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LastInLine posted:Given that Qualcomm hasn't released a new wearable chipset since early 2016 it's pretty obvious that Qualcomm doesn't care about Wear's growth either way. They are the only provider of chipsets for Wear and while I'm sure it'd be great if they were in more demand, it's all gravy to them and certainly not worth investing earth dollars into. It's difficult for me to imagine that you "don't know where their head is at" when we have the history of capitalism and many instances of monopolistic behavior all pointing to Qualcomm working as hard as possible to not spend money on a niche that has no hope of being profitable. Again, I'm not sure them being the only provider of chipsets for Wear is relevant and you haven't convinced me that it is relevant. (Also, again, I'm not arguing that it is or is not relevant, I'm arguing that the evidence isn't there to be confident.) Would Qualcomm rather you buy an Apple Watch or an Android Wear watch? What does that say about the reference class for their market?
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Jul 16, 2018 17:08
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Thermopyle posted:Would Qualcomm rather you buy an Apple Watch or an Android Wear watch? What does that say about the reference class for their market? I'm saying that I don't think Qualcomm cares, given the size of the market. If you buy one, great, if you don't, well they weren't going to make that sale anyway. No amount of investment into making dedicated SoCs for wearables is ever going to be worth the money or the effort for them so now that their partners have loudly clamored for such an investment they are going to do the barest minimum to make them happy (not that their partners have a choice). Everything I read says that the 3100 will have a dedicated chip just for power management with lower power support for wakewords and ambient displays and will otherwise be the same as the 2100. Reading the tea leaves I think that Qualcomm views it as a case of Google needing to make Wear competitive before they even think about dumping money that won't be returned into a modern chipset. (For what it's worth, I'd agree with that point of view.) Google is known for forgetting they have product lines to maintain and abandoning projects after their hardware partners made investments backing them up and Qualcomm, rightly, isn't willing to pour money into a sinkhole in an attempt to shore up a project that Google themselves seems to have already forgotten exists. Think of it this way: Qualcomm in the phone market makes a commodity chipset that they offer to OEMs for use in their yearly phone releases. There isn't any competition for these SoCs at the top end at all so while QC has to invest in next year's model, they don't really have to try very hard. They have to incorporate their modems, which is where the value lies due to their IP, and maybe tweak the reference ARM spec here and there, but everyone is going to use their SoC anyway. At the midrange or lower end, they see their margins eaten away by MediaTek and rightly understand that there's no reason to invest heavily here. They do release some SoCs for use here but they're all older fabs that offer few if any advantages over the competition and if someone chooses to use a different SoC they aren't too broken up about it as they made their investment in the fab back on the initial release a couple years back and the margins are so thin on budget devices that it isn't worth putting in the effort to "win" this market. No one's buying budget phones because they work well and their middling offerings already sell well enough, so why bother? This is exactly the logic GM used in the 70s toward developing small cars and in the short term it's good logic. I think they look at the wearables market in exactly the same way. They already own all of the Wear OS market and that investment is paid for. Every Wear device sold is profit (assuming they've made back their investment which wasn't much to begin with). If it dries up, too bad but it won't dry up completely and it only needs to sell well enough to keep the lights on. There is simply no incentive at all to invest heavily in anything for this niche. At best we can hope that there isn't a reason to maintain a 28nm fab in 2018 and they move to a more efficient process due to older phone SoC fabs going idle but what you won't see is QC putting money toward a modern fab for a dedicated SoC for a product that not only can't sell more than it already is, but that QC isn't responsible for improving or selling and that the entity in charge of doing that is likely to simply forget exists. e: I should add that this is simply Econ 101 about the dangers of monopolies. As marketshare increases, incentive to innovate decreases. That's simply how things work. ClassActionFursuit fucked around with this message at 17:42 on Jul 16, 2018 |
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Jul 16, 2018 17:34
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My problem with AW chipsets is this : I've seen the potential of the now aging Qualcomm. The LG Watch Style, while buggy with too tiny of a battery, was snappy and responsive. It ran great for the little bit I had it. I looked forward to the same performance out of the same chip in the Zenwatch 3, but it was a turd. I blame manufacturers for not giving a poo poo about the user experience.
