I popped in for a few minutes to verify something. I'm ... over this whole annual what's new presentation stuff. I just don't care anymore. And honestly the three presenters I saw didn't even seem like they rehearsed at all. They just read from the prompter and tried to put excitement in their voice at the same time and it just fell flat.
I think Apple, Samsung and Google should give up on this whole iPhone 13 and Pixel 6 naming and numbering scheme and stop pretending like it is going to be an exciting brand new product every single year.
They should name them more like cars where you can always expect there to be the latest revision each year, but you never expect it to be something completely new that you need to upgrade to.
We need the iPhone (2023) and the Pixel (2023). You would just say you have "an iPhone" and if for whatever reason it is necessary you could say it is a 2023 model.
Yea cars have this notion of model years. Everyone knows nothing really changes between model years except the trim. It's the vehicle generation you care about. I think the focus should be on holding press conferences when you genuinely have something new to show off otherwise it's just fluff.
I think the fact that they are in those high numbers already shows that they "stopped pretending like it is going to be an exciting brand new product every single year". The numbering there is pretty straightforward compared to e.g. the Macbook namings, or the convoluted naming of other brands with stacked variation signifiers, like the "Xiaomi 11 lite 5G NE".
> The numbering there is pretty straightforward compared to e.g. the Macbook namings
I'm confused, while Apple has silly naming conventions for their operating system, the Macbook line doesn't have that at all. It's just the Macbook (and the Macbook Pro and the Macbook Air), Apple doesn't even give them different names or years.
Am I missing something that isn't incredibly straightforward about the Macbook naming?
> It's just the Macbook (and the Macbook Pro and the Macbook Air)
Just that it isn't. The "(new) MacBook" (without any addition) most recently existed 2015-2019, and I personally found it very confusing, as it was thinner than a MacBook Air and with that breaking the previous expectations that were set up by the product line naming.
Placing all the blame on the naming of the MacBooks is probably overblown, but I feel like the individual lines of MacBooks have had a expectation/consistency problem for 10+ years now and throwing in the "new MacBook" into the mix for some time didn't help it.
Is there a whole lot of difference between “iPhone 15” and “iPhone (2023)”? Aside from the fact that relegating the version number to parentheses makes it more likely to be omitted and thus more likely to cause confusion for users trying to troubleshoot.
I like the version number being explicit and visible. You know what you’re getting. Pretending versions don’t exist just reminds me of OEMs swapping out components but keeping the same model number, making it impossible to know whether you are buying one built to the original design or to a cheaper design.
For what it's worth, swapping out material/ updating parts and not changing model numbers already happens a lot in consumer tech. Making changes after launch and initial mass production runs in order to average down cost or fix known issues is a fairly common practice at large hardware companies (Apple/Google/Samsung/Tesla). It's seldom changing the display or battery size or anything immediately customer facing, but there's hundreds of components that each act as a knob for performance and cost that get tweaked over time.
It's really astonishing to me how deeply bad the radio in the P6Pro is. It's such a huge step back from the Pixel 5, likely owing to them moving off of the Qualcomm radio and on to... Tensor? Some Tensor/Samsung Exynos hybrid? Either way it's misery salad. Drops calls. Can't handle wifi transition. Can't manage low-signal 5G, so just... stops working instead of falling back to LTE properly. Can't handle the UWB transition. Hot as hell when it's actually backing up anything large. Awful all around on that front.
They didn't really go back though, it's iPad (9th generation) instead of iPad 9. Not quite versionless naming like they use for Macs, but it's less versioned than the iPhone naming.
The problem with calling something "The New X" is that you basically can't come out with _another_ model after without making it confusing to differentiate between the "new" one and the "New" one. I think the main reason they felt they could try that is that they new they were not going to come out with any more "generic" iPads and instead have the Pro and Air models like they have for Macbooks.
Fwiw, I gave a much less important I/O presentation than this four years ago and I had to go through endless hours of prep/review/practice. I can't imagine they didn't rehearse it. Maybe they're just not great speakers? I doubt I am either.
For that dev part they have the developer keynote. Google just gave away many online training classes for free, which includes many many hands on coding labs.
I doubt it's press who is the audience. People behind these projects want to be seen by SVPs and above, so they get those 5 minutes of attention, get their promos and immediately switch teams to chase the next promo.
Okay so it wasn't just me. The I/O event in the past always had much interesting content. I was surprised to find that not a single one made me even consider reading about it.
I used to be a professional speaker (Amazon, VMware, etc), and presented at more than 600 events. They said I was pretty good. Point is, after years of perfecting my craft, I can instantly spot the difference between a good presenter and a "fake" / bad one.
Most people are bad. Really. Sorry to be blunt, but it is what it is. A bit of training and a bit of rehearsal would go a long way. I am shocked that big events like this one do not try to invest more in preparing the speakers. It wouldn't take much.
The audience is also able to detect professional speakers like yourself, with calculated hand movements and inauthentic voice pitch calibration and is equally turned off -- its just that professional speakers so rarely admit that since they make money off saying otherwise. The problem here is just that the topics aren't compelling enough. And you rarely get a good speaker who also knows the topic well so as to be perceived as authentic.
Look at Elon's keynotes, they are TERRIBLE from a public speaking perspective, but excellent content that generally is interesting. Also no one perceives them as inauthentic, just off-hand-ish. It works.
