This Ars Technica Wear 2.0 review fits right in here.
The Ugly
- Qualcomm’s continual repackaging of obsolete CPU technology is killing Wear OS.
Why the !%*)$! are they still using a 28nm process for a smart watch chip?
Makes perfect sense. Unlike Apple, Qualcomm doesn’t make watches, just chips. They only design and produce chips if the market justifies it. While the Apple watch is popular for a watch, it pales compared to the smartphone market.
He’d say that it sounds like Qualcomm is trying to avoid being criticized for failing to launch this year products that are at least on-paper comparable to what Apple launched last year (5G notwithstanding).
So the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 matches iPhone 7 (A10) speeds in Geekbench single core tests. The latest A12 chips in the iPhone X2 are 40% faster in single core benchmarks.
I summon the ghost of @wumpus to tell us all what it means.
Clearly Androids continue to suck. And I’ll continue to stubbornly stick to Android because I just can’t appreciate the extreme speed gains I could be experiencing by switching to Apple.
Thanks for the clarification Canadian Wumpus.
That watch is just L O L.
But you know, I’m not sure that the Android smart watches are going badly. I see them more and more in my daily life.
I see the very odd Samsung but mostly the squared off fitbits and apple watches.
Only Apple can really do smartwatches because (as of now) smartwatches are accessories to phones, and you really need the phone maker and watch maker (and, preferably, watchOS and phoneOS makers) to be the same.
It is interesting the limitations of copycat design in the mobile space. While everyone copycatted iPhone designs and iterated on them, they’ve not been able to have the same success with iPads and iWatches.
I have a Mobvoi ticwatch pro, it’s swag…
Qualcomm finally gets fucked right in their Qualcomm-hole.
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“down -12%”
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Naughty naughty.
I thought qualcomm was ruling the market just on the strength of their patents, which in a way is true, but in practice it was amazing all the ways they used them to squeeze out the competition. Glad to see they got called out for it.
Bleep Qualcomm. Bleep em right in their qualcomm-hole.
What’s the unit price? I mean, how much is a modem in a cell phone? $4? How much extra profit does that work out for me, the consumer?
Qualcomm is screwing Apple and Samsung, big deal, they screw the consumer every day.
Read the article. Qualcomm wasn’t just charging for the modem and jacking it’s price up. They forced everyone to license their patents, which took a fixed percentage on the entire value of every phone sold. That’s only one part of what they did to enforce their monopoly.
It’s a great article and makes me excited to see the market changes if the ruling is upheld. Not just for cheaper prices (which probably would never make it to consumers, lets be honest) but in terms of modem competition. Even a company as big as Intel was muscled out by Qualcomm at every turn.
While their behavior was anticompetitive and they should be castigated for it, Qualcomm also makes superior hardware. Samsung, Huawei, Intel, etc, can’t match its performance or power utilization even after many generations of trying. Apple’s SoCs are better obviously, but they tend to be much larger, and thus more expensive to produce.
Not only that, they forced phone makers to pay them for every phone they sold, even ones that didn’t contain any Qualcomm chips.