Huh? This is a hardware successor to the 2020 “Chromecast with Google TV”. This device will support casting. Casting isn’t going anywhere…

That’s not entirely true. They may have the same processor but they don’t have the same amount of RAM, which is actually super critical for on device AI tasks. They recently brought all the features to the Pixel 8, but it took additional time to optimize for 8 GB vs the 12 GB of the Pro.

What does any of this have to do with Google removing apps from the Play Store?

As you sort of alluded to timing makes a big difference because it’s a cat and mouse game. The last I had heard iPhones were pretty easy targets but some of the top end Android phones weren’t. iOS 17.4 is relatively new.

Who cares. Play Services backwards compatibility for new Android APIs and security updates being separated from the OS make this irrelevant.

You must be new here. People constantly state they love the ability to lay Pixels flat.

Also it doesn’t look like that’s changing with the 9 series…

Does F-Droid often sign apps they distribute? That seems odd.

I didn’t realize at first that the 24 in the version number stood for the year 2024. That made the initial version being 7.6, then the next version 24.2 very confusing lol

It makes sense when you factor in the development and maintenance cost. How many people have a desk with monitors, keyboard and mouse but don’t already have a more powerful machine they use there?It’s a high price to pay for the 1% of users that will ever try it.

This is going to sound very ‘my uncle works for Nintendo’ so feel free to not believe me, but the last I heard it was a “talent retention project”. Google would rather let some extremely good engineers work on Fuschia, even though it that has very little value, than leave the company and build something higher value for a competitor.

The real important reminder here is that you should never use SMS as your 2FA delivery method. Phone numbers aren’t private and once associated with an account it’s far too easy to spoof/sim swap and intercept the code.

That is exactly like saying having a separate deadbolt on your door is adding another attack vector…

It’s not clear why Google wants to do this, but one theory is that it’ll run some workloads more optimally and securely than microdroid.

Microdroid is a “Parallel Virtual Machine”. The idea is to offload part of the responsibility of an app to this VM so that it can execute in an environment that is more secure than what Android can guarantee.

So nobody knows why but (in typical Fuchsia fashion) it probably isn’t something a consumer would even know or care about.

Uh huh… The Oxford definition literally says that’s untue.

of or involving sound waves with a frequency above the upper limit of human hearing

Huh? Multimodal is coming later this year (like I said in my last comment).

They have had on device Gen AI running on Pixel phones in production since last year.

Gemini Nano. It’s in Pixel Recorder and Gboard but multimodal capabilities are coming soon. It’s very limited to a couple phones and not many companies outside of Google have access, but it has been used in production since last year.

Apple does not have on device AI in production today. Microsoft’s “Copilot+PCs” launched less than 2 weeks ago, but are significantly more powerful machines.

Ironically Google is kind of the only one actually doing on device AI.

This feature seems entirely pointless, especially for this device (which should just be called the Pixel Fold 2).

Since the device is basically square (resolution 2,076 x 2,152) why would you not just rotate 90 degrees to change the side by side to top bottom like we can today?

Because people don’t understand the difference between using ChatGPT running in a datacenter somewhere via API calls and having a tiny model actually running on device.

Even quantized down to 4bit the best 7B models barely run locally on the best mobile hardware that exists today. GPT4 is ~250x larger than that 7B model lol

Yeah, I like the camera bump on my Pixel Fold since it shouldn’t go all the way across the back and is still square-ish. These are similar but worse. Pixel 6 was peak design IMO.