It's probably because the new products are really incremental improvements over some niche. There's nothing wrong with that either. I don't expect that a company would churn out groundbreaking products year over year -- I certainly wish so, though, as it means new problems to tackle, more meaningful projects to work on, and more demand of engineers in the industry.
I think tech in general is kinda stagnating at this point. We've plucked all the low hanging fruit, to get new revolutionary things will be much more slow going from here.
Yo me it just seems like everyone is following a playbook for presentations based on some bullshit science and pairing that with the best Steve Jobs impersonation you can.
Same here, I used to care, but since Google has never seriously pushed for updates (Treble doesn't require OEMs to actually care to update), gave up on keeping Java support up to date, I lost interest.
As long as Chrome and the NDK stay around, I am good and don't care anymore whatever version I can only use 5 years from now with already deprecated APIs.
> And honestly the three presenters I saw didn't even seem like they rehearsed at all. They just read from the prompter and tried to put excitement in their voice at the same time and it just fell flat.
Yes. I haven't yet watched talks from this IO, but it was exactly my impression from last year's IO and Chrome Dev Summit. There are some speakers, mostly dev rels, who clearly love speaking and are great at it; but most of the speakers were just woodenly reading from the screen. As if they are unaware that written language is different from spoken language, and it takes rare skills to write a speech and then read it back to the audience in such a way that would sound natural and engaging.
I've watched a lot of tech presentations and though I don't care for their products, Panos Panay when he talks about Surface stuff is the gold standard. That guy just exudes charisma and you can tell that he's genuinely passionate about it.
Technology was advancing more rapidly so there were actually new and exciting things to show you. We seem to be hitting diminishing returns and most of the low hanging fruit and almost all the high hanging fruit problems that we have in our day to day lives have been solved that can be solved with a computer.
Now since they have run out of problems to solve they are inventing problems so they can solve them.
most of the low hanging fruit and almost all the high hanging fruit problems that we have in our day to day lives have been solved that can be solved with a computer.
I don't watch the Google presentations, but I'm an avid consumer of Apple's.
That said, even I'm disappointed with the state of technology today. There's still plenty of fruit to be harvested at all levels.
But all I ever see from Apple and Google is variations on "How do I get together with a bunch of people I already know for Thai food in an area that I can walk to?" Or "How do I get through my morning, which is completely predictable and never varies in even the slightest way from one day to the next?"
Here's a softball for both of them:
Using their maps app, allow me to choose a starting point, a destination, and a departure time. Then show me all of the coffee shops within x distance of that route that will still be open for one hour when I pass that location.
Robotics is the obvious high hanging fruit: autonomous lawn movers and such. But nothing is going to happen when the best minds work on reshuffling some UI that's better be left alone.
Should we look to biotech and robotics? I would love to live a life where my genetics don’t hinder everyday living or outsource labor like laundry to machines.
This is a mature industry; each company simply doesn't have a lot of new groundbreaking stuff to announce every year. It's iterative.
And a lot of the seemingly groundbreaking announcements then don't go on to pan out either (I'm thinking of Magic Leap here). If you don't care about realism/follow-through, then you have very exciting announcements; just don't expect anything announced to ever pan out.
If you like to gush over exciting announcements there's still Musk. Unfortunately it's been many years since his company actually built anything he announces
It's not merely "gushing" to be excited about new technology breakthroughs. And Musk, through his companies, is actively delivering today on Starlink, Tesla, Dragon, and Starship to name a few big ones. This meme that he's "all talk" is easily disproved for any honest observer.
> Yes, although: while the Starship project is incredibly impressive, it can’t really be said to have delivered until it’s actually reached orbit.
True, but it isn't as if SpaceX doesn't have a track record for hiring some pretty ambitious targets with their progression of Falcon 1 →Falcon 9 →Falcon Heavy. Admittedly, Starship's planned use of the new Raptor engines seems risky, but the DOD did fund a prototype-and-test contract that presumably concluded successfully a few years ago. While the results of those tests aren't public, there have been no leaks to the contrary, at any rate, and no changes in the planned use of Raptor have been announced (and SpaceX hasn't generally been at all shy about announcing changes to their plans).
I think it's a pretty safe bet right now that Starship will launch and that they will get it working reliably, and that they will have to blow up a few along the way to make those things happen.
The claim was that Musk's companies haven't "built" anything. Versions of Starship have clearly been built and launched, even if the project is still in development. It's a very real project and anyone can watch its developmental progress live: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhJRzQsLZGg
I doubt you or anyone else would bet significant money that Starship won't reach orbit. If so, I'd be happy to accept.
For the record, I don't think you can point to any project even remotely equivalent in terms of capability or progress from Boeing, Lockheed, or ULA. I'd be happy if they were doing nearly as well as SpaceX.
My other examples: Starlink, Tesla, and Dragon have clearly been "built" and shipped. Starlink is the hands of consumers, is actively helping Ukraine for military and humanitarian purposes, Tesla has shipped millions of vehicles, and Dragon Crew had another successful rendezvous with ISS days ago.
I could spend a lot more time providing examples but consider these to be more than sufficient to disprove the claim that Elon Musk's companies haven't "actually built anything he announces" in "years".
