I used to teach a course in Grid/distributed computing in our local IT College, but after putting up with the stupidity of the students for two years I stopped. This was a side project where I wanted to give something back, not my main finance source, but I just couldn't cope with last year sysadmin/systems engineers struggling with linux command line. I mean that it was as bad as unpacking their tarballs exclusively with double clicking on it on the desktop. I did try in the second/third iteration to pre-empt it a bit by doing a few first weeks basic shell programming tutorials, but there was no foundation to build on and I didn't have the time to teach a whole seat if courses from scratch so I stopped the course although they still ask if I want to return every year.
I've seen the same in other universities too, the people who are excellent were already before entering and have just hoend and extended the skills. Who enter blank rarely make out as anything useful...
Oh and love also the fact that most of those city SUV's are quite useless in now:P I usually keep both rope and tools readily in car and am usually the person who stops and pulls the cars out. Having decent four wheel drive, studded tires and the excellent drivetrain logic of an Evo X means I usually keep going when most cars stop and can still pull those guys out. Last few winters we've had way more snow than usual and it's a fun pastime just to drive around town and pull cars out of snow:P
Yikes, mountain roads probably are not what I'd prefer overly much during winter. Here in Estonia the biggest elevation difference is 300m and that's from coast to the other border almost. Also, I guess you're from a country that doesn't allow studded tires. I have studded tires and that makes a huge difference on ice. Sure in snow it makes no difference and you can use lamells or chains, but if you get onto ice (what you do at times on tarmac or when you go ice lake driving) the studs really help to keep the car handling at least to a certain level.
That's the *wrong* kind of excitement. It's also perfectly possible to have such excitement in a sedan car even with snow chains on. That is an experience that I would not care to repeat.
Well that gets to be a wrong kind of excitement only if it is unexpected:D If you drive a 4-wheel drive car and expect all the drifting and what accompanies driving on slippery surfaces and if you're proficient in it (at the minimum have taken the car to an ice track a number of times and spent hours bringing it to the limit so you know when and how it goes), then it's loads of fun. Noone says you've got to drive the whole distance from A to B with wheels spinning and in (un)controlled slides, but at times it's nice to take some corners at a drift or turn 180 with a small help from handbrake. Though the latter I do in the summer at times, though it requires some more speed and ain't too healthy on the tires, also requires you to be absolutely alone on the road or otherwise the other drivers will just be shocked witless and might do something stupid.
The usual good difference is that people who can afford to buy a real sports/rally car usually know what they are doing and enjoy the "excitement" in controlled conditions without threatening other people. The idiots who buy a 20 year old beamer and have close to zip experience are the ones who cause most stupid accidents because they want the excitement, but don't choose the conditions.
Ditto on all points... except I also like the iPhone 4 series because these devices are smaller than the Galaxy S3. Apparently that feature will be lost with the iPhone 5 which is unfortunate.
Mentioned the exact things somewhere else in this thread however from the mockups it seems the 5 will not be wider, but taller. This way the one handed usage and comfort remains the same while getting a tick bigger screen. But I do hope as well that it won't be a monster 4.x" screen just because people want bigger (just recently heard that someone's planning a 5" screen, HTC?, why the hell would you want a phone that's almost as big as a tablet?)
*sigh* people don't buy sports cars because they want to show they can afford it though sure there are some people who do it because of that too, but that doesn't mean we all buy it because of that. I have a sports car and I bought it because I want to enjoy my commute no matter when and where I go. I can't stand the slow progression from point A to B without any excitement in getting there. Even if the excitement is only minimal due to jams or what not. And also I love my sports/rally car during the winter when there is never a dull ride with all the snow etc. Yes, it's a bitch to maintain due to fuel cost and use as well as maintenance and yes I did manage to buy it therefore I could afford it, but none of those are reasons WHY I bought it.
The same goes for iPhone. Maybe to some people it's a fashion statement, but mostly it's because it's well designed and works. And I don't mean just works as a standalone unit, majority of the added value comes from seamless integration between iDevices, your laptop and your Apple TV (the more devices you have the bigger the advantages you get, clever Apple). The fact that I use iPad majority of the time I'm at home instead of the laptop is because of the comfortable use and the available content and the fact that I can close the book on the iPad and pick it up on the iPhone without having to remember where I was in the book or having to worry if my content is backed up IS worth quite a lot.
