That approach sounds clever at first, but think about it for much longer and it starts to stink.
Most obviously, it would give the rich a means to punish anyone poorer than them for any reason. For instance, suppose you saw that Paris Hilton was in the news again for doing something you didn't approve of and you decided to say something rude about her. Suppose that she happened to become aware of your comment and decided that she didn't much care for it. With the Hilton fortune at her beck-and-call, she could simply buy your family home out from under your feet for the perfectly reasonable valuation you had placed on it, suddenly leaving you out on the street.
Or suppose that you're a minor Internet celebrity or have some small amount of authority in a niche on the Internet, such as a moderator on a forum with a few thousand users, a hobbyist tech reviewer on YouTube, or a console gamer who livestreams regularly. Over time, you'll naturally accumulate an odd following of people who are jealous of your success, disagree with something you said, or want revenge for a perceived slight. Eventually, a particularly toxic Internet troll doxxes you or otherwise crosses a boundary that makes them a real life concern. You realize that they may try to buy your house out from under you as a troll tactic, so you increase the valuation. They start filing false bids to claim your home, so you have to keep increasing your valuation. Even if they never take your home from you, they can force you to pay thousands of additional dollars each year that you shouldn't need to pay.
But, the worst would be large companies swooping in. Zillow and others are already buying homes from sellers who are willing to sell for less than they think the home is worth. Now imagine if the seller didn't need to be willing. Anyone who undervalued their home would quickly find it purchased out from under them by heavily financed companies interested in flipping them quickly for profit.
Word is that these ones don’t have the fixes. The fixes aren’t coming until Ice Lake, sometime in 2H 2019 according to Intel (or, more realistically, 2020, given that it was originally scheduled to launch two years ago).
The hardware fixes for those flaws apparently won’t be included until Ice Lake. Intel is saying Ice Lake won’t be available in volume until 2H 2019, but it was originally scheduled for 2016, so I’ll believe that when I see it. Realistically, don’t expect those fixes in Intel chips until 2020 or later.
Moreover, how is this supposed to provide any extra protection unless it's done manually? They talk about having a system for automatically inserting fake bugs (presumably during compilation, minification, or some other similar process that happens after the developer does their work, that way the developer never sees the buggy code and gets distracted trying to fix it), but such additions would be deterministic in nature and easily noticed/removed. In much the same way that we can de-compile code and can de-minify code by running it through various tools, it surely wouldn't be that difficult to de-bug code that had had "safe" bugs deterministically added to it.
Thunderbolt is an Intel technology (handed to them by Apple, if you believe the rumors). You can find it on a number of motherboards with recent Intel chipsets. Apple was the first PC manufacturer to adopt it, but they're by no means the only one, and with Intel dropping royalties on Thunderbolt a few months back it's expected that we'll be seeing native support for Thunderbolt on AMD boards as well in the not-too-distant future as well.
That's a great question. I'd agree that eventually, yes, pretty much everything has diminishing returns, but I don't think that's necessarily true for brand new types of products.
When products are revolutionary (which modern smartphones most certainly were), the value provided can, in some cases, be outsized compared to their cost. In the case of smartphones, they were for many years well worth the additional cost we were paying over lesser (i.e. dumb) phones. The $400ish extra that an early iPhone cost over, say, a late model RAZR was easily justifiable because it provided SO much more functionality and utility than what the RAZR could provide. Even as low-end smartphones started to enter the market, the value proposition was still there: paying more netted you a proportional gain in the value you received, since those early, low-end smartphones were only marginally better than the dumb phones they were displacing from the market.
As the market matured and what had been high-end features trickled down to the low-end, the value proposition steadily grew worse and worse for the high-end devices. These days, paying $400 more may not actually get you any extra features that could show up on a checklist, depending on what models you're considering. And I do agree that this is to be expected in most markets and for most types of products. As markets mature, low-end products eventually—perhaps inevitably—become "good enough" for most people. Safety features aren't relegated to high-end cars: they all have them. High-efficiency heating or cooling isn't relegated to high-end homes: they all have it. Computers are relegated to industrial mainframes, we all have them. And, likewise, having the Internet and apps in our pockets isn't relegated to high-end phones: they all have them now.
But, again, it didn't start that way. So, as long as we acknowledge that one caveat, I'd agree with what you said.
