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Apple Rumored To Be Exploring Medical Devices, Electric Cars To Reignite Growth
An anonymous reader writes "The Apple rumor mill is alive and well. This time around the tech giant is rumored to be looking into exploring medical sensor technology related to predicting heart attacks, and might even buy Tesla. 'Taken together, Apple's potential forays into automobiles and medical devices, two industries worlds away from consumer electronics, underscore the company's deep desire to move away from iPhones and iPads and take big risks. "Apple must increasingly rely on new products to reignite growth beyond the vision" of late founder Steve Jobs, said Bill Kreher, an analyst with Edward Jones Investments in St. Louis. "They need the next big thing."'"
please dont do that apple, I really like Tesla. I dont want apple to be able to remote kill my car if i dont accept their EULA
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
- "Yes honey, I've seen the new 2019 iPad but I think that Microsoft stuff has gotten way better after being acquired by Lenovo, I think I'll buy the Officepad 10 HHHHHHHHHNNGGGGGGGGGGGG!"
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
It always seems that when companies start trying to branch out into wildly dissimilar industries, it's a sign of trouble within the organization. Do what you do well, figure out how to do it better if things aren't going how you'd like them. Don't try making sushi if you've always sold donuts.
Coming soon, iHeart ! Apple fanboys can line up every year to get their latest iHeart, non user repairable, not upgradeable except from Apple. Sorry, Flash no heart for you!
Yeah, medicine and the treatment of illness is a real global conspiracy alright.
iPhones and iPads make Apple an obscene amount of money and they are in a controlling position in the market. It should go without saying that they don't have "a deep desire to move away" from them. Add new product categories? Sure. Move away from iPhones and iPads? Nope.
Growth is a bullshit metric. A company with one customer can grow their user base 1000% by getting to ten customers. A company with hundreds of millions of customers can't grow like that. Growth naturally slows as a company gets larger. Only bullshit artists looking to get page views or prop up a stock price blather on about how Apple need the next big thing to continue growing. They don't need to continue growing. They are raking money in faster than just about any other company. Trying to grow at the same rate as they have done in previous years is not only a ludicrously unachievable expectation to place on them, it's probably bad for business if they were stupid enough to try. Apple's core strength has always been a small, focused product family.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Any issues with the car will probably be blamed on the driver. "Your car doesn't accelerate properly because you're holding the steering wheel incorrectly."
Since Apple likes to believe they should have control over what software we are allowed our mobile devices, does that mean If they made cars, they would belIeve they should have control over what roads we can and can't drive on?
Yeah, medicine and the treatment of illness is a real global conspiracy alright.
Keeping the cost of it high seems to be.
Next time you need a fairly major medical procedure, refuse to pay until you get an itemized bill - you'll be amazed at some of the bullshit they try and charge you for; $50 for the off-brand Sharpie they used to mark your skin, for example.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Remember that HP once was almost only known as a producer of measurement equipment. Then they went into the computing hardware business big time. They, too, needed the "next big thing". As much as I may despise Apple, from a corporate-strategical point of view such a move sounds like making a lot of sense for Apple.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
If Apple cared about selling more widgets, they would have created lower-priced versions of all of their products years ago.
Analysts want Apple to run the company their way, and Apple is refusing to do it. Good for them in my opinion.
I would be happy if Apple just started selling a 17" Macbook Pro again. Would be even happier if they started selling screens with matt displays again.
Apple could be in a position to leverage advances in sensing technology to make medicine cheaper and much more accessible.
Low prices is Apple's motto all right
With the passing of Jobs, I'm pretty sure everyone must realize that Apple's relevance is simply fading away. I know this sounds like a troll and perhaps in some ways it is.
Despite the fact that I disliked Jobs and all that, there's no denying he was extremely effective. Despite the fact that I think he help the company from overtaking the business marketplace, he probably did it for extremely good reasons. He probably kept the company from making huge mistakes and from being hugely liable for all sorts of problems which Microsoft lives with daily. Legacy code support, business and government needs and all that. While there is no doubt Apple has that problem, Jobs managed to keep those things in check and their liabilities limited.
And anyone familiar with Apple's history will recall what Apple did when they canned Jobs. They almost died because they did everything the normal business way. It didn't work. They weren't tooled to make it work. And Jobs is definitely not coming back (though I have no doubt some are still holding out hope) this time. Will there be a next great cult leader of Apple? Doesn't seem to be. So what's ahead besides the public getting tired of incremental advancements which seem to follow other products which have been successful with incremental advancements? Don't know, but I suspect anything to do with anti-privacy and personal identification research will bite Apple in the ass in today's political climate. The whole planet is still pretty angry at the US and US companies. Pushing that stuff forward now seems like it will not go over very well. But what do I know? I'm just a guy on Slashdot.
Apple doesn't have a magic-man any longer. True? Apple pushes a non-Microsoft way to the masses. True? This has always been a disadvantaged position in business and often even in personal computing. True? Apple's fandom kept it going for a while but was floundering until Jobs brought it all back but it wasn't about computers any longer. True? Now Apple is essentially "consumer electronics with a legacy of personal computer stuff." True? The mobile market, the one which Apple unquestionably played a highly visible and major role in its present-day and contemporary form, has MATURED. True? (Apple seems to think so or else it wouldn't be looking to watches and other things which, IMHO are doomed to impractical failure.) A matured market has had many players and competitors but the main players are decreasing in numbers. I just don't see where Apple will continue to fit in.
Suggestions for Apple? Get into more personal data storage and computing. Don't just let things connect together in limited, specified ways. Get into personal storage environments -- personal clouds. Create a wireless standard for storage so that users can keep their data secure and available (a tricky balance which almost seems mutually exclusive) and synchronized.