My only hope is that they don't make the iPhone 5 (or what ever it'll be called) as big as the Galaxy S III. A colleague of mine has the SIII and boy it's way too big for one hand usage. If I want a bigger screen I just pop out the iPad and use that. I'd not mind a minor increase in size as well as pulling the display to the full width and height of the phone, but it still has to be comfortable in hand. I used to wear a cover on the iPhone 4 until waiting for some crap to compile I was fiddling with the cover and after about 6 months with the cover tried the phone in my hand without it. Damn that phone felt comfortable in my hand. It may seem like an innocent additional few mm, but it WAS much better without so I've never put the cover back on again.
It's fun to see all these discussions and allegations for a phone that's not even launched yet and therefore you have no clue what connector it actually uses. True, it's likely it'll be a proprietary one again, but still, shouldn't we wait until Sept 12th at least before starting the accusations...
I was saying I don't see how Apple suing Google could be the end of Apple.
And the more iDevices Apple sells with Siri etc that perform searches bypassing Google, the more they erode the search monopoly. I don't think it's as trivial as people only go to google for Apple info. That's more a word of mouth and experience thing. Google couldn't possibly turn that channel off:)
Nah, I just started trading options. Way cheaper than buying full shares and relative winnings are orders of magnitude higher. I'm even in a play for the pre-iPhone launch runup (bought september 640 calls, sold 650 calls when AAPL was around 625 a week or two back) with maximum risk around half of a share and maximum gain over 100%. Right now both are fully in the money and the implied profit is already around 80% but I'll probably allow time decay to widen it further until around end of next week or around 10th of September even. Probably will close it before the phone announcement as Apple stock always slumps during the announcement and recovers after it:) Might even play that with a put before the event that I turn around at the end of the event.
I want to see Apple sue Google. That'll be the end of Apple.
Why would that be the case? Apple has pretty decent grounds to defeating Google. Eric Schmidt was on Apple board during the iPhone and iPad development and saw the prototypes. He then launched the Android effort in Google in preparation to take part in the game change in the industry.
Financially there's noone more powerful than Apple in corporate side. Not only have they the largest market cap, they also have the largest war chest. $117B is tough match for anyone. Google's no pushover, but I don't see how that could be end of Apple.
Not if, in the end, I can't use pinch-and-zoom on my phone anymore and all future models have to look and work like crap so Apple won't sue.
Odd, I'll always have the pinch-and-zoom feature. Ah, you must be someone who's not using an iPhone. Sorry then mate, but time to start using it, iPhone 5's coming out in a few weeks, now's your chance:P
Did that a year ago when everyone was crying fool:P now, a year later and 80% higher valuation they still keep crying, some still that I'm a fool for holding, some just cry that they didn't come along:P Even now Apple's still a bargain stock wise if you take money flow etc. It's sure as hell not a bargain actual stock price wise as most people will be hard pressed to buy even one share:) Wouldn't mind a 10-for-1 split, could buy Apple every month then:)
]Let me just say this...With Apple now being where Microsoft was in value (and plus some now), and with Apple now suing everyone that they can get their hands on. Apple has become the new Microsoft of our age. You can almost smell the monopoly and abuse of their monopoly on the horizon. It's heart breaking and awesome to see history repeat itself.
You do know what constitutes monopoly, right? The only possible market where Apple could be possibly labeled that is the tablet market (I actually typed iPad market, then corrected, kinda shows how dominant it is). In the phone market they make up below 50% market share, same for laptops etc. Even iOS wise they don't have majority so there's no way anyone could bring monopoly charges against them. They do reap 80% of the profit, but that's not something you can hold against them as market influence is based on market share. If indeed Google were to drop dead and all the Android based smartphones disappeared because of Apple, then indeed you might have a case.
Additionally, Apple has lost every shred of credibility in pretty much all of my circle of friends. Which I know, doesn't mean squat, but I believe that this may very well mark the start of the end for Apple. Once you become viewed as the tech bully of the world, you start to loose you're ability to attract good talent. You start to be viewed as, the creative versus The Man. I don't know any company that "won" people over by being on a platform of being "The Man".
Odd, in most places where I'm at I'm only seeing increase in Apple usage and the actual real life experience of most people that I know is that whoever has tried both Apple products and Android based products heavily lean towards Apple products because of the real life usage (battery, ease of use, integration). Can't say much about developer side, don't work in that sector anymore, but outside of pure IT, where people use IT products to do more useful things Apple is gaining more and more traction. And I'm not surprised that techies might somewhat lean away from Apple because Apple caters for the wider market and prefers to take charge of things that people are at times too lazy to do themselves, but that benefit the platform overall (like sandboxing that's been coming a long time, though I somewhat understand both sides there with Apple not giving enough entitlements for all scenarios).
