I really might consider buying at that price, if only for the BluRay. Hell, I paid $1000 for my DVD player!!! I think I can pay $500 for a BluRay player and a console in one.
Exactly. People bitch about Blu Ray but DVD players cost just much in their day. I paid £599 for a Pioneer player (incl £50 for a mod) and that was several years after DVD had actually come out.
The point of my response is that the PS3 is not a "bare bones console". It is a well rounded media hub which is highly likely to gain movie download / rental abilities soon too. People thinking it is just a console are not seeing the bigger picture.
If you want to go through your issues though,...:
Blu Ray, No one is saying that HD blu ray makes any sense if you have an SD set. But if you have an HD TV or intend to get one (as virtually everyone with money will do in the next 5 years) then it's a good advantage. It's also an advantage for gamers since titles will have more capacity for additional content.
DVD, CD, SACD Playback, streaming video & audio, H264 video, AAC, MP3, WMA audio . I'm sure your PC can do this. Now does it fit underneath your TV set? Even if it does, does it also act as a Blu Ray player and as a games console? There is something to be said of a device that can do all of these things with ease.
an integrated web browser, wifi, gigabit LAN, bluetooth, USB connectivity, a 60Gb hard disk, the same question - does it do all of these from underneath your TV set? While it would be great to imagine a world of MythTV users, the reality is rather different. A ViiV PC for your TV would set you back far more than a PS3.
HDMI 1.3 output, yes it's not important if you don't own an HD set. But if you have a DVI-D monitor or HD TV then it's a great advantage. Composite is crap compared to DVI-D / HDMI. And HDMI is already the defacto digital standard so all TV sets support it. It's called future proofing.
Integrated Store You have to spend money to "fully use" any console's features. The store is just an indication that this console is not "bare bones" as claimed. There are things to download and things to check out from one week to the next. The PSN store already offers some pretty cool games, trailers and other bits and bobs and it's easy to see it extend to offer downloadable music and movies in time.
free online network support, as in games don't cost you a penny to play online on the PS3. They don't cost you $50 a year as they do on the XBox 360 to play online. And you'd be lucky to find any games on the Wii that even have online play.
wirelesss controllers, the PS3 has excellent rechargable wireless controllers. I very much doubt your Logitech controller was rechargable. The Wii has wireless controllers but they are not rechargeable. The 360 has a rechargeable controllers though.
chat & messaging, ability to run Linux and doubtless many other things? . We're not talking about a PC. We're talking about something the original poster claimed was a bare bones console. When it is absolutely not by a long shot. Besides I seriously doubt you could ever build a PC that matched a PS3 or Xbox 360 for gaming prowess at the same price point. That's not to say I don't think PCs are great for certain games (e.g. first person shooters) but there is no way in hell you'd get the same performance from a PC for the same cost as a console, and certainly not in the same form factor either.
Still way more than I will pay for bare bones console.
Now how about for a console with Blu Ray, DVD, CD, SACD playback, streaming video & audio, H264 video, AAC, MP3, WMA audio, an integrated web browser, wifi, gigabit LAN, bluetooth, USB connectivity, a 60Gb hard disk, HDMI 1.3 output, wirelesss controllers, free online network support, integrated store, web browser, chat & messaging, ability to run Linux and doubtless many other things? AND it is a kickass games console.
Seriously though, I think it's fairly likely that Apple seal their batteries in and slap a high price tag on replacements to encourage people to buy a new model rather than maintain their otherwise functioning device. It's quite cynical really.
Your friend's grandmother's journal is one thing. A 150 report containing multiple columns, break out boxes, indexes, cross references, images, embedded fields, revisions, possibly multiple languages, embedded objects etc. is quite another.
Why should the burden be on OpenOffice or any other app to second guess the proprietary format of something like MS Word? At best you might get a passable representation of the original. At worst you get a complete mess which could screw up the rendering and possibly miss out whole chunks that it can't handle. And as time goes on, the burden of supporting old and possibly rare document formats becomes onerous and virtually impossible for the project to bear.
