Thread

1. pelagicAustral · 1790426428 · focus · HN ↗

   I know this is a stupid question even before I ask it, but is there any chance at this point of seeing something out of the scope of Apple and Google for mobile?? Will the bank apps ever allow people out of these two players

   1. anal_reactor · 1790427248 · focus · HN ↗

      Motorola is planning to release phones with GrapheneOS. So far only expensive models have been confirmed, but I assume cheapos should follow.

      Of course they're not doing this out of good heart. My theory is that China wants to have a popular smartphone that is completely independent from US companies. But hey, once upon a time Google were "the good guys" too, so enjoy the party while it lasts.

      An interesting point is that it's important to have powerful China around because they're a capitalist competition to the US.

      1. philipallstar · 1790427623 · focus · HN ↗

         > An interesting point is that it's important to have powerful China around because they're a capitalist competition to the US.

         Semi-capitalist at best. They're good for cloning things invented in the West, but the problem is that that is much cheaper than inventing, so things get commoditised and the places that can do expensive R&D have to find other ways to make money all the time.

         1. anal_reactor · 1790434386 · focus · HN ↗

            1. That's not true. More and more segments of technology are being dominated by China. China sells lots and lots of everyday objects that are wholly desgined in China, with quality beating western products. They're just small improvements over existing designs of relatively simple things, so nothing makes the headlines.

            2. Lots of Chinese technology never leaves China for political reasons, rather than economic/technology ones.

            3. If you want to buy a semi-professional machine as an advanced hobbyist, often your only option is China.

            4. Apple is wildly known for taking existing designs and improving on them. Why is it good for Apple to do that, but bad for China to do that?

            1. hbd-investor · 1790603378 · focus · HN ↗

               The important thing is not the product, its the machine that makes the product.

               A lot of the tech in china in invisible, normal people don't buy machines the size of a pickup truck, runs on 3kv and has 500 hp motors, has a production run of 5 of these machines ever built, is custom designed by engineers and weighs as much as 4 pickup trucks.

               2 companies can build the same product that looks similar and operates the same.

               But they can end up with vastly different price points when you look at how the factory is designed, how these massive custom machines are engineered.

               You need to keep in mind to make one product you need to design and build like 10 machines, these machines are each the size and weight of 1->4 pickup trucks, BOM's with 10,000+ components, are filled with circuit boards, sensors, takes an army of engineers multiple years etc... and the company is going to build like 5 of these machines in the lifetime of the design.

               China's competitive advantage is basically this and why the products that can be made by hand aren't moving from china to 3rd world countries. They have a lot of engineers, with this type of experience and a lot of invisible tech that average consumers don't see.

               Their machines that make products are not only expertly designed, maintained, but they squeeze out as much efficiency as possible in things like electricity consumption, cooling, minimizing maintenance over millions of cycles of running these machines, and pass these to consumers as lower costs. China is very competitive, if your machine making widgets isn't well designed, a competitor will design their own widget making machine that consumes 40% electricity and requires half the maintenance and then will undercut your widgets.

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