I think personal computing needs to be UI adaptable while providing access to most or all apps and data the user wants. But there is no universal wireless universal storage scheme yet. (You know, like a wireless server in your pocket or backpack or whatever?) Put R&D money there. This isn't only what people want, it's what they need. Apple has momentum and is capable of doing it. But will their own corporate greed prevent them from trying to keep control of user data the way everyone else is? Or will they get pushed aside when someone else steps up and says "you now control your own data and you can have it any way you want." I know lots of people want all of their pictures, all of their videos, all of their music available to them all of the time and at the same time, they don't want someone else controlling or containing it for them. Especially now.
Remember when Apple was the company that came out with revolutionary new products and the rest of the industry followed them?
Apparently, now it's Google.
(Oh, and who would trust Steve Jobs' company to make their medical devices? Yes I am speaking both to his general approach to ethics, and the circumstances of his death.)
Apple has a ridiculous amount of money at their disposal. It makes sense they try to do something with it.
This is also the approach that Samsung has been taking for the last few years. They've started making MRI scanners even.
I think that;s probably more of a national conspiracy (in the US) than a global conspiracy...
...because in 2006, Samsung clearly copied the design of Apple's 2010 iPad. Maybe Apple should buy them just for their time travel technology.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
and releasing a half-baked galaxy gear mark II with pulse and oximetry measuring.
way too much products for a "focused" apple.
it would make sense somehow - i recently advised my parents to buy a series 6 samsung tv and have been hating the cumbersome, ridiculous, slow and generally badly designed user-interface ever since. it's good hardware, but the software is one of the worst i've seen in a consumer product for years.
I think you don't need a conspiracy to explain the broken conditions in the US. Just an obsession with free market solutions in a field that can never be a free market.
I think that;s probably more of a national conspiracy (in the US) than a global conspiracy...
I can't speak for places outside the US because I haven't been there, but I'd bet dollars to pesos that Big Pharma has it's claws in a few more governments than just the US'.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Ask yourself this... do you trust Apple with your pace maker? Your cochlear implant?
Would you trust MICROSOFT with your pace maker (holy hellzapoppin' no)
I can just see it... " Your cochlear implant has reached it's maximum amount of words amplified for the day. In order to hear more today, you need to upgrade to MICROSOFT COCHLEAR PROFESSIONAL 8.1" or even worse "Oh shit. I'm sorry, I can't do anything else today. I'm only using PaceMaker XP and if my heart beats more than 86,400 times today, my pace maker will throw a very literal blue screen of death."
With Apple, it's be a shiny pace maker, with a lot of features that may or may not be compatible with any other implants... like if you have an MS Cochlear, you can't have an Apple Pace Maker..
Apple Rumored To Be Exploring Medical Devices[, ]Electric Cars To Reignite Growth
The word you're looking for is "and."
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Don't worry, fewer than 1% of users suffer "blue screams of death" as a result of any given non-optional automatic update. And such users can usually be rebooted after installing an iBrain and any other iSelf modules not already purchased. WARNING: behavioral changes may occur, and any proclivity to destroy other electronics to gnaw on their microprocessor "brains" should be reported immediately.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
All this data fed into the cloud in real time and analyzed for problems? What's not to like?
False positives? Imagine how much money doctors would make off of all those unnecessary visits.
>you could fix so many other things just like apple did with...
They've certainly spearheaded great refinements, now if only they'd stop insisting on incorporating their own brand of intentional breakage into them I'd consider actually buying their products.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Yeah fucking licensed doctors and the FDA! Trying to keep people healthy without killing them by untested medical products is so last century!
It seems to me the lightning connector, for all of its mechanical advantages over the 30 pin, also came with a lot of new restrictions and complications, all designed to keep Apple in control.
It seems to me that they're stifling innovative uses via third party accessories which seems to encourage people to find other platforms which could ultimately shrink their user base.
It's just one example, but in a lot of ways I would think they would want to encourage the iPhone/iPad as more general purpose devices with other interesting connectivity and expansion options.
OR, samsung simple added tablet parts to their existing digital photo frame? the photo frame was out prior to the ipad
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Apple could be in a position to leverage advances in sensing technology to make medicine cheaper and much more accessible.
Right... because Apple is really known for driving prices down.
They're also big enough to beat down the FDA and Wizard lobby (aka Doctors).
Damn right, 'cause the FDA and doctors are just evil. Those criminals try to make sure our drugs are safe and that our illnesses get treated. We should rely on the magic of market forces for that. Apple should invent a device that replaces them. [/sarcasm]
All this data fed into the cloud in real time and analyzed for problems? What's not to like?
Lets see... Maybe the fact that there is no actual product and even if there were there are all sorts of likely privacy, security and data interpretation problems.
Keeping the cost of it high seems to be.
That is a matter of incompetence and bad policy. Lot's of people in the US love to insist that we have the best healthcare system in the world and that nothing is broken despite the fact that we pay the most (by a wide margin) and do not get even close to the best outcomes by most measures.
The Apple tech itself is great. It's what they "allow you to do with it" that angers me. It's really as simple as that. They make cool things and then they restrict, limit and lock them down. Case-in-point? Copy-Paste was a feature of second generation iPhone and newer releases of iOS. They didn't omit it because it never occurred to them. It was a limitation they put in there by design and ended up going back on because people were pretty upset about it. And saving attachments in email? Is that still disallowed?
You saw it first when Microsoft users were refusing to upgrade. The same is beginning to be true of Apple stuff.
This isn't about products. It's about access to your health data when you can trivially generate good quality long term trends.
A number of people don't think you should be able to access your own blood chemistry reports, DNA, MRI, charts, and other medical data.
Those are inputs into expert systems sometimes that very may reveal trends that could save your life. They are also inputs that can be analyzed offshore at very low cost - in different regulatory environments.