I don’t like to gush over any leader and stop stuffing words in my mouth. I’m stating the “era” (2000-2010) keynotes were super fun, original and exciting. W̶h̶a̶t̶’̶s̶ ̶w̶i̶t̶h̶ ̶s̶o̶ ̶m̶u̶c̶h̶ ̶h̶o̶s̶t̶i̶l̶i̶t̶y̶? (You've edited your comment, thanks).
There's a popular and cynical meme that people like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk are just marketing bullshitters that don't actually do anything useful. It's laughably false and easily disproved. And yet it seems to comfort cynical/pessimistic/unhappy/ignorant people, of which many exist, and so it prevails.
"There's a popular and cynical meme" is another way of phrasing, "There are people who evaluate these people's contributions differently than I do"
> It's laughably false and easily disproved.
Then disprove it, instead of relying on an ad hominem assumption of what's going on inside someone else's brain. As it stands all you've done is claim that a criticism exists and that the people who state that criticism have moral failings, which does not make them wrong.
> "There are people who evaluate these people's contributions differently than I do"
That would presume we're talking about people with approximately equivalent knowledge that simply come to different, but reasonable, conclusions.
But this is not the case. What I see in this meme is people betraying their ignorance and motivated reasoning at every turn. There's nothing knowledgeable or reasonable about their assertions. It's always highly vitriolic and dismissive toxicity. It's not that they're simply mistaken about certain facts, and can be corrected, it's that they're transparently ignorant and/or acting in bad faith.
For example, it's extremely uncommon, maybe even unheard of, for someone with a deep knowledge of technology history to agree with these kinds of dismissals of Steve Jobs or Elon Musk. I've never seen someone able to discuss the topic at a high level that won't readily acknowledge their contributions, even if they can be very critical of them in certain ways. As one example among many: historian and professor Walter Isaacson wrote well respected books about Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, and Steve Jobs. He is currently writing one about Elon Musk.
But c'mon. You're really just playing dumb. We all know what SpaceX/Tesla and Apple have done, and (I think) we all know the role Musk and Jobs played in their success. And the reason we all know these things is precisely because of how important what they've done is. It's self-evident.
So, it seems pretty reasonable to assume that you're not acting in good faith. And that's why I answered indirectly.
But, okay, what "proof" would you find convincing?
OK I challenge you to try to engage and bring constructive evidence then.
Give a summary of what steve jobs and musk have done to improve the human condition/world.
While Apple has achieved some moderately useful advances you have to divide the amount of progress given by the amount of money captured.
Apple has an almost negligible ratio in that regard.
Musk has achieved even less.
> OK I challenge you to try to engage and bring constructive evidence then
What kind of evidence would convince you? Wikipedia has summaries. Of course, they necessarily lack the context required to deeply understand the topic.
> Apple has an almost negligible ratio in that regard. Musk has achieved even less.
I challenge you to give evidence for these assertions. I would be convinced if you explained how you came to this conclusion and explained how you calculated the terms of this ratio.
OK, but is that the kind of character you think people should look up to and be inspired by? He’s not a professional comedian; he’s a billionaire businessman with a tremendous amount of power to inspire people to do things. Do we want people to be inspired to do great things or terrible things?
He is far more inspiring than the rest of business leaders.
I find him genuine, funny, atypical and giving a hard time to people that want him to conform.
Progressives hate him. I’ve never seen any logic behind it. It is just that Elon doesn’t share their vision of scarcity driven, alarmist, stagnant, crime ridden, woke, depopulating, unionized and equal-outcomes based society.
The entire progressive platform has been hijacked, not the Obama era left-wing. Obama was pro-Elon Musk and privatization of Space industry.
IMO there are no leaders that inspire more than Elon and late Steve Jobs.
So here… I laid out the entire problem in plain words why people hate Elon. 100% political.
Those aren’t the points I raised at all. I was curious to know how you believe a person with tremendous wealth and power should comport him/herself, and whether Elon Musk's behavior is consistent with that.
Almost all the comments so far are negative! So let me change that: I'm excited that something I'm working on, Typesense, was mentioned by name and logo during the developer key note!
Did they really mess up skin tone recognition that bad that they needed three different solutions to it? (I feel like I missed some major fuckup on their end)
> “In our research, we found that a lot of the time people feel they’re lumped into racial categories, but there’s all this heterogeneity with ethnic and racial categories,” Dr. Monk says.
"People think we're lumping them into racial categories. But we're actually lumping them into slightly narrower racial categories!"
The Pixel 6 Pro camera, which they showcase and market as capable of representing true skin tone [1], has been a pain in the neck for me. I am a brown skinned person with a balding head and the camera preview and final product are completely different. The final product adds random blotches of dark tones on my face and head. None of the photos are usable. This is 100% reproducible especially in bright day light. I filed a bug report with offer to send in my pictures as samples, not a single response, its been 4+ months.
It's a catastrophe for white people as well. My wife has blue eyes, and the camera pretty consistently makes them black. Skin usually turns gray. The portrait looks fine in the preview, but the algorithm messes it up.
Similar weird problems in portrait mode on my iPhone 13 Pro. My youngest daughter comes out looking like an unholy tellytubby on crack for some reason.
Got fed up of trying to negotiate with the bastard thing and bought a Nikon mirrorless instead. Absolutely no regrets.
Considering that the Indian immigrant proprietor of the convenience store in the show is actually brown, I'm confident that the vast majority of people considered the yellow-colored Simpsons to be a white family.
Excluding skin color and gender is being blind to prejudice, not fighting it.
It's largely a generational thing.
