Erm, the OED describes the way in which words are used by the people that use them.
Even better, the OED is a scholarly work that discusses etymology as well. Want to know when 31337 was first used? It would be in the OED entry, along with the origins of the word elite. That's useful information and much more extensively discussed in the OED than in any other dictionary. The OED is an incredible resource.
Apart from the knowledge we obtain from these vehicles...can we justify these expensive ventures in these recession times?
Apart from the knowledge we obtain from this sort of endeavor...can we justify the value of the human race? Seriously, this is the goal. Everything we've done and all of our efforts as a species it lead up to this sort of exploration of the frontiers of science, astronomy, and meaning. If we don't do something other than reproduce and advertise, if we're only interested in looking inward and never outward, why do we even need to exist?
So they're planning to save money by doing a (probably expensive) renovation and, I suppose, pay for it by selling their existing books? They must have an amazing collection of rare manuscripts for that to make sense. Or, more likely, some scumbags are using the reduced budget as an excuse to spend more money.
Please Google and Apple, join Amazon and explain to the 4 greedy bastards and the MAFIAA that a music file does not need a specific license to be streamed once it has been bought.
Seriously. Amazon on its own has much larger revenue and profits than the entire music industry, but if you add Google and Apple (and let's get MS in there, too) you can field a million-lawyer army to ensure success. This is one case where the American "if you're richer, you'll probably win" court system may work to the benefit of normal people.
Here's a question: All these university researchers are using Wii controllers and Kinect devices to do research. How come they didn't invent this stuff themselves?
They did, long ago. This sort of thing is usually developed as a demonstrated concept in an academic lab. Proof of concept devices are ungainly, expensive, and incomplete, but they show that the academics' idea works and has potential for further development. Then companies take that public domain knowledge and make products from it. These are much cheaper and better packaged. Now the products are part of our technology culture, so they're natural tools for the next round of academics to use as tools for further innovation.
Is it because they couldn't think in mass-market terms so their solutions were overly complex and expensive?
Now here's another question: Why don't Nintendo and Microsoft make developers kits for their devices sans game console? Or even better, make the open source (I can dream)?
Microsoft is releasing Kinect for PC with an SDK supposedly intended to enable this sort of development. They chose to leave the output from the existing Kinect interface unencrypted, too, resulting in the already large homebrew scene demonstrated in storied like this.
If you can't compete on innovation, and you can't compete by bullying standards bodies, and you can't compete by leveraging your monopoly, and you can't compete on performance, and you can't compete on security....well, at least you can say you use less power.
And yes, when you work for the same company that wrote the freaking operating system, one would hope that IE would use the least amount of power.
Whatever.
It's a little distressing that this is currently +4 Insightful. It seems rather off topic, considering that even sites like Apple-friendly Ars Technica have declared IE9 the best current browser and IE9 is neck and neck with Chrome for the performance crown and those two browsers are tied for most secure, as well.
Just because Sony may be overly litigious doesn't mean they will be successful.
I always hope that they will fail in all their jackboot lawsuits. Yet they always seem to be on the winning end of every motion, subpeona, and trial. Even when they pull shit like the infamous rootkit, all THEY get is a slap on the wrist, while everyone who illegally downloads their stuff gets their door kicked in by cops and their lives destroyed.
The legal actions to which you're referring are between Sony and individual non-wealthy people. Amazon is actually much bigger than Sony. Amazon is bigger than the entire music industry, in fact. If Google and Apple also get in on the fight, you're looking at those three companies fighting a group of entertainment companies that's an order of magnitude smaller than they are. That doesn't mean they'll win, but it at least shows that legal resources won't be so lopsided in favor of the RIAA.
as a practicing scientist (phd in molecular biology) although a poor speller, I think this falsifiable thing is silly
actual, real scientists don't worry much about falisfiability and other philosophical concepts, just as most programmers don't worry to much about CompSci theory
real scientists are to busy doing experiments, writing papers, turning coffee into theorems, etc
And in order for real scientists to perform experiments, there must be the possibility of a negative outcome. Without thinking of it in a philosophical sense, we all verify falsifiability in our research through proper experimental design. The alternative are experiments where our hypothesis is replaced by "What's going to happen?" and the data analysis consisting of "Wow!" Even in a broad exploratory study, we follow "Wow, this makes the cheese turn brown!" with "Does this really, repeatably turn the cheese brown?" That's a real experiment with falsifiability built in.
