Matisyahu's Blog

Another day in paradise – working from home then as I am able to finish my shift it starts raining then it stops then it starts again and then it stops. Long story short I decided I wasn’t going to go for a walk and tempt fate so I decided to stay at home and have a quiet nice inside watching Real Time with Bill Maher along with catching up with a few other television shows. Bill Maher can be disagreeable at times but part of life is a willingness to hear the other side of the argument to understand their train of though rather than having an understanding based on a strawman.

There have been several YouTube channels covering the leak of One UI 8.5 rearly builds but it falls inline with the plans surrounding Android 16 which was scheduled to be a two part release with the first release upgrading the underling frameworks (which is why One UI 8 was a rather a minor upgrade) then the second release (which is what One UI 8.5 is shaping up to be) being the apps and user interface changes that make use of the new underlying frameworks. It’ll be interesting to see what happens with One UI 8.5 but I’d say that when Samsung S26 is released it’ll be based on One UI 8.5 and then One UI 9.0 will be released when Android 17 is released but then again we may see One UI 9.0 being based on Android 16 and then One UI 10.0 based on Android 17.

Whatever the case maybe we’ve pretty much hit ‘peak smartphone’ given that the platforms have matured to the point that each feature or change is about improving the quality of life when using it rather than big changes like we’ve seen in the past. A good part of it is maturity but another part of it has to do with ‘Project Mainline’ where Google are able to push out updates and upgrades to system components without having to wait for a major release. A good example of that would be the Android Run Time (ART) which receives regular improvements and bug fixes resulting in improved performance without having to wait for it to be merged into a major release.

There was an interesting article about the Intel Ultra 200 series and how over a year there have been a series of updates in the form of microcode updates, UEFI firmware updates and compiler optimisations which have resulted in improved performance (link). It’ll be interesting to see how things progress and whether the verdict regarding the Ultra 200 series my have been different had the performance seen today been delivered on day one. With that being said, avoid the comment section of the link, the reason why I say that is because all too often ‘tech dudes’ in online forums and on social media convince themselves that something is happening happening when it is not. Intel still has the majority market share when it comes to desktops and laptops, and for most people the end user is happy with the status quo with some gravitating towards the Mac but they’re still very much the minority when you consider the global market share.

As for Windows on ARM, it is an uphill slog – we’ve only just gotten hardware that is worth making Windows on ARM a viable choice not to mention that it wasn’t until recently that you could win32/win64 developers could recompile their apps and get them running on Windows for ARM whereas up until recently if you wanted to target Windows on ARM you had to re-write it from scratch using the Universal Windows Platform (see WIndows RT and other failed attempts). We’re seeing more software companies bring their app to Windows for ARM as the barrier to entry get to the point that it becomes “oh, so it is a compile and I can target both platforms….let’s go for it” rather than having to dedicate resources for what is still very much a niche segment. For me, I don’t use many native applications which most of what I need came with my device and native out of the box so there was no need to worry about the number of native apps (although I admit at this point I’m waiting for Nova Lake because the under the hood changes appear to be laying the ground work for making x86-64 competitive when compared to ARM64).