The new generations (Millennial, Z) were taught that "celebrate diversity" is the goal. Which means to highlight all the different races, creeds, colors, etc...
Previous generations (X, Boomers) were taught that being "color blind" was the ideal. Which means to treat every person the same, and disregard their race, creed, colors, etc...
Both groups are using the same language for the goal: To end racism. But the ways they were trained to do so are the exact opposite of each other.
Motivation doesn't matter when the impact is different, even if motivation is the same.
Being blind to race means being blind to acts of racism. It discredits the reality of those who experience race- or gender-based discrimination because the systemic blindness won't acknowledge the differences even exist.
Prejudice still happens even if the aggressors have good motivations or think they're "good" people.
Being blind to race means being blind to acts of racism.
No, it doesn't. That's a lovely slogan, but nothing more. People have the capacity to both treat everyone equally, and also notice when some people have not, currently or historically, been treated equally.
Prejudice still happens even if the aggressors have good motivations or think they're "good" people.
This attitude promotes prejudice, merely redirecting it to whatever demographic is convenient to paint as "dominant", it will never solve the problem because it explicitly prescribes different treatment based on ethnicity/gender.
Its an emotionally appealing but logically nonsensical justification for bigotry. And particularly appealing to people who are more interested in power than actual equality.
This common argument is disingenuous. You hide behind the term "inclusive" as though everyone is treated equally but simultaneously believe that
>Excluding skin color and gender is being blind to prejudice, not fighting it.
Which implies that historic and current prejudice must be corrected with more prejudice. Which is inconsistent with inclusiveness and equality. And we've all seen how this works in practice - certain races and one gender in particular are expected to prejudge other participants and cede their vaguely defined, unilaterally assigned and assumed privilege to create concrete prejudiced privilege for others in the "inclusive" group. And given that personal circumstances are irrelevant, this the definition of prejudice. While you may refuse to acknowledge this explicitly, logically your approach to solving racism is more racism. Which leads me to conclude that at least the loudest among the D&I camp are only using claims of equality as a thin disguise for powermongering.
>It would be pretty terrible if a historically "dominant" demographic felt persecuted because of equal options with emoji colors.
And here, ironically, you are proving my point. To correct historic injustice we are obligated to immediately dismiss any grievances from white people, bonus for snark and sarcasm. When minorities complain, all claims are immediately valid, but if whites (and sometimes Asians, when politically expedient) raise legitimate concerns, they're just being fragile. That's prejudice, my friend. And the degree to which it has become casually acceptable in increasingly larger circles is concerning.
By the way, I don't think anyone is concerned over the expanded color pallet itself, its the insistence that injecting divisive racialism into a race agnostic communication tool is the solution to prejudice. Even assuming that minorities are offended by a single yellow option is racist, much in the same way that latino people don't actually care for the similarly misguided "latinx" designation.
Equality feels like persecution to those hold all the privileges.
I'm not sure why having different colored emojis has triggered an essay to redefine inclusivity as persecution for some hypothetical "dominant" demographic, but you are proving my point.
By using weak words to avoiding naming the demographic you feel is actually persecuted here, you're turning a blind eye to centuries of prejudicial conflict and injustice - context that defeats your attempt at semantics.
>To correct historic injustice we are obligated to immediately dismiss any grievances from white people, bonus for snark and sarcasm. When minorities complain, all claims are immediately valid, but if whites (and sometimes Asians, when politically expedient) raise legitimate concerns, they're just being fragile.
You didn't even read my post.
>Equality feels like persecution to those hold all the privileges
This is carte blanche to be racist to anyone defined as privileged by the socially/politically dominant group. You're playing with fire. Only a matter of time before, as in the past, the ire is directed at you and the people you think you're fighting for. How far down the privilege totem pole are you?
It's marxism through and through, except the proles and bourgeoise have been replaced with racial classes. I encourage you to at least read the communist manifesto and see the direct parallels, right down to the language of "oppression".
Don't forget, they also usually have a little discussed special category for lumpenproletariat, where competent true believers go when they outlive their usefulness.
I will never understand why emoji, the whole point of which is to convey universal emotions (and other icons), ever needed skin tone modifiers at all. why do "thumbs up" and "thumbs up, but i'm white btw" need to be encoded differently? why is everyone OK with Native Americans and other ethnicities with reddish skin tones being excluded? just a complete mess top-to-bottom, and now we can basically never undo it.
imagine trying to explain to aliens from another planet 500 years from now why 500 years ago we decided to a.) include skin tone modifiers to begin with and b.) only allow for the gradation of skin colors that we do. beyond ridiculous.
EDIT: I forgot to mention how insanely ridiculous it is that we have these skin tone modifiers, but they don't even work for all "people" emoji, because of the obvious issue of rendering cartoon human faces in a way that isn't considered a racist caricature for many races. this makes sense of course, but I can't understand why, when this argument came up, they didn't just choose to scrap the whole idea instead of implementing it and restricting it to a subset of "people" emoji.
Because people didn't understand that emoji was supposed to represent concepts, and saw them as small illustrations instead. That's also why Apple's version is basically the de facto standard now, and Google and Microsoft has had to adjust theirs to look more like Apple's to minimize confusion when the small pictograms doesn't look the same for sender and receiver.
