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http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/gartner_projects_apple_to_rule_tablet_market_through_2015/

Gartner analysis has it at 73, and predicted to drop by 2015. You are looking at World Wide numbers. Sherman Anti Trust only pertains to US market share.
Now there is room for error in counting methods, but it is damn near the 75 percent number that makes it special in the eyes of Anti Trust. Not that it ever really hurt MS.

Apple's market share is 66% for all personal computers sold in stores for more than $1,000. In addition, Apple's market share as been increasing as sales of PCs as a whole have been dropping.

Are you serious? Those are sales figures (sold new at retail stores in first quarter 2008 for over $1000), not usage figures. You're not talking about what's being used in the market, just what was sold during the first quarter - OF 2008! - and even then you're only considering retail stores and $1000+ computers, where the average PC cost is $650. So not only are your sales figures irrelevant to a discussion about usage share, but they're cherrypicked to such a ridiculous level that they're not even relevant as overall sales figures. That's like saying a large percentage of the cars on the road are Cadillacs because, in June of 2010, they sold the most domestic cars that cost more than $40k. Most cars cost less than that new, many cars aren't bought from domestic dealerships, and most of the cars on the road aren't new or weren't bought new in that time period. Likewise, most computers don't cost that much, many of them aren't bought from retail stores, and there are more computers out there than what was bought new in the first quarter of 2008.

The GP's point was that Mac's desktop OS market share is less than 10%. And that's not only true, but it's generous - as of 5/2012, they've got about 6.5%. Like it was mentioned earlier, less than Vista.

Apple's market share is 66% for all personal computers sold in stores for more than $1,000. In addition, Apple's market share as been increasing as sales of PCs as a whole have been dropping.

That's because most Windows PC's are less than $1000. We don't pay the $2-300 extra for the Apple tax. My completely decked out PC was $1300 and had twice the computing power of an Mac of the same price. So of course an entry level model will not register in the $1000+ market.

Apple's market share is 66% for all personal computers sold in stores for more than $1,000. In addition, Apple's market share as been increasing as sales of PCs as a whole have been dropping.

Imma let you finish but Apple's about to become the most profitable company OF ALL TIME!

No, first they came for phones and tablets, and they can barely keep them in stock with people falling over themselves and risking stampedes to buy them.

http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/gartner_apple_turns_its_complete_inventory_every_5_days/

But somehow it's fashionable only to slag Microsoft on here and ignore the elephant in the room with the lion's share of devices and profits.

Maybe Woz will show up to play this one too.

Okay, I can understand wanting some kind of rudimentary spreadsheet viewing/editing application for tablet/mobile devices, but Excel is a particularly good example of a program that really needs a physical, full-size keyboard. There are numerous key combinations and shortcuts that are absolutely essential for efficient usage of Excel. If you're doing any kind of spreadsheet work, you need a keyboard with a numeric keypad, cursors, and Ctrl/Alt/Shift/F-number keys. Tapping an on-screen keyboard just isn't going to cut it, especially when that keyboard takes up valuable screen space that would otherwise be used to display more cells.

If you think shortcuts on an on-screen keyboard are the way UIs on touch devices are done, you haven't understood how they work. On touch devices, there are no shortcuts. The on-screen keyboard is used for text entry, nothing more. If you want to select a cell, you just tap on it, you don't press some kind of arrow button. If you want to make something bold, you tap the bold button right next to the text field. With a pure software UI, you can make any special-purpose input you want. For example, take a look at the Numbers number keyboard. You just have exactly the buttons you need, and they say exactly what they do. No need to remember any shortcuts or functional correspondences.

No, no, no, you're doin' it all wrong. It's Apple is beleaguered! .

Kids these days.

The study, Apple’s High Effective Tax Rate Obscures Foreign Tax Benefits, shows how tech giant Apple pays low taxes and keeps this fact from public view. Like Google and General Electric—two companies that have been in the news this year because of their aggressive tax planning—Apple takes advantage of lax U.S. tax rules to shift profits out of the United States and greatly reduce its tax bill. But unlike these companies, Apple also takes advantage of flexible accounting rules that allow it to report large U.S. tax expense to shareholders and the public even though those taxes actually have not (and may never be) paid to the IRS.

