Bill Gates reveals why he prefers Android over iOS

[midian182]

What just happened? Android or iOS? It's an argument that's been raging for years. Former Microsoft boss Bill Gates knows which one he prefers: unsurprisingly, it's Android, though he does use an iPhone when required.

Speaking to CNBC and NY Times journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin on the invite-only Clubhouse app (via Android Central), Gates confirmed that his long preference for the Android mobile operating system hasn't changed—but he doesn't avoid Apple handsets altogether.

Gates said he opts for Google's ecosystem because "Some of the Android manufacturers pre-install Microsoft software in a way that makes it easy for me and they're more flexible about how the software connects up with the operating system so that's what I've ended up getting used to."

While Gates has a day-to-day Android device, he uses an iPhone to keep up-to-date with everything and for other activities, such as using the iPhone-only Clubhouse app.

Back in 2019, Gates said his greatest mistake was losing out to Google in the mobile landscape. "That was a natural thing for Microsoft to win. It really is winner take all," he said. "There's room for exactly one non-Apple operating system and what's that worth? $400 billion that would be transferred from company G [Google] to company M [Microsoft]."

Gates was also asked about which companies he believes are doing the most exciting work. Google and Microsoft were his choices, though he added that "Amazon's doing great work, Apple's doing great work, Facebook."

"But, in terms of really pushing the boundaries of computer science and architecture and AI, I'd say Google and Microsoft have a strong R&D commitment — both stuff they share openly and things they focus on for their own products."

Elsewhere, Gates cast some skepticism over the Apple car. "I doubt they'll make the same margin they make on the iPhone," he said, adding that, unlike electric vehicles, a future filled with autonomous cars isn't a certainty.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/88769-bill-gates-reveals-why-prefers-android-over-ios.html

 

[QuantumPhysics]

Summary: I prefer Android because it works a lot like my dear Microsoft software would have if we could have ever got our heads out of our A** and made a good Zune or Xbox Phone.

 

[Ravey]

I really hope this gets add to the "most famous quotes" article that's updated every year.

 

[VaRmeNsI]

All Gates had to do was make a x86 phone and they'd have taken the market, except they tried the locked down Windows RT approach and obviously failed.

 

[BSim500]

As much as I increasingly distrust Google, the last thing the world needed was for "Embrace-Extend-Extinguish, Halloween Memo, AARD Code, let's fund SCO's troll lawsuits vs open source" software company to have a total monopoly over both desktop & mobile...

 

[ypsylon]

Bill is simply too poor to afford one. That's the real story behind it. ;D

 

[DZillaXx]

Summary: I prefer Android because it works a lot like my dear Microsoft software would have if we could have ever got our heads out of our A** and made a good Zune or Xbox Phone.

The Zunes were so much better than iPods... Its really a shame MS came in late with those. The first gen Zune was a little meh, but the versions after that with the touch pad and later the touch screen were great. Plus they had better audio quality than iPods. On the Software side the Zune Desktop software was way ahead of the times. MS has a subscription service much like Spotify, just download what you want and enjoy. That was one of the best things about the Zune was the software subscription, $100/ year for all the music you want in your late teens was a awesome thing.


MS already had a lightweight OS for Arm devices with windows ce. In fact the first version of Windows phone used an enhanced version of windows CE known a windows CE7. But they could have come up with a new shell and a app store and be to market around the same time as android. As android was in the same state as windows CE, with a PDA interface.

 

[Plutoisaplanet]

Bill Gates only has an iPhone because he has found his need for attention is fulfilled by it with Clubhouse? That makes sense.

Honestly why do we still care what this guy thinks about technology? He hasn’t been at the forefront of technology in almost 20 years. After Windows XP and Xbox, Microsoft had some of its worst years under his leadership.

 

[Darth Shiv]

All Gates had to do was make a x86 phone and they'd have taken the market, except they tried the locked down Windows RT approach and obviously failed.

x86 scaled very poorly to small devices compared to ARM. So it wasn't quite that simple but yes the dev ecosystem they most certainly should have leveraged.

 

[Puiu]

All Gates had to do was make a x86 phone and they'd have taken the market, except they tried the locked down Windows RT approach and obviously failed.

