Emacs, C and scripting languages would be hard to use with speech. Drawing programs or something like Microsoft Developer Studio would be hard as well.

This reminds me of an old Star Trek episode where the Enterprise goes back in time and they run into Gary 7. He hires a secretary and asks her to type up a report but it's with a speech-to-typewriter system which she is unfamiliar with.

I have the Garmin Forerunner 610 which came out in 2011 and it's a smartwatch only in the sense that it has a touchscreen with menus and a variety of functions. It doesn't run Apps and the only radio communications are with a chest strap, wireless PC dongle to upload data and communications with gym equipment and digital scales. But it has a very specific use and it was the best out there for quite some time. You wouldn't want to use it as a daily watch as it is quite thick and heavy - what you'd expect in a GPS watch.

There are times when I do like wearing a watch but a $40 Timex is good enough.

I'm recovering from a nasty cold and have a fairly violent cough from time to time. I don't think that I'd care for voice recognition right now. You can type a lot faster than you can speak anyways.

> According to one estimate, Apple has already brought in $1.7
> billion from the Apple Watch; Garmin's entire annual revenue
> is expected to be $2.8 billion this year and $2.77 billion
> next year.

Garmin really doesn't do marketing and they're coming at this from the fitness side - the real fitness side. Go to the starting line of any large marathon and tell me what they're doing when the gun goes off. That's right, they're all hitting the start buttons on their Garmins.

Garmin makes nice products but they sell them into a niche market - athletes. They just happened to make something quite functional with GPS and fantastic battery life.

> Apple is even estimated to have sold 7 million Apple Watches
> over the last two quarters

If they sold that many, then why won't they tell us themselves?

> 40 million annual run rate, especially as the product becomes
> more attractive/functional, seems quite reasonable to me.

They'd have to do a hardware redesign to be more functional. Athletes don't really care how attractive they are. They have less. than. one. day. of. battery. life. Are you going to charge your watch every day? At what point do you get tired of doing that? My Timex Ironman Triathlon watch runs six years on a battery. Can't Apple do better than one day?

The Apple Watch seems to be more jewelry than smartwatch. I wouldn't call it a fitness watch at all.

I can not see a run rate of 40 million/year. I think that 4 million/year would be tough. One of my tech geek friends got a Garmin Fenex 3 this year. That's what the Apple Watch should have been.

GPS, Apps, Bluetooth, 4 week battery life with GPS off, 20 hours with GPS on (for those that want to run ultramarathons). Apple has better software but Garmin has much better hardware and far more experience building smartwatches.

I have 512 GB and would go with 1 TB if I had to do it over again. I have a 240 GB Intel SSD in a USB3 enclosure and it's great but it's one more thing to carry and it uses up a port.

I didn't realize that 3-year-old MacBooks had ExpresssCard slots. My 2008 MacBook Pro has one and I have a Wintec Filemate 48 GB Expresscard SSD in it and it's the boot and application disk. The laptop has an internal 1 TB WD HDD and it's a nice combination. At least for a few years ago. Now I'm spoiled by all-SSD.

Wintec makes a 128 GB SSD for about $185 on Amazon - it's a decent solution if that's enough storage and you don't want to open up your laptop.

The other alternative is to use the SDXC slot but you're taking a huge hit in performance though the storage is really cheap. It's probably okay for archiving things.

Hopefully Apple updates the resolution of the MBA before you buy one. That's my only criticism of that model. BTW, are people happy with El Capitan'? I'm giving it some time to shake out any problems though I haven't heard of any in the news.

There are programs out there now with the sole purpose of killing Windows 10 notifications and automated downloads of Windows 10.

I think that Tim Cook knows this given that Mac sales growth was better than ALL iPad growth (which was negative). But the iPad Pro launches tomorrow so we need the iPad messaging.

My son is taking his last MSCS course this spring. He will be using one of his Retina MacBook Pros for the class (he has one from workplace and his own). The course is on network security and I imagine that there will be programming assignments dealing with networks. Can you write a network service on an iPad?

> +378K jobs for 55+ year olds yet -110K from all other age
> ranges.....please.......do you honestly believe anything
> out of the administration??

Your post is illogical.

Presumably your stats are from the administration to prove that their facts are wrong.

I do personally see job growth every morning on my daily commute.

If you're just talking about Japan, perhaps it's their immigration policy that requires some work.

This morning, we got a blowout jobs report which gives the Fed a green light to raise in December. They could let the bonds that they bought just mature to normalize but I think that they're going to roll them over to ensure enough liquidity.