Source.

If I, as a private citizen, were to hide taxable income off-shore in order to avoid paying taxes on it, I would be jailed for Income Tax evasion. I guess multi-billion dollar corporations don't have to abide by the same rules us "little people" do.

Here's another article detailing tax breaks given to Apple to establish a server farm in North Carolina. Up to $46 million will be saved in taxes. How many employees do you think they will create with that $46 million dollar break? And if the taxes are paying the employees salaries, why the hell doesn't the state just employ them directly and put them to work doing something that benefits the public directly, and not a billion dollar corporation? You hear "Government doesn't create jobs!" rhetorical bullshit constantly, if the government is subsidizing the fucking jobs, and without said subsidies those jobs wouldn't exist, how does that even make logical sense? It seems to me that the government is the only one creating jobs via tax cuts. Problem is the bulk of private sector isn't holding up their end of the bargain and actually hiring people with those breaks, they're pocketing them and blaming them on unfair regulations and other nonsense...

Methinks it behooves you to check your history since you seem ignorant of it ...

1998 March, SaeHan Information Systems ""MPMan" - the first digital MP3 player
1998 September, Diamond "Rio PMP300"
2000 Creative "NOMAD Jukebox"
2001 October, Apple "iPod" /sarcasm Looks like Creative "ripped off" 2 other companies !

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_media_player
* http://www.randomhistory.com/2008/08/04_ipod.html
* http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/iPod_1_Apple_Continues_MP3_Player_Dominance_In_November/

If Steve Jobs showed up at Android developers and offered to work with them, I think they would be suspicious. If he promised to help them port their Android software to iOS, and then when they finished working on it after spending a year of development he said "haha, nope! just kidding, it doesn't work.", THEN that wouldn't be okay. That would be deceptive and bad. If you want to announce to the world you hate somebody and you want to compete with them, go right ahead.

I'm getting a sense of deja vu here:

http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/apple_effectively_bans_flash_compiler_in_iphone_os_4_developer_agreement/

The only thing I would say is that Apple never, enticed Adobe to create a Flash compiler, but the end result was pretty similar.

I really have no clue how my post's obviously critical position towards Apple can be read as fanboyism ("Apple was being killed by having too many products and no clear sense of direction."). Quoting the article you refer to:

We were still very dependent on the profits of Apple II. I felt we had to push profits of Apple II and Steve wanted to lower the price of the Mac to get sales up. We went to the board to decide.

The period Sculley is talking about is centered around 1985. That's what your "at the time" refers to. Their prices were pretty much at the top end of what would be "acceptable" given their relatively low volumes, all the while the PC market was churning out mass-made PCs that kept going down in price. That's what I mean by the price of Mac not changing much: it only changed relative to the price of a PC.

Heck, Apple's products are still considered to be overpriced, and Apple's stock took several "beatings" supposedly as a reaction to the "excessive" pricing (say in Oct 2008).

I still stand by my position that Apple's products showed lack of focus and attention to detail under SSA (Sculley, Spindler and Amelio), and that this was really their undoing. Exceptional products can be sold at a premium, during the SSA period Apple's products kept losing the exceptional status -- status that was faltering even when Jobs was in charge of the Mac. What happened to Apple was IMHO all for the better: it allowed Jobs to learn from his own failures (NeXT), and to get the insight needed to recover the company.

I do of course consider the first Mac to be a revolutionary product, but it was coming short in performance, and there wasn't much improvement in that area, and for quite a while. It really took to change over to Intel CPU for Macs to start having competitive performance.

they even copied the power brick

I'm sorry, are you saying that the shape of an AC-to-DC adaptor is patentable? Seriously? It's a block on a cord. Ok, let's do a Google search for your Apple power brick... huh, looks like the majority of responses seem to be about a class-action lawsuit against Apple for selling a power brick that sparks and catches fire. Hmm. Aha! Here we are - Apple sued Media Solutions Holdings for duplicating the look of their power brick - but Media Solutions Holdings isn't Samsung, and that lawsuit was in 2009. Sorry, I'm not understanding where your fanboi-ish complaint about a power brick is coming from.