They tried and x86 just isn't suitable for low powered systems. Too much overhead necessary to maintain compatibility.

 

[Shadowboxer]

So he likes Android because manufacturers pre-install MS software? I think that would most people off. It would me, who wants Outlook on their phone? Or MS Word lol. I can understand Excel a bit more if you just want to remotely access it.

Is he not able to install MS software himself?

It’s a unique reason to prefer Android, usually I find people prefer Android because it’s cheaper or because they want to run some specific bit of (usually cracked) software.

 

[Uncle Al]

Knowing Gates reputation for dishonesty and business underhandedness I simply would not put much stock in anything he says. Having great wealth doesn't replace personal character and his is highly suspect, at best.

 

[Dimitriid]

x86 scaled very poorly to small devices compared to ARM. So it wasn't quite that simple but yes the dev ecosystem they most certainly should have leveraged.

And guess which Kernel had ARM support and many other platforms since very early on?

See this is the other side of the proprietary vs open source argument right here: Open source is just not as effective at monopolizing markets so Microsoft probably wouldn't have made Gates a billionaire like his proprietary stuff did.

However, Microsoft could had been better prepared to quickly adapt to newer paradigms like ARM and mobile devices or modern day distributed computing schemes. Because guess what? Under Satya Nadella, Microsoft is back at being a very profitable cloud service company and a huge part of that is that they use Linux, the thing Gates and Balmer were so adamant about killing.

The lesson here is that proprietary software stifles technological progress and only gives us terrible oligarchies that greatly entrench on consumer rights like Microsoft did.

Yet what is Gates doing now? Well killing the possibility of a free vaccine for Covid-19 by making sure the researchers for one of the vaccines didn't go "free to all" and instead went with his Astra-Zeneca proprietary vaccine to make sure nobody gets any ideas and completely eradicates a deadly disease effectively like we did with Polio.

Overall he continues to be a cancer on society by promoting endless capitalist greed, even to this day through his "Humanitarian work"

 

[JordLevy]

All Gates had to do was make a x86 phone and they'd have taken the market, except they tried the locked down Windows RT approach and obviously failed.

Disagree, x86 is not power efficient and runs a very bloated instruction set that doesn't work well on mobile. They needed to make a a better Windows operating system for mobile, that runs well on ARM. Not try and shoehorn Windows as is onto mobile. Essentially they needed to take a page out of Apple's book. Use the best bits of what works from macOS and fill in the blanks with custom code specifically for mobile.

 

[triffid]

Apple doesn't look to have the best technology but the one that can potentially bring them the most profit. Changing to Bluetooth was the signal that they are prepared to sacrifice quality for convenience. BT uses a compressed music format and will never sound as good as wired. £200+ for the latest Apple phones shows that people are gullible. Bluetooth is not a progression - never was and never will be.

 

[mountains]

Exodus (free download on F-Droid) says the Android version of Outlook has 14 trackers, the most of any single app on this (somewhat well protected) phone.

Just saying...

 

[DZillaXx]

Disagree, x86 is not power efficient and runs a very bloated instruction set that doesn't work well on mobile. They needed to make a a better Windows operating system for mobile, that runs well on ARM. Not try and shoehorn Windows as is onto mobile. Essentially they needed to take a page out of Apple's book. Use the best bits of what works from macOS and fill in the blanks with custom code specifically for mobile.

The Windows Kernel is lightweight was powerful, and the core of windows as well is pretty lightweight in both storage requirements and ram usage. Which is why Windows Phone OS that used NT based windows was able to be incredibly smooth and fast on mediocre hardware and limited storage. The Windows Phone OS was smoother and faster on old mediocre chipsets than apple phones did on top of the line silicon two years later.

MS shot themselves with their design language. The Metro UI and forcing that graphic style on all app developers on top of a extremely walled garden approach did not bold well for them. Windows Phone should have been what Android became. Google is by far the worst when it comes to OS development.

 

[punctualturn]

they're more flexible about how the software connects up with the operating system

Funny, seems that he was actually holding back in criticizing Apple stupid, draconian and anti-consumer censorship of their iOS app store and devices.