People like customising these things to be mini-avatars as a form of self expression. I don’t see a reason to get upset about this option existing — not even from the perspective of “oh no strings are even weirder, I can’t safely treat them as a stream of bytes all the time”, given that combining characters are needed for other stuff anyway.
(No idea why you think other skin tones can’t be added later).
not at all, of course. realistically the biggest impediment to adding more skin tones is that if the list of additional skin tones wasn't completely exhaustive, there would be public outcry. as it stands right now, the simple gradient scale is "good enough," so there isn't much impetus to add any more.
> if the list of additional skin tones wasn't completely exhaustive, there would be public outcry
This is kind of how I felt when looking at the scale just now, because none of the 10 really look like me. Maybe it's supposed to be a round-down/up sort of thing, or maybe I should calibrate my display?
Maybe in an advanced stage of liver failure. It's really stretching to say yellow == white. The default color made nobody happy, which is exactly why it was the right solution to the problem.
There's a good history of it in Lego here [0]. You can see its a complex relationship but yellow has been used for caucasians (and asians) and has always had a difficult relationship for people of color.
Given the history, one could make an argument that they represent Asians rather than Caucasians (it's always seemed odd to me that we ended up with this name for white(r) people, but such is life).
It's a very nice technology and is an example of permanent whole body genetic mutation via epigenetics.The issue is that it is irreversible..
The converse, a whitening substance does not exist yet but could exist in theory, by antagonizing the melanin receptors.
this is the most insane recurring argument and I'll never understand it. sure that's how The Simpsons works, but that's not how LEGO works, so that argument gets canceled out. then you look at the yellow smiley face iconography that I'm sure has cultural roots somewhere but was universally used to specifically express universality—back when WAL*MART used it as their logo, were they specifically trying to market to white people, at the exclusion of all others??
then you take the history of emoji into account and you see that that doesn't really work as an explanation at all. it's like you (and everyone else who makes this inane argument) are trying to make something that's not white-people-centric, white-people-centric, just so you can complain about it being white-people-centric.
It is how Lego originated. See discussion at [0]. Early on they had a limited palette and would use yellow for caucasians and asians and at times used black for POC and red for native americans. The time where everything was yellow is also quite limited - and there was pushback from non-cacuasians until they were forced to include skin colours in NBA sets.
> The time where everything was yellow is also quite limited
1978-2003 is hardly a limited timespan in the history of LEGO!
> and there was pushback from non-cacuasians until they were forced to include skin colours in NBA sets.
right, because this is when they decided to make minifigs look like real people, instead of imaginary, race-neutral-ish, yellow people, once they got into licensing the appearance of real people for their minifigs!
Really? The default was yellow because that's what Franklin Loufrani used back in the 1970s in France, and he's (probably) the one responsible for the smiley becoming a global icon. Did he intend yellow to mean white people? I'm highly skeptical, but I'd be open to listening if you have some documentation...
It doesn't matter if the decision was intentional or coincidence, the fact remains the most popular TV cartoon in history has trained our expectations.
It can and should be undone. There is a difference between the identifier and the representation, android should render color skinned emojis in their yellow equivalent, as simple as that.
There is the objective fact that darker skin tones are harder for some AI algos to process due to lower contrast. There's also the fact that a lot of training data just didn't have people of darker skin, and that a couple of news article pointed out that some people were classified in object detection systems in a rather... racist way.
https://careers.google.com/, scroll down to "Spotlight", scroll over to "Data center roles" or "Staff Software Engineer", both pictures of white male talking to white female.
Globally white people are about 10% of the population, so I'd expect 1 in 10 people in a representative sample to be white, which feels about right for much of Google's marketing material.
For all intents and purposes, women count as minorities. Google has plenty of pictures with white women, and white men and women. But so far I have only found one picture with a lone white male (on one of the chromecast pages, on the TV was a show page, and the show page had a lone white male). I guess they can get 1/2 credit for that. Oh and I found a picture of a lone white guy, but he was disabled. So I guess that technically counts, although he would still fall into the "minority/disadvantaged" camp.
Nah, watch the video, he's Hispanic. (Of course racial classifications have no real meaning, but ime Hispanic people are generally - bar some Spaniards - 'typed' as non-white, comparable to Asians or Native Americans. And certainly a minority in US terms.)
ETA: He's also deaf, fwiw, with regard to the minority point.
ETA2: Hmm, I may be wrong about the exact details. It looks like he's a research scientist at Google, and, judging by the name, possibly Russian. But the same non-Caucasian non-''white'' point applies. (The Spanish voiceover and subtitles confused me - it's not his voice at the start, whereas his own 'deaf voice' makes any accent hard to identify.)
Hmm, I think we're coming up against the weirdness of racial categories here. I'd say Ukrainians - to much the same extent as Hispanics - aren't quite considered white in American terms (which has virtually zero to do with one's skin color). Or not Caucasian, at least. (Yes, despite the fact that they come literally from the Caucasus, while Americans don't.) But it's impossible to come to an exact agreement on these things.
That interesting diversion notwithstanding, I think his being deaf is probably what accounts for his inclusion, which is consistent with the spirit of what that person was saying.
This is just scratching the surface, I'm not gonna spend time clicking in to every blog post and article. Again, their target market is basically the entire world, and most people in the world (and the US) are not white men. So I would not expect the majority of pictures to be white men, and indeed they are not.
I guess this is intentional exaggeration to make some kind of point, but I just checked a bunch of Google corporate pages and every single one with pictures of people had a white guy somewhere. The majority were not white men, but that's because most people are not white men.
