Posts by sleepy
442 posts • joined Monday 12th March 2007 19:39 GMT
Posted in Review: Belkin Thunderbolt Express Dock
More options
Alternatives not mentioned that I can see are the very small Ethernet, FireWire 800, VGA and DVI adapters for thunderbolt that I keep in my bag. They don't require a thunderbolt cable. And Seagate have the Goflex adapter system for drives which includes thunderbolt options. I think the Belkin dock is even more of a niche product than it appears from this review.
Re: At or below cost
Amazon was selling at or below Amazon's cost from the publisher, (not at or below the publisher's marginal cost of supply), in order to create and extend an e-book monopoly. Each book is different, and the agency model means the publisher sells to the end user at a price the publisher determines. The reseller receives a sales commission. The agency model means resellers compete on service, not price. The publisher determines the price. Books are not fungible, so there can't really be a price cartel.
The MFN clause is vital to enable Apple (or anyone else) to know that if they invest in a business model that succeeds, the suppliers can't simply cut them off. Without the MFN clause, the iTunes store would have been shut down by the music publishers who thought the world belonged to them.
Apple's strategy definitely delivered a better customer experience (like the net book agreement), and it definitely gave the publishers pricing power. But since each book title only has one publisher, it's hard to say there was price fixing on any individual title.
What happened with the ending of the net book agreement is that many bookshops disappeared, and the reality is that books effectively became fungible as the publishers ceased to be sellers of books and actually became buyers of shop shelf space. The bookshops that remain concentrate on best sellers.
Don't worry, Apple has a plan
Obviously if you are restoring from the cloud, your original device has failed, and you can't use its presence for authentication. We have a compromise between ease of use and security. Still better than nothing. For proper 2 factor authentication we'll use the impending secure fingerprint scanner in every IOS device. Then the crooks will need to chop off your finger instead of stealing your iPhone. They'll have got the password by threatening to chop off your finger.
The biggest problem
Adobe goes out of business - so do you. Your business just became an Adobe subsidiary. How much did you get for it?
This could be an opportunity for Apple to rejuvenate their fading pro apps.
For anyone remotely interested in being serious: 1: there is always a big drop quarter over quarter in Apple's iPad and iPhone sales, but component makers can't adjust their capacity, so it's sort of a non-story. 2: The Japanese Yen dollar exchange rate has fallen 25% in 3 months and Sharp is desperate for orders. Lots of orders are going to Japan; South Korea is seeing serious price competition. 3: Apple will reveal actual iPhone and iPad sales for the quarter this evening. 4. Apple operates its business in a completely different way to its competitors, and this is obviously not widely understood, which suits Apple fine.
The sad truth is that to earn enough with pitiful ad revenue, it's necessary to write click bait drama queen headlines, linking to gossip. The secrecy which is an essential part of Apple's business model makes Apple a prime target for fabricated stories.
Re: Google does the same thing
Since your privacy is Google's primary commercial currency, an even higher level of cynicism is warranted than with Apple. It's naive to imagine a switch completely erases all information, just as it's naive to imagine that the "power" switch of any electronic gadget can actually turn it completely off.
Having servants to do stuff for you has always had the down side that you have to tell them what you want.
Re: nano-SIM
Apple would prefer no SIM at all, so service could be activated online. But meantime, they do what's best for the main customer (the carriers). Changing the SIM size helps to keep phone replacement and contract renewal tied together in a single transaction. And that tie is partly what makes iPhone the best phone for subscriber retention, and hence gets iPhone the biggest carrier subsidy.
Doesn't seem cheap to me
Are you sure Michael Dell isn't actually giving the appearance of trying to buy the company cheap in order to sucker someone else into paying him good money for the last 14% (I think) of the shares he owns, before the whole thing runs aground. In my view Dell's successful original business model has been dead for five years. Like HP, Dell's current accounting-generated "profitability" has been created by buying companies with revenue, and putting on the balance sheet "goodwill" equal to the money spent. In the past two years Dell claims to have earned $6B in profits, but "goodwill and intangibles" have increased by $7B. In fact nett tangible assets (the money you'd get to give back to shareholders if you closed the company down) is now minus $2B. Not as dire as HP's -$12B. Nor as comfortable as Apple's +$121B. If you run a hugely profitable business for many years, you're supposed to end up with lots of cash and no debts aren't you? (That would be Mr Dell himself, of course, not the company!)