I too have been saved by OpenOffice which managed to read an old Mac Word file which even MS Word on the PC would not read. It almost got the rendering right but splattered question marks all over the place instead of some missing character. So the first the thing I did was repair it and save a copy in.odt format. I'm glad I could import but simply do not trust OpenOffice to support the format in perpetuity or for the format to receive sufficient testing to ensure it continues to work for ever and ever. So perhaps the same could happen with.odt? Not really since even if OpenOffice died, there are a growing number of apps that support the same format. Better yet, someone could even extract the text and styling if they had to since.odt splits presentation from the content.
The solution is to store documents in a well defined open format to begin with. Adopt the new format and write converters for the legacy documents. Then at least there is a common denominator going forward, one that is implemented by multiple applications and interchangeable between them. Even a pretty shoddy standard like HTML shows the sort of revolution that can happen when every vendor adopts it.
I think next gen consoles are easily comparable platforms, just as PS2 / XBox and GC were before. And by next gen I mean XBox 360 and PS3, not Wii which I'll comment on afterwards. Sure there are differences between the 360 & PS3 but there is also a great deal of similarity - the amount of memory, CPU speed, the supported resolutions, the controllers, the network connectivity and so forth. It means all graphic assets, sounds, and a great deal of the game code is going to be identical for either platform. You can also toss in the PC as another platform that can share code & assets with the 360 & PS3. I hear people sometimes say next gen is more expensive to develop than last gen, but it must be remembered that the more platforms you can support from the same code, the cheaper things become. I think most games companies will be keen to support 360, PS3 and PC since they can share assets and probably 90% of the code too.
The Cell is different from the 3-core 360 but most cross-platform games (and indeed single platform games) do not hit the bare metal anyway. The likes of EA / Ubisoft / Activision have in-house teams that write tools and libraries that hide most of the platform specifics so for the most part the game code will be platform agnostic. There are also plenty of 3rd party middleware libs such as Havok, Physx, Renderware, Unreal etc. that also hide the details. Even when the code does have to hit the metal, proper abstraction can insulate most of the code from the specifics. We're almost at the point where PS3 / 360 cross-platform titles are virtually identical. The PS3 may still be slightly behind but that can be chalked up to the immaturity of the middleware which will obviously get better.
I think there is scope for consoles to split off in ways that exploit their strengths. For example the Cell is basically a number shovel. It can act almost like a preprocessor for the GPU, doing texturing, wave effects, clipping, scene culling etc. allowing the PS3 to render enormous maps with enormous numbers of environmental effects. The 360 has 3 general purpose cores which means it is easier to get sophisticated AI out of it as well as better and more mature network play.
I think the odd man out is clearly the Wii. It doesn't have the memory, CPU, resolution or anything else remotely approaching either the 360 or PS3. It is clearly impossible for games to share much at all between Wii and other new consoles. Even Miyamoto called it a Gamecube 1.5. This is why it is getting an unusually large number of PS2 ports. In time it may break away from the PS2 but the number of exclusives (or franchise spin-offs) will be more reflective of limitations than any strength.
Perhaps it subsidized and it's just so expensive that the subsidies only bring it down to $600?
I doubt it. Plenty of phones offer everything that could conceivably make the iPhone expensive, only for much less. Sure they may look less stylish, but at the end of the day the iPhone is just a glorified phone / PDA and there are plenty of them to make valid price comparisons to. From my example the Treo 750v has a touch screen, keypad, does quad band GSM and even 3G. Even if you were to look at the differences such as the 8Gb memory, that probably only less than $50 onto production costs since you can buy 8Gb USB keys retail for $70 these days. I don't actually think the Treo is a better phone (it is in some ways and worse in others) but it is suitable for making price comparisons.
I really doubt that the iPhone costs anywhere close to $600 to manufacture. And even if it did, those phone plans could and should have slashed $400 off the price. At least.
I personally think it is fair that a telco wants you to sign up for a 2 year contract when they give you a subsidized phone, especially when they want to give you an expensive phone at (what appears to be) a bargain.
Exactly. Vodafone UK literally gives its phones away for free on most mid range packages for 12 or 18 months contract. You can even get something such as a Palm Treo 750v for free if you so desire. A Palm Treo allegedly costs $600 according to Palm's own site, but you get it for nothing since Vodafone recoup the money from your contract and any calls you make beyond the plan.
