Privacy : Apple Vs Google

In the recent WWDC 2015 apple kept bringing up the privacy issues and was indirectly blaming companies like google for mining users data. Many people consider this as just a marketing strategy or most people don’t even care, because most of them think:

“ What is the harm in google storing our data? They are not doing anything bad with our data. All they are doing is sending us some targeted advertisements. And i don’t mind that”

But i think that people need to change this attitude. They need to be more careful while using these free services and should have a proper understanding of what data is being collected by these so called services. I am not saying this because i hate google or android or because i am an apple fan. I use both an iPhone and an android phone (even though the iPhone is my daily driver). I use os x, windows and linux every single day of my life. So Im not a guy who is stuck to one platform. But I am not a fan of google collecting all our data.

One of the main arguments that people have in favour of google collecting our data is the fact that almost all the google services are free. Does this mean that we have reached a stage where we are willing to trade in our privacy for some free services? Also then why do we have an issue when government agencies like NSA and CIA collect our data. They are trying to keep the people secure (in some sense) and so they are giving us something in return (when compared to the free services). So why do people have an issue when these agencies collect data and when google does the same, people dont even care.

I absolutely love google services. Especially the search and the maps. Apple maps is nowhere close to google maps in terms of functionality and correctness. Also i regularly use both of these google services. But i also hate the fact that google is mining all the possible data from my devices when I am using these services. Right now google isn’t doing anything with our data and they probably never will. But do we really want to keep going like this hoping that everything is going to be ok? No one can guarantee 100% that our data will always be safe. Nobody can guarantee that no one will be able to get their hands on our data. Im pretty sure google follows the highest security standards available in the industry and the collected data will be kept encrypted and will be spread across different servers that access to a few of them won’t let anyone make sense of the data stored in it. But google is not the most intelligent guy or organization in the world. There are other people out there who are trying to get hands on our data. And some of them are possible more intelligent than the people at google. If someone is able to break these security measures and is able to make sense of the data stored in these servers then we will start seeing the bad impacts of this data mining. Most people say its almost impossible for hackers to make sense of encrypted data. But haven’t we already seen the impacts of the heart bleed vulnerability. It was detected 2 years after the code was released and nobody even knows how many people used these vulnerabilities to steal data. And the fact that we haven’t found any other such vulnerability doesn’t mean that there aren’t any. There could be a million other vulnerabilities hiding in our codes that we haven’t detected yet.

All the recent hacks and the discovery of the vulnerabilities have taught us that nothing is 100% safe and secure. Sooner or later someone will come up with some techniques that can break the existing security measures. The only way we can keep our data safe is by staying one step ahead of these hackers by improving our security measures. But is this always possible? I believe that sooner or later someone will be able to get their hands on atlas some of the data collected by these companies. The question is how long we can prevent that from happening.

Nobody cared about retailers like target storing our credit card information until all of it was stolen and many people fell victim to identity theft. Right now we don’t care about all this because these problems haven’t happened to most of us. And because of this we are taking these issues lightly. But have we ever thought about how much data google has collected about our personal life? What happens if someone gets their hands on all this private data? The impact of such a data breach would a million times more than the impact of data breaches that has happened until now.

These are all things we need to think about seriously. This is why i really admire the approach apple has taken. Im pretty sure with the limited amount of data that apple is collecting from people they will never be able to provide a service that is as good as google now. That is simply the truth. The question here is are we willing to trade our private data for a better service?

Googles latest services like the now on tap can function inside any app and can read all the information inside all the apps installed on our device. No apps need to be updated for this. An awesome feature right? But we should also realise that this means that google has been reading every single word inside every single app installed on our devices for a long time. Maybe they have mentioned about this as a small line in one of their hundreds of license agreements. But as a user did any of you know about this before? But now its high time that we start thinking about these issues. We need to be more careful about letting these companies use our data. Now on tap is one of the coolest feature i have seen in a few years and it shows us how much our technology has moved forward, but i will probably be staying away from it because i just want to give anyone else so much control and power over my data.

I really hope that soon people will start realising the risks of letting other mine our data and will start taking steps to prevent these companies from collecting our data.

Is the snapdragon 810 going to be a real headache for the flagship devices?

When samsung told the public that they decided to change the processor in their latest flagship from snapdragon 810 to an exynos chip due to overheating issues most people thought that samsung was just finding a reason to use their own chip in their flagship devices because it gives them more profit. And then I think executives from LG publicly reported that the chip performance is satisfactory and that there isn’t any overheating issue with the snapdragon. and this strengthened the argument against samsung.

But all that time I was thinking whether samsung would really do that. I mean samsung is in a really desperate situation now, their sales has been going down and the profits have come down by almost 60% in 1 year. Samsung was so desperate that they were ready to give up the removable battery and micro sd card features in their latest device to release a device with a better design. Something which many people considered as an awesome feature in the galaxy series phones. Also Qualcomm’s previous snapdragon SoCs were really good that the consumers expected every flagship to come out with a snapdragon chip. So I don’t think samsung was in a position to drop the snapdragon chip just to use their own chip in their flagship device.