As for the claims of trademark infringement... Are you complaining about the size and shape of a smartphone? Literally every smartphone on the market can be described generically as "a brick about 1 cm thick, 7 cm wide, and around 12 cm long". Similarly, nearly all of them are either black, white, or silver. Most of the decent ones that don't break after 6 months of normal use have no moving parts, so they can all be described as having a screen and practically nothing else as the front face, as well.

Or did you want to complain about a generic set of icons?

One of the icons pictured as "infringing" is a picture of a white-ish telephone handset, on a green field. You know, like every cellphone in the world has on its face, to indicate the button to push to get the dialer? Yeah, that sounds like a big trademark infringement there. Better sue Nokia, Motorola, HTC, AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile while you're at it - they all use green pictures of telephone handsets to indicate which button to push to make a voice call, too. Come to think of it, so does Microsoft.

Another icon is a speech balloon, indicating (surprise) texting and/or chat. Again, this is on damn near every text-capable phone in the world.

The third icon in that series is a picture of a... what is that, a sunflower? So now a picture of a flower is an infringement? It's not the same flower, it's not the same picture angle, it's not the same amount of flower shown, and one of them has boxes superimposed over it. What, exactly, is infringing here? More to the point, what part of "picture of sunflower" is supposed to make me think "Apple iPhone"?

Moving right along to the fourth pair of pictures showing the "similarities" of these two devices, we have a settings icon. A representation of a gear, or gears. Show me an OS that doesn't use a gear like that. No, really. Win95 uses a gear picture very similar to that for MS-DOS applications. Quick, call Microsoft so they can get a piece of this sideshow!

The notepads pictured in the next pair of icons are similar, yes... but how many different icons can you think of that might indicate some sort of note-jotting application? The only other thing I can think of is a Post-It, and those are trademarked, too.

A bust of a person, in silhouette, to indicate a contact list. MySpace and FaceBook should be able to cut ahead in line for that one, and maybe they can sue Apple too, just for fun.

Gasp! The HORROR! They stole the idea of an using image of a compact disc with a musical note superimposed to indicate a music player application! ... or maybe they just figured that it made sense, since a CD is the only way to purchase a physical copy of music any more.

Let's move on to the patent infringement, shall we?

"Patent #7,863,533 is an old-school hardware patent. Titled 'Cantilevered push button having multiple contacts and fulcrums', it covers the volume rocker on the iPhone 3G and 3GS" ... and every other device for the past 10 years that has an audio output.

Ok, I'm done with this, it's starting to feel like I'm shooting children's candy in a barrel, or something.

Probably the only company to fly a pirate flag.

Probably the only company to dedicate their home page to eulogize someone (not Steve Jobs himself).
http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/Apple_Honors_Rosa_Parks_on_Home_Page/

RIP Steve Jobs. You were a hero, an artist, innovator, and visionary of the likes we will not know. More people, businesses, and campuses should fly pirate flags.

1. Ellison was a director of Apple for a while after Jobs returned.
2. Jobs was the official wedding photographer at Ellison's wedding.
3. "Steve Jobs is my best friend" - Ellison.

So yes, Ellison is quite happy to throw a monkey wrench into Google's gears - aligning with Google instead would have meant going after his best friend.

Meanwhile actual hackers, like the guys who won the Pwn2own contests by beating OSX security, now say OSX Lion is more secure than Windows (even though they previously freely admitted Snow Leopard was trailing Windows' latest offering in that department.)

"Both Miller and his co-author in the book The Mac Hacker's Handbook, Dino Dai Zovi of Trail of Bits said that from a security perspective, Snow Leopard was little better on Leopard, but that Lion is a "significant improvement." Zovi describes the level of security in Lion as "Windows 7 plus plus." Apple hired the inventor of the BitFrost security system for OLPC, Ivan Krstic, two years ago in an effort to beef up core OS security. Krstic's methods in BitFrost mirror closely what has now been implemented in Lion."

Then the iPhone came, and everyone changed their designs.

You know, Apple wasn't the first with a touchscreen phone.