That neither Apple nor AT&T do this probably has a lot to do with greed. They know they can rape hype befuddled early adopters and get away with it.
Smart? The GTA series (4 games) sold 37 million on the ps2. The top 4 of the best selling ps2 games consists of 3 GTA games. I would say that losing the early lead Sony had with the ps2 could be quite devastating to the ps3.
Yes smart. GTA IV is still coming to the PS3 so what's the problem? As I said if they can fund 5-10 games for what GTA would have cost to keep exclusive. I'd rather see Sony bulk up with new exclusives rather than pay through the nose to hang onto existing ones.
And I say that as someone who has owned pretty much every GTA title at one title at one time or another. I'm looking forward to GTA IV, but I really don't care that it's coming to the 360 too. Good for them. I just hope the PS3 version isn't hobbled by the DVD-9 capacity of the 360.
Even the much vaunted exclusive content for the 360 isn't happening until some time next year and might end up being a "timed exclusive" or similar. The PS3 is rumoured to be exclusive content which may or may not be the same content just 6 months later. I hope Sony didn't pay to get it and don't see why they should if Take Two rake it in from people downloading the content from the PSN store.
Are you nuts? Believe me, the iPhone costs more than $600. You're only paying that because you sign a 2+ year agreement with AT&T to be on their crappy network which in turn earns them well over the extra $200-300 they paid ontop of the $600 you paid for the phone.
It is highly unlikely that the iPhone costs Apple anywhere remotely close to $600 to manufacture. And even if it did, there is no reason at those ridiculous contracts that AT&T couldn't have have slashed the retail price down to $300.
Look how much Vodafone in the UK charges you for a Treo 750v (the v meaning gimped Vodafone version) on an Anytime 500 package which costs roughly $70 pm. NOTHING. That's right you pay nothing for a phone which costs $600 according to Palm. Another example - I can buy the incredibly lovely looking Toshiba G900 for £117 ($235) on the same Anytime 500 package. On a 12 month contract too. The G900 has less memory than the iPhone but is far superior in most other respects including screen resolution and even has a popout keyboard.
So the point is that Apple could have sold the iPhone retail for $600 and probably made a profit. Why they did this is a mystery but I suspect that they thought there was no point in an iPhone if no service provider had a package including unlimited data and other things it needs to be in any way impressive. That's where AT&T come in and probably both Apple and AT&T concluded that their customers were ripe for a raping and neither made any concessions to price or relied on the other for subsidy.
It sucks for people stupid enough to buy into a 2 year contract for iPhone 1.0 but there you are. That's the power of hype for you. After reading reviews on Engadget & elsewhere, it is hard to come away thinking the phone is anything but meh. I'm sure iPhone 2.0 will be a lot better, especially if it gets 3G and the glaring faults in some of its apps are sorted out.
Sony would have loved to hang on to GTA but when you consider that Microsoft paid them 50 million dollars just for some downloadable content, is it any surprise that they did not? Imagine how much Take Two must have been demanding from Sony for exclusive rights. It wouldn't surprise me if they were asking 50-100 million at least.
That is a lot of money, enough in fact for Sony to fund 5-10 1st party titles or maybe 30 PSN store titles. No wonder Sony told TTWO where to stick it.
Other than that, most of the other exclusives really don't mean much for system sales. Devil May Cry might be a great game but I doubt it sold many consoles. And if it would have cost 10 million to keep it exclusive, perhaps the decision was that the money is better spent elsewhere.
Sure that means losing exclusives, but it also means that the money goes to making new exclusives. People talk of Sony losing exclusives when they have something like 15-20 games in the works at present, many of which are new exclusives. Think Resistance, Motorstorm, Lair, Uncharted, Heavenly Sword etc.
At the end of the day, it's not like you can't play GTA or Assasins Creed or Devil May Cry. They're still all there so I really don't see the fuss. If someone asked me if I'd rather your game had 5 great exclusive sequels, or 5 great cross-platform sequels and 10 brand new exclusives (some of which are also great), I know what option I'd choose.