I think that's one of the cleanest statements about why some people don't like Apple. Things cost. You can't have everything for cheap and free so you whine about it. Well I've learned over the years that the fact that things cost is not such a bad thing. Most things cost little enough that it won't have a high impact on your life (majority of apps on iTunes Store are between $0.99 and $2.99, if that's a hard bargain for you, then you really are in a crap situation anyway and can go and hack linux boxes further until you get a real job as then it's mandated by real need for you to do it). However the fact that things cost usually means that they are beneficial to the developer and therefore they keep supporting it. I've seen so many things in Linux die because of lack of interest and constant change in the underlying OS that makes it harder and harder to keep up. Watching movies legally for just $3.99 - $4.99 on Apple TV is far preferred for me to searching for the torrent downloading it and checking the quality etc. I can browse the store and start watching.
I used to be an utter linux affionado in the 90's, even managed one of the local computer companies here in Estonia to start selling machines with Linux pre-installed (it was an extended distro made by me that added loads of needed stuff that wasn't part of the distros at the time, but needed for by users to really adapt). I advocated linux everywhere and had extremely customized installations for myself. I used to support large servers and linux provided an excellent work laptop config to do that at a customer location, but I have to say fiddling and making everything work took a good quarter of my total work time in the early 2000's. I then moved to high energy physics and tuning the laptop became a hinderance to work, not as a fun pastime so I finally had the institute fork over the money to buy an iBook just to see if the stories were true and after the first two weeks of feeling like my arm had been chopped off because I first of all didn't know how to tune things and possibly even couldn't I discovered that I was doing a lot more work and that in fact the things I was used to tune most operated quite satisfactorily already on the default settings. Some things blew me away utterly like the instant suspend and resume that actually worked (at the time I had been hacking for months on swsusp on linux kernels with about 80% probability of recovering work and 20% kernel panic) to make it also auto-detect lid closing and opening, but it was nowhere close in the speed. So ever since then I've lived the Apple life and to be fair I'd not say things cost that much more than they would have cost living on Linux and related hardware. Yes, Apple products tend to be a bit more expensive, but that's only if you compare to the lowest of offerings. To get the same build (and I don't mean GHz, GB only) you need to look at higher end models from the competitors. For me at least the weight, battery life, screen quality, large trackpad, strong rigid case make up far more on the choice of laptop than wether I get 2.1GHz or 2.5GHz CPU (RAM you can get plenty, disk you get plenty). And OS X is in my opinion far superior to any Linux flavor for laptop use. No matter that the best VNC client cost me a whopping $4.99, there were free alternatives, but this client is 10+ times faster, I've never seen anything even close to that on any platform, you're working over semi-reasonable network you don't feel any lag at all. So things are worth buying if they are good and I don't mind paying for things as long as it's reasonably priced. Major OS upgrades for $20 is cheap and doable, reasonable office packages for $79 is reasonable etc etc.
If you absolutely adhore paying people for their work, then of course the Apple way is not for you. If you don't earn enough that 2-3 usd / day is something you can spend on things that you like just so, then probably the economic model is a bit tough for you as well and I can fully understand wanting cheaper alternatives and maximally things fo
Seriously? I usually read in the evenings in bed and usually spend 1-2 hours, but at times if it's an interesting book / close to ending etc I read for 4-6 hours straight without noticing the time pass. In bed the best part is that you can turn the iBooks style to Night and you're reading white on black. This way the light emitted from the display is marginal yet provides a clear image to read and focus on in the dark. The added benefit is that I can prop the iPad against a pillow or use its smart cover as a stand and just read while on my side. I always hated that with books reading for hours your thumb would get cramped from keeping the pages apart and your hand tires. With the iPad I don't have either of the worries.
And the added benefit is that I can also download the newspapers (or well they auto-download in the night so I have the latest newspaper in the morning when I go to the toilet), check e-mail in the morning without getting out of bed or reading up on facebook/slashdot/whatnot without actually having to go anywhere close to my laptop. Only once I need to start doing real work do I move to the laptop for the larger screen and full keyboard as well as capacities that a full OS and hardware provide. Majority of the time I'm hanging around with the iPad though.
And if you're really against the 10" form factor (which I personally love as it's about the size of an A4 page so reasonably decent for PDF's), then the rumors are large that Apple's about to introduce iPad mini on 12th of September, which is just three weeks from now...