Google's workforce is 53.1% white, and 36.3% Asian (so, not far). 2.5% is black. Their marketing graphics - to put it charitably - bely those demographics.
Respectfully, I think it's a bit dishonest that you've linked to one very specific subpage for one specific office in Seattle, presumably the one page you found which contained a lot of white people.
I'm not sure if I even need to write any more, because the fact that you needed to do that demonstrates my point probably better than I can.
But, to say the obvious, have a look at their root careers page (I think that's a good "nothing-up-my-sleeve URL", so to speak): https://careers.google.com
> To put what charitably?
Well, the phrase immediately surrounding that one in my comment: "their marketing graphics bely those [i.e. 53%-white] demographics".
(To be clear, I don't say this with any racist intent. I'm just allergic to insincerity. Whatever one's political commitments, it's plain – to anyone who hasn't completely subordinated their critical faculties to some or other ideological dogma – that Google's photos make great play of their few minority ethnic staff, more than would an equally-large set of random samples from their 53%-white staff. It reminds me of my sister (who's mixed-race, as I am) being summoned whenever her china-white private girls' school was taking photos. My own - hers was our sister school - mustn't've deemed me sufficiently dark..)
So far it's been a lot of "look how smart we are: we make things easy!"
It brings me to a pretty forlorn place, that there is such high & mighty technology, but delivered in such preconcieved, packaged products. Technological goods have become much better distributed, but the art of technology keeps evaporating upwards. Subliming up into the cloud.
Part of the allure of the personal computing era (RIP) was that it invited in the spirit of Man The Toolmaker. There was a dignity to mastery & development that was visible, we could form a close & knowing relationship with our systems. That spirit has been returned to the gods, fire returned back to Hephaestus's workshop. Which is now HQ'ed in Mountain View.
(I haven't always felt this way about Google. My perception is there had been a bigger focus on helping advance the web & making available APIs. That Google was creating new starting places.)
The same thing happened with cars. A half century who, anyone with a bit of an interest used to be able to understand pretty much everything going on under the hood of a car of the era. Today no one person fully understands the symphony between all the mechanical, hardware, and suffocate systems in a given brand new vehicle.
As technology matures, the underlying systems that drive it increase in complexity, but the user experience improves and simplifies. A mechanical pocket watch is much more complex than an hourglass or sundial, but vastly more useful.
It's more exotic but there's plenty of very very fancy aftermarket engine & fuel control systems, options for the geeks to get in & remap things ro their hearts content.
Do most gearheads go there? No. Is it available for all vehicles? Absolutely not. But there's an enthusiast community & a serving of it where it is absolutely recognized as a pinnacle of belief that keeping humans in the loop, giving them options & control, is the only acceptable path, that falling from grace is not an option.
Generally I dont think you are entirely wrong per se, but the degree to which modern computong technology has precluded, prevented human engagement is unbelievable. To chase your analogies again, almost no one will be compelled to go understand their mechanical pocketwatch. But they could. A decent repairman could fix it. In contrast, the technology we entreat with is 100% alien, a far off remote force we cannot observe, cannot learn about, ensconsed in behind impreginible firewalls: we cannot ever begin to understand the vast realms of computing we are innundated with, we have no stance at all, are regarded as nothing.
This is against the human spirit, this is the ultimate infernal device, and we should smash it to pieces, resist, with everytbing we have, with every joule in our souls.
Google is working on some interesting stuff but their live events aren’t doing them any favors. There’s no hype leading up to them and the events themselves are dull as hell. Google currently has only 40k people watching the live event. Apple WWDC events attract 10X as many concurrent viewers.
There's no hype because they don't have anything to show that deserves hype.
It's all the same: AI to improve photos, AI to improve translations and small iterative improvements to Android that you swear were shown at a Google IO event years ago
Edit: watching the livestream and they've just announced an Android tablet! Honestly this déjà vu is getting ridiculous
Not to mention Google Wallet, an "amazing new" product by the same name of an existing product they keep renaming and haven't finished retiring yet. They could just say they were updating Google Wallet or whatever it's called now, but I guess you don't get promoted for that.
I laughed when the Pixel guy (before announcing the tablet) said they don't usually announce products so far in advance. Has he seen Google I/O?
The tablet announcement is funny too. Another generation of people who haven't been through multiple cycles of this by now are gonna be run through the process of believing Google when they say they're focusing on tablets for real this time, until they launch their tablet and get bored of it a year later and then you wait a few more years before Google makes a totally real commitment to tablets.
Honestly, I preferred the days when developer conferences were for DEVELOPERS and not consumers. Announce APIs, DevTools, demo new stuff developers can use. Back when I/O was "Google Developer Day" and used to be mostly Web-tech, I found it way more interesting, more of a hackers conference. The modern conferences are more about commerce, even on the developer side, and not simply about the Joy of Cool Stuff and Cool Hacks.
These days Apple and Google use developer conferences as pseudo-consumer product soft launches.
IMHO, consumer end user launches should do done at consumer conferences.
Still, compared to Apple, Google's keynotes still contain more stuff of interest to developers like PaLM, LaMDA models, and a change to play with them. Apple's WWDC keynotes are usually so dumbed down, their graphs don't even have numbers of axis labels.
