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iPhone 3.0 Software Announced
Apple unveiled the iPhone 3.0 software just now in Cupertino. Here's MacWorld's live-action blow-by-blow coverage. The announcement included new features for developers and users. For developers, the big items were in-app purchasing (for example for game upgrades, map content, and subscriptions) for paid apps only; peer-to-peer connectivity via Bluetooth; giving apps access to hardware via the dock connector or Bluetooth; maps embeddable in apps; and push notifications. For users, there's finally cut-copy-paste available in all apps; search across everything in the iPhone; landscape keyboard; MMS messaging; and voice memos. Developer beta starts today and 3.0 will be available in the summer — free for all 3G phones, $10 for iPod Touch.
It's actually a matter of generally accepted accounting principles, and I still have trouble seeing what Sarbanes has to do with it. It's revenue recognition, which is pure GAAP. The argument is basically that they'd have understated the expenses associated with generating the revenue last period, i.e. overstated net income and it's derivative numbers such as earnings per share, if they added new functionality to sales already recognized.
The short answer is that our financial regulatory environment forces them to do so, kinda.
If Apple books profits for iPod Touches at the time of purchase, but then books expenses for iPod Touch development later, they are vulnerable to the accusation that they were hiding expenses on their balance sheet, which is illegal.
After getting burnt by this once in the past (Airport basestations, I think), they started charging for feature updates. When they book expenses for the development of iPod Touch 3.0, they can account for it like a new product for sale, and either make a profit or loss on those sales.
The other solution to this issue is that they book profits for iPhones on a "two year subscription basis". That means they only record 1/8th of the sale profit of an iPhone as profit in the quarter it was purchased. They can then charge further development costs against this same income, and they don't have to account for it like a separate product for sale.
Whether they should account for *everything* on a subscription basis is totally open for debate. It has been suggested that this subscription accounting is one of many factors that could be depressing Apple's share price. When they have a killer quarter for iPhone sales, that profit gets smeared across 8 quarters of earnings statements.
IMHO, it could be argued that this is a good thing, and forces shareholders to consider longer term value. So maybe they really should account for everything this way. The question is how profitable are these $9.95 iPhone OS updates & $100 Mac OS updates. Iduno.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
They can estimate expenses for continued support and development.
They choose not to, however, because they want to hide the expense (and hope to later recoup it by selling the updates).
It's all bullshit, and it's all typical Apple.
Uh? You can run linux on a mac just fine. Not the iphone, true, but the others, yes.
Not to mention that Darwin, the unholy marriage of mach and BSD that mac os x is built on, *is* open source. It's the graphics layer on top that's not, and that's not built on anything open source anyway.
Apple actually releases quite a bit of open source code. You need to get a better handle on the actual facts.
The ringing of the division bell has begun... -PF
Every one of the 4 different Palm OS smartphones I've owned had cut/paste. And not just between Palm apps either, I could cut/paste between the phone dialer interface as well.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
So, what you mean is, you've never owned a smartphone. My corded landline doesn't have cut and paste either, but every smartphone I've had has had cut and paste.
Lucky you. I have a fairly recent Nokia "business phone" with Symbian S60 as the operating system (Nokia E61i). It does support cut and paste, BUT you can only cut and paste (or copy for that matter) in edit mode. What this means is that you can't copy from a webpage, and to copy from an email you have to select "forward" or "reply". I guess you could call that smart if you stretch things?
No, some Apple apps are allowed to stay in memory (and run) whereas no third party apps are given the privilege. Mail will download emails in the background for instance, and Safari maintains your open tabs.
Safari isn't guaranteed to maintain your back button/forward button history, however; sometimes it loses them.
Your open tabs are kept in stable storage, so they survive Safari shutting down and being restarted. The same is true of newer versions of Safari on Mac OS X, although you have to use History->Reopen All Windows From Last Session after restarting Safari.
Your back button/forward button history isn't maintained in stable storage (whether in Mac OS X or iPhone OS), and that gets lost if Safari is restarted.
And, yes, Safari on the phone will be killed off in the background on occasion; I've had that happen on occasion when switching to Mail, for example.
As soon as you download Discover, iCatchall, or probably 10 other apps that do that.