Didn't I just recently hear about the idea to seed iron to fight global warming. Right, it was the Panchaea project in Deus Ex Human Revolution. Well I just hope it works out better than it did in the game though:P
I'm in CMS and we pretty much released all the details now at the seminar. If ATLAS held back until publication, then either they didn't manage to get it approved or they cut corners and didn't feel presenting the results right now yet. In any case it's CMS that showed most thorough investigation here. Though I can understand delaying the lower priority channels until some time this/next week I don't understand why they didn't provide a mass fit at todays seminar which was to be a discovery seminar (or they didn't expect CMS to have 5 sigma).
Well it's not that much good luck really. CMS showed the expected significance of a SM Higgs boson for the full 5 channel combination to be ~6 sigma for 125 GeV. So seeing 4.9 sigma is actually a downward fluctuation (or in other words unlucky) or it's not Higgs.
Also, it's odd to see how much worse ATLAS was. They got 10% more statistics, yet see about the same significance as CMS. They also presented only 2 channels (true, the most sensitive ones) and didn't even attempt to fit the mass of the new particle (while CMS gave 125.3 +- 0.6 GeV, a precision of 0.5%!!!) nor did they look at the other supporting channels that could indicate if this is SM Higgs or some other particle. CMS as an example sees some tension in the 2tau final state where there is actually a downward fluctuation and almost exclusion of SM Higgs. CMS also showed first fits of couplings to fermions and bosons and that was very interesting result. ATLAS just claimed the 5 sigma and approximate mass. Really expected more of them...
Lots of valid points. However here the percentage of profit does matter. In the case of Android you have ~50% market share and iOS gives you ~30% market share. Those numbers are very comparable as they differ only by about a factor of 1.6 (i.e. they are the same order of magnitude). This means that if Apple rakes in 80% of the smartphone profit and Android phones rake in 20%, then here it means that Apple is literally taking majority of the profit even though their market share is smaller slightly. Also for any particular model Apple owns the top 3 slots of model sales as is expected considering the market share is taken by just a few models while the competition is made up of hundreds of models by many manufacturers with varying quality and OS implementations.
For a developer the iOS framework should be THE platform both for market penetration as well as unit sales (iPod touch goes there too) and the fact that the average iOS user is more likely to actually pay for applications unlike Android users (sorry, but Linux mentality and el cheapo phones target by default the people who don't want to pay for stuff). So if you are looking for a platform to earn money, then this is the platform. You may also branch out and do Android hoping that you can enhance sales, but it may well be that the support cost for keeping the software up to date will not be covered by the platform at all (and you'd need to support a lot wider plethora of devices/OS versions, in iOS case it's just 1-2 OS releases to target majority and only 1-2 devices).
And the reason Apple has not reduced the price of iPhone is very simple. They don't need to. They have not reached supply-demand balance meaning they still sell every single phone that is produced as it leaves the factory assembly line. Also, they have made the great strategic move of transitioning the devices down the line to cheaper modes effectively targeting also those segments of sales without needing to set up separate manufacturing lines as those already existed for the phones when they came out. This method has been only in place for the past two years and we can assume Apple will keep doing it so that as a developer and a customer you'll get the benefit of the platform no matter what you purchase power.
And of course as a consumer you should take note of the benefits as well. I think the one screaming difference is the battery power where an iPhone 4/4S will last 2-3 days while majority of Android based phones are hard pressed to last a day at decent usage. Then the usage experience must be good as well because Apple has the best user retention statistics (sorry couldn't find a newer plot). And the vertically integrated ecosystem with paying customers being able to watch movies across devices with seamless syncing etc etc does lock one into the ecosystem quite well and provides a plethora of options inside it that you don't even want to go looking outside the system as there's no other such integration there yet.
Well the flash part they do own now as they recently made an acquisition in that field. However they "own" also the rest of the supply lines in the sense that they have exclusive (or close to it) contracts with manufacturers that they have pre-payed. A number of factories in the world have been built with Apple funding it close to 100% and getting an exclusive right for the production results. I think no supplier would want to screw them over as they fines are probably not describable in 7-8 figures.