This isn't about snake tonic. This is about data - your data - and who will own it.
I welcome Apple coming to that party.
..don't panic
I think that;s probably more of a national conspiracy (in the US) than a global conspiracy...
I can't speak for places outside the US because I haven't been there, but I'd bet dollars to pesos that Big Pharma has it's claws in a few more governments than just the US'.
I highly doubt that the pen has anything to do with big pharma. They probably are very inexpensive for the surgical center. But they have so many people skip out on bills and insurance companies try and screw doctors over. My doctor wanted me to try a medical device for some pain I was having. He put it through to the insurance where my copay was going to be $500. The doctor sold it to me for his cost - $90. The reason for the discrepancy? He has to charge the insurance big time $$ just to recoup his $90. He doesn't even try and make a profit on storing the medical device. He does plenty of other things that are far more lucrative for him. It's just a huge hassle and drain on him to deal with the insurance.
I wish I had thought to mention that myself, but my rant was already pretty long.
Yes. Apple loves to restrict and limit. And they don't care what it costs the end user. "No, you cannot replace the battery. If we let you do that, other companies would make compatible batteries and extended life batteries and all that mess. Also, we want to make sure we can find you and your phone. It must be on at all times even if you think it's off."
I'm starting to rethink who the good guys and who the bad guys were on Get Smart. I am starting to prefer KAOS over CONTROL.
It is more successful and widespread in the US, yes. Possibly because the cult of the free market is so strong over here that we somehow think that healthcare is or can be a free market. But I'd argue that the conspiracy is indeed global. Pharmecuticals are obviously globalized. The US isn't the only place where drug patents are used to strangle more money out of sick people.
It's not global as in reaches absolutely everywhere to the same degree, but a lot of that is because it's not as cost effective to enact the same conspiracy in countries where they won't make as much of a profit.
Apple markup may be the fattest in the industry but if anyone can kick the bottom out of medical device pricing while still making an enormous profit, they're the company to do it.
Ok, consider that the province of Quebec market in Canada is tiny compared to the US but I had a friend developping software for ultra-sound devices. They were a small tech startup and they were working on real-time 3d viz of ultra sound when it was still an idea. The thing is they managed to sell their software to 15 hospital that's a LOT of hospital for most province in canada so they had good market coverage. Now it's not rocket science to calculate that the cost of 15 employees with a lot of math guy for signal processing, software engineer, etc means that 100 000 is actually CHEAP if they want to turn in any kind of profit. The amount of customer is so tiny and the dev costs are huge in comparison.
I feel like a broken record but its an US thing. In Canada they just fix you up no matter what you have, they never cheap on the treatment because there's no bullshit like a max number of hearth surgeries of type X a year per hospital. If the hospital has to run a deficit to treat everyone they just will. Seriously, even for medicines we have free gov coverage and if you're employed, the employer has to provide a plan with no limit. The best part? Our economy STILL hasn't collapsed or is not in danger because of that. I never IN MY LIFE had to worry about being sick and not being able to get treatment. The only worry you have when you have to see a doc is: "Damn I'm going to have to wait 3-4 hours in a waiting room to see a doc, am I sick enough to want to wait that long.".
Apple tips over the edge and begins the downward slide.
All the future failures will simply make the accomplishments of early 21st century Apple shine that much brighter. We were all very fortunate to have been a part of it.
"The Apple rumor mill is alive and well."
And, you can stop reading right there. Analysts are idiots, and rumors usually turn out to be wrong.
As for growth... "Last year, we grew (revenue) by $14 billion to $15 billion. Yes, those percentages are smaller compared to a year earlier and two years earlier and so forth. But that doesn't mean that you're not a growth company. We were in hyper-growth, or whatever is above growth. We went from $65 billion to over $100 billion to $150 billion to $170 billion. These are historic, unprecedented numbers. I don't know any companies adding growth at that level. So when you say $14 billion to $15 billion compared to those numbers, it's clearly smaller and a smaller percentage, but, to put it in some context, that's like adding three Fortune 500 companies in a year. [emphasis mine] I think that's hard to say that's not a growth company."
--Tim Cook to the WSJ Feb 7, 2014
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Anyone see that movie Repo Men? Yeah, that's basically this.
It's not a free market, but not for the reasons you describe. Under the guise of safety, regulations in practice stomp competition. This is why medical tourism to (western-trained) surgeons in other countries can offer much cheaper rates, including travel, and comparable outcomes.
The difference is massive over-regulation that makes true competition difficult.
I'm all against snake oil because that is fraud. That's about 2% of what we're talking about. The rest just uses that and safety to jack up rates.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Apple could be in a position to leverage advances in sensing technology to make medicine cheaper
I wouldn't be betting on Apple to make anything cheaper.
Keeping the cost of it high seems to be.
That's an uninformed position. There are many factors contributing to the high prices in US health care, but the heart of the matter is third party payer. Whenever you pay someone else to pay the bill for you, especially when the goods or services delivered are opaque as they are in health care, the cost tends to escalate. Combine this with government tax incentives that have historically tied health care to employment, adding another layer of payment indirection between the consumer and the health care providers, and the litigious nature of American society in general and you have a recipe for sky high prices. All of this began as an accident of history with wage controls during WWII and grew from there reinforced by decades worth of bad government policies. Incidentally, this is also why Obamacare will fail to control costs. They did nothing to address the underlying causes of high prices, they just subsidized the escalating prices so that people are even further insulated from the true costs of their care. If you don't believe that government subsidies raise prices then I ask you to explain how the cost of College has increased at several times the rate of inflation since the 1980s. Whenever the government opens the public purse to subsidize or pay for something prices tend to skyrocket. Who wouldn't raise prices if they knew the government would pay for it?
