Posts by Michael C

not psychology

it's that apple consumers understand 2 things:

- its about TCO, not purchase price

- good support is worth what small difference there might be.

off base

"...so forcing you to give 30% to Apple."

No, apple is NOT requiring ONLY in-app purchases simply the "option" to do so. No customer is forced to buy through apple, thus providing 30% to apple. they're only forced to decide who gets to profit.

Combined with the fact that existing customers have no overhead (apple automatically excludes commission on existing subscribers), anyone can sign up online and apple also gets 0%. It will be quite easy for Last.fm, or anyone else, to avoid paying apple for the bulk of renewals as well (simply e-mail the customer a link to re-sign online), so very, very few will re-up through in-app. Its only new customers, who instead of signing up online find your app in the iOS store, (where the DESCRIPTION can still tell you to sign up on-line, you just can't have a button in the app), and download it, and sign up in-app. this is in contract to Google who is asking a flat 10%, period....

Apple is not only hosting a free app, that free app is a competitor to their own iTunes media services (which will also soon include subscriptions). Does BestBuy let amazon.com throw up kiosks in their stores? Does BnK allow the Amazon eBook reader on the Nook? NOPE! Apple is actually ALLOWING their customers to sell against them, in their own store, for nothing more than a CHANCE of getting a 30% cut. That's pretty fair.

As for the "you can't undercut us elsewhere," that's a VERY COMMON paractice, and completely legal (no matter your feelings on it). Amazon (for ebooks), Walmart (for most items), and many other big boxes (on select products) have the same conditions in place with vendors.

it is likely

Apple does cheap, provided "cheap" comes with little sacrifice to the user experience.

They don't make $400 PCs because i3s + GPUs can't be built cheap, and OS X doesn't do Celeron with IGP.

A $200 phone (off contract) is a free phone on 1 year contract. A slight limitation on the device blocking video streaming except on wifi, and a $15 2GB data plan covers what 90% of people can do with it. Making a device smaller has little impact on call reliability, there are a thousand phones a fraction of the iPhone's size that do great calling.

No on-board user memory /= no local apps. LOOK AT THE ATV2! it has 4GB storage, it's just not user accessible for FILES. A phone with apps, but that relies on the cloud for media streaming and documents is not a big deal, since as you say, primary concern is that it is a phone, and if you have no signal, it's useless either way. That said, i doubt apple would completely block local music storage, they'll let iTunes auto-fill from a play-list available local storage...

what stream?

The budget PC steam doesn't exist. Most budget PCs are sold at a loss, or margins measured in tens of dollars, with a single support call from someone who did not opt for an extended warranty inverting that case. They're also buffered by metric tons of crapware and bloat, which Apple won;t stoop to ever again.

Also, it's about experience. People do not buy Macs for surfing facebook, they buy them for the AV experience, storing tens of thousands of photos, and working with home movies, and that requires GPUs. You won't be finding Sandybridge, let alone AMD/nVidia GPUs, in $400 machines anywhere.

If they want a web box with some limited storage ability, and simple apps, and limited multitasking, I could see a desktop knockoff of iOS eventually being born, maybe by version 6.0, and coming on a $250-350 machine with quad ARM core, enough GPU to do 1080p basic editing (the iPhone can do 720p editing), and using a common 1080p display/TV and BT keyboard/touchpad. anything more, and we need to wait for the replacement to Sandybridge in order to make macs affordable to build and still meet user expectations (engouh time to turn celerons into Sandybridge as it looks today).

Apple doens;t care about the price, they care about the the user first, profit second. $400 macs don;t make money, and don;t do what people ask, and that's no go on both counts.

Same for ATV2

It has "no local storage" but has 4GB of storage.... Apps, the OS, buffer area, etc, all there. You just can;t sync other things to it. No local music, i don;t know if Apple would do that... They'll probably ship either 4 or 8 GB, and leave you some small space for a little music for when signal is not available, and certainly all your games/etc will be local.