The issues of the 810 became very clear when the LG G Flex 2 was released. Most people who reviewed the device said it was a really slow device. Pocketnow even said the system was really slow because when ever it did something the thermal kicked in and brought the performance down. Also recent reports shows that the new htc flagship, the htc one m9 heats up to 55 degree Celsius when it runs GFXBench. That’s really crazy. We wont be able to hold the phone comfortably at that temperature.

This is a really big problem because if the overheating is due to some hardware issues rather than software then I don’t think there is anything that can be done. Because all they can do now is release a new revision of chip which doesn’t have these issues. But I am not sure wether Qualcomm will be able to come out with a new version in such a short period of time. Also I really don’t think it’s a software issue because android lollipop has been out for more than half a year now and companies like samsung, htc, LG and even google had more than enough time to correct the issues if it was related to the software. So I strongly believe that this is a hardware issue which all these companies tried to control but they all failed.

So to conclude all the devices which use this snapdragon chip will have the overheating issue which means that they are all going to perform poorly because of the thermal kicking in. Also now its not possible for companies like htc and LG to drop the 810 chip and switch to a different one. So now it feels that for the first time we are going to have a number of flagships devices with poor performance and this will hurt the sales of these devices. And I think Samsung kind of avoided such a really bad situation by making a really bold decision which many people didn’t like. I really feel that a company like Qualcomm should have been more responsible and careful while designing such a chip or they should have at-least made sure that the final version of the chip was released only after all these issues were solved.

Why i think tizen will never be a major operating system

Tizen is a mobile operating system from Samsung which they believe will be the replacement to the android operating system that they are using right now. Samsung is doing this to reduce their dependence on Google and to differentiate themselves from other OEMs.

Differentiating themselves from other OEMs is very important in the android field because of every single manufacturer is using the same vanilla android then the only thing that can compel people to buy a device from Samsung will be just their hardware and we all know that Samsung doesn’t make the best hardware. This is the reason why every company producing an android phone had some form of custom version of Android installed in their devices even though  it irritates android lovers like me to the core. In addition to this Samsung had to work under a lot of restrictions since google has control over android and they want the users to have a more unified experience across devices. Also I believe that  Samsung had to pay some licensing free to google.

So to solve these issues Samsung came up with the idea of developing their own os. With tizen they can design the system the way they want and include all their stupid features that nobody usually uses and at the sane time they can optimize the os for their hardware  so that it will run smoother in low-end devices and will perform better in high-end devices as well. Also it solves the issue of Android fragmentation which means Samsung can push updates to the consumers much faster.

So all these seems good for Samsung but the real question is “will Samsung be able to bring developers on board so that consumers will have all their applications available to them”. And unless that happens nobody will be willing to buy tizen phones no matter how better it performs compared to android. Well in my opinion i don’t think this is going to happen, at-least not in the near future. IOS and android are the 2 major operating systems that dominate the market right now and because of that developers prefer developing apps only for these 2 platforms. Even windows which you can say is kind of popular faces the issue of lack of applications. Sometime these platforms may have applications but they may not get update very often and they certainly wont be as good as the IOS or android apps. So now samsung is trying to bring a new os into this already saturated market. And i strongly believe that there is no place for a fourth OS in this area. Samsung maybe able to get major apps like Facebook, whatsapp etc on their platform but i don’t think they will be able to get a variety of other applications which comes from other small developers just because they really can’t afford to support a 4th platform just for a small percentage of people.

And without the presence of good application an OS cannot be successful in the current scenario. Maybe Samsung will be able to satisfy the consumers of low-end devices by provide them with a

small set of core application but i don’t think the people who are looking for high-end flagship devices will ever be satisfied with such a platform. Also right now Samsung is using tizen only in their low-end devices and usually only a small portion of the total revenue of the developers come from these low-end devices and hence these developers don’t have a good reason to support tizen at least as of now. Samsung can start supporting these developers by giving them some incentives at least in the initial phase of tizen development but im not sure how helpful that strategy is going to be.

I think even Samsung has realised this issue with tizen and that is why they still depend on android for most of their devices. Samsung may still try to bring out new devices which run tizen but I strongly believe that these devices are either going to be restricted to low-end market or gradually Samsung is going to drop the idea of tizen.

The new MacBook with a single port. An insane move from Apple?

The new Macbook with just one port for power and connectivity has stirred up a lot of controversy. Most people believe that keeping just one port in a device is stupid. I do agree with some of the arguments that most people have but i don’t think that it is a completely crazy move

Right now every one of our laptops have a number of different ports like usb, hdmi thunderbolt and many others. And some ports like hdmi are meant for specific kinds of peripherals. Also our exiting usb ports can only supply a limited amount of power to the peripherals that are connected to it. USB type C is something that can solve all these issues. It is a single port that can be used in place of any of the ports mentioned above. So now all the peripherals can be connected to a single port without any issues. In addition to all the usb type C port is much smaller than previous usb ports which makes it possible to design thinner devices and it can be used for powering up any device which consumes a power of less than 100W. So if all the peripherals start coming out with a usb-c port then we don’t have to worry about whether we will be able to connect a peripheral to our laptop. But that is the main issue right now. We don’t have many peripherals that have a usb-c port in them. Also not even the usb 2.0 or 3.0 devices can be connected to the new usb-c port. That really is a problem because now we have to carry around all these adapters with us to make sure that we don’t run into any problems when we try to connect something to our laptop.