>>>And what's a "hulu.com-compatible line"?...like a troll? You're a troll, aren't you?
Hulu.com doesn't work with lines slower than 192k (i.e. dialup or ISDN or cellular G2) mister Anonymous Coward..
And neither it nor Netflix work well below about 512 kbps. There are large chunks of the Silicon Valley that can't get above 768 kbps DSL. Isn't that weird?
So weather forecasts are automatically NOT predictive? I understand weather pattern estimates don't always pan out, but they are generally more accurate than not. What point are you trying to make, other than just being needlessly contrarian?
I can't believe this AC post was modded up and the GP modded down. Fridaynightsmoke is making an important clarification from TFA (and even TFA doesn't emphasize this point nearly enough): there is no plume. The prediction is based on the hypothetical situation of a constant emission from nuclear plants in Japan, simply predicting where that radioactive material would travel. He's not questioning the weather prediction at all. He's pointing out that the report says, "If there were a worst case scenario plume, which so far isn't the case and almost certainly won't be, where would it go?"
What most sci-fi directors fail to take into account is that good sci-fi isn't about the robots, the aliens, or the gagdets. It's about the people. At the heart of the best classic science fiction is solid character development and rich human interaction. Its really a psychological drama. That's why "I, Robot" failed so hard - the original book wasn't about the robots at all, but the humans who worked with them. Yeah, there is oohing and ahhing over the nifty toys, and nitpicking over the accuracy of the science, but ultimately what we remember are the characters.
When we scientists want to understand a complex system over which we have control, we change an input variable and observe the effects. Good science fiction makes a change to the fundamental rules of society that are usually beyond our control, often but not always through a game-changing technology (advanced space flight, terraforming, genetic engineering, AI, etc.), and explores the effects of this change on characters and sometimes their societies.
I agree with you. Most movie sci-fi is focused on the flashiness of the technology and the generic, tacked on, unrelated stories of the stock characters who interact with it. The genre should instead follow sci-fi literature and use the sci-fi elements to examine the human experience.
As reported in the NY Times - it looks like this is Japan's Katrina. From reading the article, I get a sense that this is worse than what happened with Katrina in the US. Any readers from Japan care to comment? It seems like, even if there are very dedicated and smart people working the problem, this wouldn't be something that can be handled simply by nuclear experts. Effective management of this as a crisis is needed, and the people in charge need to work together as a team to solve a national crisis. Neither of which seem to be happening.
The nuclear bit hasn't produced much in the way of damage, at this point, but the tsunami did far, far more damage to Japan than Katrina did to the United States. Katrina isn't even on the same order of magnitude. I've been shocked to see tv news sources suggesting that Japan wants to avoid a Katrina-scale disaster as if this weren't already ~hundreds of times worse.
I just don't understand why americans tolerate ISPs enforcing ridiculous caps. From a swedish perspective it seems kind of backwards, I don't really know of any ISPs here that have caps and it really seems like a concept take from the early days of consumer broadband (mid-to-late 90s there were a few swedish ISPs that tried the whole thing with caps but they were pretty much forced into obscurity since most ISPs didn't cap).
Even major cities in American typically have only 2-3 available internet service providers, and they tend to implement very similar metering policies at roughly the same time, so there's no easy alternative.
"A properly maintained iPad battery is designed to retain up to 80% of its original capacity at 1000 full charge and discharge cycles. You may choose to replace your battery when it no longer holds sufficient charge to meet your needs." Here's the link: http://www.apple.com/batteries/ipad.html.
I dunno, but 80% after at least 3 years seems pretty damn good to me.
"Up to 80%" means 0-80% under ideal conditions. From my experience with the lithium polymer batteries used by Apple, I'd expect about 50% after 2 years.
as much as Mac OS X has a reputation for being safer than Windows, security researchers won't hesitate to point out that the opposite is, in fact, true.
I'm sorry, what? Windows is "safer" than OS X? "In fact"?
Every single year, OSX loses the Pwn2Own competition first. Windows and Linux always go down on the same day. No matter what version has been current, OSX has always been less secure than Windows when both are up to date on patches. If Apple changes its security culture, it could mean big things for Apple in corporate environments.
All they really needed to say was that it's the time-reversed counterpart of a laser. Calling it an "anti-laser" makes it sound like it shoots out a beam of darkness or something like that (which could be cool, but physically impossible).