Even if we ignore things like the decade-old Handspring Visor GSM module and focus on "modern" touchscreen phones, I can point to the LG Prada (announced in Dec. 2006, released Jan. 2007). You'll not that it had a capacitive touchscreen. (LG even claimed that Apple stole their design after they won a design award in Sept. 2006)

Before the Prada, we had a whole bunch of touchscreen phones -- so many you may even be interested in this Top 5 article from Dec. 2006. (Pay particular attention to the design of the 8525 -- you can clearly see the shadows of the iPhone.) Of course, the Prada is the first truly iPhone like phone -- I can only assume that LG used their time machine to beat Apple to the punch.

It appears Oracle wants the community to fork the code, and even if they don't, I see it as almost inevitable. At that point, Oracle has dealt itself out.

Here's another example, in the case of MySQL: Apple officially removed MySQL from the OS X Lion Server build, in favor of Postgres SQL. And this is directly because they (Apple) are concerned with Oracle's policies.

And of course, Apple deprecated Java a long time ago.

No doubt Apple is backing its new iCloud platform as the way for everyone to share - and damn the so-called hardware Server market. This is the only operating system not natively supported in most virtual machines. IDC doesn't even include Apple in market share reports anymore, and they've clearly de-leveraged their investment over the past few years as opposed to their commitment to growing xServe in 2002

All that aside, I had a client who insisted on moving to OSX Server in 2003 to manage his email. FIle sharing was fine, even over a massive fiber/iscsi San config. But it didn't take long for his users to force a switch to an exchange hosted environment. The features just weren't there and the support or the tech resources to make corrections were far too time-consuming.

It's also been said at least twice (2009 and 2010)

Care to source that? Only thing I can find is this:

Any security expert knows that Mac OS X is less secure than Windows. The question is which is SAFER. Because Mac OS X is still relatively rare, it is actually a little safer. But it has nothing to do with it being more secure, but rather, that bad guys are entirely focused on Windows at the moment due to the overwhelming market share Windows has. At this time, I still don't recommend anti-virus for Mac OS X users, because there simply isn't much malware for that platform. However, if Mac OS X market share ever goes up, there will be a landslide of exploits and malware.

Sounds like the most expensive laptop is the easiest one to hack, according to the competitors. Who wouldn't go for it?

http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/pwn2own_winner_mac_os_x_is_less_secure_than_windows/

In a surprise turn of events, Apple is able to undercut most other tablets in price due to the enormous volumes in which they buy components. We are talking billions at a time (almost $8B from Samsung alone), giving Apple volume pricing, and allowing them to come close to cornering the market on 9" LCDs, and get a good chuck of flash at great prices as well. Apple's vlume-pricing power makes Wal-Mart look like a mom-n-pop.

All that cash (over $50B) that Apple has sitting around, losing money on T-Bills, which some shareholders have bitched about, has actually come in handy. Don't question the Jobs.

The Spotlight db gets corrupted. Read this.

I suppose this is the (evil) genius of lock-in: subsidise the hardware with app-store profits. Defer consumers seeing higher prices until they buy apps, or rely on the cut-throat app-store market forcing developers to absorb the discount.

Apple doesn't release iPad gross margins specifically, but they have hinted that while the iPad is profitable, it's got lower margins than other product lines. Considering the margins they report, and the percentage of their overall sales the iPad now represents, I'm pretty sure they aren't selling it at a loss.

Just FYI, a recent business IT survey shows interest in iPads stomping all other tablets: about four fifths of companies planning to buy tablets next quarter plan on buying iPads. And it shows satisfaction with iPads vastly outstripping other companies' offerings. (It's also extremely interesting to note that 38% of IT respondants using iPads say they are using them for laptop replacement.)

In other relevant iPad news, holiday sales numbers seem to show iPads squashing competitors in the consumer channel.

No, I mean, by lying. In fact the EU's Advertising Standards Authority banned IPhone ads because Apple was lying. They are infamous for their lies about PC vs. MAC that is before abandoning their hardware platform. Oh, don't confuse a Desktop PC with a workstation PC! I personally didn't know the distinction before Apple pointed it out!