HP? They're still around?
Apple may do most of the pioneering work. But they'll never stay in those areas.
Quite simply, they don't want the hassle of having to deal with industries.
Deep down, Apple wants (and needs) to be the artsy-fartsy choice for computers and media consumption devices.
They simply don't have the mindset to fix problems for people who don't give a flying fuck about the Apple/Mac "aesthetic", and simply want their business equipment to work without having to dick around with it too much.
They don't want to have to deal with a douchebag in an Apple-branded polo shirt mumbling incoherently about something and then being told to wait while they exchange it for a new one.
They just don't work (or think) that way.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Keeping the cost of it high seems to be.
That's an uninformed position. There are many factors contributing to the high prices in US health care, but the heart of the matter is third party payer. Whenever you pay someone else to pay the bill for you, especially when the goods or services delivered are opaque as they are in health care, the cost tends to escalate. Combine this with government tax incentives that have historically tied health care to employment, adding another layer of payment indirection between the consumer and the health care providers, and the litigious nature of American society in general and you have a recipe for sky high prices. All of this began as an accident of history with wage controls during WWII and grew from there reinforced by decades worth of bad government policies. Incidentally, this is also why Obamacare will fail to control costs. They did nothing to address the underlying causes of high prices, they just subsidized the escalating prices so that people are even further insulated from the true costs of their care. If you don't believe that government subsidies raise prices then I ask you to explain how the cost of College has increased at several times the rate of inflation since the 1980s. Whenever the government opens the public purse to subsidize or pay for something prices tend to skyrocket. Who wouldn't raise prices if they knew the government would pay for it?
So, how does this explain that free public health care systems in Western Europe according to all comparisons get a lot more health care value per dollar spent than the US system?
I'm less concerned with stuff like the battery or other kinds of hardware engineering questions.
When it was new, the idea of a non-replaceable battery seemed dumb, but having owned 4 iPhones since and two iPads, it doesn't really seem to matter and frankly it's just as easy/convenient to carry a spare generic USB charging battery as it would be a phone battery if I'm doing the kind of traveling where I will be away from power and worried about depleting my battery. Every other use case seems to be covered by access to power of some kind -- in the car, at a computer, wall jack etc.
My interest is in the broader usability of the iPhone or iPad for other tasks.
1) I/O through lightning port -- why is this so controlled or limited? Apple should encourage all kinds of connectivity solutions, including USB peripherals.
2) Bluetooth mouse pairing -- why is this deliberately excluded, especially from the iPad? I guess maybe I can see apple not wanting to allow it or not want to program mouse movements or mouse-only widgets in their general UI, but maybe consider allowing the device to be paired so its usable in other apps like games or a remote desktop application? I could get miles more out of my iPad as an RDP client with a mouse.
There's just all kinds of little things like that the Apple seems to block for reasons that don't make sense.
Um, there MOST DEFINITELY is a limit to specific surgeries in Canada. Sure, for obvious stuff there isn't, like broken arms or heart attacks, but cataract surgery, or pretty much anything that won't result in your short-term death is rate-limited. And lord help you if your arm doesn't set right, it takes years to see the specialist [and of course, your arm is fully bonded] about getting it fixed.
And then it also really depends on the doctor. I broke my thumb playing volleyball, and I had to repeatedly request that it be x-rayed, because I wasn't screaming in pain when he touched it so he just assumed it was sprained.
It's better than the US by miles, but it ain't magic.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
and when my first cardiologist looked through my itemized bill, he was agahst. "$50 for THAT?!?" $40 for this? $32 for aspirin???" they are not taught in medical school the overhead costs of having this shot of morphine and that bag of D5W right at hand in the operating room, and not in some deadbeat's arm in a linen closet.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Keeping the cost of it high seems to be.
That's an uninformed position.
Says the person who writes an entire paragraph without a single source citation.
the litigious nature of American society in general
Complaining about malpractice suit awards? See, now I know you're full of it.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
"Apple may do most of the pioneering work. But they'll never stay in those areas."
I don't understand this comment. Apple will build a medical device/wearable, then sell it off? The number of scientific hires they have made recently is simply astounding. I doubt very much they are creating a product to abandon shortly after.
I hope you were sarcastic.
Strange how Apple's "largely derivative" enclosure design looks like nothing else on the market when it is first released. Stranger still that it stays distinctive until *after* their competitors have had the opportunity to see said enclosures and release new products.
When the iPad, the biggest surprise was the $499 price tag, no one thought it could be done at that price.
When the iPhone was introduced, the CEO of Blackberry claimed it was faked, it couldn't be done at that price, or any price.
And for years now, you couldn't build a MacBook pro equivalent (same or very similar parts) for less than what Apple sells.
So, Apple doesn't sell cheap stuff, but they do make it price competitive.
Please, the fact that a lack of immediate care from the first available source causes you to die is what stifles competition. You can't take your time and shop around when you're bleeding out on the floor. It doesn't work.
It always seems that when companies start trying to branch out into wildly dissimilar industries, it's a sign of trouble within the organization. Do what you do well, figure out how to do it better if things aren't going how you'd like them. Don't try making sushi if you've always sold donuts.
Yeah, Steve Jobs, don't try making phones or music players if you've always sold computers. Actually, don't even starting making computers if you've always made Atari games. Actually, maybe you've got the whole thing backwards...
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
When they entered the mobile phone business, they kicked the bottom out of pricing for third party developers.
Malpractice is a side dish, but it's not the meat of the problem. Seriously, Google health care and third party payer and you will receive an education.