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Jul 16, 2018 17:42
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LastInLine posted:stuff Yes, all that is true, but it's tangential to the point I'm trying to make. You're basically making an argument that Qualcomm will not make a better Wear SoC because they are a monopoly. I am not claiming that they are or are not a monopoly. I am not claiming that they will or will not release a better chipset. I am not claiming that you can't make a good argument that they are a monopoly. I am claiming that even making a good argument that they are a monopoly in this space is a long way from being able to claim it with a high degree of confidence. Monopolistic reference classes are difficult when you're not dealing with spherical cows.
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Jul 16, 2018 18:13
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Thermopyle posted:I am claiming that even making a good argument that they are a monopoly in this space is a long way from being able to claim it with a high degree of confidence. Given that the FTC classifies them as a monopoly, I'm willing to state with a high degree of confidence that they are. They are a monopoly, the textbook definition of such, and have been found to be abusing that position. I have no idea how anyone could make the claim that they aren't?
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Jul 16, 2018 19:43
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LastInLine posted:Given that the FTC classifies them as a monopoly, I'm willing to state with a high degree of confidence that they are. They are a monopoly, the textbook definition of such, and have been found to be abusing that position. You are defending a claim that Qualcomm has a monopoly on mobile SoCs by linking a charge that they have a monopoly on CDMA and LTE modem chips? You understand that the majority of Wear OS watches do not contain a modem, yes?
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Jul 16, 2018 19:50
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Rastor posted:You are defending a claim that Qualcomm has a monopoly on mobile SoCs by linking a charge that they have a monopoly on CDMA and LTE modem chips? Oh, well I'm sure they only abuse their monopoly position in one market that they have a monopoly, not in any of the others... Nevermind then. If you can't use past actions as a guide toward other, contemporary actions by the same entity, what do you propose should be used? Or is every case a unique, unknowable situation that cannot be understood or analyzed in any way? Quite the philosophical conundrum we've created, a world in which nothing can be understood or examined because past actions cannot be used to inform predictions of future behavior. Or, maybe, just maybe... we can assume that this situation is similar to every other market niche that this company operates within and we can state with high levels of confidence through both the historical data on the behavior of monopolists from GM, to AT&T, to Microsoft, and from the behavior of this specific entity in markets literally adjacent to the matter of discussion that they will, in fact, continue to behave in the way that has kept their profit margins intact as they are required to do by the shareholders? In order for anyone to appeal to regulators for relief against a monopoly in wearable chipsets, one might imagine there would first have to be anyone else at all making those chipsets and for there to be a way to make those chipsets available at a profit. Given that neither condition exists in the wearables space while those conditions do exist in the telephone SoC space should be your primary clue as to why there is no appeal to regulatory commissions surrounding the wearables space. I don't feel I'm making any claim that's outside the realm of reasonable expectation whereas I'd have to say that anyone stating that the 3100 will be anything but a minimum effort rebrand of the 2100 is either wildly uninformed about the nature of the current state of the wearables market or willfully ignoring such realities in order to indulge in fantasy. What possible line of reasoning is there behind believing that the 3100 will be any substantial leap forward to even last year's technology? Is there anyone out there who honestly believes that, gosh darn it, they're trying their best? On what evidence?
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Jul 16, 2018 20:33
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LastInLine posted:Given that the FTC classifies them as a monopoly, I'm willing to state with a high degree of confidence that they are. They are a monopoly, the textbook definition of such, and have been found to be abusing that position. I'm actually quite familiar with the textbook, and defining the reference classes for a monopoly is a Hard Problem and calculating the outcomes of monopolistic practices is also a Hard Problem. You can definitely use the past actions as a guide for contemporary actions. The question is are those past actions of the same sort in the same circumstances where they make any sense to apply.
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Jul 17, 2018 01:56
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Very excited to see where this debate is headed and how many paragraphs the next response will be. I hear a lot about the new soc, but is there any reason to think this will enable anything interesting beyond snappy performance (which they really should have had already) and slightly to moderately better battery life?