And let us never forget the now immortalized Reality Distortion Field Which is basically lying personified.

At the bottom of the wiki article it says
See Also:
Apple Inc.
Propaganda
Steve Jobs
Suggestibility
Somebody Else's Problem


And I think that more than anything really drives home my point. Apple really loves people, like you, that will put their own reputation on the line to defend the indefensible. In fact their continued success depends on normally logically thinking people promoting their products for irrational reasons.

How exactly do you divine the sales trajectory from a single data point. Please explain this to me. Comparing it to other platforms is what TFA is trying to do, but they're comparing monday sales to first weekend sales to first 6 months sales and somehow drawing a conclusion from this.

From wikitionary: "An phenomenon that generally occurs in advance of an important phenomenon, aiding in its prediction." Opening day sales is a leading indicator; it's not always 100% accurate, and it's not the only one. But without omnipotence, those who look analyze these things have to look at numbers. One analyst however noted that Monday is not a good day for a launch. I agree that the first six months sales is not really a good comparison. Opening weekend sales are closer but exact. We will have to wait and see for more data.

For a product you need to sign a 2 year contract for, yes, I think this is a valid assumption if you're buying it without ever using it or knowing someone who has used it. Further, timing is especially important for phones. To buy a new phone on contract, you have to either be just getting out of your contract, or specifically waiting off contract to buy this phone. Since the probability that any given person just got off his contract on Monday, it's more likely that the people who bought the phone have been waiting specifically for it and are therefore fans.

I think you're missing a key group in that analysis. You're assuming that all customers are either just out of contract and looking for a new phone. Or specifically waiting for this phone. I know many people who have been out of contract (for a while) but neither looking or waiting. They simply didn't get a new phone when their contract expired. They might get a Windows/Android/Blackberry/iPhone phone if they happen to see a feature they like. Or they'll keep using their current phone until it breaks. MS unfortunately have launched their product in an economic downturn.

Also you're assuming that someone won't break contract and pay a fee to get this phone. Some people do that to get new models. These people might be fans or early adopters but the two are not mutually inclusive. Some people are just attracted to $LATEST NEW THING$.

Zune never had a massive amount of advertising, especially compared to iPod. In iPod's heyday, there would be an iPod silhouette advertisement every commercial break on some channels, on prime time television. The only Zune ads I ever saw were at 11:00 on adult swim.

Compared to the iPod no, but estimates put for the first six months of 2007, MS spent $17 million on advertising the Zune alone. The problem I saw with the Zune ads were MS was trying to be obscure (therefore 'cool' in their minds) and advertise the product at the same time. I think they forgot the some basic rules of advertising in that you should identify what you're selling and what it does. Those first Zune commercials could have been selling soda and no one would have noticed.

Compaq - 1997

IBM - February 11, 1998

Dell - January 30, 1998

HP - February 14, 1998

Gateway - March 1, 1998

And those aren't introduction dates, they're just handy examples.

By the way, those listed companies were the top 5 PC makers in Q3 1998, globally and in the US, and they accounted for the strait-up majority of the US PC market at the time.

And Apple sold only a tiny fraction of the USB PCs bought in the era of the early iMac. "USB PC shipments were estimated at 20 million units in 1997 and 100 million units in 1999." So I'll split the difference and say 1998 saw 50 million USB PCs sold. How many were iMacs? Try 0.8 million. So that's 0.8 million versus 50 million. Let's be charitable and call that a 50:1 ratio or 2% of market share. Ouch.

Well, that wasn't a full year. How about 1999? We've seen the overall number of 100 million USB PCs, but in 1999 Apple sold only 1.8 million iMacs. So in 1999 USB iMacs again accounted for roughly 2% of the USB PC market. Still ouch.

So, the iMac was not the first PC with USB, the iMac was not the major but rather a fractionally tiny vector for USB into the marketplace, and the iMac did not "exclude all other port types."

I'm sure other media outlets will provide a more balanced view of the technology industry.

http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/pew_no_one_gets_more_coverage_than_apple1/

Or not.

