I am not a fan anymore I used it for over a year on a XPERIA XA2. It's usable but barely so. The Android layer usually craps out with heavier apps or crawls to a halt. Most of the native apps are really basic I would compare them to early Windows Phone apps in functionality and UX. The UX itself is an odd mix of really intuitive and absolute horrible. It seems like they are missing focus and the felt development stalled for some years now. I hope plasma or gnome get more momentum because this isn't a viable alternative for 90% of smartphone users. Meego was better and I don't understand why they pivoted in the direction they are going now. It's certainly opinionated.
I am really more annoyed about config files that are cluttering up everything. Even resolve and other big packages started to clutter the Documents folder on Linux.
What point are you trying to make? I'm honestly not sure. Is it that China is polluting a lot? Or a little? That they are making environmental progress? Or none?
They they are exceeding their initial commitment. Talking about pollution in your tone is also a bit rich coming from the biggest net polluter in all of history.
Nobody can know and that's why it's interesting to you... arguing in bad faith. Take your unfalsifiable counterfactual challenge and go back to debate club.
It’s everyone’s wet dream that Apple buys Anthropic, but I’m guessing their valuation now is already too high even for Apple. And why would Amazon let that happen?
It’s a solid match but not happening unless the AI market craters and Apple swoops in to buy them for vastly less.
All reports are that Apple isn’t really focusing on building their own server side models and is mostly just going to be a platform for other companies to fight over just like they said they don’t pay OpenAI anything for the current integration and Google pays them $20B+ a year to be the default search engine.
It makes no sense for Apple to waste money on having their own LLM when they are becoming commoditized - just chose the one that will give them the best deal.
I also think apple has put a lot of energy into providing on device hardware for this kind of stuff, like they have gone through a ton of iterations at this point on their own hardware that is also ai focused. so now they offer a lot of value in the mid to near future because if you can run ai on device why wouldn't you since you don't need to pay cloud costs anymore since users pay that for you by buying iphones.
So they’ll just die when Google has a seamless AI-first mobile experience where consumers just ask their Pixel to do X and it happens. Disruption comes for everyone, hardware isnt a moat
The issue is that Android won’t have an AI first experience where you depend on local inference because most Android phones being sold are cheap crappy devices and Android users don’t monetize.
But there is much more to a phone than “just doing stuff agentically”. Either way, you give way too much credit for Google to ever make a good end user product and be able to sell it. Google’s sells of pixels for a year are about the same number Apple sells in three weeks.
Apple’s hardware/ecosystem has been a most for 50 years.
Also Google is non existent in the country that has 1/5 of the worlds population.
Google broke my ability to set timers via voice (a core thing my phone used to do forever) for like a year. I no longer use that functionality on my phone (I can't trust Google not to break it, if it can't routinely work, it can't be part of my routine, and I personally don't enjoy cooking dinner twice after a long day).
Google replaced 'Google play the news' from playing news clips from sources I chose and trust, to an AI generated news feed that I have zero faith isn't hallucinated and from sources I have no idea about. Another multiple times daily function I used my phone for, broken by 'Google AI' because 'I should be happy with whatever they give me, it's a free product'.
Google's Youtube/Music algorithm punishes me if I flag AI slop in my feeds by removing those genres/topics, trying to force AI slop into my feed. This one I actually (well until it runs out the end of the month because I canceled) pay for.
Google has trained their users not to use Pixel's voice/AI capabilities, and to resent them (in the typical Google way, be damned with the old it's been replaced with our new half baked product that will itself be replaced shortly after the bugs are gone and it starts to work kind of OK (still really bad, but Google justifies bad is OK because it's 'FREE').
No one is integrating anything new from Google into their routine. No one is integrating Google's broken AI stuff into their daily routine, because it's friggen BROKEN. Google just one day removed me from setting voice timers with my phone, a core use case, for a year, because they could. My routine is not going back to using Google for things I count on just working because Google will arbitrarily break it and I will get the impact (maybe a burnt dinner, maybe faulty news reporting that causes me a heart attack, maybe who knows, maybe a missed important appointment tomorrow?).
Google doesn't care that I'm hit because 'it's good enough for a free product' to them. Everyone I know with a Pixel hates the ecosystem right now. Removing sideloading might fix that and improve good will I guess though? God Google doesn't know and hates their users/advocates/supporters. Google has moved themselves from 'a good solution' to 'good enough for a cheap device and free tools', and made damn sure I know it (via burnt dinners, having to move to my podcast app for (less current) news, by degrading my music/youtube feeds).
Google is a zombie company, they are dead, they just don't know it yet. Coming soon... Alphabet, a Bending Spoons company.
apple is quite smart with this, there was a time when people thought they were dumb for not buying up tesla and ultimately shutting down their self driving division, but now it seems like a good bet.
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