Phil Schiller

Two 'Phil Schiller' stories October 2013 - January 2015

Phil Schiller on Google Glass: ‘I can’t believe they think anyone normal will ever wear these things’

The Tech Block on Thursday shared an email exchange between Apple marketing chief Phil Schiller and the website’s founder Abdel Ibrahim that pokes fun at Google Glass for its perception of being an unstylish device. The email from 2012 surfaced just days after Google announced that it will be ending its Glass Explorer program on Monday as it works on a new version under the leadership of Tony Faddell.

After being sent a picture of actor Steve Martin wearing obnoxious looking glasses in the film “The Jerk,” mocking Google co-founder Sergey Brin wearing Glass, Schiller responds to Ibrahim saying “that is very funny” and that he “can’t believe they think anyone (normal) will ever wear these things. It reminds me of the push to market video goggles a few years back.”
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Report finds almost all Android OEMs, not just Samsung, cheat on benchmarks

When a story earlier this week discovered Samsung was artificially inflating benchmark scores for its new Galaxy Note 3, many were quick to point out it wasn’t the first time Samsung had been caught engaged in such a practice. The same issue was discovered by AnandTech for the Galaxy S4 back in July, and today the site has an extensive report showing that almost every Android smartphone manufacturer is shipping devices that do the same.

As pictured in the chart above, that includes the HTC One, HTC One mini, LG G2, Galaxy Tab 10.1, and many others. In fact, the only companies that appear to not be using the method is Apple and Motorola, as well as Google with its Nexus 4 and Nexus 7 devices:

We started piecing this data together back in July, and even had conversations with both silicon vendors and OEMs about getting it to stop. With the exception of Apple and Motorola, literally every single OEM we’ve worked with ships (or has shipped) at least one device that runs this silly CPU optimization. It’s possible that older Motorola devices might’ve done the same thing, but none of the newer devices we have on hand exhibited the behavior. It’s a systemic problem that seems to have surfaced over the last two years, and one that extends far beyond Samsung… None of the Nexus do, which is understandable since the optimization isn’t a part of AOSP. This also helps explain why the Nexus 4 performed so slowly when we reviewed it – this mess was going on back then and Google didn’t partake.

As noted in the report, the gains that OEMs are experiencing from the inflated scores are probably not worth the press they’ve been receiving. AnandTech points out that most of the inflated scores provide under a 10% increase in GPU and CPU performance benchmarks:
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