> Apple WWDC events attract 10X as many concurrent viewers
Apple does the best job of anyone in the industry (imho) of building awareness and excitement over their events, developer or otherwise, but I think it is important to note that the WWDC keynotes (not the State of the Union), are also treated as proper consumer-facing product events, not just a developer keynote. As such, the audience is going to be much larger.
Back in the day, when Larry and Sergey were running things day to day, I/O definitely had more of that energy (they year Sergey jumped out of the plane and then walked on stage was bananas) and could pull Apple-like numbers, but that’s not what I/O is anymore.
40k concurrent for virtual conference that could be a series of blog posts and pre-recorded talks is actually pretty strong, IMHO.
When I did a lot of dual-platform mobile dev, the teams would always watch Google and Apple events.
The Apple ones were exciting, because they'd usually announce a bunch of OS and development-related stuff we could start using very soon.
The Google ones were kind of a bummer, because the (appropriate and justified) mood in the room was "well, this feature might be cool to use... in five years or so." The only people who got excited about them were the hardcore Android fans who weren't excited about dev-facing features, but because they'd always buy whatever new Pixel or whatever that was announced, ASAP.
WWDC and other Apple events justify more hype because they are market leaders in mobile. When you watch an Apple event you are often seeing things for the first time. Google Pixel is blatantly copying the Apple product portfolio, from custom chip designs to now Airpod Pro clones. Where would Google be with Pixel if Apple didn't exist? It is literally spun up division to copy the most valuable company in the world. We shame Huawei and these Chinese companies for copying, but look in our own backyard.
I carefully chose the word "copy" because I know this quote well. It's hard to define the difference between copy and steal but it's easy to see by example. You just feel it when you watch.
> Google Pixel is blatantly copying the Apple product portfolio, from custom chip designs to now Airpod Pro clones.
Google relentlessly copies every other company in the industry, and it's been going on for years now.
>You can look at Google’s entire portfolio of launches over the past decade, and trace nearly all of them to copying a competitor: Google+ (Facebook), Google Cloud (AWS), Google Home (Amazon Echo), Allo (WhatsApp), Android Instant Apps (Facebook, WeChat), Google Assistant (Apple/Siri), and on and on and on. They are stuck in me-too mode and have been for years. They simply don’t have innovation in their DNA any more. And it’s because their eyes are fixed on their competitors, not their customers.
You can do the same exercise for Apple and find loads of copying, but Apple fans will say the Apple feature or product somehow wasn't a copy. Even in your own list, there are Apple copies, like HomePod and App Clips. Earin preceeded Airpods (along with a long line of bluetooth earpieces).
Apple has copied tons of features from Android, Chrome, and Maps over the years, mostly ignored, but as soon as Android gets a feature iOS had, Apple fanboys make a huge deal over it. Apple's been playing this game for decades, all the way back to the era of constantly accusing Microsoft of copying "Redmond, start your copiers!"
Apple literally stole Spotify's entire business model for Apple Music, and then turned around and used their platform ownership to punish them. Apple Fitness copied Fitbit and Peleton. Apple TV+ basically followed everyone else getting into streaming. Hell, it appeared at one point, they were even going to copy Tesla by making an EV.
All major tech companies have a 'copy, acquire, kill' strategy for competition. Apple is not different.
Apple's online WWDC content has very good production value, but a bunch of well-produced videos dropped over the course of a week don't really make it a "conference".
Microsoft, with their BUILD conference a couple years ago, actually had the best implementation of a COVID-era virtual "conference" that I've seen-- lots of actual live content (and live chat interaction), and to some extent some of the content was actually superior to a real-world conference because the online format (taking questions via chat) makes Q&A more feasible than it would be in person.
As someone who worked on the programming team for Build in 2020 and 2021, thanks for saying that. In 2020, especially, it was really difficult to pivot with as little time as we had. We did most of our stuff in 2020 live, even though it was remote (a few of us were in the studio but most people were at home), because we didn’t have the lead time to make it a well-produced pre-recorded thing. We were “live” across time zones (meaning people in the US (like myself), were often working at 3am, in order to bring live content to other parts of the world), for an ungodly amount of time, and the fact that it didn’t break was really great. Even though we had more production time in 2021, we still did a lot of live content (with on-demand, of course), across time zones, and focused on more breakout sessions too.
I’m not at Microsoft anymore (tho I might still do some stuff for Build this year, since I’m at GitHub), but being part of the team that got Build 2020 across the finish line is one of the things I’m most proud of. Microsoft was the first to do a tech conference in the pandemic (Google canceled, Facebook might have too), so we really didn’t have anything to base it off of.
Apple, naturally, just knocked it out of the park with the production values, but I’ll always love the scrappy nature of Build 2020.
The North Glasses with AR in that Google acquisition was a long time coming to be shown off and was as expected [0] but I'm very surprised that this acquisition of North was overlooked [1] by many.
Importantly, this is where the race for AR/XR glasses starts and begins to be interesting. They needed to show off something tangible in the end to still show that they are still in the race.
Maybe Apple already started years ago and are waiting for others to do it wrong (again) and will try to time it again.
I tried this and I'm wondering if anyone involved in this project was around when Space Cadet Pinball dropped, on Windows 95 in 1995. Because this is like a parody of that.
Any recommendations? I've been holding off on upgrading my shattered-screen 3a for almost 6 months assuming I'd get the 6a when it released, so pretty much anything would be an upgrade at this point.
