Google isn't necessarily the seller, but Best Buy, Staples, Amazon, Walmart and Target could hash out a deal with Google (or Bing, etc.) for "insights".

This post is posed as the next big step in internet pricing, not something necessarily happening today.

Today, it's not standard procedure outside of some specific segments (that I know of, maybe airfare? But the data fed in is more limited) but tapping into the vast amounts of data we leak through the services we use is far too big of a gold mine for companies to overlook researching and tapping into. There's a lot of things that need to happen (who supplies data? Google is the hypothetical here but what's their price? etc.) but it's absolutely feasible at scale.

Google removed “Ok Google with the screen off” (made the toggle disappear, replaced with the option to allow its use in apps) on my Moto Z Play via Play Services updates and later advertised it as a Pixel-exclusive feature. (this was when the Pixel 1 was new)

Their support threads were ended curtly with statements of the phone not supporting the feature which I guess was technically true now that they changed it. (but no, the hardware always supported hotwords)

Never got that feature back and I bailed. For the ups and downs, I’m glad Apple doesn’t do that, instead omitting or handicapping new features for older devices. Of course not the best but yeesh, at least I don’t have to worry about “Hey Siri” being pulled to promote the iPhone 20 yet…

I read in a couple spots earlier that the new battery is physically too big and the OLED panel won’t transfer either.

We had petitions for everything, Windows Phone, you name it a decade ago. That won’t do jack shit unless it somehow comes with some large sum of money (how much? who knows) for Microsoft or some bean counter decides “hmm, maybe the environment shouldn’t take another for the team” and gets the company to change course before they are canned.

In the meantime, let’s continue to plot our off-ramps.

My favorite is that their seeming takeaway from the success of Barbie is to go heads deep into TOY MOVIES.

I think “discontinued after one year” would be a fun punchline here, like the “perfect r/cars car” being a “brown, manual transmission, V8 wagon that’s used from the factory”

Bingo, I saw an ROG Ally(?) on display at Best Buy the other day and it was sitting on the Windows 11 desktop with a couple applications open like any demo laptop out on the floor - what dumbstruck me is that the scaling was set so the interface was absolutely tiny. Of course someone could have messed with DPI settings but it just looked like an interface for ants!

Windows 8 or 10’s tablet mode would have probably gone a ways towards making it more suited for a handheld but that function is gone.

At least the bottom edge swipe opens the start menu which I found by mistake. Maybe Big Picture mode would help.

nujabes moment :(

That’s incredible, happy to see the old hardware still kicking!

On a similar note, sometime a year ago I spotted a guy using a Q10 at a shopping center in LA. Had a quick chat which was fun.

Windows’s achilles heel is arguably its chief benefit - legacy compatibility and being the de facto platform for applications.

Back when I had a Surface RT, I thought it was awfully neat, ARM-compiled versions of Office, IE, Windows 8.x bits ran well and it was fanless with fine battery life. (although I surely sound weird, I had a Windows Phone back then too and the syncing with IE on both was a nice feature) It’s just they were pushing the Store then and if you jailbroke it, ARM applications were rare.

Apple is a pro at architecture transitions and can steer the whole ship, MS can put Windows on ARM all they want but OEM’s will be reluctant since it’ll be a relatively big risk to sell a “Windows, buuut…” computer and the popular closed-source applications probably won’t bother with ARM for a while

Please not Siri, it ain’t smart but it does everything I want - the basics and reasonably easily.

I remember Cortana fondly when it was a great blend of Siri and Google Now but naturally it and Windows Phone got left to rot, and made her useless on desktop Windows since they forfeited my pocket.

I tolerated Google Assistant for a bit but ditched Android when Google pushed updates to remove the “okay Google with the screen off” feature from my Moto Z Play and gaslit the internet - stating it was never supported in closed support threads, the chipset didn’t support it and promoted it as a (then new) Pixel 1 feature. I figured Apple wouldn’t remove “Hey Siri” and so far several years in it’s still holding true.