And slashdotters are always eager to comment without reading the source material. There's a big difference between saying that Google is doomed (that's not what this article says) and Google may not be able to stay at the top (that's much closer to what this article says).

Thompson's original article predicts no doom or gloom for Google.

This ad, ultimately, does all those things. I mean, it's cat food. It's there to feed your cat. In each video, there's a moment where the cats eat the cat food very happily, but the ad doesn't spend a lot of time screaming 'BUY FRISKIES' at you. It just shows some happy cats eating food. The benefits are that your cat is happy. It will cost about as much as cat food costs, one presumes, since they're not advertising it as up-scale gold cat food.

I'm not going to buy Friskies cat food. I buy food from the vet, and I know perfectly well that Friskies is garbage. But advertising allows content to get made--it's the basis of the last 50 years of TV production. So if they're going to make entertainment that's entertaining first and a small ad spot second, I'm okay with it.

But regardless of your personal views on the matter, that's a big pot of money sitting there that's ready for taking. In the context of the original story, it means that Google is passing up a lot of money that SOMEONE will grab.

Honestly, I don't think they are, when they're good.

For instance, the 'Dear Kitten' videos are brilliant. I love kittens. I love the way zFrank makes videos. So he made some videos for BuzzFeed and Friskies. I watch them gladly and of my own volition. Friskies only just barely puts their mark on the video, and I'm compelled to watch it and share it because the content itself is so worth watching. That's the kind of ad Thompson is talking about.

BuzzFeed is the king of that kind of advertising. A lot of their content is annoying, but it gets shared, and it makes them money.

Thompson's argument is mainly that that's the future of advertising, and Google's ability to capture those advertising dollars is incredibly limited. They can't make a Friskies video like that--that runs counter to all the ways they do business. It doesn't mean Google won't continue to be huge and rich, just that over time, other companies will surpass them.

There isn't any gloom and doom in Thompson's article. Not really. He's not arguing that Google is on the ropes, merely that it won't be able to hold its position at the top. There's a big gulf in between.

And he's probably right. Not because Google is doing badly, but because the size of the advertising market is *enormous*, and Google's current strategy limits its ability to capture more than a certain amount of that market. Over time, Google may find itself swamped by other companies (Facebook, for instance). This isn't because Google is bad, it's because other ways of making money in advertising have broader reach and make more money. I haven't seen any evidence that Google is willing to cannibalize its own business in the short run so that it can make a longer-term bet--that's an Apple strategy, and not many companies do it. Apple didn't care that iPhone sales would tank iPod sales, even when the iPod was a huge money-maker. They knew that they were trading one for the other, and it would be a good long-run bet.

This isn't to say that Google won't do that, or that Google is necessarily forced into what Thompson feels is its destiny, merely that that's the trajectory they're broadcasting right now.

Actually, if you go to Thompson's site and actually read the source article, he says very clearly that he doesn't think Google is going anywhere. The thesis isn't that Google is DOOMED, it's that Google's time AT THE TOP is limited. Those are two vastly different things.

Ben Thompson is a really thoughtful writer, and this game of telephone that we're seeing by Manjoo writing about Thompson's article has clearly caused confusion.

This isn't a doomer article, honestly.

Keeping in mind that I'm NOT a programmer that has spent a lot of time thinking about this...

But pre-distributing tasks just sounds like a queue becoming many little queues without any particular advantage. Moreover, if you're not sure when a processor is going to be done its work, pre-assigning work may lead to bigger bottlenecks and starvation. If you try to pre-analyse the tasks so you know how much work is needed, you're effectively wasting cycles on a problem that doesn't need to be solved--it's almost pure overhead, since the analysis could be part of the solution.

I'd have to read the paper to see exactly how they're getting such a huge speedup here. The graph is nice (and I believe it) but the explanation in the article isn't very satisfying.

God, this is such obnoxious bullshit.

I buy Apple products because they work better than other products I could be paying for. I did a CS degree. I've been making console video games for almost fifteen years. I've run my own mail server, installed Slackware and free BSD on cobbled together beige boxes.

I buy macs because I was sick of coming home from work and doing more work. I wanted to sit in front of my computer and have it do things, not endlessly tinker with it. I've gotten over the need to configure every last widget. It's just not anything I'm interested in anymore. Don't tell me I'm doing it because I'm thinking of my computer or phone as 'jewellery'. I'm the same way with my bicycles. I want my time with my bike to be about riding, not wrenching.

And having run lots of things over the years, the system that has the least work for the most utility has remained Apple for me. Maybe you've got different needs. I have friends that literally can't do the thing they need on an iPhone, so they buy a different phone.

Is there status hunting in the phone market? Definitely. Is it the main driver of people to iPhones? I don't think so. Do you have counter evidence? If you do, put up or shut up. Stop being so patronising.

If they do patch it, I greatly suspect that if you bring your laptop into an Apple store, they'll do an upgrade/patch/swap for you there.