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Jul 17, 2018 04:35
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electricmonk500 posted:Very excited to see where this debate is headed and how many paragraphs the next response will be. I actually found it interesting and responses like this do not contribute whatsoever, so don't do this.
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Jul 17, 2018 04:48
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LastInLine posted:Anyone who bought an LG or a Nexus 5x can attest to just how great their chip design is. Bad example for this point. The SD 808 and 810 used bog standard A57 and A53 cores. That's actually the generation that Qualcomm designed the least and it's by far the weakest and most problem filled generation out there.
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Jul 17, 2018 05:05
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electricmonk500 posted:I hear a lot about the new soc, but is there any reason to think this will enable anything interesting beyond snappy performance (which they really should have had already) and slightly to moderately better battery life? That's what we're discussing at the moment. I would say there's no reason to expect snappy performance or increased battery life, given that performance-wise it's expected to be the same chip we have currently and from a battery perspective the only benefit is a dedicated, low power chip to handle processing concerns for wakewords and ambient displays. If you really want to have better battery life, you're going to need to do better than a 28nm process. bull3964 posted:Bad example for this point. The SD 808 and 810 used bog standard A57 and A53 cores. That's actually the generation that Qualcomm designed the least and it's by far the weakest and most problem filled generation out there. Actually that serves to further illustrate my point: Why would they try at all if they can poo poo out a reference design with catastrophic failure rates and they'll be bought up all the same? That's exactly the kind of behavior you'd expect from a company with little to no competition because where else are your customers going to go? The fact that ARM reference designs leave so much room for improvement is a separate and valid discussion, as is the observation Nerdrock made upthread about OEMs having to actually optimize. Wear has a lot of things going against it, but unlike tech blogs I'd place nearly all of the blame at Google's feet. It's their platform and honestly if it can't be made to work with the hardware they have (and it can't), then I just can't see where throwing more hardware at the problem is the answer.
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Jul 17, 2018 05:47
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Ironically, the 808 and 810 were subpar reference jobs BECAUSE of competition. It was a rushed 64bit response after the A7 was released and likely due to a lot of Google pressure as well to have a chip to run 64bit android on (since Nvidia did such a laughable job with the K1 in the N9.) Had Apple not come out with a 64bit A7 in in 2013, The 5x and 6p might not have their storied history. Yes, you could argue that Qualcomm should have been further along in 64bit designs and would have been had there been more direct competition, but I have to lay the blame at Google's feet there since there wasn't anything to run on a 64 bit processor until the tail end of 2014.
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Jul 17, 2018 06:44
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So I want to get this straight, they were bad because they were in "competition" with Apple, a company which does not sell to OEMs, even though there was no software to run and because of either their market dominance or their incompetence they had not planned for the next innovation in the supposed field of expertise? The defense of "It wasn't hubris, it was incompetence" seems to me to feed from the same font, an unchallenged market position.
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Jul 17, 2018 08:53
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The thing is there are actually a lot of mobile SoC suppliers. Does anybody know the technical reasons smartwatch designers must build around Snapdragon Wear instead of choosing anything else?
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Jul 17, 2018 11:15
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Rastor posted:The thing is there are actually a lot of mobile SoC suppliers. Does anybody know the technical reasons smartwatch designers must build around Snapdragon Wear instead of choosing anything else? My Ticwatch E uses a MediaTek chip.
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Jul 17, 2018 11:44
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Rastor posted:The thing is there are actually a lot of mobile SoC suppliers. Does anybody know the technical reasons smartwatch designers must build around Snapdragon Wear instead of choosing anything else? My guess would simply be that OEMs would rather work with a vendor they already buy parts from rather than going to MediaTek or whoever. I wouldn't be shocked to learn Qualcomm gives, say Huawei a discount on Wear SOCs since they buy lots of phone SOCs.