I can't help but feel as if this news is missing the obvious explosion of growth in the value proposition being offered by the low-to-mid portion of the Android market. Whereas in years prior a phone that cost 1/4 that of a flagship phone might provide most people with an equivalent value (i.e. it's about 1/4 as capable as the flagship phone), these days you can get a phone that costs 1/4, yet provides most people with 90% of the value of the flagship. If you're an Android user, there's really no reason to go for the flagship phone unless you're set on getting that last 10%, but for most people, that's well past the point of diminishing returns.
I'm an iPhone user and am almost certainly going to upgrade from my 2013 iPhone to whatever new flagship they launch later this year, but even I wouldn't advocate my choice as a general practice. In years past, it used to be easy advice to tell people to get max(favorite_brand) (with favorite_brand being swapped around depending on if someone was in the Android or Apple ecosystem), since the lesser models all made significant compromises. These days, however, most people are best served by double-checking on what that last 10% actually gets them and whether it's worth the additional cost.
It's a hard sell among the regular population, but Apple makes products for the high-end of the market. Provided there are enough people capable of buying their products, they don't need to worry about making things affordable for those who can't. With around 1.3B people living in India, even if only the top 5% can afford Apple products, that's still 65M people, which is far larger than some of the markets Apple has already gone into.
It seems I may have read sarcasm into your words where none was intended, so I apologize for that.
Going back to the much earlier poster in this thread, I’ll agree with what he said: reinforced cockpit doors and passengers willing to resist have been the only two demonstrable improvements since 9/11. I know you just said there were no improvements, but surely we can agree on those two? Otherwise, despite my disagreement about your thinking they were relevant to his post, I agree that the expansion of the Air Marshal system after 9/11 has NOT made things safer. There are apparently now thousands of Air Marshals in service, which seems pointless to me.
Regarding my use of “Islamic”, I double-checked myself in a number of online dictionaries and grammar guides in response to what you wrote. So far as I can tell, “Muslim” would’ve worked just as well since I was talking about men, but “Islamic” broadly appears to be considered just as acceptable (when used as an adjective) when referring to something related to Islam or its adherents. The only dissenting view I found was a well-informed user comment in this exchange where they point out that—based on its original meaning in Arabic—“Islamic” should not be used to refer to practitioners. As such, I must acknowledge that from a prescriptivist angle it may not follow the original meaning, but that meaning has clearly been lost when it comes to actual usage in English today, which every other source I checked seems to either agree on or be silent about. In fact, I used the term here to match the specific usage I read when reading up on this topic.
Interestingly, I can’t recall ever seeing it being used this way except to refer to extremists and the like. Perhaps it’s a modern convention being used as a way of connoting that extremists are not legitimate Muslims? I don’t know, and I actually don’t have a strong opinion one way or the other, in all honesty, but it was a fun rabbit trail to research regardless.
As someone who has dabbled in Bluetooth headphones, this is exactly the reason I’ve never purchased a high-end Bluetooth set, yet have had several decent wired ones over the years. Why would I pay more for an otherwise-identical model that has an expiration date, thanks to its use of non-replaceable batteries? I don’t care as much on electronics that are unlikely to last long enough for the battery to become a concern, but good headphones can last decades, so those batteries need to be replaceable.
America wasn’t. Other countries have been carrying guns onto planes since before 9/11 as well, which the linked article specifically mentioned some examples of. And most of those hijackings weren’t being done by Americans. Most of them were being done by terrorist organizations (by the 1980s, predominately Islamic extremists) in an effort to gain funding for their organizations. As a Communist country near to Florida, Cuba was simply the nearest place without an extradition treaty, hence its popularity with hijackers. But back then, the most Air Marshals the US ever had at a time was 33, so they weren’t even on 0.1% of domestic flights on any given day. After 9/11, that number increased by several orders of magnitude and a number of other countries started their own programs.
Otherwise, if you have an actual point to make, I’d be happy to continue the discussion, but it sounds like you’ve run out of ideas and are simply throwing petty insults after having your initial statement and subsequent rationalizations proven wrong.
Not only that, but not all Internet access is made the same. Even among homes that have both cable and telephone lines, that doesn't mean broadband is available.
Part of the issue here is the FCC's ridiculous method for measuring broadband penetration (in fairness, this method pre-dates Pai, so I can't lay it at his feet). Rather than extrapolating from a representative, random sampling of homes or doing a full survey for each home address, ISPs self-report, on a per-county basis, where they provide broadband. For the purposes of the FCC's measurements, if anyone in the county is self-reported by the ISP as being offered broadband, everyone in the county is counted as having access to broadband. As such, those numbers are only useful for comparing against themselves from prior years (and even then, only questionably so), rather than as any sort of measurement of or reflection of reality.