I disagree
Of course geeks feel pain and criticise when trivial little ipads take over territory once ruled by geeks. If you then try to use ipads as direct replacements for other teaching resources, then it's you that causes failure. You can't blame the ipad for not being pencil and paper, or a wintel PC, or a violin.
iPad is primarily for general educational purposes, not for A level computer science. A raspberry pi seems a pretty good addition to an iPad for teaching computer science. And for general education, it's commonly found that attainment levels improve when iPads are introduced.
Here's a typical subjective description of what iPad brings to education, if you let it:
http://edudemic.com/2012/11/the-early-results-of-an-ipad-classroom-are-in/
Re: Why do people put forward the idea that iPads are good for art?
David Hockney dun it. No paint on kid's clothes makes iPads good for art.
Re: It's "just" a replacement back cover
Precisely. Probably just posturing by Samsung to extract something from its "partners". Business is war.
As Charlie Munger says, if you can't cope with 50% falls in the market price, you probably don't deserve to own shares in a business.
The combined market cap of the world's carriers is far greater than Apple's, and they apparently hate Apple. Yet Apple is able to milk 50% of its profits from the carriers, because Apple delivers subscribers who pay more, and who switch carrier less. How are the carriers going to put Apple out of the picture when they have to make 3 year volume commitments to get iPhone, and bleed subscribers when they don't have iPhone. Apple changed the mobile customer experience by leveraging government-forced carrier competition, and Google et al walked in through the open door behind Apple. Apple had already forced the music business to get out of the way. And that's what the cash pile is for. There is no industry in the world that Apple cannot extract groundbreaking change and cooperation from, because Apple has the cash to set up as a formidable competitor if they don't get cooperation. Two industries that must be in the firing line next are TV content distribution, and retail banking services. TV is a tough one because the product is not fungible.
The idea that Apple is a gadget company that got lucky is supremely naive. They are an engineering company, and they engineer whole industries and markets. The gadgets, software and cloud services are the result of their success, not the cause of it, and that's why it's never going to matter if Apple's products lack geek appeal.
Re: Me right
English is an evolving language, and this case both forms are used, depending on the names of the people involved. Thus "Me and Tracy went to the pub" and "Elizabeth and I went to the pub" are both acceptable. But if the names were swapped, they would both be unacceptable.
Alternatives are good?
Apple's choice is to hold constant the appearance and behavior of core features such as phone, email, web, and to prohibit arbitrary code execution except by the Apple JavaScript engine (thus minimizing the exploit attack surface). Whereas Android users must observe certain behaviors for matching benefits. Those behaviors may be natural for Reg readers, if not for the billions of ungeeky. It seems to me there are benefits in both approaches, but the chances are that millions of Android users will at some point in the coming decades be using an exploited smartphone, beyond Google's or their own control, even if that outcome is exceedingly unlikely for readers of the Reg.
Apple's approach has its place in the market.
Re: Problems
1. true, but most people like the fact that an iphone is an iphone, and not a weird personal statement. A long time ago there was "What did morons do before CB radio?" Today it's "..before Android?" That's not to say there aren't plenty of perfectly normal people who use Android.
2. All cameras produce imperfect images with very bright lights in front. You can see the effect on screen, and slightly adjust camera position to fix it before taking the picture. I've never seen the iPhone 5 purple haze produced unintentionally. The camera is very good.
IOS keyboard has always had long press popup, and slide from shift key to chosen key for single keystroke shifts. But that doesn't mean it's perfect for everyone. Personally, I could never buy a BMW because the texture on the brake pedal isn't as effective as on the Audi. (lame joke) The idea that it would make a BMW better if different models had different brake pedals (more choice - more versatile - see?) doesn't gel with me. Equally the idea that each Android device might have different keyboard details does not excite me.
non-story
Last years pay was golden handcuffs that will reward him over the coming decade or so provided he stays and achieves results. Of course he's not getting more this year. What does he do? For a start he gets up at 3:45 every morning then does an hour of email and an hour in the gym and then a very long day's work. He is seriously, obsessively dedicated. Would you be if you had hundreds of millions in the bank?