2/3 size /= 2/3 screen

there's pleanty of bezel to remove before shrinking the screen, several phones are no shipping with no or very little bezel. We're also in a 3D world, and thichness shrink is also part of 2/3 smaller. If the screen went as low as 3.2" from 3.5, it would be about it. I doubt the screen itself will actually change size. It will likely be 3GS resolution, though retina is possible if they switch to a different screen on the full phone (since supply would be instantly available).

playability = worthless

1) Most of those flash games are not even compatible with 10.1 on Android: too many images to pre-load and not enough RAM. At best, it;s a limited functional experience, and at worst, it not only auto-kills all your background apps as it fill up RAM, and closes other tabs in your browser you might have wanted to keep open, but it crashes the phone itself on many sites, and causes you to reboot.

2) many of these flash games are meant to be played by leaving them running in a browser for long periods, or by continually interacting with the app, which is not only difficult to do on a phone screen, but it kills your battery fast, and back-grounding has questionable results as the site's flash content doesn't know how to use your phone's notification engine, nor respect the boundaries placed on background tasks.

3) Games designed for a mouse and keyboard suck on touchscreens, especialyl ones that rely on clicking on large numbers of small objects, especially when click and drag is not a designed in feature (farmville is AWFUL to play without a real mouse for example, yet the native app supports dragging functions the browser version does not, and actually increases playability).

4) many a good flash game have been readily ported to (and run better as) native phone apps.

5) running flash 24x7 even when you're not using a flash site is just dumb. It needs to be at the least a hot-load plug-in, or should show the flash content in a separate (and sandboxed) frame. This is particularly an issue when you leave tabs open with web adds that continually try to cycle content, and can kill your battery in hours...

Flash is not a blessing, it;s a plague upon the web. 95% of the content it actually supports on a phone is ads and poorly designed web interfaces most of us block or get past by electing a non-flash optional version of the site. encrypted flash video still can't be played, most flash apps don;t actually work or worse crash the device, short of some web video equally displayable in H.264 or WebM, what does flash actually bring to a mobile device that we actually want? nothing. It is NOT full flash, it is but a subset, and the majority of it we don;t want and/or can otherwise get, so WHY BOTHER!

Rage?

There's no rage, the open sourcer's LOVE THIS. They can distribute their app FREE, on a well trusted system, in competition directly with big name app firms.

It's the BIG firms that hate this, putting their multi-million dollar budget developments side by side with Gimp in the same store....

You could not develop an app for iOS initially because of Cingular, not Apple. Cingular did not want to risk the issues associated with it. When AT&T bought apple (and after the outcry pushed their hand) AT&T changed the terms and allowed a 3rd party app system, it just took a good year to 18months to get it running. What, you think the SDK and emulator were slapped together in a few weeks? Apple had that developed from day 1, they just could not open it to others initially due to contractual limits.

Once released, the initial restrictions, and ongoing ones, are actually reasonable. Maybe you shoudl look further in. yea, there were some anomalies in the early days. What got rejected in 2010 that didn't violate a clear and easily understandable rule? NO ONE AP. The rules are simple, and basically boil down to a) the app has to do something a simple website can't do alone, b) use good code practices and security, c) don't break laws or carrier contract terms, d) don't false advertise features, e) don't steal user data, and f) don;t steal someone Else's Intellectual Property. Yup, that's it. All the "gray area" boils down to that. If that's too restrictive for you, then i guess you want BestBuy to carry pirate software too then huh?

wrong

they do not pursue people making hackintoshes, they pursue people SELLING hackintoshes. Os X is licensed WITH a machine, they only sell upgrades. The OS is valued at between $399 and $599 depending on who you talk to, the value of iLife, and the value of the OS itself. Selling a machine with a $29 OS copy and a $49 iLife copy is stealing, and not just copy protected materials, but trademarked materials, and trademark law REQUIRES the holder to prosecute or forfeit the trademark.

Apple gave away Darwin, and has a thriving homebrew community. They LOVE their hackers, they jsut do not love the hackers that think they can PROFIT from Apple's wares while undercutting apple's market through unlicensed software.

Microsoft equally sues small IT shops that sell machines with improperly licensed OEM versions of their OS.

Apple's "closed" market is not really closed, outside of requiring their devs to a) follow local, state and federal laws, b) sell what they advertise, c) don't steal data, d) use good code practices (don;t use depreciated or forbidden APIs), and e) don;t steal IP. Follow those rules, and you're in. bestBuy and Walmart and Amazon have the EXACT SAME RULES, except they do allow people to sell crap, and then pull it after people complain (and loose money).

