger batteries in phones, SoC power consumption shouldn’t matter. That is moving the goalpost, because you introduce a variable that should be irrelevant to SoC performance testing to dismiss my observation.
That hasn't been true for years. Both Oppo and Xiaomi ship with very usable software nowadays, very inspired by Cupertino in the case of Oppo but still ok.
If the mistake is one error of author and location in a citation, I find it fairly disingenuous to call that an hallucination. At least, it doesn't meet the threshold for me.
I have seen this kind of mistakes done long before LLM were even a thing. We used to call them that: mistakes.
The article paints a situation where the EU is caving in to US pressure and completely ignores the very real criticisms of the current regulatory push coming from the EU itself.
A significant part of the Draghi report on European competitiveness is about how the Parliament has been stifling the ability of EU companies to efficiently compete under the weight of more and more complex laws.
It's not very useful being the first to put in place complex regulations if nothing remains to regulate because every company has moved somewhere else.
It is interesting how downvoted you are for stating simple facts. Many people in the EU will just willfully bury their head in the sand when it comes to the impact of regulation on the economy.
It's a night and day difference trying to get something built in the EU vs the US.
It's always easier to focus on a shared ennemy than to look inward. Talking about the Draghi report forces people to confront that the EU is actually extremely disunited at the moment and the political landscape is very messy. The report was buried by Germany and the Netherlands after all.
It's easy to rally behind the idea that bad foreign actors conspire to torpedo customers protecting laws because it provides a theorically easy solution: just stop allowing foreigners to interfer. Meanwhile, considering how these laws might be impacting companies in a fairly cut throat international environment and if we have put the cursor at the right place between protections and economic growth is a far more complex debate. It involves a lot of trade off and shades of gray and it puts the onus of decision strictly on us.
It's complex and as with everything involving trade offs, it's very easy to rattle purists of both sides. I rarely expect a rave welcome when I start discussing these topics on the internet.
I think the article is mixing together multiple things while at the same time having an underlying bedrock of truth. The system as it stands is not viable and people need to rebel at least in how they vote but I don't think AI is the real issue here.
The system is flawed for different reasons. Tolerance for high vertical integration and oligopolies have seriously damaged the efficiency of the market and limited people's ability to disrupt. Capital concentration has created a new form of aristocracy. They have successfully lobbied to significantly weaken the mechanisms supposed to spread this money, notably inheritance tax. The Supreme Court has significantly altered how democracy functions by lifting limits on fundings and given far too much power to the richest.
The last forty years have basically torn down all the foundations Tocqueville saw as fundamental to the success of the young USA. People should fight to get things back on track.
AI is mostly incidental in that. It doesn't matter if AI temporary concentrates some wealth if the mechanisms for it to then be spread again are in place.
What was shocking to me is discovering that Windows 11 on a managed company laptop and Windows 11 on a store bought personal laptop feel so different, they might as well not share a name.
It's insane the amount of bullshit Microsoft is pushing on private users.
I also liked the idea when I used Gentoo 15 years ago but you quickly realise it doesn't make much sense.
You are trading off having a system able to handle everything you will throw at it, and having the same binaries as everyone else for, well, basically nothing. You have a supposedly smaller exploitable surface but you have to trust that the Gentoo patches cutting these things out don't introduce new vulnerabilities and don't inadvertently shut off hardening features. You have slightly smaller packages but I'm hard pressed to think of a scenario where it would matter in 2026.
To me, the worst debuggability and the inability to properly communicate with the source project make it a bad idea. I find Arch's pledge to only ship strictly vanilla software much more sensible.
Google's strategy is as unreadable as ever. It feels like two companies fighting each other in one.
On the one hand, they apparently want to be a service provider Microsoft-style. They are just signing a partnership with their biggest competitor and giving them access to their main competitive advantage, the most advanced AI available.
On the other hand, they want to be another Apple. They are locking down their phone. Are competing with the manufacturers of the best Android phones. Are limiting the possibility of distributing software on their system. Things that were their main differentiator.
It doesn't make sense. It's also a giant middle finger to the people who bought the Pixel for Gemini. Congrats, you were beta testers for iPhone users who won't have to share their data with Google for training Gemini. I have rarely seen a company as disrespectful to its customer.
I don't know something with a slick form factor, a great TV UX out of the box, that handles sleep well and can be waken up by a controller reliably fits a real niche I think.
I might pay for that actually. Fiddling with a PC is not fun. There is value in convenience.
I still only use WhatsApp because it’s a lot better than sms.
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