“Google might have a long way to go before it starts selling iPhone-like numbers of Pixel phones, but there is one important area where it’s firmly in the lead, and it has nothing to do with bezels or beats,” Michael Simon writes for Macworld. “It’s about intelligence.”
“At its recent iPhone X event, Tim Cook pulled out Steve Jobs’s old Wayne Gretzky quote about skating to where the puck is going, but there’s only one company that’s thinking forward right now and it’s not Apple—it’s Google,” Simon writes. “New hardware might have been the reason for the event, but machine learning was the strongest undercurrent, and the message Google sent was clear: Our AI is better than your AI.”
“Apple’s first home AI speaker won’t hit shelves until December, but Google already has three of them. When it was announced in June, HomePod appeared to have an advantage over Google Home and Amazon Echo with its high-fidelity, room-sensing smarts, but now Google Home Max has landed, and it might be even better,” Simon writes. “The real difference-maker is Google Assistant… In its first year, Google Assistant has advanced further than Siri has in the past seven. And it’s getting smarter every day.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: When, if ever, will Apple’s commitment to user privacy turn from handicap to selling point?
Google has no such handicap. Google wipes their feet on users’ privacy and vacuums up their personal data every second of the day.
Regardless, Apple would be smart to let the user opt-in to sharing more information with Apple in exchange for a Siri that really works for users. Apple should have been doing this for years. If they did, they might be shocked at how many users opt-in because they trust Apple.