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Jul 17, 2018 14:20
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Rastor posted:The thing is there are actually a lot of mobile SoC suppliers. Does anybody know the technical reasons smartwatch designers must build around Snapdragon Wear instead of choosing anything else? Pure speculation here as I've done zero research and its just based on some general feeling about what the market is like: My first guess is that most Android watches coming out in the past year or so have been from Fossil and its brands so they're all going to use the same thing. And then other smartwatches you can think of like Huawei's, Motos and LGs came out before there were other "good" options to choose from. Note that at least some non-Fossil watches like that guys Ticwatch are not using the Snapdragon.
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Jul 17, 2018 15:21
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CLAM DOWN posted:I actually found it interesting and responses like this do not contribute whatsoever, so don't do this. I was talking about the discussion on whether qualcomm is a monopoly or not in this particular market, which is impossible to resolve definitively without, you know, being an investigator for the FTC, and seemed increasingly antagonistic for no good reason. But yeah, I agree and like the conversation in general, yes. electricmonk500 fucked around with this message at 17:44 on Jul 17, 2018 |
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Jul 17, 2018 17:40
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Has anyone bought the Tickwatch Pro? It seems to have literally everything one could want in an android wear watch except really heavy water resistance. https://www.techradar.com/reviews/ticwatch-pro-review Dual display (5 days mixed use, 30 days fully if only transflective display is used) GPS built in NFC (!) Heart rate monitor. Speaker No Flat Tire IP68 waterproof (waterproof up to 1.5 meters underwater for 30 minutes, enough to shower or take a bath in, but not to really swim unless you never dive and keep the time in the pool pretty short)
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Jul 25, 2018 14:37
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Nitrousoxide posted:Has anyone bought the Tickwatch Pro? It seems to have literally everything one could want in an android wear watch except really heavy water resistance. It was talked about on the last page.
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Jul 25, 2018 17:55
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Nitrousoxide posted:Has anyone bought the Tickwatch Pro? It seems to have literally everything one could want in an android wear watch except really heavy water resistance. *pets Amazfit Pace* It's okay, you've still got plenty of life left in you before you're replaced. "The TicWatch Pro's buttons..." *looks back at Pace, which my hands have already smashed with a hammer* "Oh no."
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Jul 25, 2018 19:22
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This isn't Android Wear but I'm not sure where to post about this. I just bought a Pebble Time off ebay for $30 shipped and I wanted to know if any of you guys are still using a pebble in 2018. I know that they shut down the official Pebble services on June 30th but there's apparently rebble.io that's still supporting it unofficially. FWIW I really wanted to get an android wear device but as many of you have already said ITT it is a really bad time to buy one.
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Jul 27, 2018 16:09
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There's a generic wearables thread you can try: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3459618
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Jul 27, 2018 16:22
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isndl posted:There's a generic wearables thread you can try: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3459618 Ok will do! Thanks! Also have there been any rumors about Motorola making another Android Wear device or are they out of the game? CerealKilla420 fucked around with this message at 18:10 on Jul 27, 2018 |
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Jul 27, 2018 17:23
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64bit_Dophins posted:Ok will do! Thanks! Gone forever.
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Jul 27, 2018 22:58
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LastInLine posted:Gone forever. RIP My dream watch is a F-91w Android Wear edition. Seriously though I really hope Casio makes something affordable because I would buy a $300 android wear g-shock in a heartbeat.
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Jul 28, 2018 00:31
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quote:Fossil Group Inc. FOSL, +1.80% said Monday that it has entered into a licensing agreement with Bayerische Motoren Werke Aktiengesellschaft (BMW) for BMW-branded watches and smartwatches through 2023. The first collections will be available in 2019 and will be sold in 4,000 BMW retail channels as well as through Fossil's global sales network. Fossil shares have skyrocketed more than 215% for the year so far while the S&P 500 index SPX, -0.46% has gained 5.4% for the period. Get ready for the BMW Wear watch!