Latterly, Steve Jobs wasn't really into hedonism; I suspect it was mainly for privacy and home cooking anywhere in the world with his family. Not for sailing; it's a landlubbers idea of the perfect yacht.To prove it, it's being taken to the USA as deck cargo.
If he'd wanted to sail it, his friend Larry Ellison would have put him right on the design(er).
A bit more reading suggests . . .
Autonomy was a conventional software house, mostly, generating consultancy fees. Doubtless the consultants were bundled into software sales, making the software appear far more valuable than it was. So HP actually paid $5M a head for a professional services firm. Very hard to scale, but probably, the consultants have mostly left now anyway.
Big challenges
Despite trying to, Intel hasn't been able to change, because the duopoly with Microsoft has been so strong. But that's changing. The supremacy of X86 is almost over and in the next few years, Intel may have its biggest change since switching from being a memory company to a CPU company. The CPU may finally have become a commodity like memory.
Sad
It's sad that Greenpeace has changed from campaigning on important issues to maximising attention and financial contributions from guilt ridden middle class gadget buyers. Instead, how about a Greenpeace exposee of the building industry's use of PVC for example, which must be thousands of times greater than that of the electronics industry?
Really?
Looks to me like a total misunderstanding. Apple hates to see its products discounted. Just a click bait story pretending this price difference isn't just VAT, which I'm sure it is. The whole industry runs on tiny margins supplemented by "marketing support" payments to "well behaved" retailers who don't brag about discounts.
So that's 3% margin then. Business as usual. and don't forget in the EU it's the retailer with the two year warranty obligation, not Apple. Then there's the credit card fee. And have you seen high street rent and rates? And anyway, it's still back ordered, so the whole story is barmy.
I prefer the agency model too
In the Internet economy, authors can sell direct to readers, setting their own price. It's the author/publisher buying marketing and fulfillment service from Apple or Amazon, not Apple or Amazon buying and reselling physical goods.
Posted in Apple to ditch Intel – report
PowerPC?
Intel has managed to mitigate the weakness of the X86 instruction set by having the best fabs, and not making chips for anyone else. They even sold off their ARM based products to Marvell, to prove their faith in X86 to their sceptical customers. But if losing Apple was a done deal, and Apple don't sell bare chips, maybe Intel could make ARM, or even PowerPC SOC's for Apple.
However much you may dislike Apple's control freakery, it's what enabled them twice before to switch CPU architectures. Something both Microsoft and Intel have aspired to, but failed to gain traction with. (remember Windows NT for PowerPC? iAPX432, Xscale, Itanium?)
The nub of the matter is: what could Apple persuade Intel to do for them, given that X86 is not remotely the mainstream any more, and iGizmos must inexorably move towards zero build cost over the decades.
Posted in Apple iPad Mini 8in tablet review
Re: Say it isn't so
Only the naive ever took Steve Jobs at face value. And that's nearly everyone. He just said the competing 7 inch tablets were a bad experience, because that's what Apple needed people to hear. And they were and are a relatively bad experience. Launching at 10 inches was essential to give the iPad its own identity and its own distinctive apps. Apple even discontinued laptops below 13 inch years before, to create an extra kick start from Apple loyalists. But no-one can seriously believe Apple/Steve Jobs didn't know that 7-8 inch would outsell 10 inch, just as 3.5-4 inch (iPhone) outsells both. Apple never were as stupid as the average commentard (obviously).
Perhaps the biggest weakness of the Android seven inchers is their dependence on scaled up phone apps and UI. There simply isn't the motivation for the average app developer to make a special 7 inch UI and by allowing cheap 7 inchers into the Android market first, there never will be a well defined full sized Android tablet UI. Apple's willingness to spend years constructing its own market is what keeps it so very far ahead of both competitors and pundits, who delude themselves that Apple's position is the result of hype, and style over substance. Meanwhile, the iPad mini is here, ready for Christmas, ready to outsell every other tablet, and ready to be upgraded to retina resolution in 6 months, with the current model continuing at £249, and the ten inch model unlikely to be seriously challenged, even by Microsoft, whose Surface is just the latest incarnation of the PC.
I queued . . .
I'm sorry, I couldn't help myself. I though I was being logical. I could wait until I'd read the reviews, and still be sure of getting the config I wanted on the first day, instead of a three week wait for it to arrive if I ordered online. The Glasgow photo at 9:00 am obviously ins't going to show a queue that was at 8:00am. It took me 15 minutes including queueing and being served in Exeter. The queue (about 60 at 8:00am) was almost gone when I left.