I guess if you consider the company value highly inflated, then you just don't know economics that much. The value in comparison to most companies is dead cheap. Based purely on cash flows and earnings you can assign a value to Apple and it's very reasonable and actually cheap for a company that keeps growing earnings in 80-100% range YoY every quarter. Apple also doesn't have any dept and has a shitload of cash that they can secure the supply line no matter what. At worst if they see some manufacturer start to screw them slowly they'll just invest into other companies to build alternate factories and let the original company take the hit of lost sales (Samsungs biggest client is Apple, losing that would hit them very very hard, possibly killing off also the smartphone business that might slightly be subsidized by the components business).
Well for the car analogy you can still have an Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution X GSR that is manual shift and allows you to turn off the traction control for loads and loads of fun (I'd know, I drive one). So enjoy your M5 (i.e. N9) while I enjoy my Evo X (i.e. iPhone).:P
First off, it was someone else who posted the initial thing. And you'd have to have invested in a narrow window to not be in profit right now. Apple's at 584 usd / share and was over 600 for a short period of time only. It's still up 40% this year and is cruising near all time highs. There is no larger company and I'm pretty sure there has never been a company at 500B market cap that features 80-100% growth rate YoY.
Slashdot Mirror
I used to teach a course in Grid/distributed computing in our local IT College, but after putting up with the stupidity of the students for two years I stopped. This was a side project where I wanted to give something back, not my main finance source, but I just couldn't cope with last year sysadmin/systems engineers struggling with linux command line. I mean that it was as bad as unpacking their tarballs exclusively with double clicking on it on the desktop. I did try in the second/third iteration to pre-empt it a bit by doing a few first weeks basic shell programming tutorials, but there was no foundation to build on and I didn't have the time to teach a whole seat if courses from scratch so I stopped the course although they still ask if I want to return every year.
I've seen the same in other universities too, the people who are excellent were already before entering and have just hoend and extended the skills. Who enter blank rarely make out as anything useful...
Wolfram alpha, yelp, etc Apple's extending the database count all the time to bypass google.
Oh and love also the fact that most of those city SUV's are quite useless in now :P I usually keep both rope and tools readily in car and am usually the person who stops and pulls the cars out. Having decent four wheel drive, studded tires and the excellent drivetrain logic of an Evo X means I usually keep going when most cars stop and can still pull those guys out. Last few winters we've had way more snow than usual and it's a fun pastime just to drive around town and pull cars out of snow :P
Yikes, mountain roads probably are not what I'd prefer overly much during winter. Here in Estonia the biggest elevation difference is 300m and that's from coast to the other border almost. Also, I guess you're from a country that doesn't allow studded tires. I have studded tires and that makes a huge difference on ice. Sure in snow it makes no difference and you can use lamells or chains, but if you get onto ice (what you do at times on tarmac or when you go ice lake driving) the studs really help to keep the car handling at least to a certain level.
That's the *wrong* kind of excitement. It's also perfectly possible to have such excitement in a sedan car even with snow chains on. That is an experience that I would not care to repeat.
Well that gets to be a wrong kind of excitement only if it is unexpected :D If you drive a 4-wheel drive car and expect all the drifting and what accompanies driving on slippery surfaces and if you're proficient in it (at the minimum have taken the car to an ice track a number of times and spent hours bringing it to the limit so you know when and how it goes), then it's loads of fun. Noone says you've got to drive the whole distance from A to B with wheels spinning and in (un)controlled slides, but at times it's nice to take some corners at a drift or turn 180 with a small help from handbrake. Though the latter I do in the summer at times, though it requires some more speed and ain't too healthy on the tires, also requires you to be absolutely alone on the road or otherwise the other drivers will just be shocked witless and might do something stupid.
The usual good difference is that people who can afford to buy a real sports/rally car usually know what they are doing and enjoy the "excitement" in controlled conditions without threatening other people. The idiots who buy a 20 year old beamer and have close to zip experience are the ones who cause most stupid accidents because they want the excitement, but don't choose the conditions.
Ditto on all points... except I also like the iPhone 4 series because these devices are smaller than the Galaxy S3. Apparently that feature will be lost with the iPhone 5 which is unfortunate.
Mentioned the exact things somewhere else in this thread however from the mockups it seems the 5 will not be wider, but taller. This way the one handed usage and comfort remains the same while getting a tick bigger screen. But I do hope as well that it won't be a monster 4.x" screen just because people want bigger (just recently heard that someone's planning a 5" screen, HTC?, why the hell would you want a phone that's almost as big as a tablet?)