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Jul 30, 2018 18:48
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I was going to make fun but BMW already makes smartwatch apps for their cars so it's not like it is completely crazy. And actually if they put a comfort access transmitter in the watch they could probably sell a fair number of them:
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Jul 31, 2018 00:17
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Three Olives posted:I was going to make fun but BMW already makes smartwatch apps for their cars so it's not like it is completely crazy. And actually if they put a comfort access transmitter in the watch they could probably sell a fair number of them: But what does it do? I don't understand why BMW is going so hard with all this tech stuff. I have owned two BMWs (a 1990 e30 and a 2001 530i) and both of those cars were bare bones when it came to tech stuff (hell the included stereos were total garbage even). To me a BMW is supposed to be something you buy for $5k like 10 years down the line when it has depreciated to the point where you can get a decent amount of performance for next to nothing. It is supposed to be a box with a inline 6 that you beat the poo poo out of and throw away. I guess the BMW customer has changed quite a bit over the years. Why anyone is stupid enough to buy a new on is beyond me.
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Jul 31, 2018 02:47
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64bit_Dophins posted:I guess the BMW customer has changed quite a bit over the years. Why anyone is stupid enough to buy a new on is beyond me. My fiancees sister bought a new BMW. She also straight buys the newest Apple anything as soon as it comes out and just moved into an apartment that's $1300 and change a month only included utility is water and trash. Some people are just bad with money
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Jul 31, 2018 02:51
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I wish I could find an apartment for $1300/month.
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Jul 31, 2018 02:52
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Endless Mike posted:I wish I could find an apartment for $1300/month. The complex apparently raised it right after they got in because now the website shows it at $1500 and change. That's double the rent of my apartment and double the house payment of my friends house. Granted we live in the Massillon/Canton region and she's down in Columbus but jesus christ.
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Jul 31, 2018 02:54
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$1300 here would either get you a one-bedroom apartment in a gentrifying neighborhood, or a studio in a popular one if you are lucky.
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Jul 31, 2018 03:15
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Len posted:My fiancees sister bought a new BMW. She also straight buys the newest Apple anything as soon as it comes out and just moved into an apartment that's $1300 and change a month only included utility is water and trash. Yeah some people really are. Like I would love to ride around in a new BMW and I could afford it but why would I do that for something that only offers a moderate amount of utility? BMW has really been whoring itself out recently. As a brand (if you care about that sort of thing) they used to be the cool sporty alternative to Mercedes but now it just seems like they're trying to be relevant to baby boomers that want to set themselves apart from their corvette neighbors. I just read a blurb about the watch that mentioned that they partnered with Fossil to produce the watch so I can only assume that it'll be the smart watch equivalent of those ridiculous Ferrari watches that appeal to 13 year old kids.
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Jul 31, 2018 04:08
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64bit_Dophins posted:But what does it do? What does what do? The thing in the picture is pushbutton entry/start like the fob but smaller and waterproof. The smartwatch app will let you check the range, locate the car, turn on climate control, honk the horn and some other stuff. BMW's infotainment systems have actually been really great for the past 7 or 8 years after their original iDrive disaster.
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Jul 31, 2018 04:09
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Three Olives posted:What does what do? The thing in the picture is pushbutton entry/start like the fob but smaller and waterproof. The smartwatch app will let you check the range, locate the car, turn on climate control, honk the horn and some other stuff. yeah I've seen youtube videos about it and I'm kind of happy that they have improved considering that my 2001 e39 530i only had a single disc CD player and a stereo made by Nokia (not kidding) ((mind you this car had an MSRP of 55k back in the day)). Anyways can you already do that from a BMW app or something? I mean the idea of being able to remote start your car from your watch is pretty cool but I feel like they're better off just putting it on the key fab or making an app for android wear.
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Jul 31, 2018 04:38
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BMW hasn't been about bare bones beaters in decades. What rock have you been living under?
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Jul 31, 2018 14:28
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Thermopyle posted:BMW hasn't been about bare bones beaters in decades. The rock of relative poverty 
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Jul 31, 2018 14:47
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Endless Mike posted:$1300 here would either get you a one-bedroom apartment in a gentrifying neighborhood, or a studio in a popular one if you are lucky. Yeah, bay area here and my (old, not fancy) 1br is $2400 So, let's speculate about the possible pixel watch! I have a ticwatch e that, honestly, is pretty decent and only cost like $120. What's the killer feature that will make Android Wear popular? Apart from (finally) a new SOC, what could they feasibly do?
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Jul 31, 2018 20:08
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