There are basically two choices. You can either eliminate all subsidies and allow the insurance market to become a real insurance market, like auto, fire, life or any other type of insurance where risk is priced at market rates OR you can go all the way with single payer and make the government the single buyer of all major medical services. Obamacare does neither of these things. It combines the worst parts of both paths into a disastrous course down the middle. It's frustrating because Obama has probably now blown any chance at reforms that would actually begin to address high costs. Even if more people end up ensured the costs are only being shifted onto the taxpayers. The costs themselves aren't being reduced, merely shifted and hidden beneath more layers of bureaucracy, subsidies and mumbo jumbo about more people being able to afford insurance while the national debt continues to increase like the odometer on the Starship Enterprise.
if I'm having a hart attack my best course of action is to be a smart shopper, make sure I select the best offer before proceeding with being treated?
Every hospital in the United States is required to provide life saving treatment, regardless of whether you have insurance or not. That hasn't changed and it's not the issue here. The "heart attack" example is a liberal canard used to distract attention from the issue of costs and how best to address them.
What does the requirement to provide life-saving treatment have to do with anything? It helps people who are so broke that they have no assets, but it doesn't help anyone else.
You have a heart attack, you get treated at a hospital which is required to do so; you're insured but not adequately, and you get a bill for $50,000 more than your insurance covers. Welcome to medical bankruptcy.
Now, how exactly are you supposed to shop around, rather than just taking the first-available treatment? Sure, they're required to provide that treatment whether or not you can pay -- but if you can pay, they're going to do everything in their power to be sure that you will.
In my wife's case, it wasn't a heart attack, but brain surgery -- and while she was in the hospital, her employer went out of business. Her insurance policy disappeared with them, and she was personally on the hook for follow-up care, wiping out years of savings.
PING! +1 (no karma to give)
Working for one of the top three Insurance (oops, I mean 'Health Benefits Management'), and one of the 'World Famous' Medical Centers (both in the same state, you can figure it out), and the largest Pharma company in the free world at the time (and having two small town country doctors in the family), I've seen the world from all sides, and it's not pretty.
BR> My quick summation of the problem... every HBM has a different definition of 'good' care, based on 'average' care models, which are highly fragmented and almost require an HBM to make sure the payer (re: for most... your employer) gets the lowest cost for average or better quality, based on nothing but prior outcomes, and use 'Steerage' and 'Preferred Provider' methods to extort health care providers into capitulation, and the term 'quality' really evolves into a Fast Food Metaphor, and the quality/$$ spent actually goes down.
Any payor Model, Gov't or HBM, that allows someone else to get between you and the MD to negotiate a price or what is expected for a symptom... is the problem. There should be no middle men in healthcare. Especially Middlemen paid by someone else with no skin in the game (my employer/pension-manager)
And they are most effective when the consumer determines what 'value' 'quality' is.
And I do think they will just be a simple platform where they charge 30% (or less) to allow other companies that are actually in the healthcare business to use their platform to do their stuff, purely as a common app-platform/payment/identity/secure delivery conduit. If insurance (sigh... see my comments above;-) pays $19.99 for an app to monitor blood glucose from a BT enabled skin patch (or one that is part of a 'rumored iWatch'), then Apple could be in line to make $6 on every diabetic with a smart phone, and have a huge number of diabetics spend $600(phone) + $99(iwatch) on Apple Hardware (and $50+ month in bandwidth) just for the ability to have continuous blood monitoring. If proved viable to regulatory reviewers, this would be a huge win compared to comparable FDA approved standalone solutions much more in price, and much less capability.
"Right... because Apple is really known for driving prices down."
Look at the original iPad.
The Doctors aren't evil... they just practice medicine the old fashioned way. Most learned their diagnostic skills when rotary phones were the standard. Would you consider a rotary phone today adequate technology to place a call today... If you want to be treated in methods that are
As for the FDA... They're not that bad.... just usually very blinder focused. I really don't see them having an issue with this in terms of data collection. (I don't see apple supporting a portable pacemaker BlueToothed into an iPhone to get it's operational controls from some data center in lower elbonia).
and you'll be surprised that most of your medical procedure data is already in the cloud, if you used insurance or put your SSN on any form (The bad news about HIPAA is that it's 'portable'... often to the highest bidder ). The problem is most of the diagnostic information is in islands that the MDs don't even have good access to.
As for privacy/security issues...Noted. Data Interpretation... that's well outside of Apple's purview... I can't see Apple doing anything other than providing a secure end to end pipe. The back end, whether it be Johns Hopkins, or Joe's Appliance, and Blood Pressure monitoring will likely have to prove their system, including interpretation someplace. But raw data, in standard HLxx code, has to stand on it's own against the diagnostic standard in the HIPAA world. Non Issue (assuming the regulatory people validate it's to the HLxx standard).
You do realize, by the way Korean conglomerates are structured, that it is completely impossible for anyone to buy Samsung? You would have to buy out the entire Samsung Chaebol, which includes a large bank, large ship building company, large insurance company, and the electronics company, which combined represents like 1/5th of Korean GDP
And yet, tablets as capable as the ipad for much cheaper abound. The iPad is still expensive.
And yet, the CEO of BlackBerry didn't exactly understand the cost of things, as the iphone was not the first touch-screen handheld.
And yet, Razer has created something more powerful than the MBP for less than the equivalently specced MBP. Also, Microsoft has released a piece of hardware specced like the Air, but with a high resolution display and a touchscreen, for less than the Air.
So, no.
The original iPad was (and still is) fabulously overpriced for what it is.
All true. They're going down. When the Lisa was their flagship loser Jobs went psycho and made the macintosh a winner.
They kicked him out and started going downhill. He got what was eventually to become iOS developed at NeXt before bringing it back to an Apple that needed resuscitation once again and the iThingy revolution saved their asses.