According to their method of counting, I should have at least three broadband ISPs available to me at my home in my metropolitan area neighborhood, but, in practice, I only have one (Suddenlink cable). Frontier DSL's website suggests that they're available and offering broadband in my area, but in actually calling them up last year, the best they offered at my address was 3Mbps for $35/month. Likewise, the locally-operated WISP's service area stops just at the edge of my neighborhood, with no plans to expand into my neighborhood. They're having enough trouble keeping up with demand from the people outside the big neighborhoods, since, as you suggested, cable is not nearly as prolific as the GP seems to think, meaning that many of the people near me aren't even "fortunate" enough to have access to Suddenlink.
All I'm looking for are modest speeds (>20Mbps) with no data cap. I'll always go for the cheapest plan that offers that, but the cost of getting that plan from Suddenlink (again, the only ISP offering those speeds at my address) has nearly tripled in the last seven years, from $31/mo. 7 years ago to $80/mo. today, most of which happened once Suddenlink's speeds got fast enough to make DSL irrelevant, giving them the justification they needed to drop all pretense of competing.
Well, if nothing else, they have Street View in South Korea, so there's that, but they also benefit from well-maintained public streets every time a ground courier delivers a Google-branded device, like a Chromecast or smart speaker, to a customer in South Korea. I'm sure we could dig up more possibilities if we gave it some serious thought.
[...] a consumer junk brand that makes products that need throwing out every 2-3 years due to built in design flaws (planned obsolescence)
There are plenty of valid reasons to ding Apple, but none of the ones you listed ring true, this one most of all. If you look back at the top, you'll see that I started this comment thread by pooh-poohing Apple's market cap accomplishment (as I quoted then, this news is nothing more than vanity), but I did so from a three year old MacBook Pro that is still running like a champ, despite everything I throw at it as a software developer leading a team of people who work on desktop, web, and mobile apps across Windows, Linux, and iOS. The first device I use most mornings? It's my iPad Air 2 from 2014 that still runs the latest OS and apps and still feels as snappy as the day I bought it. The device I carry with me every day? My iPhone 5s from 2013 that still runs the latest OS and apps and still has enough battery capacity, five years on, to make it through 2-3 days of light use before needing a recharge (though its performance is sluggish these days, so I plan to replace it soon). The computers at home? A MacBook Pro and a Mac mini, both from 2011, both running the latest OS, both with the latest updates, and both still in active use (though the Mac mini is losing support later this year and has felt long-in-the-tooth for awhile, so I plan to replace it in the next month or two).
As I said, there are plenty of valid reasons to go after Apple (e.g. the anti-poaching agreement they had with other tech companies, their abusive practices in the eBooks industry, their extortionate pricing for storage/memory upgrades on hardware, their stingy iCloud storage offerings, their infrequent updates to hardware, etc.). You don't need to invent fictional ones or repeat false narratives you may have heard.
And adjusting for inflation, Star Wars made $1.7 trillion at the box office. Seem ungodly?
It does, likely because you're off by a few orders of magnitude. Inflation-adjusted, the original Star Wars made about $3 billion at the global box office (or about $1.3B in the US box office), and it's the highest grossing of the series when accounting for inflation. Even if you were referring to the franchise as a whole instead of the first film, prior to The Last Jedi the franchise had made a bit north of $22 billion at the global box office in inflation-adjusted dollars, so I have no idea where you got 1.7 anything from, let alone trillions instead of billions.
Accounting for inflation is a lot less meaningless when you aren't pulling numbers out of thin air.
Hey, no worries! From what I've seen, you and I actually end up on the same side of disagreements in most Apple-related news, and in the case of today's news, we're basically just disagreeing over our opinion of how important the news is, rather than anything of actual substance. Plus, I recognize that I am raining on the parade a bit, so I get why you'd respond as you did. You didn't come across as being rude or anything of the sort. You were simply disagreeing for perfectly good reasons, which is exactly what I like about this site.
I read the MacRumors article because—even though there was no point to it—it's still something I found to be interesting in my RSS feed, and I came here because I like the comments and commenters here (you included, and not just today). Why else?:)
Look, I like Apple. Between my wife and me, we've owned dozens of Apple products over the years, and I consider myself a recovering Apple fanboy (I stuck with them through the dark days of the mid-90s, which I now regard as fanboy-ism on my part). But I also like to keep things in perspective. This is a neat achievement, but it doesn't mean much, other than that Apple's stock is doing well today. If tomorrow it's back below $1T, it won't mean much then either, despite what the Apple-hating contingent might try to make of the news then.