I'm really sick of this weak argument against the iPhone when there are SO many valid things it is really lacking compared to "free" cell phones providers are giving away with 2 years of service (speed dial, changing ring tones, Bluetooth object transfer, voice dial, swappable batteries, MMS, Bluetooth tethering, etc.).
Perhaps you can escape the plan, but does that include an unlock code? Can you even unlock your iPhone?
Perhaps I'm spoilt from living in Europe. Most ~ $60 price plans would get you any phone for nothing or a small fee. That includes models like the Palm Treo 750, Blackberry models etc. We'll have to wait and see what happens when the iPhone appears in Europe. It wouldn't surprise me if Vodafone, O2 etc. engage in a little rape of their own if there are people dumb enough pay for one and sign up for a high contract.
I never understood this either. Assuming an iPhone costs $600, why not just sell them in the Apple store and let customers sort their own phone plan out. Yes it might mean some inconvenience setting up stuff like WAP / SMS etc. which are provider specific, but nothing I'm sure some setup software couldn't have sorted. Most GSM phone providers will sell SIM kits, and most really couldn't care what phone you use on their network just so long as you use their network.
All Apple have done by their move is ensure that anyone buying their phone package is locked into a contract that with the phone costs anywhere upwards of $2000 for two years. That represents absolutely terrible value for money. You really would have to be blinded by the hype to buy an iPhone on those terms. It's an utter waste of money especially considering other technical deficiencies such as lack of 3G. Perhaps a firmware update will fix that issue because there's going to be some severe buyers remorse if an updated model appears with that feature.
I will confess to being an Illuminati agent, to know who killed JFK, to have befriended the yeti, to know the warehouse where the moon landing set is stored, to be frequent visitor to Atlantis and to have the exact coordinates that lead to the centre of the Earth. After all, if it's in my affidavit and I'm not around to answer questions, it must be true. Right?
Apple would address linux before 64 bit windows. With that said, the manual says it in quite a few places that it's not supported.
Building software for 64-bit windows would usually be a matter of a few compiler switches and using the proper types and macros. Or just building a 32-bit app that runs properly in 64-bit. Apple might have some crazy in-house cross-platform environment or a lack of QA resources which prevents doing either but that isn't much of an excuse.
They could be doing it for political reasons of course which isn't forgiveable either.
Considering Apple's reputation for software which "just works", their recent offerings on Windows seem to be doing anything but.
I bought a Canon S750 about 3 years ago. It cost me a pretty penny compared to some of the cheaper models but it had the advantage of separate colour cartridges, 3rd party refill cartridges were plentiful and it was easy to refill too. So Canon got their money up front from the sale, and I saved money over the long term on ink. It's not the greatest printer for photos but the quality is just fine for every day printing. I expect I will use it as long as it works.
I think if I had bought some cheaper printer that I would have spent 2-4x the money by now on refills, even assuming the printer even worked any more. I despise devices that have built-in obsolescence or rely on disposable & non-recyclable parts to force upgrades. Someone like the EU should force the industry to define and adopt standards that cover things like chargers, batteries and cartridges.
You can change the SIM in the iPhone too (there are pictures of the software demanding that the SIM be inserted). However, like many US phones, it is vendor locked and can only be used with SIMs from a particular provider. If Apple drops the exclusive deal with AT&T (which they can do in two years), they'll probably send out unlock codes via Software Update. Maybe.
The sick part is people are paying $600 for a phone UNDER CONTRACT. That's simply insane.
More planned obsolescence. Pity. I'd like to see Apple go a little greener. A non-user replaceable battery limits the life of a device substantially.
Apple would probably claim that they seal the battery for safety or for ergonomics. The more likely reason is they derive a good amount of repeat business from existing users who "upgrade" simply because their old model doesn't work very well any more and the cost and effort of replacing the battery is ridiculously large.
I doubt the situation is ever going to change unless someone like the EU clamps down on manufacturers and forces them to make batteries replaceable.
Gyroscopic mice have been around for years (pioneering the same tech you now see in the Wii remote and PS3 SIXAXIS). You really wouldn't want to use one unless you're doing a presentation or similar since you'll just hurt your hand and wrist waving the thing around in mid-air.