Are there problems? Of course. Could I cherry-pick stats and make things look bad? Of course. Could I cherry-pick stats and make them look good? Yes again. We had a crises in 2008 and we came out of it and things are not so bad now. Are they great? Not for most. But I'd say that they're better than when we started.

The dollar is going to get stronger as we're tightening and the rest of the world is loosening. But they will come out of their problems eventually and start tightening and then maybe our currency will come down so that our companies can more easily export.

The big guys - prognosticators, fund manager, etc. often complain when the market doesn't go their way. Their job is to make money for their client more than it is to look good predicting the future. In the absence of good returns, it's only natural to look for someone else to blame.

If ICC is in the Linux Kernel, then there are tons of users. They're just not paying for development license seats. I assume that Intel wants this particular business to pay for itself. DEC was a company that believed that software should be given away to sell hardware. Those of us on the software side of the company felt like second-class citizens.

There are libraries too and you can optimize for specific processor generations.

We use it where I work and I'm sure that the price per seat is not cheap. It is definitely worth the money if you want the best performance bang for the buck.

The thing is that it doesn't really matter for most consumer software because you can always buy a faster computer. I think that it's a value thing - for some companies, it makes sense and, for others, it doesn't.

This is just a reversion back to the mainframe.

Reminds me of working on PDP-11s and VAXes connected from a VT100 or VT52.

BTW, this is my work environment. The hosted OS is Linux. The host has my development work though. Email, HR, office stuff is done on my personal Mac.

VDI would still mean Intel sales - but they'd be server sales. I assume that they'd just use their old hardware for clients as the clients don't need much horsepower.

Interesting that some businesses are considering switching to Macs. Apple isn't really set up that well to handle the Enterprise and they really don't have cheaper hardware which businesses seem to prefer. There's also far less Enterprise software though the cloud is starting to change that.

The number was about 19% of people surveyed plan to buy a new PC vs about 14% the previous year. This kind of goes along with my thesis that people have enough stuff for needs.

The only thing that we bought this year that could be considered a computer is a $40 phone that we used as a hotspot while on vacation. This is one of those rare years when we've spent practically nothing on tech. My daughter is happy with her 2010 Sandy Bridge, we have two 2014 MacBook Pros and my wife has here 2010 iMac. Phones are all adequate as our our tablets.

Garmin has a new running watch coming out later this year and I may look at that in 2016 (it takes them 4-6 months to get the bugs out of their new toys).

I'm thinking that there are lots of people that are making do with what they have and only upgrading when the feature sets are a big jump from what they have and they have the money. A lot of the new devices are pretty cool and I'm sure that there are still lots of people with older PCs that will be amazed at the performance of an SSD but these are wants for the most part.

Kangaroo 100$ Portable Computer

InFocus today debuted the Kangaroo, a $99 Windows 10 portable PC that “goes anywhere and works with any screen.” The term “mobile desktop” may seem like an oxymoron, but that really is the best description: Picture your typical desktop PC tower shrunk down to the size of a phablet sans screen; just like any desktop, you’ll still need to connect a mouse, keyboard, and monitor. Kangaroo is available on Newegg now, and will go on sale at the Microsoft Store by mid-November.

http://venturebeat.com/2015/10/26/kangaroo-is-an-amazing-99-windows-10-portable-pc/



Main downside is that it runs Windows 10.

5x SSD performance is pretty impressive in the server world.

They might even sell some into the consumer market. Way overkill in my opinion but it would provide for bragging rights.

Optane is better-sounding than VIIV.

I take my iPad Mini with me in my backpack but I don't bring my backpack everywhere. The iPad Mini can double as a cellular hotspot without having to pay for a voice/text plan.

I saw an ad for a what they considered a small Android smartphone recently. It was 4.8 inches (bigger than my iPhone 6 which I consider big). So the whole market has gone big.

I think that the iPad Pro will be a niche product for Apple. Samsung just introduced an 18 inch tablet - we'll see how that sells. The iPad Mini is nice for reading books, watching videos, reading email and reading news articles.

I don't use it for stuff like posting here through - I'd rather type with a real keyboard.

"The rumor reached the “Fools”. If true it could also be “ terrible news” for Samsung."

I'm sure that Intel would be happy to sell modems to Samsung.

I think that our use cases are similar except that I use a rMBP instead of a Mac Pro. I can't see upgrading for several years as my system is only a year old and I could see using this for another five years. If I had it to do over again, I would have gone with 1 TB of storage. Right now I have an external Intel SSD that I carry around with me sometimes when I think that I'll need the space. I have thought about getting a 256 GB SDXC card - very slow but very cheap and nothing sticking out. Hopefully laptops will have 2 TB SSD options in five years.