But the thing is we have to start somewhere so that the usb type c becomes a widespread standard. Only then the dream of  using a single port that can be used for everything can come true. Manufacturers will start producing peripherals with usb c ports only if the consumers need them and for that the consumers need to switch to devices with usb-c ports. That is exactly what Apple is trying to achieve here. There are trying to make usb-c the standard so that in future we can live in that dream world where everything can be done using a single port. And this is a classic Apple move. They are one of the few companies that are willing to make such a drastic move just because they believe that usb-c is going to be standard of the future. So what apple did with the Macbook is going to speed up the adoption rate of the usb-c standard.

But at the same time i believe that apple should have been a little bit more thoughtful about keeping just 1 port in the device. I would have been satisfied if they had at-least 2 ports in the device (even if both of them are usb type c). Now if the device is being charged then i cant use the port for anything else. I do agree that the device has an awesome battery life of 10 hours and hence we don’t have to charge it really often. But still it has to be charged at some point of the day. And removing the charging cable and connecting a device and then swapping them again after the data transfer is done is really a hassle. Also if i need to transfer data from one flash drive to another i have to first copy it from the source flash drive to my macbook and then to the destination drive and this is going to be more difficult if you don’t have enough space in your macbook hard drive (especially for that 128 gig ssd variant). Another issue is when i want to connect a projector to display something that is stored in a usb drive. Also since usb type c is not such a widespread standard now, most users will have to carry around an adapter along with them where ever they go and this is really bad for a device which is supposed to be ultra-portable.

So having a single usb-c port is really an issue for many users but i think we can forgive Apple when we consider that this is a decision that is going to push us towards a future where all devices can be connected to the same port. Also people who absolutely need more ports on their device can opt for a MacBook Air.

Why i think the apple watch is going to be a failure

Apple announced this week that apple watch, the latest addition to their gadget family will be available for purchase from April 24. Many people have already predicted that it is not going to be a huge success because apple wasn’t able to come up with a really good use case for the watch and because its battery life sucks. These are in-fact really that can prevent people from buying the apple watch. And most people have been saying that the prize of the apple watch edition is crazy high and that nobody is gonna buy it. But i feel that the biggest issue of the apple watch is high price of the stainless steel edition.

I know everyone is going to say “you do realise that the apple watch edition costs at-least 10 times more than the stainless steel variant”.  Well i do realise but the thing is the apple watch edition is not targeted at usual users like us. It is targeted at the 1% of the society who can actually afford to upgrade something like that every year. Apple made that clear even during its presentation by saying that the apple watch edition will be made available in select apple stores (not all apple stores). They want the apple watch edition to be something that people considers as a symbol of their status, something that only a few people can get their hands on.

But the other 2 versions : the aluminium and the stainless steel is targeted at the normal iPhone users or atleast thats what i think. And you can’t expect someone to buy an accessory that is worth $1100 when their phone costs just $700-$800. I do realise that the stainless steel variant starts from $550 most people would have to spend something in the range of 700 -800 dollars (the straps look much better than the ones that you get for 550 or 600 dollars). And the watch is just an accessory. Its not a stand alone device, it can only work when paired with an iPhone.  Also its not an accessory that does what the iPhone can’t. It just makes it easier to check our notifications. So now we have a situation where a simple accessory that shows your mobile notification costs more or at least as much as your iPhone. THATS CRAZY!!!.

I understand that apple always wanted to be a premium brand and thats how they always priced their iPhones (if you don’t consider the $200 contract pricing). But there were other high end phones which costs almost as much as the iPhone like samsung S6, note 4, htc one m9 etc. So if you are looking for a flagship phone then the iPhones are just 50 – 100 dollars more costlier than other devices. And that difference is ok for most people. But most high end android wear watches cost only $300 or $400. So now we are talking about a 400 to a 600 dollar difference in price. That is too much for a normal iPhone user even if he really wants an apple watch.

The smart-watch industry is not such a big profit making industry even now because people find it unreasonable to spend $300 on a gadget that just makes it easier for them to check their notifications. I think the entire industry sold only less a couple million devices last year. And into that market apple is trying push a product that does the same things as the existing devices at double the price. Well that is going to drive away customers who are even looking for a smart watch (that small portion of people who are willing to spend 300 – 400 dollars on smart watch). Otherwise these people will have to be go for the 350$ apple watch sport, which i don’t think is going to be appealing for everyone. Apple’s situation is going to be worse when google comes out iOS support for android wear.

So to conclude what I feel is that apple totally failed to interest new people into their new gadget or to smart watches in general and they priced the device so high that even people who are interested in smart watches are not going to buy this product. There maybe people who love apple products that are going to buy this watch just because apple made it. But i don’t think anyone who asks themselves the question “is this device really worth it” at-least once before they make a decision, is going to buy this product.