>I think one of the biggest challenges for Twitter is on-boarding new users.

This is worse than ever, they invest most of their effort in getting you to follow their cherry picked celeb users for your country. Then they spend the rest of their effort trying to ban you.

- Don't give us an email > account locked

- Don't give us a phone number > account locked

- Don't change your egg avatar > shadow banned

If you're a new user that they know nothing about, then recommending the "popular" users from your region is a good default option.

Also they don't lock out your account because of a lack of an email or phone number - you just need 1 of those to signup.

>These are all awesome uses of Twitter that anyone can benefit from without needing to have any followers.

fyi accounts with low or no follower counts are now auto-blocked using the new safety features by most important people so this is no longer true.

> and they've managed to ethically out compete them with flying colors

Yeah and it only took 5 attempts.

(Poke, Bolt, Slingshot, Flash, Instagram Stories)

It's not just machine learning, 3D rendering is moving over to GPU as well and there is next to no support for anything other than CUDA in that space today.

Not everything starts and ends with gaming in the high end computer space.

Octane is the only real example of this I can think of. Nearly every other tool I use is openCL.

Still means you need a PC, mainstream is all tablets, laptops and consoles.

If vr ever goes mainstream beyond a mobile phone gimmick addon it will be via Playstation or Xbox

I consider PC gaming to be mainstream. It's a huge market, as evidenced by Steam.

> relative experience in hardware, which exacerbates their already high labor cost

But everyone in the thread is saying Google didn't really manufacture it and it's just a rebranded HTC device

To be fair the iPhone build quality and hardware design look like a premium product. This looks like a chinese knockoff

Hardware design on this feels entirely uninspired, Chinese knockoff of last years iPhone and Samsung devices.

If they truly started from scratch and ended up here then this hardware initiative is going to fall flat. But I'm gonna guess they didn't start from scratch and this is just a rebadged device as people suspect.

Why on earth would you launch such a cheap plasticky looking device in such a similar form than your competitors device last year when their update was moving that device into more premium materials (iPhone 6 looks positively cheapo next to the 7) and making it seamless.

Surprised they went with a form factor so similar to Samsung and the iPhone 6, just looks pretty dated really.

Think now would have been a good opportunity to go for something less rounded. An iPhone 4 style sharp design would probably end up looking futuristic next to all the faceless rounded blobs the market is full of.

I haven't noticed anything because the only thing it ever managed to do reliably is set timers so that's all I ever used it for.

and one in 20 times you'll get a "here is the timer" where it just shows you yesterdays already complete dinner timer