I'm really just looking for a good camera, a headphone jack, and a good battery.
Another option to consider might be supplementing the best single-port phone you can find with a Dongle Dangler [0], which allows you to keep a dongle on your keychain.
I use it with an iPhone 12 Mini (which has good enough camera/battery for me) and it solves the wired headphone problem, albeit with adding some extra steps. I would prefer to support manufacturers that are keeping the jack, but at a certain point I felt like I was sacrificing quite a bit in terms of other aspects of my smartphone experience to do so.
I'm not really a fan of keeping the dongle attached to my headphones since all of my other devices have actual jacks. This probably works well if none of your devices have jacks (and they all have usb-c), though.
Sony launched their Xperia 1 IV (yes, it's the fourth version of the 1, ridiculous name) today. It's probably around twice as expensive as the Pixel 6a since it's a flagship, but it still has a 3.5 mm jack, and it introduces optical zoom.
Looks amazing, honestly. The big draw of the Pixel a-series for me was midrange phones with normal features, headphone jacks, and stock Android. I don't think that's an unreasonable ask.
It's been kind of funny to see folks criticize apple, then when their product cycle catches up copy them :) This has been like clockwork for a number of companies, starting with the move from keyboards to glass etc.
For me the lighting jack on the iphones actually has fantastic latency. Does anyone know how that works? Much better than USB-C (ie, you can use as a monitor for a multi-track recoding very comfortably)
Apple writes their own audio drivers for very specific hardware is how it works. It's very annoying, because there's so many amazing music apps that just couldn't work on Android. I just want a headphone jack or a simple way to use wired headphones.
You make it sound it's true but it's misleading, the critics was because apple users were the beta testers. Letting plenty of time for the industry( headphones, etc) and users to adapt for their Android phone
Yup, my latest 'upgrade' was to the 5a for this reason... I fear it may be the last Pixel with a headphone jack. When it eventually eats shit I'm terrified of being relegated to the sea of horrible OS bloatware Android devices.
This is getting into the weeds, but I'm keeping an eye out for information on whether the 6a will have a subscription option like the 5a (24 payments of $15 = $360 for a $450 phone).
Of course, my 5a will only be paid off in another 19 months, at which point a hypothetical Pixel 7a will presumably be available for upgrading, hopefully also with a similar subscription plan, but meanwhile whether the 6a even has a subscription plan is an indicator of what the offerings will be in another year and a half.
I am glad that the 6a has a Tensor chip (that's the one significant limitation of the 5a compared to the rest of the current lineup), so whatever else, I can be reasonably certain that the phone upgrade will have one too.
I find the urge to conduct kremlinological analysis somewhat annoying, but given that my subscription agreement just says that I will have an opportunity to upgrade at the end of the payment plan, with no indication as to the price or value of that upgrade, it is hard not to worry.
It is interesting though that the present value of a subscription hardware purchase is now hinging in part on the future upgrade opportunity (and in the sense of replacement with a new version rather than expansion with add-on hardware) just like software.
That said, even if that future upgrade opportunity turns out to be crap, I'll only be disappointed rather than feeling burned. After all, a sizable discount and an interest-free payment plan on a solid mid-level phone was a decent deal regardless.
If you want to upgrade your 5a go for the 5. The 6 is awful and I doubt the 6a is any better. Apple perfecting their SoCs has made it seem so easy, but as it turns out, it is extremely hard.
Well, we'll see what the upgrade situation is like in 19 months!
I may just opt to keep the 5a until the security updates stop coming, especially if the Adaptive Charging works as advertised to preserve battery capacity.
I totally get the appeal of having the jack, but when push comes to shove, I'll accept the tradeoff and get a USB-C headphone adapter.
One less hole for water to enter is also a good thing (speaking as someone who has managed to drop phones into puddles, toilets, pools, and pots of soup).
Quite the opposite. They could showcase an impressive list of competitors that haven't been launched, thanks to all their would-be employees working for FANG.
I think maybe these tech companies need more MBAs and middle managers whose only existence is to 'trim the budget' and isolate their team's work under their own little banner so they can use it as a parachute to glide to the next company. That will surely get the creative juices flowing at any organization I think.
One question I did have on the monk skin tone scale. They note that tone (normally a color measurement) is actually subjective (not objective) and so participants in studies should be asked to self identify their own skin tone and not let the computer classify images based on the scale. To the degree self identification is materially different than a technical measure of skin tone, how does that work in a model (ie, someone who is white self identifying as having a black skin tone). Secondarily, are these tones intended to map in any way to any traditional measures of ethnicity / race / national origin?
The immersive view in Maps looks quite impressive, it reminds me of Microsoft Flight Simulator and how Microsoft used its Bing Maps scans to render the world in very high detail. But now you can do this on your phone.
I showed my older parents the 3D view that exists in Maps and Google Earth today and they were blown away (and also thought they were being spied on). The technology is incredible. A few years ago I got to try the Google Earth VR on an Oculus Rift and being able to stand in my hometown in VR with the weirdly chunky approximated renderings was a surreal experience.
Definitely happy they are figuring out the skin tone stuff for search. Being able to search for skin conditions and hone in on skin tone efficiently has been a pet peeve of mine. Psoriasis, for instance, looks different on different skin tones.
TL;DR "We've developed new and innovative products and features that will help us profile you and sell you stuff you don't actually want like never before"