I think that part of the reason why Apple continues to grow Mac sales is Windows.

A lot of us probably tried to use tablets for productivity applications and found that they have rather severe limitations. Which is why I have an iPad and a Mac.

Apple sold a record 5.7 million Macs - I guess the PC isn't dead. That's only 1/7th but people turn their phones over a lot faster than their PCs.

Apple had 20% unit growth sales on iPhones. That's on a tough comparison year too. I'm guessing that iPhone sales are going to be stronger in 2016 given that it will be a major update - so that should sell more Intel modems.

Or they fizzle out.

I look at 3D-Printers as a really cool technology that some people have bought to play around with and it's something that I should probably get into but I don't have the time to spend on it - it would be fun for a future learning project. In the meantime costs keep coming down, and, I assume that the software is getting better and better. But it might be more practical for centralized services (such as Staples) than for everyone to buy one.

Intel rated Market Perform by Cowan, FBR Capital.

(just felt like posting something related to Intel)

Yeah, a lot of people are still too cheap to upgrade their PCs to SSDs until they actually use one and then they're amazed at the performance. Once you start, you're hooked. If it's a machine that's turned on all the time and most of your stuff is cached, then it's not as big a deal but if you're rebooting a lot and mobile, then it's really, really nice.

I think that datacenters like SSDs more and more because they can turn around transactions faster and performance matters in the cloud and in transactions.

A lot of doubts in the comments.

Reminds me of IBM-style "of course, we have that working too".

Speaking of IBM, where's Chipguy's analysis of their report?

I'd like the Apple comms deal to be the foot in the door with the opportunity for their processor Fab business down the road.

That's a pretty decent amount of money in the mobile space. I need to peek at QCOM's chart later to see the market response to them potentially losing some of this business.

I was hoping the folks here would provide more comments as I saw the headline and headed over here to look. Maybe the really smart EE guys here know a lot more about CPUs than comm chips.

I'm incredibly impressed that Intel is even under consideration to win this business from Qualcomm as several have told me that they have a lock on this market.

I imagine that unit prices are pretty low on these things but every little thing helps.

No clue. But any technical apparel company should be thinking about IOT, and, hopefully Intel.

I follow Nike (and I'm a customer) and I saw that headline and was wondering about it. They are already the 500 pound gorilla in the business and they have lots of competition but they are aggressively creating new technical products in clothing and I assume that they're doing the same thing with shoes. There have been a lot of technical improvements in shoes the past 7 years, particularly in cushioning.

I was at the Nike Store last week and saw a long-sleeve shirt with Dri-Fit on the skin side and wool on the outside. It was very thin and looked like a nice thing to wear when running outside on very cold days. I'd never seen anything like it before. This stuff isn't exactly inexpensive either.

So Nike is making improvements in shoes and clothes and they're getting people to pay lots of money for these improvements (which probably don't cost them a lot in manufacturing).

Can I see it happening? A 60% gain in four years for a large, established company is a tall order and the world is dealing with global deflation. I think that it's possible (a lot of runners are nuts on the amount that they spend for gear), but I'll wait and see.

Intel's not a consumer company (mostly) - it does several things really well and makes a lot of money doing that. I guess that Intel needs to continue to lead in what they do best - I just don't know how big the market is out there to gain.

"We're really excited ..."

I think that the SSD is a bottleneck because it's reading and writing to the same device. A way to speed it up would be to use an external device for writing too.

My laptop has PCIe 2.0 SSD storage. PCIe 3.0 hasa 60% more throughput and the new SSDs are faster but I don't think that I really need to upgrade when an external USB 3.0 drive would probably do the job. It's good enough for what I do in casual video work. I could improve things even more with Thunderbolt (20 GB throughput) external drive.

I've been doing video editing and transcoding for work the past few days and can appreciate an Intel PC for this work. The software on an iPhone does make it possible to edit videos but I'm working with 16 GB files and I can't imagine how long it would take to process this on the iPhone where video seems to be stored in compressed format by default and there are compression/decompression stages in operations. I imagine the phone would get pretty hot as well.

My Intel Haswell i7 is running at about 50% CPU (eight threads) so the SSD is the likely bottleneck. I guess that I could get higher throughput with my external SSD as the output device. I can imagine why people buy Mac Pros if they're going to be doing this sort of thing all the time.

4K video is already here though the percentage of people doing it is tiny. I have a friend that does 4K videos and it takes him a day to process a video - and, no, he's not doing it on a mobile device.

Thanks. I like to have a relative idea on these sorts of things.

What does the patent cover? That's not chump change, even for Apple.