I don't know that it actually does carry any significance. The fact that inflation is a pretty steady thing made it an inevitability that someone would cross the mark eventually. If not Apple, then Amazon and Google look to be on track to do so in the near-ish future as well. Plus, technically speaking, Apple is NOT the first to cross that threshold. That honor goes to PetroChina, who crossed the trillion dollar mark way back in 2007, though admittedly only for a day. In terms of inflation-adjusted dollars, Apple would need to gain yet another $145M in market cap before they would break PetroChina's record.
It's a big number, to be sure, but other than the vanity of it, I really don't see a point.
Apple has officially become the world's only trillion dollar publicly traded company, in terms of market capitalization, which is simply the company's number of outstanding shares multiplied by its stock price. [...] As with most milestones of this nature, however, Apple reaching exactly a trillion dollar market cap doesn't have too much significance, beyond the vanity of it.
Since you are having trouble understanding what could go wrong by trying to get more money out of each customer
Sorry, I wasn't aware we switched topics. I thought we were talking about whether or not their ASP rising over the last year is a problem for Apple. Let me check...
Apple’s average selling price is way up from a year ago
What could possibly go wrong with that?
Not much, actually, at least with the way that Apple is doing it.
Yup...that's definitely what we were talking about.
Apple did not add any differentialtion to its product, but raised the price anyway. How elastic is that price, really? Bad luck for Apple if the answer turns out to be "not very".
As I already pointed out, these last few quarters already answered that question. Regardless of whether you saw any differentiation, it looks like somewhere in the ballpark of a third their customers* saw something different about the iPhone X and had enough elasticity in their wallets to opt for it. The fact that you don't see a difference or think it justifies the higher price doesn't mean that others think and feel the same as you.
Using myself as a data point
An anecdote does not a trend make. That Apple doesn't make things you're interested in doesn't mean they don't make things that others are interested in. You want better bang for your buck and to see your dollars go towards obvious benefits. That's commendable, good thinking and a perfectly reasonable approach to making purchases. Others have different priorities and are more willing to spend more on smaller gains or smaller perceived benefits. To each their own.
Well. Apple will need to sell next year's model for $1200 to match this year's revenue increase
No, they don't. You've missed the forest for the trees if you think they need to increase prices like that. They need to grow their profits, sure, but there are plenty of ways to do so besides significant price hikes (e.g. reduce costs, increase monetization on already-sold units, increase units sold, etc.). Apple does a solid job at reducing their manufacturing costs each year (particularly after they come out with something that has high-cost components, such as the FaceID system in the X), and though I don't expect their sales numbers to shift dramatically, their Services division has been their fastest growing revenue stream for the last few years, so I'd expect to see them increase it even more in the coming years, thus providing them with continued profit growth without the need for any of the price hikes you're suggesting.
factoring in another 1% or so of market share decline
I'm not sure why you think this would matter. Provided their unit sales maintain their current levels (or slightly increase, as they have been for the last several years), Apple's market share could continue to slide without impacting their ability to maintain their current profitability or grow it in the ways I mentioned above.
* They don't provide breakdowns by model, but their iPhone ASP for this quarter was up $122 YoY. Given the price gap of $300 between similarly configured 8 and X models, a $122 gain in ASP taken at face value would suggest about 40% of their customers are opting for the X. I'll be a bit more conservative than that and look towards their 4Q rolling average ASP since this last quarter was particularly good for them. Looking at the 4Q average, it's only gone up $70 YoY. That said, the iPhone X has only been out for three quarters, so the 4Q average still has another quarter to go before it'll fully account for the X's impact. If current trends continue, we'd expect the 4Q ASP to stabilize around a gain of $93 YoY, suggesting that just less than a third of their customers are opting for the X. Either way, it's a lot of people.
Slashdot Mirror
That approach sounds clever at first, but think about it for much longer and it starts to stink.
Most obviously, it would give the rich a means to punish anyone poorer than them for any reason. For instance, suppose you saw that Paris Hilton was in the news again for doing something you didn't approve of and you decided to say something rude about her. Suppose that she happened to become aware of your comment and decided that she didn't much care for it. With the Hilton fortune at her beck-and-call, she could simply buy your family home out from under your feet for the perfectly reasonable valuation you had placed on it, suddenly leaving you out on the street.