Still, this is pretty much garbage. I haven't had these problems, but my iMac and Mac Mini aren't the most cutting edge hardware. I wonder what combination of hardware and software is causing issues here.

Videotron (in Quebec) will give you a discount if you bring your own modem.

It's a miracle because those commercials are lip-service. There are a bunch of things they could legislate fairly quickly that would force competition in the space, but it's unclear that they're really interested. They're budging a bit because popular opinion is so vociferous, but they're not what I'd call a tech-savvy government. They're decidedly anti-science and they're incredibly secretive. They don't even LIKE the CRTC.

That said, I don't really have a good sense of what the other parties would do. In general, they tend to be even MORE protectionist (Bell, Rogers and Telus are garbage, but they ARE Canadian) even at the expense of competition.

But this is what you get when most of the people running for office (and winning) are old white lawyers. They don't know what's going on, and they're not interested in learning. The current Minister of Science and Technology was an *insurance broker*. I'm sure he's doing what he can, but it's a deep pity that there aren't any scientists or technology people in those Ministerial positions.

Yeah, the specs don't really tell the whole story. When you go through the benchmarks, the A7/A8 chips really clean the floor with the Snapdragons, and they do it at a lower clock (and a lower voltage; performance per watt on the A7/A8 is much better). The cameras on the iPhone is of a comparable or higher quality in all those cases (keeping in mind that megapixels is perhaps the worst way to rate a digital camera; my 12.1MP Nikon D3s will crush any phone camera without any effort).

My screen isn't as high DPI, but I'd be hard pressed to tell any difference without a microscope. Numbers being bigger for the sake of being bigger doesn't impress me. Also, it chews up a lot more battery.

I get TouchID, an implementation of biometric access that currently isn't well matched on the Android side. (I've heard Huawei has a good implementation? They're not a very prolific brand in NA, so I haven't read anything except occasional offhand remarks.)

The only thing that the Android phones tend to have is more RAM, but by virtue of a completely different multitasking model and garbage collection scheme, additional RAM is less relevant to iOS. (The lone exception being webpage reloading, which I'll cop to as being an annoyance.)

So yeah, my iPhone 6 runs faster than basically anything else on the market (http://www.anandtech.com/show/8554/the-iphone-6-review/5) and will have the legs to take me to 4 years, even if it'll feel pretty dated by then. I don't really think you can legitimately claim that just because the specs of a few phones were *higher* that they were meaningfully *better*.

Oh, and I don't have to talk to my carrier about my phone, like, ever. That alone is a virtue that's hard to pass up because fuck those guys. :)

In this case, I mean 'OS Support' when I say 'support'. I'm definitely not worried about needing hardware repairs.

To a certain extent, I DO like these announcements merely because they really tweak the noses of the people that have been beating the 'Apple is Doomed' drum for a while. So yeah, there's a small bit of enjoyment that I get that Apple's numbers are so astronomical--I'll cop to that. That's the same thing that's happening with Daring Fireball. Gruber is obviously an Apple partisan, but he complains about as much as anyone I've heard about quality and direction.

But Apple has a good brand and it's drawn customers in. It's what every company hopes to do, really.

But there are lots of other examples of this. Ford vs. Chevy (or Ford vs. Holden, if you're in Oz) is a good one. People become partisan over all sorts of things.

I don't know why you think I'm getting ripped off. I paid $600 for a phone that will get software updates for four years. The hardware will last for four years. My last iPhone did.

The reason why those profit margins are a good thing are because it means Apple isn't concerned with me buying a new phone from them every 18 months to stay afloat. They don't have to track my personal data or advertise to me to make money. Apple making money means that I can be sure that when I want to buy another phone in 4 years, they'll have something good for me to buy and they'll still be around for me to buy it from.

Contrast that with Android phones. They only promise support for 18 months, even on Nexus devices (though they MAY support them longer than that). There are dozens of phones that have fallen by the wayside. Sure, I can buy a new $150 Motorola every year or two, and it would be a good phone, but I could also just buy my top-of-the-line iPhone and keep it a little longer, and it means that I get a really exemplary phone every once in a while.

I understand the decisions that lead you to chose Android devices, but it's not wrong to chose Apple even BECAUSE they're making money. It's a short term pain that has (for me) been a long-term win.

Well, clearly it's what the market will bear. By definition, it's not overpriced. Overpriced items don't sell.

That is, 75 million phone buyers have decided that the phone price aligns with its value in their hands, whatever that value entails.

In my case, I buy phones to last for four years. That's what I did with my iPhone 4, and that's what I'm planning with my iPhone 6. The $600 I paid is a mere $150 when amortised over that time. And I can rely on there being 4 years of software updates and support from Apple. I can count on the hardware lasting that long, because it's really solid hardware. In what universe is that not good value for money?

My $600 pocket computer is only overpriced if you consider it far more disposable than it actually is.