Then he decides to get all hippy dippy refusing conventional medicine which most likely would have saved his life and as a result kicked the bucket earlier than was necessary.
And now Apple will fade into the obscurity it was always destined for without Steve Jobs there to implement his uncanny business savvy.
I too am not a fan of the man and probably wouldn't be able to stand his presence on a personal level. But he was the business success of Apple (with the Woz being mostly responsible for the technical success in early days) and this time, he aint' coming back.
Big pharma and the big medical device makers conspire to keep the regulatory overhead high. There is a buddy-buddy relationship between the companies and the FDA. They love being the only ones rich enough to innovate
Alright, I'm going to walk you through this step by step. I'm not trying to patronize here, but each step follows from and builds upon the previous step so it's important to understand all of the steps from start to finish. So with that in mind here we go:
1. What is the purpose of insurance, any insurance not just health insurance? The concept is simple enough, it's about offsetting risk. Suppose that we want to insurance against the costs of a certain adverse event, whether that be a major medical expense or property loss or whatever, that has low probability but high costs when it does occur. We can say that the probability that the event occurs is P and that the probability that the event does not occur is 1 - P. In theory, we should be willing to pay a premium amount, call it A, which exactly balances the amount of the loss, call it L, should the event occur. So the formula for the balanced equation is:
A * ( 1 - P ) = P * L
A rational person should be willing to pay the premium amount A (or less) that balances the cost of the adverse event should it occur with probability P.
2. Different people have different financial situations coming into the event. Some people might have substantial assets, be they houses or cars or stocks or bonds or maybe even their bodies themselves if they make their livings with their hands or their looks or even just what's in their heads. The point here is that the consequences of a bankruptcy are not the same for all people. A person with fewer assets to protect is not willing (or even able) to pay the same amount of insurance premium that a wealthier person with more to lose in bankruptcy is. In this case I'm viewing bankruptcy strictly as an expedient financial decision, apart from any moral considerations which are necessarily subjective. Companies declare bankruptcy all the time, so an individual should not allow moral compunctions to prevent them from taking advantage of the rights afforded them under the same legal system used by corporations. Which leads into the next point.
3. Each person or household must decided for themselves, based upon their own perceived risk factors, tolerance for risk and the dollar value of any assets how much insurance they need to carry. To use an example from the auto insurance business you can carry the minimum amount required by state law or you can carry extra liability, medical or property damage insurance for a higher premium. Some people choose to carry more insurance than the minimum required because they feel that the benefits of this extra insurance equal or outweigh the additional premium costs.
4. So the point of all this is that insurance is a risk pricing exercise, nothing more and nothing less. People inject emotion into the argument, especially when it comes to health insurance, but that does nothing other than to distract from the essential issue which is cost.
Now, to address some of your points:
What does the requirement to provide life-saving treatment have to do with anything? It helps people who are so broke that they have no assets, but it doesn't help anyone else.
It helps to the extent that your life was saved. I will grant you that debt or bankruptcy are not pleasant, but at least you're still alive (hopefully) after receiving treatment. I would argue that having your life saved counts as being helped, apart from how large or small the bill ends up being.
You have a heart attack, you get treated at a hospital which is required to do so; you're insured but not adequately, and you get a bill for $50,000 more than your insurance covers. Welcome to medical bankruptcy.
So what? If you have assets to protect then be smart and carry enough insurance. If you don't have assets or at least not substantial assets, buy what insurance you think you need or can afford and accept that bankruptcy is a possibility. Why the fear of bankruptcy BTW? In the corporate world bankruptcy is viewed as just another tool in the
Apple might be more innovative in the medical device field if they began by marketing in India or China first, where there is less monopoly control of medicine. As soon as Western medical tourists there, who are becoming legion, start getting wind of effective Apple devices they can't get in their own countries, pressure for change will come from the general public.
In this case, it isn't even a secret conspiracy.
What are you smoking? The Razer is MORE expensive. NewEgg has the 8GB/256GB model at $2500. It has a smaller screen and a slower SSD.
Medical markups are so far out in the asteroid belt that the Apple markup is tame by comparison.
If 'like with like' means a tablet, then no. There is no non-Apple tablet at the store I visited yesterday that was more than half the median price of the iPads also in that store. And there was a good selection of non-Apple tablets.
You can count on the medical device manufacturers to insure that remains the case. There is a buddy-buddy relationship between the premier Medical Device manufacturers to keep the cost of entry into the market high enough to keep out competition. Small start-ups definitely need not apply.
It would be fun to see Apple try. Samsung would be farting out apple fumes for weeks afterward.
How is it a "cult" simply to point out there are people with a deep hatred for Apple? Even a child can see that is so from the Deep Trolls that inhabit whatever story on Apple that may be found.
I just like using some of their products. But I really, really hate Haters of all forms, not just Apple Haters. They are the bane of the internet whoever found because they love to spread lies and misinformation, the poison that befouls the internet.
If you like misinformation by all mean support the haters of the world.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I wonder if Apple will go into the Search Engine space? Imagine all iOS and Mac OS defaulting to Apple's own Search Engine, would that cause a ripple in the search market?
The first computer I ever programmed on, in High School, was a Hewlett Packard minicomputer. We never got within miles of it, of course, all we could touch were the ASR-33 teletypes we dialed into it with.
Later on, they went into the 'computing hardware' business small-time, with PCs.
Thank goodness the Instruments division got away from HP before the company went to total shit.
The way I read it is that Apple is scrambling to find a reason for anybody to want an iWatch. So they're looking at medical applications as a possible reason people would buy one.
The problem is, 'killer apps' aren't usually designed in by hardware vendors. They happen more serendipitously. Maybe Apple will get luck. But this venture looks like an act of grasping for something, anything, to get a market for some next-gen product.