I really like the first day queuing system. It's beautifully egalitarian. If you really want a new Apple product, you can have one, at the start of the first day, whoever you are. The inconvenience is surprising small (15 minutes in queue for me).
Three points
1. Foxconn have over a million employees; only 1 employee in 250 was involved even if the story is true.
2. Anyway, Foxconn says no-one went on strike, and production wasn't disrupted.
3. Quite likely this story is exaggerated FUD to cover Apple stock price manipulation by high frequency traders. It happens every time there's a run up in Apple's share price at the same time as an expected gap in real Apple news flow. This time we've had mapgate, scratchgate, iPhone 5 is rubbish, iPhone 5 is Steve's final genius product; 5 million in the first weekend is a big disappointment etc etc, and lo the market cap is down 50 billion.
4. Foxconn manufacture for almost every other brand name too, nothing special about Apple.
5. Apple manufacture in China not principally because it's cheaper, but because they can get new designs and design changes into production within hours anywhere else; not enough mid level engineers, not enough specialist companies, and not enough staff willing to come in to do repetitive but exacting work at zero notice, even in the middle of the night, as soon as the parts are available.
Vice versa?
Could it be that dementia is the cause and not using computers the effect?
And by the way
Java is disabled by default on MacOS and is automatically re-disabled if unused for a period of time.
Re: Can anyone please advise me ...
Chrome is not the only browser to sandbox Flash/plugins. Safari and Internet Explorer also sandbox. But a sandbox won't necessarily save your system from a vulnerability.
Funny
Funny how Steve Jobs / Apple were called evil control freaks for keeping everything but HTML5/Javascript off the iPhone. Two years ago Google took out full page ads to boast its openness in supporting buggy proprietary Flash on Android. "We love Apple, but what we don't love is anybody taking away your freedom . . .".
And now everyone's quietly doing the same as Apple, practically every mobile browser is built on Apple's Webkit, and HTML5/Javascript is standard and more or less universal. Remember the days of Internet-Explorer-only web sites, and only-works-properly-on-Windows Flash?
Frankly, thank goodness for Apple (and Google before they switched objectives to world domination).
Apple is a very straightforward company, easy to understand and very professional.
Apple does not give to charity, but does match employee charitable payments up to 10% of salary.
The article and many comments offer opinions as facts, but provide no evidence.
This is only one lawsuit out of 50 or so between Samsung and Apple around the world. It doesn't stop even Samsung from selling Android smartphones; it just makes slavish copying less worthwhile. How does preventing Samsung from copying the iPhone top-to-bottom inhibit innovation? It doesn't.
Apple's business model does require some protected space to survive. Just look what happened when they licensed Mac OS; it nearly killed them. Software patents are stupid, but they are all Apple can use to defend the space in which they operate.
Apple didn't just invent the iPhone; they figured out how to force the carriers to (a) offer reasonable data contracts and (b) get out of the way of providing services based on data. "Walled garden" tight control is what enabled them to negotiate deals that broke down barriers not just for iPhone, but for Android too.
Without Apple and iPhone we would still be on Windows Mobile, with exorbitant data contracts and no significant Android market share. Like it or not, Apple innovation and control freakery has changed the world in desktop, smartphone and tablet computing.
Apple wants a judgement, any judgement. . .
. . . not a settlement. Samsung only had real success when they copied everything, including the device appearance, the packaging, the power adapter, the dock connector. Apple just wants a space in which to operate, or their business model is blown.
never mind the quality, feel the width
The article says Android is 3 times as popular as IOS. Being the largest selling phone OS does not make it the most popular (which means liked by people). It's clear the majority of Android users don't care much about their phone, and don't use it much beyond a feature phone either. Android may outnumber IOS by 3 to 1, but IOS devices outnumber Android by 3 to 1 on the web. Four out of five Android users are not on the latest release 4.x, whereas four out of five IOS users are on the latest release (Android 4, IOS 5 both released Oct 2011). (Netmarketshare).
In JD Power and other user satisfaction ratings, iPhone comes top. In Changewave smartphone buying intentions, iPhone is ahead of all Android.