Why this is neat is that, because it's the reverse of a laser, it'll absorb some frequencies almost perfectly while ignoring others. The reason why they said this would work for cancer, for instance, is that you could embed some of these dudes in the cancer (there's techniques for that, I have no idea how they work) and then bombard them with a laser frequency that normally passes harmlessly through humans. Areas without these reverse-lasers will be unaffected, but areas with them will get really hot, killing the cancer. We use similar techniques already (with I think gold, I'm not quite sure) in order to localize radiotherapy, but I believe that the radiation used in the current methods still kills a lot of normal cells on its own.
You win. Mods, please get the parent to +5 Informative. It's clearly the best post on the story.
So because you don't like that sort of game people playing them for "no reward, no effect, and no return" should just kill themselves. But people wasting just as much time for "no reard, no effect, and no return" playing games you don't think are stupid should just keep on doing so?
Seriously what is the difference between spending 1 hour a day playing mafia wars and spending 1 hour a day playing call of duty and spending 1 hour a day playing dungeons and dragons and spending 1 hour a day playing tetris and spending 1 hour a day watching House? They're all equally time sinks with the onley upside being people get some enjoyment from them.
D&D improves your creativity. Tetris improves your spatial reasoning, as does CoD, which also improves your dexterity. I don't know whether Mafia Wars/Farmville would be more or less beneficial than House. The games are interactive, which tends to engage more of your brain than passively consuming something like a television show, but MW/FV are almost uniquely repetitive, unstimulating experiences. They may be more akin to spending an hour counting pixels on your tv.
I admire the way you've cited good solid research in your rebuttal. If you hadn't backed up your statements about why "people do it," your comments would have come across like just another angry sounding, defensive opinion from someone who likes to pirate entertainment.
Note that the "researchers" making this extraordinary claim also cite no data, only speculation. Also, note that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Honestly, if someone looks angry and defensive and out of touch with reality here it's you, not the GP.
Does anyone else think that the quote sounds like one of those fake quotes you see in mail hoaxes? For instance, why would he say "I put this stuff inside my black North Face jacket", which adds nothing to the story but is something a hoaxer would put in if he saw photos of Longueuil wearing North Face products. Besides, maybe the guy wasn't a Rhodes Scholar, but I have a hard time believing the managing director of a capital management firm speaks like a valley girl.
I'm not saying he's innocent, just that this news item doesn't look right.
People in Manhattan, especially investment banker types, place a lot more value on things like the brands of their clothes than most people elsewhere. Seriously, I know a lot of people who call their jackets/sweaters/etc. "my Patagonia" or "my Northface." The actual nature of the object is less important than the designer.
And all of this can be yours for the low low price of a $200 Windows upgrade if you're one of the hundreds of millions (more than 50% of the Web) users on Windows XP.
Or, you know, $110/3 on Amazon. By all means don't let reality get in the way of your ranting, though.
It's easy to argue that McDonalds don't make the best burgers
I find this to be an odd analogy... McDonalds goes for the low end and Apple goes for the high end. And Nike has a product spread from the relative cheap to the fairly high end (for athletic shoes), while Apple has no such spread.
You'd have to look at a company that does not measure success with market share. To use a car analogy, they are more like BMW. High end with no low-end offerings, limited selection, and content to occupy only that space.
The iPhone is for people who are willing to drop a couple hundred on a phone, who don't have philosophical problems with Apple's walled garden, who don't need a keyboard, who like the large app library, and who are attracted to the overall simplicity. People who still want a smart phone but don't see exactly what they want with the Apple have a large selection of Motorola, HTC, Samsung, and other models running a variety of OSes. People who want a no-nonsense experience and a keyboard can get a Blackberry. And of course, many, many people still buy the "Chevy" - the flip or feature phone.
Apple only goes for the high end in terms of price, not in terms of the quality or components in its products. Perhaps a good analogous non-tech company would be Juicy Couture - it's about design and price, not quality. With Apple's hardware generally a generation behind PCs or Android phones, it fills a specialty niche role, not a high end role.
Slashdot Mirror
Erm, the OED describes the way in which words are used by the people that use them.
Even better, the OED is a scholarly work that discusses etymology as well. Want to know when 31337 was first used? It would be in the OED entry, along with the origins of the word elite. That's useful information and much more extensively discussed in the OED than in any other dictionary. The OED is an incredible resource.