I have an iPad Pro because there werent any good Android tablets but I simply despise not being allowed to do or install whatever the hell I want on MY device.

Luckily, Samsung tablets seems very nice and will be getting more updates.

The only issue is that I will have to debloat it with ADB scrips, but still, is better than not being able to install anything on the device that you paid for.

 

[DZillaXx]

Apple doesn't look to have the best technology but the one that can potentially bring them the most profit. Changing to Bluetooth was the signal that they are prepared to sacrifice quality for convenience. BT uses a compressed music format and will never sound as good as wired. £200+ for the latest Apple phones shows that people are gullible. Bluetooth is not a progression - never was and never will be.

Well even going back to the iPod days, the DACs and amps used in the iPhones and iPods were always meh. People who care about audio quality were not using a iPhone in the first place.

Bluetooth is convenience and sounds great. Were all listening to compressed music anyways. I stopped doing everything in FLAC and now pretty much only use Spotify. Why? Because in reality the difference is so small.

 

[Bullwinkle M]

Disagree, x86 is not power efficient and runs a very bloated instruction set that doesn't work well on mobile.

and when was that?

Back in 2011, my 32nm dualcore desktop i3 averaged 23 Watts from a Pico Power Supply and 45 watts from an ATX power supply

Imagine what we could do with that same 2.6Ghz Sandy Bridge @ 3nm when Intel outsources to TSMC

I could run Windows XP from a 5 Volt tablet with a wireless keyboard and mouse, or swap out the flash card and boot to Windows 10 for full touchscreen support, and then boot to Linux if I choose

LoL

That 23 Watt desktop still works B.T.W. and is posting this message with Spyware Platform 10

Double LoL

 

[JamesBlond]

Hmmmmmmmmmmmm, why not integrate, why give up, the Idea was awesome and the phones were good quality, to just give up shows a lot, I mean, in 2 yrs his going to turn around and say, Dam that **** vaccine he made, it killed 2million people and its crap, I should have just stuck to getting people to eat healthy as it works ... Bill Gates is a puppet for the Rothchild's Puppet Masters... he does not really have brains or does not really know what his talking about, stealing from his own partner to get rich... its in the blood

 

[Bullwinkle M]

Hmmmmmmmmmmmm, why not integrate, why give up, the Idea was awesome and the phones were good quality, to just give up shows a lot, I mean, in 2 yrs his going to turn around and say, Dam that **** vaccine he made, it killed 2million people and its crap, I should have just stuck to getting people to eat healthy as it works ... Bill Gates is a puppet for the Rothchild's Puppet Masters... he does not really have brains or does not really know what his talking about, stealing from his own partner to get rich... its in the blood

Hmmmmmmmmmmmm,
Your insights are very intriguing and I'd like to subscribe to your newsletter

 

[candle_86]

Summary: I prefer Android because it works a lot like my dear Microsoft software would have if we could have ever got our heads out of our A** and made a good Zune or Xbox Phone.

Windows phone was fantastic, fast, lightweight, it made sense, it's only short comming was getting 3rd party support and not being aggressive enough. If microsoft had given Lumia phones to large corporations, government's, and other fields they would have easily secured dominance as people would have gotten used to metro and wanted it for their personal phone. To this day I miss my HTC 8x, Lumia 930, and Lumia 950, those where the best phones I ever owned

 

[QuantumPhysics]

Windows phone was fantastic, fast, lightweight, it made sense, it's only short comming was getting 3rd party support and not being aggressive enough.

Microsoft screwed up Zune.
Apple knocked iPod Touch out of the park.
Microsoft had every chance to build an "Xbox Portable/ Phone" just like SONY did with the Xperia Play.
Microsoft did NOTHING.
Sony did a half assed job.
Apple just put gaming on iPod Touch.

If you want 3rd party development, you need to give them something worth developing on.
Zune wasn't it.
And Microsoft never game them a worthwhile platform.

 

[Avro Arrow]

This is no surprise. Bill is (of course) a techie and we techies like to tinker and customise. You can't tinker with or customise anything when using iOS. It's like android with training wheels and is designed for people who don't know tech and are afraid of screwing things up. So they're not given that option.