Or perhaps it's not 11 brand new XBox 360s. Perhaps Microsoft keep sending him the same "fixed" one back, or giving him refurbished units which are as liable break because they've been similarly "fixed".
I'm sorry to report that Thunderbird/Sunbird is nowhere near ready to replace Exchange. Depending on your needs, it might be a good fit though.
They would be far closer to replacing exchange if they supported Exchange. The Evolution Exchange plugin has been open sourced for ages now, porting it the cross platform Thunderbird and Sunbird would make the suite hugely more attractive to enterprises locked into MS Office for their client software.
Nothing makes it standout except for it's price. At $600 ON A CONTRACT, you are essentially pissing your money down the drain. You could buy an 80Gb iPod and virtually any other phone (including superior Windows Mobile / Blackberry phones) from any other provider on a lower contract for less.
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Exactly. People bitch about Blu Ray but DVD players cost just much in their day. I paid £599 for a Pioneer player (incl £50 for a mod) and that was several years after DVD had actually come out.
If you want to go through your issues though, ...:
Now how about for a console with Blu Ray, DVD, CD, SACD playback, streaming video & audio, H264 video, AAC, MP3, WMA audio, an integrated web browser, wifi, gigabit LAN, bluetooth, USB connectivity, a 60Gb hard disk, HDMI 1.3 output, wirelesss controllers, free online network support, integrated store, web browser, chat & messaging, ability to run Linux and doubtless many other things? AND it is a kickass games console.
Seriously though, I think it's fairly likely that Apple seal their batteries in and slap a high price tag on replacements to encourage people to buy a new model rather than maintain their otherwise functioning device. It's quite cynical really.
Why should the burden be on OpenOffice or any other app to second guess the proprietary format of something like MS Word? At best you might get a passable representation of the original. At worst you get a complete mess which could screw up the rendering and possibly miss out whole chunks that it can't handle. And as time goes on, the burden of supporting old and possibly rare document formats becomes onerous and virtually impossible for the project to bear.
I too have been saved by OpenOffice which managed to read an old Mac Word file which even MS Word on the PC would not read. It almost got the rendering right but splattered question marks all over the place instead of some missing character. So the first the thing I did was repair it and save a copy in .odt format. I'm glad I could import but simply do not trust OpenOffice to support the format in perpetuity or for the format to receive sufficient testing to ensure it continues to work for ever and ever. So perhaps the same could happen with .odt? Not really since even if OpenOffice died, there are a growing number of apps that support the same format. Better yet, someone could even extract the text and styling if they had to since .odt splits presentation from the content.
The solution is to store documents in a well defined open format to begin with. Adopt the new format and write converters for the legacy documents. Then at least there is a common denominator going forward, one that is implemented by multiple applications and interchangeable between them. Even a pretty shoddy standard like HTML shows the sort of revolution that can happen when every vendor adopts it.
The Cell is different from the 3-core 360 but most cross-platform games (and indeed single platform games) do not hit the bare metal anyway. The likes of EA / Ubisoft / Activision have in-house teams that write tools and libraries that hide most of the platform specifics so for the most part the game code will be platform agnostic. There are also plenty of 3rd party middleware libs such as Havok, Physx, Renderware, Unreal etc. that also hide the details. Even when the code does have to hit the metal, proper abstraction can insulate most of the code from the specifics. We're almost at the point where PS3 / 360 cross-platform titles are virtually identical. The PS3 may still be slightly behind but that can be chalked up to the immaturity of the middleware which will obviously get better.
I think there is scope for consoles to split off in ways that exploit their strengths. For example the Cell is basically a number shovel. It can act almost like a preprocessor for the GPU, doing texturing, wave effects, clipping, scene culling etc. allowing the PS3 to render enormous maps with enormous numbers of environmental effects. The 360 has 3 general purpose cores which means it is easier to get sophisticated AI out of it as well as better and more mature network play.