In the virtual world? Yes
Now, imagine if they had posted the street and postal addresses of the organisations...

eg: http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/Spam_King_Inundated_By_Junk_Mail_Fails_To_See_The_Irony/

It really aught to be the case where the trade name is limited to the area of commerce the trademark will be used in. It's more than a little unfair to say on the trademark paperwork "we're going to use this for anything and everything and also the kitchen sink", when in reality they have no intention of ever marketing kitchen supplies or indeed anything but electronic entertainment devices under that name.

Looking at the eiPott packaging though--that's probably where they lost the case. It's funny. It's clever... But a reasonable person would conclude they are clearly trying to establish a link to the iPod brand. The link between the names eiPott and iPod is so much more tenuous on its own.

I have a hard time believing Android users are suddenly discontent with Android phones.

Nope...
There's no was Apple could do something like this...

So how is this developer's desire to port something from Android to the iPhone and advertise it different from Apple's desire to have Windows applications running on OSX and actively advertise it?

Oh, now I get it. You push the little guys around when you're the big man on campus. Certainly is interesting I can find literature about Symbian on your site. Tell me, if a very popular Symbian or Blackberry app was ported to the iPhone, would you allow the developer to advertise it? Because I'm betting you would.

As much as I wish I could agree with you unreservedly...

I can totally see Apple releasing a new mac mini with this OS because *it just works*.

Then it won't be branded as "Mac OS X,"

Mac OS XI?

and surely won't become the primary OS sold by Apple.

Primary...
By units, OS X has been Apple's secondary OS for a while. In fact, if you count the ipod OS, then it is third.
http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/four_years_of_apple_unit_revenue_graphs_illustrate_growth/

By dollar, I don't know.

Then putting a premium on future machines with the OSX variant.

Only if it wants to alienate almost all of its users and developers.

It won't happen.

I would like to think so, too.

There are more iPhones sold than Macs. There are plenty of apps & developers for the iPhone.
There are more xboxes sold than Macs. There are plenty of apps & developers for the xbox.
(name that closed system, here)

In a school or business, what is valued? Productivity apps. Security. Low maintenance. Ease of use.

I would like to think that Apple will always sell computers. And that they will always be hackable. But as I look around, I see that there is a distinct possibility that may not be the case.

I'm not interested in an iPhone or an iPad. I want hackable. But I can't ignore what's going on around me. If the iPad takes off *at all*, I would not be even a little surprised if Apple starts to move toward a closed OS.

Equating geeks to crack addicts? Is that you, Darl?

Microsoft is widely misunderstood. It is not primarily a software company. It is an abuse company that uses software to deliver abuse.

That's my opinion, and the opinion of millions of others, it seems.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer reportedly has little or no technical knowledge. Could someone with no technical knowledge make a high-tech company profitable without an abusive virtual monopoly?

Steve Ballmer, As Portrayed by 80 Blue Screens of Death

Will this be anything like the Be Focus Shift at all?

I'm still waiting for Godzilla Firewire Hub to come back.

*sigh*

http://chameleon.osx86.hu/
The same, but FOSS. Some even suggest the same codebase, but I of course would never be cynical enough to suggest that or that running strings on both if someone had a spare moment might be interesting.

Pystar itself uses an open source boot loader, Darwin Universal Boot Loader or DUBL. This leads me to question exactly what value Pystar adds. It can't be hardware compatibility and drivers, the CNet tester even says "It seems like Psystar still has a lot of homework to do when it comes to drivers and hardware compatibility." Hackers, open source, and other programmers provide a list of hardware compatible on the OSX86 Project website.

Falcon

Oh, btw I hope Apple comes down on Pystar like a sludge hammer. I don't mind if individuals, such as those with the OSX86 project work to get hackntoches running, but not for profit businesses. While I believe Apple should either license OSX to OEMs or release mid range expandable Macs I also believe they should be able to set hardware requirements. The simple fact is though is that Apple is a system integrator, they make hardware and software run well together for the most part. By specifying hardware Apple can make sure the software runs well on it.

Apple's R&D investment is far below industry average, and most of that is "D", not "R".

ORLY?

Then why, pray tell, do they far out-innovate most other tech companies? Please cite the source for your otherwise baseless bashing.