Android may one day wipe IOS off the map. But at the moment iPhone has the stronger, more loyal and more profitable customer base.
Insoluble
It's an insoluble problem, which is why both Google and Microsoft are making attempts to bolt Apple's business model on the side of their own, becoming device manufacturers in competition with their own hardware partners.
The problem is that the device manufacturer doesn't have the customer; the platform and/or the carrier does. Next time around, any loyalty a customer has, will be to Android, not to Samsung, HTC, Panasonic, Sony, Motorola, LG, Kyocera, Panasonic or Huawei. There is simply no motivation for manufacturers to spend good money enhancing an already sold device with the latest Android release.
It's the same problem for Android OEMs that plagued the Wintel PC makers - inability to innovate or even change, because change takes effort, and the effort costs, while benefitting competitors equally.
Apple's business model lets them keep devices up to date, and reap the benefit of a strong customer relationship, which includes an ability to impose change. The rest of the industry has always depended on Apple not for innovation itself, but to give innovations critical mass in the market. That includes the 3.5 inch floppy, SCSI, WiFi, HTML5, the mouse/windows UI, USB, the touchscreen UI, Postscript, the tablet computer, and doubtless others.
The only way this is useful to Samsung is if they can say "no, we copied Sony, just as Apple did." As soon as you consider that, it's clear that Samsung's product is deeply close to Apple's, but both are at best only superficially related to a prior Sony product.
Although the court cases always come down to moronic specifics, Apple does have a large and serious issue to resolve. Just as Microsoft OEMs do now that MS has made them all second class partners with Surface. MS hasn't learned from Playsforsure/Zune, but Apple certainly has from the cloning of Apple II and Macintosh.
Re: Analyse?
Exactly, it can't have been analysing what each app was actually doing. So it's more a "here's what Bitdefender thinks of your Apps" application masquerading as something more insightful and authoritative.
Re: I may be a bit simpole here but.....
MS does this with every Windows upgrade. It enables them to claim enormous immediate sales of the new release, and in fact engineer more or less whatever initial sales figure they want.
It's based on US accounting regulations that say you can't recognise sales until you have made ALL the deliverables available to the customer. So those Windows 7 licences OEM's are buying in the usual huge quantities (or quite possibly more, because of the threat Windows 7 might not be available at the current price for very long), include a free upgrade to Windows 8. And because Windows 8 is a not yet available deliverable, MS is not recognising the sales until after W8 can be downloaded. So it's not really a Windows 7 OEM sale is it? It's a Windows 8 sale that is not currently deliverable, but has the right to use Windows 7 meantime.
And that's how MS can say to the world "our most successful Windows launch ever". It's a monopoly, and they simply relabel a suitable bunch of sales of the old version to look like the world eagerly CHOOSING the new product.
So when, in due course, MS brags about the incredibly successful launch, you'll know their claims are entirely meaningless, won't you? You didn't think MS could afford to take a RISK with a Windows release did you?
Of course Samsung copied, and in detail. Of course iPad looks "obvious" in retrospect - that's what's Apple's minimal design is all about. But it was not obvious before Apple showed the world. There had been tablets for years, but very few people actually wanted them.
The judge has explicitly allowed Apple to continue asserting that Samsung copied iPad. He believes it to be a matter of opinion, which Apple has the right to express. But he wants Apple to point out to consumers that under English law, sale of Samsung's product has not been compromised by Apple's well publicised litigation.
Of course his real motivation in this olympic year was to remind the world of Monty Python.
Posted in China risks mountain of unsold PCs
I thought the global market for PC's was shrinking?
So China must be shrinking 3 times as fast.
Oh look. Apple is back in EPEAT.
http://www.apple.com/environment/letter-to-customers/
You can read about the environmental impact of Apple products here:
http://www.apple.com/environment/reports/
Re: admit it, you just made that word up.
OSX spellchecker likes it. "Disintermediation" is in Wikipedia too, if you want more.
Re: You Pay to Play When You Join the Cult of Cupertino
AFAIK Apple issue security updates for the current and immediately prior OS versions. Older than that, I don't know, but I'm pretty sure Apple would ensure that you can safely use a Mac for at least 5-7 years from original purchase date, and if you can't update your OS any more, they will issue security updates for the last OS version you can use.