You're right, it;s no where near a monopoly. Even if it is, it;s not illegal to be a monopoly, and if you;re not amonopoly it;s not illegal to be anticompetitive, it;s only illegal to be BOTH, and apples ruels are not anticompetitive, they're reasonable and non-discriminatory.

you have that

it;s called the WWW. Sourceforge, CNet, etc will all STILL EXIST. By order of the supreme court, the manufacturer of an OS can not directly restrict what you run on hardware you own. (This is more loosely applied to phones due to FCC regulation of the stability of the network, and the fact that you own the phone but NOT the cell chip in it). Apple ca NOT prevent you from putting in apps fro other sources, they can only choose to not carry an app, something bestbuy, Amazon, Walmart, even your local grocer do every day.

Yup

It is because of this pointless bloatware than in most cases, Windows is cheaper than Linux. We don't buy Limux machines, we buy machines with Windows Pro licenses (decidedly NOT OEM versions), that have manufacturer linux support, and then just load linux on it, and sell the Windows Pro license to employees... net cost is about the same, maybe a touch higher including the labor to install Linux ourselves, but given that we purge and re-install windows based on our own image anyway, its a non-issue.

Film might be the only medium that CAN

The Silmarillion was drawn out, wordy, and compared to other works, pretty boring, but it did have a compelling story and some great scenes. It was overly full of descriptive text, which, translates into a few seconds on screen, making all the boring parts vanish and leaving a good story...

agreed, complete BS

The YOUNGEST Windows XP install in my home is over 3 years old. I have 1 running near 5 years without a re-install. The only reason any of them perform slower now than when installed day 1 is they have more software one them, more background tasks that they were previously asked to handle, and the application requirements themselves have gone up. IE has gone through 4 major revisions, Flash has gone through a bunch, iTunes, Quicktime, Office, all these apps have been upgraded, and are more demanding, thereby making the old systems work harder and appear slower. Even the base requirements for Windows itself have increased a ton. An XP machine with under 1GB of RAM is almost useless with modern software on it where, and I recommend 2GB standard, but I sold XP machines with 128MB of RAM when they were released, and that was plenty.

It only takes a small bit of care and effort to keep a machine running smooth. Keep it virus free, uninstall stuff you don't need anymore, if you add/remove a lot a registry cleaning might be needed, defrag as appropriate, and add hardware upgrades every 12-18 months (RAM and/or disk), and keep good backups (hardware failures can not be avoided, and software does cause issues, but why re-install when you can simply "recover"?).

invalid

I've build, and supported numerous online purchase portals. Even excluding rancid costs like boxing, advertising, unsold product, and logistical concerns, just the operation of your own systems to support sales can alone eat 30%. The smaller you are, the bigger the chunk.

Visa and the other card processors take a big swipe, as much as 5% off each transaction, and there's substantial investment in getting those systems up and running, especialyl if you also take alternate payment methods and a large variety of cards. The servers (and the internet pipe) have substantial costs as well, unless you business is VERY tiny. Handling post-sale purchase support, returns, and more is a burden as well for a lot of firms, though most smaller companies do handle that by simply not having a phone to call and saying "no" to emailed refund requests. Add in just a smidge of advertising, and throw some money at Google, and you could need to move thousandas of units just to recoup that cost.

Apple is providing the hosting, bandwidth, purchase overhead, even sales tax processing for you.

Granted, if you already invested this money, and have the infrastructure in place, 30% may easily exceed you current operating costs, but this hosing system means a lot of start up developers will be moving into this space, and as you read a lot of companies are simply discontinuing boxed products, and even cutting prices in half after giving apple 30% still looks to be netting them overall more money.

Not all companies will benefit from this, but MANY (even most) will. Others will have to adjust their business models, and likely spend more money to get noticed standing outside the store. Software prices are also expected to adjust accordingly, coming down, as boxed costs go away there's more room for margin, and thus heavier competition. If this adjusts enough (and apple shoudl give it incentive to), it could mean Mac software costs less than the same title on PC, and yet still makes more money for the devs, and unless Microsoft releases a similar marketplace, Windows could take a huge hit (if macs cost $200 more than an equivalent machine, but software is a $400 savings, suddenly the value proposition is easier to accept!)

not even closwe to the same

There are only a few "forbidden" APIs in OS X. They are not things Apple uses to stay ahead of the competition, they are things related to internal Kernel operation and security, features apps have no business touching, not even Apple's own apps. OS level functions only. Use of most of these forbidden APIs relates to handling of protected data houses inside some of apple's own apps, things that work around permission escalation or sandboxing, etc.