*sigh* people don't buy sports cars because they want to show they can afford it though sure there are some people who do it because of that too, but that doesn't mean we all buy it because of that. I have a sports car and I bought it because I want to enjoy my commute no matter when and where I go. I can't stand the slow progression from point A to B without any excitement in getting there. Even if the excitement is only minimal due to jams or what not. And also I love my sports/rally car during the winter when there is never a dull ride with all the snow etc. Yes, it's a bitch to maintain due to fuel cost and use as well as maintenance and yes I did manage to buy it therefore I could afford it, but none of those are reasons WHY I bought it.
The same goes for iPhone. Maybe to some people it's a fashion statement, but mostly it's because it's well designed and works. And I don't mean just works as a standalone unit, majority of the added value comes from seamless integration between iDevices, your laptop and your Apple TV (the more devices you have the bigger the advantages you get, clever Apple). The fact that I use iPad majority of the time I'm at home instead of the laptop is because of the comfortable use and the available content and the fact that I can close the book on the iPad and pick it up on the iPhone without having to remember where I was in the book or having to worry if my content is backed up IS worth quite a lot.
My only hope is that they don't make the iPhone 5 (or what ever it'll be called) as big as the Galaxy S III. A colleague of mine has the SIII and boy it's way too big for one hand usage. If I want a bigger screen I just pop out the iPad and use that. I'd not mind a minor increase in size as well as pulling the display to the full width and height of the phone, but it still has to be comfortable in hand. I used to wear a cover on the iPhone 4 until waiting for some crap to compile I was fiddling with the cover and after about 6 months with the cover tried the phone in my hand without it. Damn that phone felt comfortable in my hand. It may seem like an innocent additional few mm, but it WAS much better without so I've never put the cover back on again.
It's fun to see all these discussions and allegations for a phone that's not even launched yet and therefore you have no clue what connector it actually uses. True, it's likely it'll be a proprietary one again, but still, shouldn't we wait until Sept 12th at least before starting the accusations...
I think Sir you missed my point :P
I was saying I don't see how Apple suing Google could be the end of Apple.
And the more iDevices Apple sells with Siri etc that perform searches bypassing Google, the more they erode the search monopoly. I don't think it's as trivial as people only go to google for Apple info. That's more a word of mouth and experience thing. Google couldn't possibly turn that channel off :)
Flaimbait :D lol, seems sarcasm understanding is in short supply these days on /.
Nah, I just started trading options. Way cheaper than buying full shares and relative winnings are orders of magnitude higher. I'm even in a play for the pre-iPhone launch runup (bought september 640 calls, sold 650 calls when AAPL was around 625 a week or two back) with maximum risk around half of a share and maximum gain over 100%. Right now both are fully in the money and the implied profit is already around 80% but I'll probably allow time decay to widen it further until around end of next week or around 10th of September even. Probably will close it before the phone announcement as Apple stock always slumps during the announcement and recovers after it :) Might even play that with a put before the event that I turn around at the end of the event.
I want to see Apple sue Google. That'll be the end of Apple.
Why would that be the case? Apple has pretty decent grounds to defeating Google. Eric Schmidt was on Apple board during the iPhone and iPad development and saw the prototypes. He then launched the Android effort in Google in preparation to take part in the game change in the industry.
Financially there's noone more powerful than Apple in corporate side. Not only have they the largest market cap, they also have the largest war chest. $117B is tough match for anyone. Google's no pushover, but I don't see how that could be end of Apple.
Not if, in the end, I can't use pinch-and-zoom on my phone anymore and all future models have to look and work like crap so Apple won't sue.
Odd, I'll always have the pinch-and-zoom feature. Ah, you must be someone who's not using an iPhone. Sorry then mate, but time to start using it, iPhone 5's coming out in a few weeks, now's your chance :P
Did that a year ago when everyone was crying fool :P now, a year later and 80% higher valuation they still keep crying, some still that I'm a fool for holding, some just cry that they didn't come along :P Even now Apple's still a bargain stock wise if you take money flow etc. It's sure as hell not a bargain actual stock price wise as most people will be hard pressed to buy even one share :) Wouldn't mind a 10-for-1 split, could buy Apple every month then :)
]Let me just say this...With Apple now being where Microsoft was in value (and plus some now), and with Apple now suing everyone that they can get their hands on. Apple has become the new Microsoft of our age. You can almost smell the monopoly and abuse of their monopoly on the horizon. It's heart breaking and awesome to see history repeat itself.