To paraphrase Ovid, rident stolidi OED.
100 millisieverts? Per hour? Per day? Per century? Thanks, Slashdot, for giving us a useless number.
Apart from the knowledge we obtain from these vehicles...can we justify these expensive ventures in these recession times?
Apart from the knowledge we obtain from this sort of endeavor...can we justify the value of the human race? Seriously, this is the goal. Everything we've done and all of our efforts as a species it lead up to this sort of exploration of the frontiers of science, astronomy, and meaning. If we don't do something other than reproduce and advertise, if we're only interested in looking inward and never outward, why do we even need to exist?
VLC's functions, like very short jump/short jump/medium jump/long jump
Luckily XBMC doesn't have these features so a simple remote is fine.
It had those features 8 years ago and still has them today. FUD.
So they're planning to save money by doing a (probably expensive) renovation and, I suppose, pay for it by selling their existing books? They must have an amazing collection of rare manuscripts for that to make sense. Or, more likely, some scumbags are using the reduced budget as an excuse to spend more money.
Please Google and Apple, join Amazon and explain to the 4 greedy bastards and the MAFIAA that a music file does not need a specific license to be streamed once it has been bought.
Seriously. Amazon on its own has much larger revenue and profits than the entire music industry, but if you add Google and Apple (and let's get MS in there, too) you can field a million-lawyer army to ensure success. This is one case where the American "if you're richer, you'll probably win" court system may work to the benefit of normal people.
Here's a question: All these university researchers are using Wii controllers and Kinect devices to do research. How come they didn't invent this stuff themselves?
They did, long ago. This sort of thing is usually developed as a demonstrated concept in an academic lab. Proof of concept devices are ungainly, expensive, and incomplete, but they show that the academics' idea works and has potential for further development. Then companies take that public domain knowledge and make products from it. These are much cheaper and better packaged. Now the products are part of our technology culture, so they're natural tools for the next round of academics to use as tools for further innovation.
Is it because they couldn't think in mass-market terms so their solutions were overly complex and expensive?
Now here's another question: Why don't Nintendo and Microsoft make developers kits for their devices sans game console? Or even better, make the open source (I can dream)?
Microsoft is releasing Kinect for PC with an SDK supposedly intended to enable this sort of development. They chose to leave the output from the existing Kinect interface unencrypted, too, resulting in the already large homebrew scene demonstrated in storied like this.
If you can't compete on innovation, and you can't compete by bullying standards bodies, and you can't compete by leveraging your monopoly, and you can't compete on performance, and you can't compete on security....well, at least you can say you use less power.
And yes, when you work for the same company that wrote the freaking operating system, one would hope that IE would use the least amount of power.
Whatever.
It's a little distressing that this is currently +4 Insightful. It seems rather off topic, considering that even sites like Apple-friendly Ars Technica have declared IE9 the best current browser and IE9 is neck and neck with Chrome for the performance crown and those two browsers are tied for most secure, as well.
That said, I use FF because of addons.
It's actually one red square - the measurement was off by a factor of 100 and later corrected.
http://www.eimai.in/incorrect-measurements-that-led-to-alarm-in-fukushima/3348/
Just because Sony may be overly litigious doesn't mean they will be successful.
I always hope that they will fail in all their jackboot lawsuits. Yet they always seem to be on the winning end of every motion, subpeona, and trial. Even when they pull shit like the infamous rootkit, all THEY get is a slap on the wrist, while everyone who illegally downloads their stuff gets their door kicked in by cops and their lives destroyed.
The legal actions to which you're referring are between Sony and individual non-wealthy people. Amazon is actually much bigger than Sony. Amazon is bigger than the entire music industry, in fact. If Google and Apple also get in on the fight, you're looking at those three companies fighting a group of entertainment companies that's an order of magnitude smaller than they are. That doesn't mean they'll win, but it at least shows that legal resources won't be so lopsided in favor of the RIAA.
as a practicing scientist (phd in molecular biology) although a poor speller, I think this falsifiable thing is silly
actual, real scientists don't worry much about falisfiability and other philosophical concepts, just as most programmers don't worry to much about CompSci theory
real scientists are to busy doing experiments, writing papers, turning coffee into theorems, etc
And in order for real scientists to perform experiments, there must be the possibility of a negative outcome. Without thinking of it in a philosophical sense, we all verify falsifiability in our research through proper experimental design. The alternative are experiments where our hypothesis is replaced by "What's going to happen?" and the data analysis consisting of "Wow!" Even in a broad exploratory study, we follow "Wow, this makes the cheese turn brown!" with "Does this really, repeatably turn the cheese brown?" That's a real experiment with falsifiability built in.
