There's an aphorism that I like to use every time someone tells me that Windows is the easy choice: Windows makes accomplishing easy tasks easy, and hard tasks impossible.
To this day and for the past 20 years, every time I go back to my parents' house, it's Windows tech support time. Every time, I have to go through the same routine of cleaning up all sorts of crap that make their computer slow to a crawl, even when I purposely created non privileged accounts for them. Every time, the same ritual: diagnose why the printer stopped working, why apps look pixelated, why some sites stopped working.
So, it works for my parents, and possibly works for the vast majority of people, because it has created this ecosystem where these users either depend on folks like me, or have to pay up at the repair shop. And somehow, something as simple as not breaking a critical component during an update, or prevent users from installing harmful stuff, has not been addressed properly. And that's without mentioning what Microsoft does that's very much anti-consumer, like stuffing the consumer versions of the OS with ads.
> However, the Microsoft stack is sooooo much more. ID management. Device management. Uncountable number of little helpers in form of software and scripts that you cannot port to a Linux based stack without significant effort. Entire mail domains are managed by Office 265 - you own the domain and the DNS records, you get licenses for Office365 from MS, you point the DNS records to Microsoft, you are done.
Is there any bit of this that is not web based or does not support Linux nowadays? Office 365 runs on a browser, and even Intune supports some enterprise oriented distributions, like RH, so device management shouldn't be a problem. But even if none of that was true, there is certainly competition in the IT management space. Defaulting to Microsoft just because of a Windows based fleet doesn't sound like a great idea.
> The truth is, they keep continuously innovating and I can see it, little things just conveniently showing up, like that I now have a Teams button to create an AI script of my conversations, or that if more than one person opens an Office document that is stored in OneDrive we can see each other inside the document, cursor positions, and who has it open.
This is stuff other vendors have been offering for ages now.
The browser versions of the Office apps aren't comparable to the native apps, and also don't support whatever native integrations (like VBA add-ins) companies use.
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.
> 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.
Hardly, you are intentionally looking at peak consumption because it suits the answer you want after being proved wrong. This is nicely highlighted by how you want to casually dismiss benchmarks which don't support your point.
> 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.
No, that is looking at the actual experience of using the phone. Peak consumption is a useless metric. Nobody cares. People care about their phone feeling smooth and how often they have to charge. From this point of view, Apple has no lead whatsoever provided by their SoC while they used to which is the point I have been making from the start.
> 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 you are saying that Qualcomm and Mediatek are on par with Apple because they perform the same in Geekbench, then we have to talk about peak power consumption and TDP. But regardless, even if we were to look at average power consumption over time, Elite Gen 5 still tops the A19 Pro by more than *20%*.
> No, that is looking at the actual experience of using the phone. Peak consumption is a useless metric. Nobody cares. People care about their phone feeling smooth and how often they have to charge. From this point of view, Apple has no lead whatsoever provided by their SoC while they used to which is the point I have been making from the start.
Speaking of moving goalposts...
This whole paragraph makes no sense. First you said that Qualcomm is on par with Apple based off benchmarks. Now, if peak consumption doesn't matter, therefore benchmarks don't either, so we have to compare the "experience" of using a phone? How do you quantify that? Which phone would you compare an iPhone with? Does every single phone with an Elite Gen 5 perform exactly the same? Do we choose the Poco F8 Ultra, which seems to throttle and stutter quite frequently, or the OnePlus 15, which reaches external temperatures of 50C?
Anyway, pick a lane, or at least make a good point, because this ain't one.
Unrelated, but this whole thing reminds me of how, back in the day, some manufacturers would put a desktop CPU and GPU inside a laptop as thick as a brick, fed the 10Kg monstrosity with a 400W power adapter, and call it "the fastest laptop ever", which could be technically true, but was very, very wrong.
The iOS YouTube app is not worse than the one in Android. Texting in iOS is arguably better or, at the very least, there is one more app to choose (Messages). And I’m curious to know what makes Antenna Pod so much better than the thousands of other podcast apps out there.
Social media apps have historically been worse in Android, because of lax app and privacy controls.
> What else is there, where is the advantage?
Personally, I’d rather not have Google buried deep inside all aspects of my phone.
Everyone I know on iOS just uses Messages, they don’t feel a need for other apps.
People on Android I’ve run into seem to have a half dozen apps and use anything but the built in messaging.
A few months ago while on a trip I ran into an older couple that wanted some picture I took in a place they weren’t physically up to going. They were not tech savvy at all. Had they been on iOS, they would have just been using Messages and it would have been easy. They had Android, and the guy opened about 5 or 6 different messaging apps, not really knowing what any of them were, it seemed like a real mess. I sent them using Messages over RCS, assuming they’d go to Google Messages, or whatever the default equivalent standard app is for Google (they seem to have changed it a dozen times). It could be that the pictures were taking a while to send, my phone showed they sent, but he had no idea where to look or where they might have went, despite having so many messaging apps. I hope he is able to find them or they came through with a notification once he had a better single.
Having one good app that everyone uses is better than the default app being sub-par, or so constantly in flux that the users and smattered about to dozens of different apps that can’t talk to each other.
> Texting in iOS is arguably better or, at the very least
Since some updates ago, my keyboard is still broken if I type too fast, and autocorrect been essentially broken for the same amount of time. Must be happening for ~years now, still waiting for a new update to finally fix it.
At least on Android you can change the keyboard to something else if you'd like, instead of being stuck with what your OS developer forces on you. Wish I had that option now.
A lot of the apps, not just the banking apps, but food delivery etc, restrict using alternative keyboards, leaving you with a default one, which is especially jarring for a multi-lingual countries where you typically need keyboards for English + language 2 and 3.
I had to give ap on a swiftkey iOS for that reason
You could say that there are Apple devices that do not work well or don’t work at all without another Apple device, and off the top of my head I would say the only ones are the Watch and the HomePod, but most alternative devices work fine with Apple ones, e.g Chromecast, Garmin watches, Google Home hubs, etc.
And even so, the same could be said about Android only features and devices, e.g. Samsung Watch doesn’t work without an Android phone, Google Earbuds are feature capped on iPhone, etc.
IMO, if we are looking at rent seeking behaviors, Google shoving Gemini down the throats of Google Home users, with no chance of rolling back if they don’t like it, is way worse.
The difference between Apple vs Google is that with Apple you ARE the ad. They don't need advertising when they know people will adopt them and then be forced into their ecosystem.
I’m not sure what you are trying to say here. Even if that was true, my point was that an ad driven business like Google, would be incentivized to monetize all the aspects of my life they could have access to. If that’s not what Apple is doing, compared to Google, then that’s a win I guess?
Google most profitable business line is ads. They profit from literally knowing everything about you, then selling access to that to ad bidders. Apple makes the most money from devices. It is not the same.
Then why is it that they advertise? We just last week had a thread about how the Apple app store is making ads blend in more with organic results. So not only are they advertising to users (which admittedly was news to me), they are engaging in dark patterns to make those ads more enticing. It doesn't seem like being locked into the Apple ecosystem (and paying their tax on hardware) is actually benefiting the users.
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