You're confusing 'the public' with a cult-like following of people who love waiting in line at the Apple store for each new version. It's like a social reunion for them. All their friends are in the line with them, etc.
They're not "free". The people in Western Europe pay way higher taxes.
As for your actual question, maybe there are stronger government regulations.
I am less sceptical than the average slahdot reaction regarding these rumores
Medical devices: an area that could use good innovation. I can imagine Apple being well placed to combine lots of non-invasive sensors into a userfriendly (watch?) deivce) to monitor health. It is not an unrealistic expectation.
They also bought a home automation company some time ago, I can see them defining a standard that will be as popular as Airplay is these days. I can imagine using an idevice/watch to quickly dim the light in the living room for example.
Tesla, now that is really interesting. Indeed a different industry but that does not need to spell failure. Both companies have an innovative attitude, both companies have experience with high quality manufacturing. I can imagine the skills and experience to be nicely complementary. Currently these cars are a the top end of the market, and issues remain, but I bet it is a growth area.
Before continuing this discussion, allow me one question, which I believe should adequately establish whether we have any reasonable chance of being able to reach an agreement on principals, even should we come to agree on facts.
Do you consider it appropriate for a risk pool to contain individuals with varying levels of inherent risk? Consider, for instance, the common case of a risk pool consisting of the set of employees participating in a large enterprise's health plan. Is it appropriate for individuals who are at an inherently high personal risk (on account of genetic predisposition, disability, medical history, or known or predictable factors) to be subsidized by those who are not, or should the pool be stratified into bands by inherent risk level, and thus serving only its traditional role of spreading the costs of unpredictable (and, hopefully, non-clustering) events?
Haters do not need logic or facts.
And yet, tablets as capable as the ipad for much cheaper abound. The iPad is still expensive.
Sure. There're $49 tablets. So what? They don't have the performance of the A7 chip. When you are talking about comparable performance, the tablets all cost about the same. But iOS has additional advantages. It comes with hardware encryption. Only Samsung S4 and other "SAFE" rated Androids have it. It comes with 2-3 years of updates. Things that have value. Funny how fandroids all just ignore that.
And yet, the CEO of BlackBerry didn't exactly understand the cost of things, as the iphone was not the first touch-screen handheld.
So? Fact is, that was what Blackberries used to sell for. That's what my Palms used to sell for.
And yet, Razer has created something more powerful than the MBP for less than the equivalently specced MBP. Also, Microsoft has released a piece of hardware specced like the Air, but with a high resolution display and a touchscreen, for less than the Air.
So, no.
This thing? http://www.newegg.com/Product/... at 6.58lbs, what are you smoking, to compare it to the MB Air? Hell, it's even heavier than my MacBook Retina.
In my country, the pharma cos have to bribe the doctors, rather than the govt. to get the sales of their medicines up. It is really convoluted, actually. If they don't pay a particular doctor, he/she will not prescribe that particular manufacturer's medicine to their patients. The doctor, after receiving payments (and this is not a one time, but recurring payment), will shove that particular company's medicines down the throats of his/her patients. After an year or so, it'll be the turn of a competing manufacturer to bribe the doctor, during whose approved period, no other manufacturer's stuff will be prescribed. And the cycle continues. This is true for private practitioners, resident doctors in hospitals and govt. funded clinics. The pharma companies have to bribe the local pharmacies as well, else they won't stock their stuff. Fucking evil, I say.
I think that you and I are coming from different world views. You talk about things being appropriate or inappropriate but those are value judgments that I cannot make for others. I favor freedom of contract for both insurers and insured. The insurers should be free to offer stated policies with enumerated benefits at stated prices and both parties should be free to negotiate, take or leave it as they see fit. The only thing that matters is that two private parties, whether individuals or groups of individuals, came together in a mutually acceptable agreement. The details are neither my business nor my concern. The market would decide what policies are offered at what prices and what the details of those policies would be. Some regulation would still be necessary to ensure that contracts and prices were honored, but by and large it's my opinion that this type of system would serve most people best and that it would be a fair way to price risk.
I understand that you might disagree with this take, but as I've said I believe that the purpose of insurance is to accurately price and thereby mitigate risks, whether they be to health, life or property. Some people would like to see the insurance system used for other purposes, in addition to providing insurance. For example, they may like to see the insurance business molded by government into an alternative form of income redistribution or a parallel system of taxation in addition to providing insurance, but I do not favor such schemes.
If you're really interested in reading a much better explanation of how a market system for health care would work then I suggest the following article:
How to Cure Health Care
Look at the original iPad.
What about it? It was expensive and it remains expensive.
The Doctors aren't evil... they just practice medicine the old fashioned way. Most learned their diagnostic skills when rotary phones were the standard.
That's a nice bit of data you made up. Twenty seconds on google would have shown that you are wrong. The average age of a physician in the US is 51 years old. That means the average doctor was in medical school between the late 80s and mid 90s and half have trained more recently than that. Sure there are some old farts out there but they are the exception at this point. You seem to have some notion that diagnosis and treatment of disease has undergone some radical change in the last 20 years that makes the skills of older physicians obsolete. This view is entirely incorrect and worse it wrongly presumes that doctors stop learning when they finish their residency.
Furthermore I'm married to a doctor so I know personally that your notions about how "out of date" their skills are is quite incorrect. Most are actually fairly up to date in the area of their specialty. You also have a very false notion about how they practice medicine. Most are eager to use the best techniques available PROVIDED that they can be shown to be an improvement. Doctor's as a rule have a very sensible "show me the data" attitude but they aren't at all averse to new tech, quite the opposite in fact.
As for the FDA... They're not that bad.... just usually very blinder focused.