Or suppose that you're a minor Internet celebrity or have some small amount of authority in a niche on the Internet, such as a moderator on a forum with a few thousand users, a hobbyist tech reviewer on YouTube, or a console gamer who livestreams regularly. Over time, you'll naturally accumulate an odd following of people who are jealous of your success, disagree with something you said, or want revenge for a perceived slight. Eventually, a particularly toxic Internet troll doxxes you or otherwise crosses a boundary that makes them a real life concern. You realize that they may try to buy your house out from under you as a troll tactic, so you increase the valuation. They start filing false bids to claim your home, so you have to keep increasing your valuation. Even if they never take your home from you, they can force you to pay thousands of additional dollars each year that you shouldn't need to pay.
But, the worst would be large companies swooping in. Zillow and others are already buying homes from sellers who are willing to sell for less than they think the home is worth. Now imagine if the seller didn't need to be willing. Anyone who undervalued their home would quickly find it purchased out from under them by heavily financed companies interested in flipping them quickly for profit.
Word is that these ones don’t have the fixes. The fixes aren’t coming until Ice Lake, sometime in 2H 2019 according to Intel (or, more realistically, 2020, given that it was originally scheduled to launch two years ago).
The hardware fixes for those flaws apparently won’t be included until Ice Lake. Intel is saying Ice Lake won’t be available in volume until 2H 2019, but it was originally scheduled for 2016, so I’ll believe that when I see it. Realistically, don’t expect those fixes in Intel chips until 2020 or later.
Moreover, how is this supposed to provide any extra protection unless it's done manually? They talk about having a system for automatically inserting fake bugs (presumably during compilation, minification, or some other similar process that happens after the developer does their work, that way the developer never sees the buggy code and gets distracted trying to fix it), but such additions would be deterministic in nature and easily noticed/removed. In much the same way that we can de-compile code and can de-minify code by running it through various tools, it surely wouldn't be that difficult to de-bug code that had had "safe" bugs deterministically added to it.
Thunderbolt is an Intel technology (handed to them by Apple, if you believe the rumors). You can find it on a number of motherboards with recent Intel chipsets. Apple was the first PC manufacturer to adopt it, but they're by no means the only one, and with Intel dropping royalties on Thunderbolt a few months back it's expected that we'll be seeing native support for Thunderbolt on AMD boards as well in the not-too-distant future as well.
That's a great question. I'd agree that eventually, yes, pretty much everything has diminishing returns, but I don't think that's necessarily true for brand new types of products.
When products are revolutionary (which modern smartphones most certainly were), the value provided can, in some cases, be outsized compared to their cost. In the case of smartphones, they were for many years well worth the additional cost we were paying over lesser (i.e. dumb) phones. The $400ish extra that an early iPhone cost over, say, a late model RAZR was easily justifiable because it provided SO much more functionality and utility than what the RAZR could provide. Even as low-end smartphones started to enter the market, the value proposition was still there: paying more netted you a proportional gain in the value you received, since those early, low-end smartphones were only marginally better than the dumb phones they were displacing from the market.
As the market matured and what had been high-end features trickled down to the low-end, the value proposition steadily grew worse and worse for the high-end devices. These days, paying $400 more may not actually get you any extra features that could show up on a checklist, depending on what models you're considering. And I do agree that this is to be expected in most markets and for most types of products. As markets mature, low-end products eventually—perhaps inevitably—become "good enough" for most people. Safety features aren't relegated to high-end cars: they all have them. High-efficiency heating or cooling isn't relegated to high-end homes: they all have it. Computers are relegated to industrial mainframes, we all have them. And, likewise, having the Internet and apps in our pockets isn't relegated to high-end phones: they all have them now.
But, again, it didn't start that way. So, as long as we acknowledge that one caveat, I'd agree with what you said.
Exactly this.
I can't help but feel as if this news is missing the obvious explosion of growth in the value proposition being offered by the low-to-mid portion of the Android market. Whereas in years prior a phone that cost 1/4 that of a flagship phone might provide most people with an equivalent value (i.e. it's about 1/4 as capable as the flagship phone), these days you can get a phone that costs 1/4, yet provides most people with 90% of the value of the flagship. If you're an Android user, there's really no reason to go for the flagship phone unless you're set on getting that last 10%, but for most people, that's well past the point of diminishing returns.
