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Originally Posted by GTO Honda was once the master of tech & reliability. In the 90s, they came out with the hallowed Vtec technology that every high-revving enthusiast loved. Their cars were phenomenally durable too. Today, Honda has lost the plot in technology. Heck, they took so many years just to bring a simple diesel engine to India. And whatever else you see - dual clutch ATs, turbo-charged direct injection petrols, hybrids etc - it's all from the competitors. Quality? Well, who would have ever thought a thread like this or a cheap dashboard like this in a Honda? IMHO, the company is a shadow of its former self today. |
I beg to disagree. Honda's were never the paragon of build quality in that they never had heavy doors or softest plastics like European cars but when it came to durability mechanically, there are hardly any equals in the Indian context and its true even today. The 1.5 petrol is a jewel of a motor still, plenty powerful and fuel efficient at the same time and long lasting, the 1.5 diesel even though noisy is reasonably powerful and very efficient at the same time. Also, there is no comparison between Honda's international product portfolio and what they sell in India. Look at the new Civic which is an incredibly well rounded product for the price and in Type R form is the fastest front wheel drive production car around the 'Ring, the new Accord and the NSX. I don't see where they are loosing the edge. It may be true to a certain extent in India but I am assuming you are not just talking Indian context.
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Originally Posted by GTO I see a similar thing happening with Apple. We saw top quality innovation after innovation (iPod, iTunes music store, iPad, iPhone etc.), but the company is losing its edge IMHO. Yes, I am well aware of their tremendous revenues, market cap & iPhone sales. But I'm talking of stuff like the current Macbook Pro disaster, the Apple Maps debacle, Apple Music's lukewarm service compared to Spotify, batterygate last year & more. What real innovation has Apple done after the iPhone? They say Alexa & Google Assistant are making more progress than Siri, and that Google & Amazon are both stronger in the AI race than Apple.
What's up with these companies? They are still great today, but at one time, they were AWESOME. |
Again I am not entirely sure. Apple music launched in June 2015 while Spotify started in October 2008 and Apple Music is already the second biggest in terms of subscribers and unlike Spotify they do not have free subscription. Not only that, Apple Music is set to surpass Spotify in the USA, their biggest market.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/4/16...us-subscribers
Innovation is not only what you can see, its also what you cannot see. Apple leapfrogged the whole industry which was and is still using the vanilla chips from Qualcomm with a first 64 bit cpu in a mobile phone and everyone in the industry knew how big a deal it was. Their chips are still atleast a couple of years ahead in performance compared to the best from Qualcomm.
The innovation also comes from the fact of how they make any technology so easy to work with. Touch ID vs Galaxy S5 fingerprint anyone? Face ID which is a kinect like system in a phone used for authentication for everything from payments to your passwords? Dual camera's (i know they are not the first one's to do it, but they are the first one to do it right so much so that everyone followed), NVMe (SSD) based storage in a phone starting from iPhone 6s, 3D Touch which is yet to be replicated in another phone (surprising since Android tries to do it in software and given how other OEM's always jump on to features that Apple has in their phones going so far as to include a notch in the display without the associated functionality), smaller things such as linear oscillator aka taptic engine without which it would have been impossible to implement 3D Touch interactions such as when an icon does not have 3d touch menu and the system lets you know via some very quick spaced vibrations (which are impossible to do in a vibration motors that most smartphones came with) and the taptic responses throughout the system in iPhone 7 onward. The new iPhone X uses the same engine in almost all areas of the operating system and you need to use one to appreciate how nuanced and subtle these taptic responses are. Apple is also the first company which in one announcement made Augmented reality mainstream with the introduction of the ARKit last year which supports phones as far back as iPhone 6s. Apple also started the high frame rate video feature in phones starting with iPhone 6 while Android flagships still have arbitrary limitations on how long you can record a video. Do you know that the latest and greatest Galaxy S9 cannot record a 4k video for more than 5 minutes at a time, something which the iPhone 6s has been doing without limit ever since its launch!
https://mashable.com/2018/03/02/ipho.../#QSgizxK4qiq8
Then is the security - iPhone was doing hardware encryption since the 3GS days while Android was still grappling with performance issues after encryption in 2015
https://www.theverge.com/2015/3/3/81...on-performance
The fact that all processing for tagging your photos for objects or faces etc happens on your iPhone and not on their servers like Google. They are behind in AI for sure but that is not because they do not have the technology but because they do not mine personal data or their users or profile their users to the extent google does. Some even go so far as to say that Android is a glorified data mining software.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/bluesk...605-story.html https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2018/02/w...still-matters/
As for Apple Maps, the article below explains that and more. Again the central theme is privacy.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/29/ap...the-ground-up/
There is also industrial design which figures high in Apple's scheme of things so much so that iPhone X is more beautiful inside than it is outside. The Galaxy S9 still cannot get all its port and buttons aligned.
https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iPhone+X+Teardown/98975
Industrial design is also one of the reason Apple would never comes up with a so called bezel less design like Samsung with Galaxy S8 which has a chin at the bottom and at the top and curves on the sides of the display (which by the way are detrimental to use experience given the reflection of light) to given an illusion of no bezels. So what does Apple do in iPhone X to make it bezel less - they fold the oled display inside the phone so that the display controller can be placed there to have a uniform screen. There is no company yet on the planet which has this attention to details and one which is willing to go the distance to make sure that they do.
https://www.quora.com/Why-is-OLED-di...-at-the-bottom
I can come up with numerous others genius's in other Apple products but I think I have made my point.
I know the recent MacBook Pro throttling issues (Core i9 in a thin and light chassis is a really bad idea and there is no thin and light laptop with Core i9 that does not throttle) and its disappointing because Apple ought to know better because they are Apple. It will be interesting to see what their response to this would be.