That statement is so vague as to be meaningless.
and you'll be surprised that most of your medical procedure data is already in the cloud, if you used insurance or put your SSN on any form
I'm well aware of what is out there. My wife's practice uses a medical records system that stores data through a company in another state as does basically any big insurance company. Apple isn't really set up to deal with the regulatory burden that comes with that. Not to say they couldn't be in theory but I doubt they will in any big way. Apple is a consumer products company, not a medical device company. In my day job I work with medical device companies (we make wire harnesses for them) and it is a very different industry with very different cost structures and very different regulatory requirements. Producing a heart rate monitor or fancy pedometer is one thing. Producing a device that is going to actually communicate with your doctor about serious medical conditions is a whole different kettle of fish.
The problem is most of the diagnostic information is in islands that the MDs don't even have good access to.
Wrong. They do have access to all sorts of information and can usually get what they need. The problem is that the access too often isn't efficient (slow and expensive) and that the data is complicated. It is HARD to make a database that efficiently captures all relevant medical information. It is much harder still to make a database that can communicate with all the other databases out there is an useful and efficient manner for an economically sensible price. This has nothing to do with the doctors directly. This has to do with the technical difficulty and economic problems of creating a networked and efficient medical records system. Doctors don't write software, IT people do and not the sort that tends to work at Apple.
That if they do grab Tesla, that Ive and his garish design team keep their pixels far away from any UI that Tesla might have.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
Sound like apple is trying to take one big leap OVER wearable computing and get INSIDE us! Actually this sounds like a pretty cool idea... Just think about it. With Apple inside of us, instead of just a walled garden, we could have a garden of pure ideology. We could be one people with one will, one resolve, one cause. This unification of thoughts could change the world; it would be a more powerful weapon than any fleet or army on earth! Our enemies shall talk themselves to death while we bury them with their own confusion!
I care more about equitable outcomes than about freedom of contract. As such, I do not expect our positions to be reconcilable.
Um, there MOST DEFINITELY is a limit to specific surgeries in Canada. Sure, for obvious stuff there isn't, like broken arms or heart attacks, but cataract surgery, or pretty much anything that won't result in your short-term death is rate-limited. And lord help you if your arm doesn't set right, it takes years to see the specialist [and of course, your arm is fully bonded] about getting it fixed.
And then it also really depends on the doctor. I broke my thumb playing volleyball, and I had to repeatedly request that it be x-rayed, because I wasn't screaming in pain when he touched it so he just assumed it was sprained.
It's better than the US by miles, but it ain't magic.
===
When you go to the hospital emergency clinic, they do a triage. If it looks like you could come back in a week, you are in queue 3. If it looks like you are going to die on them, you are admitted. If you have fever, or similar problem, like a broken arm, you are in queue 1 or queue2. Queue1 people get in and looked at on a fifo basis in around 15 minutes per person. Queue2 is also fifo, but broken arms take longer to fixup, so your wait may be longer. And of course, there is queue jumping.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
Apple was known for making computers. Then they started making idevices. You don't think anyone would buy an iCar?
How can there be equitable outcomes in a world without enforceable promises?
A world in which not all promises are enforceable is not a world without enforceable promises.
Neither history or the world we live in presently has any shortage of examples of power or information imbalances resulting in individuals being unable, on a large scale, to effectively represent their own best interests.
But then -- we're continuing a conversation I expect we both know will be ultimately unproductive. Surely we can find a better use of our time. :)
If 'like with like' means a tablet, then no. There is no non-Apple tablet at the store I visited yesterday that was more than half the median price of the iPads also in that store. And there was a good selection of non-Apple tablets.
Yeah, there's a lot of Chinese made Android tablets at the ten cent store.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
Well. I really shouldn't be letting myself getting sucked into this, but.
A world in which freedom of contract is unhindered is a world in which Shelley v. Kramer would have been differently decided. I prefer not to live in that world.
And yet, the CEO of BlackBerry didn't exactly understand the cost of things, as the iphone was not the first touch-screen handheld.
If you want to bring up the LG Prada (that was actually presented after the iPhone): that one cost 50% more than the iPhone.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
And yet, Razer has created something more powerful than the MBP for less than the equivalently specced MBP. Also, Microsoft has released a piece of hardware specced like the Air, but with a high resolution display and a touchscreen, for less than the Air.
So, no.
This thing? http://www.newegg.com/Product/... at 6.58lbs, what are you smoking, to compare it to the MB Air? Hell, it's even heavier than my MacBook Retina.
Well, it weighs almost exactly what the last 17" MacBook Pro weighed, has has similar specs too, but is 1/10th of an inch thinner - and has no optical drive. Yeah for a lame copy of an Apple product Apple stopped selling almost two years ago.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
LOLOLOL. Since when has ANY Apple product been cheaper and more accessible?
Since 1976.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
And 2001: A Space Odyssey was made decades before digital photo frames.
And the TV device shown in it looks exactly unlike an iPad in almost every possible way.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
Apple Haters? You sound like a cultist on the level of Scientology.
Funny, so do you. Just that you are talking from the "My cult is bigger than your cult, so I must be right" soapbox.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
Up until Apple started marketing the first iPhone product line, they were on a "kick" where all their devices used a variety of pastel color schemes and had "ergonomic" shapes which includes bulges and bubble-looking bits. It was their "signature look".
So the iPhone came out, what, 2004? That was the year the eMac, the last Apple product that wasn't a "rectangle with rounded corners" sold. And that was a hold-out of the CRT era for edu markets. And already was plain white.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
You're confusing 'the public' with a cult-like following of people who love waiting in line at the Apple store for each new version.
You are confusing several dozen million people who buy Apple products each quarter with a few thousand people. Because you are the cult member.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
Because Android isn't making incremental advancements or because other companies haven't followed Apple's lead? Ever?