I'm an iPhone user and am almost certainly going to upgrade from my 2013 iPhone to whatever new flagship they launch later this year, but even I wouldn't advocate my choice as a general practice. In years past, it used to be easy advice to tell people to get max(favorite_brand) (with favorite_brand being swapped around depending on if someone was in the Android or Apple ecosystem), since the lesser models all made significant compromises. These days, however, most people are best served by double-checking on what that last 10% actually gets them and whether it's worth the additional cost.
Allow me to distract you from your opinions with a link to the U.S. Department of the Interior Instagram page.
In all seriousness, they post some amazing pictures. If that's what government propaganda looks like, I want to see more of it.
It's a hard sell among the regular population, but Apple makes products for the high-end of the market. Provided there are enough people capable of buying their products, they don't need to worry about making things affordable for those who can't. With around 1.3B people living in India, even if only the top 5% can afford Apple products, that's still 65M people, which is far larger than some of the markets Apple has already gone into.
It seems I may have read sarcasm into your words where none was intended, so I apologize for that.
Going back to the much earlier poster in this thread, I’ll agree with what he said: reinforced cockpit doors and passengers willing to resist have been the only two demonstrable improvements since 9/11. I know you just said there were no improvements, but surely we can agree on those two? Otherwise, despite my disagreement about your thinking they were relevant to his post, I agree that the expansion of the Air Marshal system after 9/11 has NOT made things safer. There are apparently now thousands of Air Marshals in service, which seems pointless to me.
Regarding my use of “Islamic”, I double-checked myself in a number of online dictionaries and grammar guides in response to what you wrote. So far as I can tell, “Muslim” would’ve worked just as well since I was talking about men, but “Islamic” broadly appears to be considered just as acceptable (when used as an adjective) when referring to something related to Islam or its adherents. The only dissenting view I found was a well-informed user comment in this exchange where they point out that—based on its original meaning in Arabic—“Islamic” should not be used to refer to practitioners. As such, I must acknowledge that from a prescriptivist angle it may not follow the original meaning, but that meaning has clearly been lost when it comes to actual usage in English today, which every other source I checked seems to either agree on or be silent about. In fact, I used the term here to match the specific usage I read when reading up on this topic.
Interestingly, I can’t recall ever seeing it being used this way except to refer to extremists and the like. Perhaps it’s a modern convention being used as a way of connoting that extremists are not legitimate Muslims? I don’t know, and I actually don’t have a strong opinion one way or the other, in all honesty, but it was a fun rabbit trail to research regardless.
As someone who has dabbled in Bluetooth headphones, this is exactly the reason I’ve never purchased a high-end Bluetooth set, yet have had several decent wired ones over the years. Why would I pay more for an otherwise-identical model that has an expiration date, thanks to its use of non-replaceable batteries? I don’t care as much on electronics that are unlikely to last long enough for the battery to become a concern, but good headphones can last decades, so those batteries need to be replaceable.
America wasn’t. Other countries have been carrying guns onto planes since before 9/11 as well, which the linked article specifically mentioned some examples of. And most of those hijackings weren’t being done by Americans. Most of them were being done by terrorist organizations (by the 1980s, predominately Islamic extremists) in an effort to gain funding for their organizations. As a Communist country near to Florida, Cuba was simply the nearest place without an extradition treaty, hence its popularity with hijackers. But back then, the most Air Marshals the US ever had at a time was 33, so they weren’t even on 0.1% of domestic flights on any given day. After 9/11, that number increased by several orders of magnitude and a number of other countries started their own programs.
Otherwise, if you have an actual point to make, I’d be happy to continue the discussion, but it sounds like you’ve run out of ideas and are simply throwing petty insults after having your initial statement and subsequent rationalizations proven wrong.
Not only that, but not all Internet access is made the same. Even among homes that have both cable and telephone lines, that doesn't mean broadband is available.
Part of the issue here is the FCC's ridiculous method for measuring broadband penetration (in fairness, this method pre-dates Pai, so I can't lay it at his feet). Rather than extrapolating from a representative, random sampling of homes or doing a full survey for each home address, ISPs self-report, on a per-county basis, where they provide broadband. For the purposes of the FCC's measurements, if anyone in the county is self-reported by the ISP as being offered broadband, everyone in the county is counted as having access to broadband. As such, those numbers are only useful for comparing against themselves from prior years (and even then, only questionably so), rather than as any sort of measurement of or reflection of reality.