>>>And what's a "hulu.com-compatible line"? ...like a troll? You're a troll, aren't you?
Hulu.com doesn't work with lines slower than 192k (i.e. dialup or ISDN or cellular G2) mister Anonymous Coward. .
And neither it nor Netflix work well below about 512 kbps. There are large chunks of the Silicon Valley that can't get above 768 kbps DSL. Isn't that weird?
So weather forecasts are automatically NOT predictive? I understand weather pattern estimates don't always pan out, but they are generally more accurate than not. What point are you trying to make, other than just being needlessly contrarian?
I can't believe this AC post was modded up and the GP modded down. Fridaynightsmoke is making an important clarification from TFA (and even TFA doesn't emphasize this point nearly enough): there is no plume. The prediction is based on the hypothetical situation of a constant emission from nuclear plants in Japan, simply predicting where that radioactive material would travel. He's not questioning the weather prediction at all. He's pointing out that the report says, "If there were a worst case scenario plume, which so far isn't the case and almost certainly won't be, where would it go?"
What most sci-fi directors fail to take into account is that good sci-fi isn't about the robots, the aliens, or the gagdets. It's about the people. At the heart of the best classic science fiction is solid character development and rich human interaction. Its really a psychological drama. That's why "I, Robot" failed so hard - the original book wasn't about the robots at all, but the humans who worked with them. Yeah, there is oohing and ahhing over the nifty toys, and nitpicking over the accuracy of the science, but ultimately what we remember are the characters.
When we scientists want to understand a complex system over which we have control, we change an input variable and observe the effects. Good science fiction makes a change to the fundamental rules of society that are usually beyond our control, often but not always through a game-changing technology (advanced space flight, terraforming, genetic engineering, AI, etc.), and explores the effects of this change on characters and sometimes their societies.
I agree with you. Most movie sci-fi is focused on the flashiness of the technology and the generic, tacked on, unrelated stories of the stock characters who interact with it. The genre should instead follow sci-fi literature and use the sci-fi elements to examine the human experience.
As reported in the NY Times - it looks like this is Japan's Katrina. From reading the article, I get a sense that this is worse than what happened with Katrina in the US. Any readers from Japan care to comment? It seems like, even if there are very dedicated and smart people working the problem, this wouldn't be something that can be handled simply by nuclear experts. Effective management of this as a crisis is needed, and the people in charge need to work together as a team to solve a national crisis. Neither of which seem to be happening.
The nuclear bit hasn't produced much in the way of damage, at this point, but the tsunami did far, far more damage to Japan than Katrina did to the United States. Katrina isn't even on the same order of magnitude. I've been shocked to see tv news sources suggesting that Japan wants to avoid a Katrina-scale disaster as if this weren't already ~hundreds of times worse.
I just don't understand why americans tolerate ISPs enforcing ridiculous caps. From a swedish perspective it seems kind of backwards, I don't really know of any ISPs here that have caps and it really seems like a concept take from the early days of consumer broadband (mid-to-late 90s there were a few swedish ISPs that tried the whole thing with caps but they were pretty much forced into obscurity since most ISPs didn't cap).
Even major cities in American typically have only 2-3 available internet service providers, and they tend to implement very similar metering policies at roughly the same time, so there's no easy alternative.
You win a cookie for bringing the most crazy to this story. Cheers!
You must be thinking of cheap PC batteries.
Apple is stating on their web site:
"A properly maintained iPad battery is designed to retain up to 80% of its original capacity at 1000 full charge and discharge cycles. You may choose to replace your battery when it no longer holds sufficient charge to meet your needs." Here's the link: http://www.apple.com/batteries/ipad.html.
I dunno, but 80% after at least 3 years seems pretty damn good to me.
"Up to 80%" means 0-80% under ideal conditions. From my experience with the lithium polymer batteries used by Apple, I'd expect about 50% after 2 years.
as much as Mac OS X has a reputation for being safer than Windows, security researchers won't hesitate to point out that the opposite is, in fact, true.
I'm sorry, what? Windows is "safer" than OS X? "In fact"?