If all companies were as stingy as Apple when it comes to R&D, computer science research would be in deep trouble.

So, I guess all the R&D that Apple has released as Open Source is being "stingy" with R&D (launchd, iCal, Calendar Server, bonjour, Darwin, webkit, Grand Central Dispatch, etc.) and all the R&D that Apple has contributed to ongoing F/OSS projects (zfs fixes, Khtml fixes, CUPS (yes, I know they bought CUPS, but they still leave it Open Source), Apache fixes, etc.) is also being stingy with R&D.

Oh, and that doesn't even count the echnology that Apple released into the Public Domain, long before their was a term for "Open Source" (AppleTalk and OpenDoc come to mind, and I know there are others I can't recall off hand). Yes, the world would be in a sorry state if all companies were as "stingy" with their R&D as Apple...

Apple can only make nice products because other companies and universities have invested a hell of a lot of money and time inventing the things that Apple then assembles into products.

So, I guess Nokia invented the transistor, the integrated circuit, Li-ion batteries, epoxy, polycarbonate plastics, LCDs, the capacitor, surface mount technology, the resistor, the microprocessor, flash memory, SRAM memory, to name but a few of the "nice products" that Nokia "then assembles into products.", right?

That model is not sustainable

Hmmm. Seems to be working well for not only Apple (since their stock just closed at an all-time high (and in this economy!)), but for all of the tech sector as well. Again, cite a source that says that Apple's business model is "unsustainable".

I can see why companies like Nokia are getting litigious over it.

Really? Because it just looks like going after the deep pockets to me...

I did run into Office not running, but then everything else wasn't loading correctly that required a hard shutdown (Mac OS X's shutdown just sat there too).

That sounds like a disk problem to me. Better check the status of your harddisk. I know it doesn't sound like that, but I've seen two Linux boxes misbehave like that and when I checked the logs, it showed input/output errors to the harddisk.

I would only be wrong if the U.S. were the whole world, and it would still be debatable.

The third generation iPod, with USB support, was announced at the same day as the iTMS, more than a year before the iTMS was available in any other country. Of course, a Windows user with a working Firewire connection could use the second generation iPod as well. So your argument really rests on that Firewire is Mac only and the U.S. is the whole world. You're wrong on both accounts.

But instead of arguments from mere speculation based on faulty premises, let's consider the facts:

In the first six months of this year -- after Apple (AAPL ) cut the price and added features -- iPod's market share climbed to 7.1%, estimates NPD analyst Tom Edwards. [...] The week of Aug. 26, Apple is rolling out an iPod for Windows-based PCs. Kevin Hunt, an analyst with Thomas Weisel Partners, estimates that iPod sales should jump 25% over the next two quarters.

That's from Businessweek, August 27, 2002. A slightly more biased source, Mac Observer, claimed the 'iPod is the king of portable music players, according to new dollar market share numbers'. New, as of March 12th, 2003.

So kindly fuck off. You're wrong, I'm right.

It's not like I made it up, you know. It's been pretty well documented and Bill Gates has even signed documents attesting to the fact. Microsoft also paid Apple for copyright infringement in 1998. Here's one good article on it that you might be interested in checking out.

You bring up interesting history not strictly related to the antitrust suit - but still terribly interesting.

All of the Apple / Microsoft dealings were so inbred in those days! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_v._Microsoft

In 1997, five years after the lawsuit was decided, all lingering infringement questions against Microsoft regarding the Lisa and Macintosh GUI as well as Apple's "QuickTime piracy" lawsuit against Microsoft were settled in direct negotiations. Apple agreed to make Internet Explorer their default browser, to the detriment of Netscape. Microsoft agreed to continue developing their Office and other software for the Mac for the next five years. Microsoft also purchased $150 million of non-voting Apple stock, helping Apple in its financial struggles at the time. Both parties entered into a patent cross-licensing agreement.

But I think you're right, I recall there being more to this than the wikipedia entry allows. At some point, the MS Mac Business Unit (MBU) stopped providing updates for IE on OS X, and I recall the MS web talking about it in relation to Office. Next surprise, an upgrade came along and then IE stopped working in OS X altogether and Microsoft continued to significantly upgrade Office for the Mac.