It was Apple and Google
..that worked together to make it an HTML5 internet and end the Microsoft (or any other) monopoly. Then, just as it began to work, Google decided to try and become the new Microsoft and defeat both Apple and Microsoft, by entering the phone business, doing a deal to put Flash back centre stage, etc. But it didn't work. Despite the fact that there are more Android devices than IOS, only 7% of them run the current release (vs 70% of IOS), and Android owners don't even use the web much, let alone subscribe to Murdoch publications. (in June there was more than three times more IOS browsing than Android, despite lower device numbers).
And with hundreds of different device/release versions, Android isn't yet such an attractive market for Murdoch. The problem Murdoch hasn't embraced is that to sell like old print media did, you have to sell it like old print media. In other words, I'll happily pay a pound or two for one copy of the Times or the FT on a day when I'm likely to read it (e.g. on the train). But there's no way I'm going to actually subscribe for more than pennies a day. Even free, I'm quite likely not to subscribe. There is no way Murdoch can get casual readers to subscribe. If he wants their eyeballs, it has to be free. Find a way.
Don't write off Apple too quickly at the low end. Only natural they should hold off for as long as possible before pissing in the soup (as the CEO of Avis so graphically put it years ago).
Carriers let apple in because of the downside of iPhone, not the upside
I think the way Apple disintermediated the carriers was by exploiting the "competition" set up by governments when issuing carrier licences. By offering an exclusive, if iPhone failed, no harm done that the carrier had signed away the customer relationship. But if iPhone was a success, subscribers would switch in their millions, and competing carriers would be powerless.
So carriers signed up as simple insurance, not to be on the losing side. I don't think anyone in the industry actually believed iPhone would succeed. Signing was just in case.
Apple needs product differentiation
Apple's business model is based on innovation and differentiation. Business is war, and Apple is going to use every legal means to keep its products differentiated. It has nothing to do with petulant narcissism. It is puerile to anthropomorphize Apple. It's a multinational corporation; it doesn't have emotions. Everything Apple and Samsung do is of necessity cynical, because otherwise someone somewhere would rip them off. But cynicism with integrity is possible.
The Apple II started the mainstream adoption of personal computers. Cloners cloned, and IBM copied the Apple II in the IBM PC*. Apple II became irrelevant. The IBM PC was in turn cloned by Compaq and others, and IBM lost control of their own product.
The Macintosh revolutionised personal computers, and made them accessible to everyone, from toddlers up. Despite the fact that it took Microsoft twelve years to make the first convincing copy of MacOS (Windows 95), the PC virtually put Apple out of business. Apple tried to increase market share by licensing Mac clones, but the cloners simply made cheap copies of Apple models, taking sales from Apple instead of growing market share. To conceal their monopoly, Microsoft did what was needed to keep Mac alive (mainly maintaining a compatible version of MS Office on the Mac).
Android was unsuccessful as implemented for Google in 2007, so Google copied iPhone's OS. Samsung was unsuccessful with their own copies of the iPhone and iPad hardware, so they copied iPhone and iPad slavishly and have been phenomenally successful. Android phones now outnumber iPhones.
Copying can put Apple out of a market and out of business far more quickly than in the first PC OS wars, leaving a wasteland of zero margins and zero innovation. It's an issue Apple has faced for decades. In the courts, the individual battle always ends up being apparently trivial. But what's at stake is much larger.
*The IBM PC was a direct response to the Apple II. It used a different CPU (8088 vs 6502), and a separate standard IBM keyboard. But otherwise it was uncannily Apple II ish, with slots, TV interface, game paddles, cassette interface.
Posted in Why I love Microsoft’s vapourware tablet
No way does this ship in October
Download the spec sheet. Practically everything is undefined (including weight, thickness, screen resolution, battery life, price, included features. There is not a single photo of the product on surface.com. No wireless features are specified (apart from the fact it has an aerial). The video out port is a file format, and the screen technology is a software text rendering system.
In short, it's gibberish. This is just MIcrosoft yet again pretending its monopoly is something else. Trouble is, the client device monopoly is long gone. What Disty or retailer is going to buy this after Zune, and the RIM and HP tablet experiences?
Microsoft has had a good run with client computing, but this is just a remake of the last scene with Ballmer as Thelma and Sinofski as Louise.