Every single year, OSX loses the Pwn2Own competition first. Windows and Linux always go down on the same day. No matter what version has been current, OSX has always been less secure than Windows when both are up to date on patches. If Apple changes its security culture, it could mean big things for Apple in corporate environments.
All they really needed to say was that it's the time-reversed counterpart of a laser. Calling it an "anti-laser" makes it sound like it shoots out a beam of darkness or something like that (which could be cool, but physically impossible).
Why this is neat is that, because it's the reverse of a laser, it'll absorb some frequencies almost perfectly while ignoring others. The reason why they said this would work for cancer, for instance, is that you could embed some of these dudes in the cancer (there's techniques for that, I have no idea how they work) and then bombard them with a laser frequency that normally passes harmlessly through humans. Areas without these reverse-lasers will be unaffected, but areas with them will get really hot, killing the cancer. We use similar techniques already (with I think gold, I'm not quite sure) in order to localize radiotherapy, but I believe that the radiation used in the current methods still kills a lot of normal cells on its own.
You win. Mods, please get the parent to +5 Informative. It's clearly the best post on the story.
So because you don't like that sort of game people playing them for "no reward, no effect, and no return" should just kill themselves. But people wasting just as much time for "no reard, no effect, and no return" playing games you don't think are stupid should just keep on doing so?
Seriously what is the difference between spending 1 hour a day playing mafia wars and spending 1 hour a day playing call of duty and spending 1 hour a day playing dungeons and dragons and spending 1 hour a day playing tetris and spending 1 hour a day watching House? They're all equally time sinks with the onley upside being people get some enjoyment from them.
D&D improves your creativity. Tetris improves your spatial reasoning, as does CoD, which also improves your dexterity. I don't know whether Mafia Wars/Farmville would be more or less beneficial than House. The games are interactive, which tends to engage more of your brain than passively consuming something like a television show, but MW/FV are almost uniquely repetitive, unstimulating experiences. They may be more akin to spending an hour counting pixels on your tv.
I admire the way you've cited good solid research in your rebuttal. If you hadn't backed up your statements about why "people do it," your comments would have come across like just another angry sounding, defensive opinion from someone who likes to pirate entertainment.
Note that the "researchers" making this extraordinary claim also cite no data, only speculation. Also, note that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Honestly, if someone looks angry and defensive and out of touch with reality here it's you, not the GP.
Does anyone else think that the quote sounds like one of those fake quotes you see in mail hoaxes? For instance, why would he say "I put this stuff inside my black North Face jacket", which adds nothing to the story but is something a hoaxer would put in if he saw photos of Longueuil wearing North Face products. Besides, maybe the guy wasn't a Rhodes Scholar, but I have a hard time believing the managing director of a capital management firm speaks like a valley girl.
I'm not saying he's innocent, just that this news item doesn't look right.
People in Manhattan, especially investment banker types, place a lot more value on things like the brands of their clothes than most people elsewhere. Seriously, I know a lot of people who call their jackets/sweaters/etc. "my Patagonia" or "my Northface." The actual nature of the object is less important than the designer.
And all of this can be yours for the low low price of a $200 Windows upgrade if you're one of the hundreds of millions (more than 50% of the Web) users on Windows XP.
Or, you know, $110/3 on Amazon. By all means don't let reality get in the way of your ranting, though.
It's easy to argue that McDonalds don't make the best burgers
I find this to be an odd analogy... McDonalds goes for the low end and Apple goes for the high end. And Nike has a product spread from the relative cheap to the fairly high end (for athletic shoes), while Apple has no such spread.
You'd have to look at a company that does not measure success with market share. To use a car analogy, they are more like BMW. High end with no low-end offerings, limited selection, and content to occupy only that space.
The iPhone is for people who are willing to drop a couple hundred on a phone, who don't have philosophical problems with Apple's walled garden, who don't need a keyboard, who like the large app library, and who are attracted to the overall simplicity. People who still want a smart phone but don't see exactly what they want with the Apple have a large selection of Motorola, HTC, Samsung, and other models running a variety of OSes. People who want a no-nonsense experience and a keyboard can get a Blackberry. And of course, many, many people still buy the "Chevy" - the flip or feature phone.
Apple only goes for the high end in terms of price, not in terms of the quality or components in its products. Perhaps a good analogous non-tech company would be Juicy Couture - it's about design and price, not quality. With Apple's hardware generally a generation behind PCs or Android phones, it fills a specialty niche role, not a high end role.