I think the odd man out is clearly the Wii. It doesn't have the memory, CPU, resolution or anything else remotely approaching either the 360 or PS3. It is clearly impossible for games to share much at all between Wii and other new consoles. Even Miyamoto called it a Gamecube 1.5. This is why it is getting an unusually large number of PS2 ports. In time it may break away from the PS2 but the number of exclusives (or franchise spin-offs) will be more reflective of limitations than any strength.
I'm so glad I'm not an investor.
I doubt it. Plenty of phones offer everything that could conceivably make the iPhone expensive, only for much less. Sure they may look less stylish, but at the end of the day the iPhone is just a glorified phone / PDA and there are plenty of them to make valid price comparisons to. From my example the Treo 750v has a touch screen, keypad, does quad band GSM and even 3G. Even if you were to look at the differences such as the 8Gb memory, that probably only less than $50 onto production costs since you can buy 8Gb USB keys retail for $70 these days. I don't actually think the Treo is a better phone (it is in some ways and worse in others) but it is suitable for making price comparisons.
I really doubt that the iPhone costs anywhere close to $600 to manufacture. And even if it did, those phone plans could and should have slashed $400 off the price. At least.
Exactly. Vodafone UK literally gives its phones away for free on most mid range packages for 12 or 18 months contract. You can even get something such as a Palm Treo 750v for free if you so desire. A Palm Treo allegedly costs $600 according to Palm's own site, but you get it for nothing since Vodafone recoup the money from your contract and any calls you make beyond the plan.
That neither Apple nor AT&T do this probably has a lot to do with greed. They know they can rape hype befuddled early adopters and get away with it.
Why would Apple sue him, and why would you consider it to be funny?
Yes smart. GTA IV is still coming to the PS3 so what's the problem? As I said if they can fund 5-10 games for what GTA would have cost to keep exclusive. I'd rather see Sony bulk up with new exclusives rather than pay through the nose to hang onto existing ones.
And I say that as someone who has owned pretty much every GTA title at one title at one time or another. I'm looking forward to GTA IV, but I really don't care that it's coming to the 360 too. Good for them. I just hope the PS3 version isn't hobbled by the DVD-9 capacity of the 360.
Even the much vaunted exclusive content for the 360 isn't happening until some time next year and might end up being a "timed exclusive" or similar. The PS3 is rumoured to be exclusive content which may or may not be the same content just 6 months later. I hope Sony didn't pay to get it and don't see why they should if Take Two rake it in from people downloading the content from the PSN store.
It is highly unlikely that the iPhone costs Apple anywhere remotely close to $600 to manufacture. And even if it did, there is no reason at those ridiculous contracts that AT&T couldn't have have slashed the retail price down to $300.
Look how much Vodafone in the UK charges you for a Treo 750v (the v meaning gimped Vodafone version) on an Anytime 500 package which costs roughly $70 pm. NOTHING. That's right you pay nothing for a phone which costs $600 according to Palm. Another example - I can buy the incredibly lovely looking Toshiba G900 for £117 ($235) on the same Anytime 500 package. On a 12 month contract too. The G900 has less memory than the iPhone but is far superior in most other respects including screen resolution and even has a popout keyboard.
So the point is that Apple could have sold the iPhone retail for $600 and probably made a profit. Why they did this is a mystery but I suspect that they thought there was no point in an iPhone if no service provider had a package including unlimited data and other things it needs to be in any way impressive. That's where AT&T come in and probably both Apple and AT&T concluded that their customers were ripe for a raping and neither made any concessions to price or relied on the other for subsidy.
It sucks for people stupid enough to buy into a 2 year contract for iPhone 1.0 but there you are. That's the power of hype for you. After reading reviews on Engadget & elsewhere, it is hard to come away thinking the phone is anything but meh. I'm sure iPhone 2.0 will be a lot better, especially if it gets 3G and the glaring faults in some of its apps are sorted out.
That is a lot of money, enough in fact for Sony to fund 5-10 1st party titles or maybe 30 PSN store titles. No wonder Sony told TTWO where to stick it.
Other than that, most of the other exclusives really don't mean much for system sales. Devil May Cry might be a great game but I doubt it sold many consoles. And if it would have cost 10 million to keep it exclusive, perhaps the decision was that the money is better spent elsewhere.