The majority of the "banned" APIs are either depreciated code, beta code, or code they have announced impending changes to. It pretty much means "if you touch this, and then we do, you're app will break, so this is just fair warning." They just replace the warning of "don't do it' with "we reject it, go do it the right way, you know, the NEW way we documented for you to do this..."

thanks troll

NO! the US supreme court guaranteed us the right to install any software within a standard PC OS. They can absolutely NOT wall that in.

Further, Apple could give two flips about locking down the OS. The only reasons iOS is so tight is the CARRIERS. All apple cares about is an app market free of crap, providing some customer comfort in trusting devs, and putting the apps in easy to find places with consistently available and accurate descriptions. It's a customer service. They barely even profit off of it.

Mobile OS are different. The FCC gives carriers the right to protect THE NETWORK, and on top of that, you never "technically" own the phone (see the FCC notice sections about how a carrier can demand the return of the cell chip and associated SIM at will, and without refund). The carrier can control the ecosystem on the device such to protect the network, because the only usable functions of the device are ON the network. PCs have not such binding association,you outright own the hardware, and license the OS on it. they can not more tell you you can not run 3rd party software as Microsoft could tell you that you can't have both MS office and OO on the same machine. Law protects that explicitly.

You have to jailbreak a phone not because apple doesn't support "openness" but because the carreris won't carry the device at all unless it's locked in specific ways. MS's store is also closed, as is RIM's. The only "open" store is google's, and only because the carriers were literally DESPERATE to have an alternative to iOS, and even that has to be jailbroken to do a lot of things, and many new droids are coming out without that ability, and some even coming down the pipe with remote-wipe capability for non-official ROMs.

my god man

What BS is this? There is no wall. US LAW prevents apple from closing the PC down, even if they wanted to, which they do not. the phone is only closed because the FCC gives carriers the right to do it, and because you do not own the phone, and because the OS is essentially inseparable from the device. PC and the OS on it ARE seperable.

The App store is merely a market, ONE market. It's cleaned of crap, will have aggressive prices, will be virus free, will have an amazing selection, and comes with some guarantees indie devs simply do not offer. It will never however be the only way to get apps. Any suggestion otherwise simply shows brute ignorance of law and Apple's intent both.

2 reasons no.

1) the market is not measured by media available on a single platform, it is measured by the total market size, which includes all methods with which to acquire that media, including physical copies. It is not illegal to exert anti-competitive practices unless it actually prevents business. Sony can just as easily sell elsewhere, and the government is OK since consumers can still buy it in that other place.

2) much more importantly, apple is not requiring sony to move books exclusively through their store, they';re just requiring they ALSO have the OPTION of moving books they also carry through their store.

This is being misconstrued as a money grab, but in reality, its much more likely a protection system for all their users with iOS devices who do not have credit cards, and/or for the kids getting iTunes allowances and/or gift cards to still be capable of buying content apple sells (the other models require a credit card, and if many popular apps move in that direction, a significant customer base is disadvantaged).

more to the point

it is STILL an option, even under these "enforced" rules. You can;t have an in-app process to buy a book direct from Amazon, but you can have a link in the app that opens a web site with which to buy the book, and it can still download into the device (into shared space, not inside the app container). This is how it is done today. All Apple is doing is saying "if you offer that, you ALSO have to offer in-app purchases through the iOS app store", at least for any content that actually is available in both places. If the content is not offered by apple, no itunes link is required.

Prevailing logic moves that this is in fact not a money grab, but is a protection for iOS users who either do not have a credit/debit card, who buy using iTunes gift cards, and for those who provide iTunes "allowances" for their kids. If Amazon, Sony, BnK, etc all used exclusively their own stores, customers who did not have Visa/etc accessibility would not be able to buy content, except through iBooks. Applying to books alone, this doesn't sound like a huge burden, but when applied to periodicals, game levels, and more, content that IS available in both places, it could be an issue.