You do know what constitutes monopoly, right? The only possible market where Apple could be possibly labeled that is the tablet market (I actually typed iPad market, then corrected, kinda shows how dominant it is). In the phone market they make up below 50% market share, same for laptops etc. Even iOS wise they don't have majority so there's no way anyone could bring monopoly charges against them. They do reap 80% of the profit, but that's not something you can hold against them as market influence is based on market share. If indeed Google were to drop dead and all the Android based smartphones disappeared because of Apple, then indeed you might have a case.
Additionally, Apple has lost every shred of credibility in pretty much all of my circle of friends. Which I know, doesn't mean squat, but I believe that this may very well mark the start of the end for Apple. Once you become viewed as the tech bully of the world, you start to loose you're ability to attract good talent. You start to be viewed as, the creative versus The Man. I don't know any company that "won" people over by being on a platform of being "The Man".
Odd, in most places where I'm at I'm only seeing increase in Apple usage and the actual real life experience of most people that I know is that whoever has tried both Apple products and Android based products heavily lean towards Apple products because of the real life usage (battery, ease of use, integration). Can't say much about developer side, don't work in that sector anymore, but outside of pure IT, where people use IT products to do more useful things Apple is gaining more and more traction. And I'm not surprised that techies might somewhat lean away from Apple because Apple caters for the wider market and prefers to take charge of things that people are at times too lazy to do themselves, but that benefit the platform overall (like sandboxing that's been coming a long time, though I somewhat understand both sides there with Apple not giving enough entitlements for all scenarios).
I think that's one of the cleanest statements about why some people don't like Apple. Things cost. You can't have everything for cheap and free so you whine about it. Well I've learned over the years that the fact that things cost is not such a bad thing. Most things cost little enough that it won't have a high impact on your life (majority of apps on iTunes Store are between $0.99 and $2.99, if that's a hard bargain for you, then you really are in a crap situation anyway and can go and hack linux boxes further until you get a real job as then it's mandated by real need for you to do it). However the fact that things cost usually means that they are beneficial to the developer and therefore they keep supporting it. I've seen so many things in Linux die because of lack of interest and constant change in the underlying OS that makes it harder and harder to keep up. Watching movies legally for just $3.99 - $4.99 on Apple TV is far preferred for me to searching for the torrent downloading it and checking the quality etc. I can browse the store and start watching.
I used to be an utter linux affionado in the 90's, even managed one of the local computer companies here in Estonia to start selling machines with Linux pre-installed (it was an extended distro made by me that added loads of needed stuff that wasn't part of the distros at the time, but needed for by users to really adapt). I advocated linux everywhere and had extremely customized installations for myself. I used to support large servers and linux provided an excellent work laptop config to do that at a customer location, but I have to say fiddling and making everything work took a good quarter of my total work time in the early 2000's. I then moved to high energy physics and tuning the laptop became a hinderance to work, not as a fun pastime so I finally had the institute fork over the money to buy an iBook just to see if the stories were true and after the first two weeks of feeling like my arm had been chopped off because I first of all didn't know how to tune things and possibly even couldn't I discovered that I was doing a lot more work and that in fact the things I was used to tune most operated quite satisfactorily already on the default settings. Some things blew me away utterly like the instant suspend and resume that actually worked (at the time I had been hacking for months on swsusp on linux kernels with about 80% probability of recovering work and 20% kernel panic) to make it also auto-detect lid closing and opening, but it was nowhere close in the speed. So ever since then I've lived the Apple life and to be fair I'd not say things cost that much more than they would have cost living on Linux and related hardware. Yes, Apple products tend to be a bit more expensive, but that's only if you compare to the lowest of offerings. To get the same build (and I don't mean GHz, GB only) you need to look at higher end models from the competitors. For me at least the weight, battery life, screen quality, large trackpad, strong rigid case make up far more on the choice of laptop than wether I get 2.1GHz or 2.5GHz CPU (RAM you can get plenty, disk you get plenty). And OS X is in my opinion far superior to any Linux flavor for laptop use. No matter that the best VNC client cost me a whopping $4.99, there were free alternatives, but this client is 10+ times faster, I've never seen anything even close to that on any platform, you're working over semi-reasonable network you don't feel any lag at all. So things are worth buying if they are good and I don't mind paying for things as long as it's reasonably priced. Major OS upgrades for $20 is cheap and doable, reasonable office packages for $79 is reasonable etc etc.