Sure that means losing exclusives, but it also means that the money goes to making new exclusives. People talk of Sony losing exclusives when they have something like 15-20 games in the works at present, many of which are new exclusives. Think Resistance, Motorstorm, Lair, Uncharted, Heavenly Sword etc.
At the end of the day, it's not like you can't play GTA or Assasins Creed or Devil May Cry. They're still all there so I really don't see the fuss. If someone asked me if I'd rather your game had 5 great exclusive sequels, or 5 great cross-platform sequels and 10 brand new exclusives (some of which are also great), I know what option I'd choose.
Perhaps you can escape the plan, but does that include an unlock code? Can you even unlock your iPhone?
Perhaps I'm spoilt from living in Europe. Most ~ $60 price plans would get you any phone for nothing or a small fee. That includes models like the Palm Treo 750, Blackberry models etc. We'll have to wait and see what happens when the iPhone appears in Europe. It wouldn't surprise me if Vodafone, O2 etc. engage in a little rape of their own if there are people dumb enough pay for one and sign up for a high contract.
All Apple have done by their move is ensure that anyone buying their phone package is locked into a contract that with the phone costs anywhere upwards of $2000 for two years. That represents absolutely terrible value for money. You really would have to be blinded by the hype to buy an iPhone on those terms. It's an utter waste of money especially considering other technical deficiencies such as lack of 3G. Perhaps a firmware update will fix that issue because there's going to be some severe buyers remorse if an updated model appears with that feature.
I will confess to being an Illuminati agent, to know who killed JFK, to have befriended the yeti, to know the warehouse where the moon landing set is stored, to be frequent visitor to Atlantis and to have the exact coordinates that lead to the centre of the Earth. After all, if it's in my affidavit and I'm not around to answer questions, it must be true. Right?
Building software for 64-bit windows would usually be a matter of a few compiler switches and using the proper types and macros. Or just building a 32-bit app that runs properly in 64-bit. Apple might have some crazy in-house cross-platform environment or a lack of QA resources which prevents doing either but that isn't much of an excuse.
They could be doing it for political reasons of course which isn't forgiveable either.
Considering Apple's reputation for software which "just works", their recent offerings on Windows seem to be doing anything but.
I think if I had bought some cheaper printer that I would have spent 2-4x the money by now on refills, even assuming the printer even worked any more. I despise devices that have built-in obsolescence or rely on disposable & non-recyclable parts to force upgrades. Someone like the EU should force the industry to define and adopt standards that cover things like chargers, batteries and cartridges.
The sick part is people are paying $600 for a phone UNDER CONTRACT. That's simply insane.
Apple would probably claim that they seal the battery for safety or for ergonomics. The more likely reason is they derive a good amount of repeat business from existing users who "upgrade" simply because their old model doesn't work very well any more and the cost and effort of replacing the battery is ridiculously large.
I doubt the situation is ever going to change unless someone like the EU clamps down on manufacturers and forces them to make batteries replaceable.
Gyroscopic mice have been around for years (pioneering the same tech you now see in the Wii remote and PS3 SIXAXIS). You really wouldn't want to use one unless you're doing a presentation or similar since you'll just hurt your hand and wrist waving the thing around in mid-air.
Or perhaps it's not 11 brand new XBox 360s. Perhaps Microsoft keep sending him the same "fixed" one back, or giving him refurbished units which are as liable break because they've been similarly "fixed".
They certainly do. The difference is that PS3 & Wii returns are not widespread and they're certainly not being described as "endemic". One 3rd party repair firm in the UK is REFUSING to repair any more 360s that suffer from the ring of death issue.
They would be far closer to replacing exchange if they supported Exchange. The Evolution Exchange plugin has been open sourced for ages now, porting it the cross platform Thunderbird and Sunbird would make the suite hugely more attractive to enterprises locked into MS Office for their client software.
Nothing makes it standout except for it's price. At $600 ON A CONTRACT, you are essentially pissing your money down the drain. You could buy an 80Gb iPod and virtually any other phone (including superior Windows Mobile / Blackberry phones) from any other provider on a lower contract for less.