IMO they peaked with the Nexus 6 - camera has gotten worse and they make up with it in software or try to. You could and can see this at night or stacked shots in N6 vs pixel 4,5,6.
They bought the best phone hardware and software companies (Motorola and Android) and gutted them both.
They purchased Motorola Mobility for the patent portfolio as essentially a nuclear deterrent against Apple and then sold it to Lenovo. They're doing quite well internationally but haven't been a big brand in the US for a while. Their flagship phones are going to have GrapheneOS as a selling point soon and we'll hopefully be able to expand beyond the high end over the next couple years.
> They purchased Motorola Mobility for the patent portfolio as essentially a nuclear deterrent against Apple
By Apple, you mean Microsoft.
The early Android device makers had to pay a per device patent licensing fee to Microsoft.
Google sued Microsoft for massive amounts of money using video standards essential patents they purchased from Motorola, but it didn't work out well for them in court.
Apple was actively going after Android OEMs including Samsung too. We did mean Apple but Microsoft was also relevant. The point was that they primarily bought Motorola Mobility to strip mine it for patents.
The company that Google targeted with their Motorola patents was Microsoft.
Google sought to ban the sale of Microsoft products that used the H.264 video standard on a global basis if Microsoft didn't hand over a literal fortune.
> Microsoft and Motorola are embroiled in a legal spat around the world over the software giant’s alleged use of Motorola industry-standard H.264 patents in its many products. Motorola has argued that Microsoft has used the technology illegally and should have its products banned until it licenses them.
Motorola says that Microsoft should pay $4 billion for the use of its technology, applying a 2.25 percent royalty based on product price.
...have you tried any of the cameras from the last 5 years or just the pixel 6? My 11 pro's cameras are by far the best cameras I've ever used on a smartphone, my previous iPhone included.
Have you seen the raw images you get out of those cameras? They're still the same grainy low res webcam sensors they were 10 years ago (if not worse), most of the improvement is just AI hallucinating details.
Reminds me of a friend's Geforce FX GPU with some jank 40mm fan that decided it wanted to become a projectile in the middle of the night during a lan party we were having and shoot through the small plexiglass window on his case across my room.
Otherwise the only fan insanity I had was much later with a T610 having its idrac corrupt flash and try to do liftoff similar to the precision 7500 towers when the 2nd CPU riser got a little unseated or went bad.
Nice looking phone im seriously interested in but they don't say what US carriers I'd be able to use anywhere I could find which seems odd with the off the shelf chipset.
USB-C is far easier to break than rca plugs in my experience and then you lose data and rapid charging or charging completely if the phone doesn't do wireless. Until phones get repairable like the current generation of laptops where you pop the port out and can replace it we aren't in a great spot.
This was before broadband and pocket computers were big so we had to split screen or hot seat multiplayer on the family computer. It was a lot more in person and social and that may have been a big factor.
Nothing to do with internet or smartphones, all mentioned games are split screen/coop on one TV, yet they still for some reason dont like Worms (Armageddon), I didn't even bother trying the old graphics Worms.
Absolutely check out his multi part series "it doesn't have to suck" about turning Tucson AZ into a living greenspace city. It's hopeful and inspiring what they are doing there!
I went the skills route - skill improvement skill and a rule to use it always. Basically it's directed that if anything causes more than a hop of thinking - failure - try something else it should flag that it needs to learn it as a skill so it never does it other than first shot again or if an existing skill fails improve it after it solves whatever problem. it then syncs the files to a shared location and updates the version and also pulls new skills. this let's a team use it or you have multiple workstations.
I think I read at one point alpha had a 64bit cpu in the 90s that could have hit 1ghz but some bug held it back. I am having so much trouble finding these articles and stories about processors these days with AI and shitified Google.
The other one I can't find I swear was a former AMD engineer talking about how Intel bet the farm on one ibm mainframe design but AMD went with an older architecture (under the hood of x86 for both) that was harder to deal with but ultimately runs faster and that's how we got ryzen. Maybe I'm just losing my mind.
I think the "Jim Keller" story around Zen is a bet on modularity, core-complexes, then chiplets. Smaller, less monolithic designs and a clean re-design of the x86 cores for compacity, ease of validation and scalability (in core count).
They bought the best phone hardware and software companies (Motorola and Android) and gutted them both.
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