According to their method of counting, I should have at least three broadband ISPs available to me at my home in my metropolitan area neighborhood, but, in practice, I only have one (Suddenlink cable). Frontier DSL's website suggests that they're available and offering broadband in my area, but in actually calling them up last year, the best they offered at my address was 3Mbps for $35/month. Likewise, the locally-operated WISP's service area stops just at the edge of my neighborhood, with no plans to expand into my neighborhood. They're having enough trouble keeping up with demand from the people outside the big neighborhoods, since, as you suggested, cable is not nearly as prolific as the GP seems to think, meaning that many of the people near me aren't even "fortunate" enough to have access to Suddenlink.
All I'm looking for are modest speeds (>20Mbps) with no data cap. I'll always go for the cheapest plan that offers that, but the cost of getting that plan from Suddenlink (again, the only ISP offering those speeds at my address) has nearly tripled in the last seven years, from $31/mo. 7 years ago to $80/mo. today, most of which happened once Suddenlink's speeds got fast enough to make DSL irrelevant, giving them the justification they needed to drop all pretense of competing.
Plenty of us here know about Betteridge's Law and Godwin's Law, but not as many recall Poe's Law, which most certainly applies to this situation.
My thoughts exactly. I don't know how it happened, but I'm glad it did, because this is the right decision.
Well, if nothing else, they have Street View in South Korea, so there's that, but they also benefit from well-maintained public streets every time a ground courier delivers a Google-branded device, like a Chromecast or smart speaker, to a customer in South Korea. I'm sure we could dig up more possibilities if we gave it some serious thought.
[...] a consumer junk brand that makes products that need throwing out every 2-3 years due to built in design flaws (planned obsolescence)
There are plenty of valid reasons to ding Apple, but none of the ones you listed ring true, this one most of all. If you look back at the top, you'll see that I started this comment thread by pooh-poohing Apple's market cap accomplishment (as I quoted then, this news is nothing more than vanity), but I did so from a three year old MacBook Pro that is still running like a champ, despite everything I throw at it as a software developer leading a team of people who work on desktop, web, and mobile apps across Windows, Linux, and iOS. The first device I use most mornings? It's my iPad Air 2 from 2014 that still runs the latest OS and apps and still feels as snappy as the day I bought it. The device I carry with me every day? My iPhone 5s from 2013 that still runs the latest OS and apps and still has enough battery capacity, five years on, to make it through 2-3 days of light use before needing a recharge (though its performance is sluggish these days, so I plan to replace it soon). The computers at home? A MacBook Pro and a Mac mini, both from 2011, both running the latest OS, both with the latest updates, and both still in active use (though the Mac mini is losing support later this year and has felt long-in-the-tooth for awhile, so I plan to replace it in the next month or two).
As I said, there are plenty of valid reasons to go after Apple (e.g. the anti-poaching agreement they had with other tech companies, their abusive practices in the eBooks industry, their extortionate pricing for storage/memory upgrades on hardware, their stingy iCloud storage offerings, their infrequent updates to hardware, etc.). You don't need to invent fictional ones or repeat false narratives you may have heard.
And adjusting for inflation, Star Wars made $1.7 trillion at the box office. Seem ungodly?
It does, likely because you're off by a few orders of magnitude. Inflation-adjusted, the original Star Wars made about $3 billion at the global box office (or about $1.3B in the US box office), and it's the highest grossing of the series when accounting for inflation. Even if you were referring to the franchise as a whole instead of the first film, prior to The Last Jedi the franchise had made a bit north of $22 billion at the global box office in inflation-adjusted dollars, so I have no idea where you got 1.7 anything from, let alone trillions instead of billions.
Accounting for inflation is a lot less meaningless when you aren't pulling numbers out of thin air.
Hey, no worries! From what I've seen, you and I actually end up on the same side of disagreements in most Apple-related news, and in the case of today's news, we're basically just disagreeing over our opinion of how important the news is, rather than anything of actual substance. Plus, I recognize that I am raining on the parade a bit, so I get why you'd respond as you did. You didn't come across as being rude or anything of the sort. You were simply disagreeing for perfectly good reasons, which is exactly what I like about this site.