The irony of that is that MS lost $560million in an infringement lawsuit for parts of IE - http://www.macobserver.com/article/2003/08/12.4.shtml

And just in an attempt to keep a balanced view - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc._litigation

Will cost me about 1085 Pounds as a student (incl. wireless mouse/keyboard), but for this money I get a computer which provides me with excellent value for the price

Mac apparently keep resale value better, too: 1, 2, 3, 4

Running as non-admin is easy, runas (which is only a right-click away)is very easy to use and works well 99% of the time. The annoying thing is remembering to right-click the msi/exe to use runas :) Do you need AV? IE is how BHO's like vundo get in to your pc, active-x is also a nightmare... I've been saying this for years! I have 5000+ users that we no longer install AV directly on their PC's, and we pass our PCI/DSS and SOX audits every year. There is no excuse for M$ to put users into Admin by default. Windows 7 however it does... the local admin account is disabled... but so what! It's idiotic, lock the administrator, but place a new user into admin group by default. -rich ClearSite

Rob Galbraith is the frequent butt of jokes about his ego and mouth- the man considers himself an expert on absolutely everything, loves to declare things horrible/worthless (he declared the Canon Mk3 autofocus to be "useless" as well, and that hasn't stopped news agencies the world-over from making the camera their standard equipment.)

His premise is that the laptop is worthless because of the glossy screen. Well, guess what? It's literally a $30 problem, and there will no doubt be at least a couple companies that produce lightweight fancy hoods that weigh next to nothing and shield the screen from glare for photographers who MUST do image adjustment in the field (which nobody does.)

He speaks as if he's an expert- but check out the qualifications of him and his team. He's a former photographer for a no-name Canadian paper....eight years ago. His partner shoots horsies for work. A third dude doesn't seem to have any qualifications except for being industrious in writing about photography and a former Nikon lackey. None of them have had showings of note. None of them are retained by any wire services that matter. None of them currently work in the field.

Ever heard about "splitting", where people tend to consider something all good or all bad? Galbraith is an almost pathological splitter, and he's completely ignorant of some solutions to the problem, if you otherwise like working with, or are required to work with macs/mac software by your company/agency/wire service. It's also a problem solved with about $10 of cardboard or plastic to make a viewing hood, which used to be extremely common back when (GASP!) everyone had "glossy" CRTs.

It also demonstrates how ignorant he is of how "real" professional photographers these days work. The big boys are told to send everything, touch nothing- they're in the business of shooting photos, not editing or adjusting them. Anyone who is anyone has a team of people sitting back at "HQ", with fast machines, professionally calibrated displays in controlled lighting, etc. Nobody (at least nobody doing it for money) does anything beyond rate/categorize images on laptops...which is what he claims the MBP "is only good for."

Okie dokie, so instead of just saying they exist, name a few.

I'm sorry, you are unclear. You want me to come up with examples that support your argument? Its unclear because your examples jump to conclusions and ignore the first principles I was talking about like "all men are created equal" and "the right to a fair trial."

Or, I can release it with restrictions and you're free to take it or leave it (as would happen with your special bottled air). ...
Air goes everywhere, and you have limited control over which air you're breathing at any given moment. Your mp3 player contains songs that you intentionally put there

You seem to lack an understanding of the word excludable. It isn't about the choice of the consumer, it is about the natural control of the creator. Its a common misunderstanding in such discussions, generally stemming from a lack of knowledge beyond econ 101. Seeing as how your entire argument is predicated on that error, I won't be replying any further.

I've seen the way these go, you will either try to dispute the indisputable, haggling about the definition of excludable like so: "copyright is enforced pretty well on a daily basis" or try to apply some sort of moral justification lacking any firm root in first principles that the current law, despite all its costs and poor enforceability is "right." Been there, done that, horse to water and all. Good luck with the buggy whips.

I shift a LOT of data on my systems, and alter my files quite a bit on terabyte drives.

The idea that this "better" technology, which has lower performancefor the long sequential reads required for music and movie playback, could eventually be "hyped" into the market until i'm unable to find a spinning plate solution is quite scary.