I read the MacRumors article because—even though there was no point to it—it's still something I found to be interesting in my RSS feed, and I came here because I like the comments and commenters here (you included, and not just today). Why else? :)
Look, I like Apple. Between my wife and me, we've owned dozens of Apple products over the years, and I consider myself a recovering Apple fanboy (I stuck with them through the dark days of the mid-90s, which I now regard as fanboy-ism on my part). But I also like to keep things in perspective. This is a neat achievement, but it doesn't mean much, other than that Apple's stock is doing well today. If tomorrow it's back below $1T, it won't mean much then either, despite what the Apple-hating contingent might try to make of the news then.
I don't know that it actually does carry any significance. The fact that inflation is a pretty steady thing made it an inevitability that someone would cross the mark eventually. If not Apple, then Amazon and Google look to be on track to do so in the near-ish future as well. Plus, technically speaking, Apple is NOT the first to cross that threshold. That honor goes to PetroChina, who crossed the trillion dollar mark way back in 2007, though admittedly only for a day. In terms of inflation-adjusted dollars, Apple would need to gain yet another $145M in market cap before they would break PetroChina's record.
It's a big number, to be sure, but other than the vanity of it, I really don't see a point.
From the MacRumors article (emphasis mine):
Apple has officially become the world's only trillion dollar publicly traded company, in terms of market capitalization, which is simply the company's number of outstanding shares multiplied by its stock price. [...] As with most milestones of this nature, however, Apple reaching exactly a trillion dollar market cap doesn't have too much significance, beyond the vanity of it.
Pretty much sums it up.
Since you are having trouble understanding what could go wrong by trying to get more money out of each customer
Sorry, I wasn't aware we switched topics. I thought we were talking about whether or not their ASP rising over the last year is a problem for Apple. Let me check...
Apple’s average selling price is way up from a year ago
What could possibly go wrong with that?
Not much, actually, at least with the way that Apple is doing it.
Yup...that's definitely what we were talking about.
Apple did not add any differentialtion to its product, but raised the price anyway. How elastic is that price, really? Bad luck for Apple if the answer turns out to be "not very".
As I already pointed out, these last few quarters already answered that question. Regardless of whether you saw any differentiation, it looks like somewhere in the ballpark of a third their customers* saw something different about the iPhone X and had enough elasticity in their wallets to opt for it. The fact that you don't see a difference or think it justifies the higher price doesn't mean that others think and feel the same as you.
Using myself as a data point
An anecdote does not a trend make. That Apple doesn't make things you're interested in doesn't mean they don't make things that others are interested in. You want better bang for your buck and to see your dollars go towards obvious benefits. That's commendable, good thinking and a perfectly reasonable approach to making purchases. Others have different priorities and are more willing to spend more on smaller gains or smaller perceived benefits. To each their own.
Well. Apple will need to sell next year's model for $1200 to match this year's revenue increase
No, they don't. You've missed the forest for the trees if you think they need to increase prices like that. They need to grow their profits, sure, but there are plenty of ways to do so besides significant price hikes (e.g. reduce costs, increase monetization on already-sold units, increase units sold, etc.). Apple does a solid job at reducing their manufacturing costs each year (particularly after they come out with something that has high-cost components, such as the FaceID system in the X), and though I don't expect their sales numbers to shift dramatically, their Services division has been their fastest growing revenue stream for the last few years, so I'd expect to see them increase it even more in the coming years, thus providing them with continued profit growth without the need for any of the price hikes you're suggesting.
factoring in another 1% or so of market share decline
I'm not sure why you think this would matter. Provided their unit sales maintain their current levels (or slightly increase, as they have been for the last several years), Apple's market share could continue to slide without impacting their ability to maintain their current profitability or grow it in the ways I mentioned above.
* They don't provide breakdowns by model, but their iPhone ASP for this quarter was up $122 YoY. Given the price gap of $300 between similarly configured 8 and X models, a $122 gain in ASP taken at face value would suggest about 40% of their customers are opting for the X. I'll be a bit more conservative than that and look towards their 4Q rolling average ASP since this last quarter was particularly good for them. Looking at the 4Q average, it's only gone up $70 YoY. That said, the iPhone X has only been out for three quarters, so the 4Q average still has another quarter to go before it'll fully account for the X's impact. If current trends continue, we'd expect the 4Q ASP to stabilize around a gain of $93 YoY, suggesting that just less than a third of their customers are opting for the X. Either way, it's a lot of people.
Given his religious beliefs, I sincerely doubt Jobs is looking down on me in the afterlife. ;)
Yeah...I cringed when I heard them utter that line on stage, though I'm afraid I don't see the relevance here.