If you absolutely adhore paying people for their work, then of course the Apple way is not for you. If you don't earn enough that 2-3 usd / day is something you can spend on things that you like just so, then probably the economic model is a bit tough for you as well and I can fully understand wanting cheaper alternatives and maximally things fo
Seriously? I usually read in the evenings in bed and usually spend 1-2 hours, but at times if it's an interesting book / close to ending etc I read for 4-6 hours straight without noticing the time pass. In bed the best part is that you can turn the iBooks style to Night and you're reading white on black. This way the light emitted from the display is marginal yet provides a clear image to read and focus on in the dark. The added benefit is that I can prop the iPad against a pillow or use its smart cover as a stand and just read while on my side. I always hated that with books reading for hours your thumb would get cramped from keeping the pages apart and your hand tires. With the iPad I don't have either of the worries.
And the added benefit is that I can also download the newspapers (or well they auto-download in the night so I have the latest newspaper in the morning when I go to the toilet), check e-mail in the morning without getting out of bed or reading up on facebook/slashdot/whatnot without actually having to go anywhere close to my laptop. Only once I need to start doing real work do I move to the laptop for the larger screen and full keyboard as well as capacities that a full OS and hardware provide. Majority of the time I'm hanging around with the iPad though.
And if you're really against the 10" form factor (which I personally love as it's about the size of an A4 page so reasonably decent for PDF's), then the rumors are large that Apple's about to introduce iPad mini on 12th of September, which is just three weeks from now...
Didn't I just recently hear about the idea to seed iron to fight global warming. Right, it was the Panchaea project in Deus Ex Human Revolution. Well I just hope it works out better than it did in the game though :P
In fact CERN patents every discovery and then gives it to public domain. This way they protect their discoveries against patent trolls.
I'm in CMS and we pretty much released all the details now at the seminar. If ATLAS held back until publication, then either they didn't manage to get it approved or they cut corners and didn't feel presenting the results right now yet. In any case it's CMS that showed most thorough investigation here. Though I can understand delaying the lower priority channels until some time this/next week I don't understand why they didn't provide a mass fit at todays seminar which was to be a discovery seminar (or they didn't expect CMS to have 5 sigma).
Well it's not that much good luck really. CMS showed the expected significance of a SM Higgs boson for the full 5 channel combination to be ~6 sigma for 125 GeV. So seeing 4.9 sigma is actually a downward fluctuation (or in other words unlucky) or it's not Higgs.
Also, it's odd to see how much worse ATLAS was. They got 10% more statistics, yet see about the same significance as CMS. They also presented only 2 channels (true, the most sensitive ones) and didn't even attempt to fit the mass of the new particle (while CMS gave 125.3 +- 0.6 GeV, a precision of 0.5%!!!) nor did they look at the other supporting channels that could indicate if this is SM Higgs or some other particle. CMS as an example sees some tension in the 2tau final state where there is actually a downward fluctuation and almost exclusion of SM Higgs. CMS also showed first fits of couplings to fermions and bosons and that was very interesting result. ATLAS just claimed the 5 sigma and approximate mass. Really expected more of them...
Lots of valid points. However here the percentage of profit does matter. In the case of Android you have ~50% market share and iOS gives you ~30% market share. Those numbers are very comparable as they differ only by about a factor of 1.6 (i.e. they are the same order of magnitude). This means that if Apple rakes in 80% of the smartphone profit and Android phones rake in 20%, then here it means that Apple is literally taking majority of the profit even though their market share is smaller slightly. Also for any particular model Apple owns the top 3 slots of model sales as is expected considering the market share is taken by just a few models while the competition is made up of hundreds of models by many manufacturers with varying quality and OS implementations.
For a developer the iOS framework should be THE platform both for market penetration as well as unit sales (iPod touch goes there too) and the fact that the average iOS user is more likely to actually pay for applications unlike Android users (sorry, but Linux mentality and el cheapo phones target by default the people who don't want to pay for stuff). So if you are looking for a platform to earn money, then this is the platform. You may also branch out and do Android hoping that you can enhance sales, but it may well be that the support cost for keeping the software up to date will not be covered by the platform at all (and you'd need to support a lot wider plethora of devices/OS versions, in iOS case it's just 1-2 OS releases to target majority and only 1-2 devices).
And the reason Apple has not reduced the price of iPhone is very simple. They don't need to. They have not reached supply-demand balance meaning they still sell every single phone that is produced as it leaves the factory assembly line. Also, they have made the great strategic move of transitioning the devices down the line to cheaper modes effectively targeting also those segments of sales without needing to set up separate manufacturing lines as those already existed for the phones when they came out. This method has been only in place for the past two years and we can assume Apple will keep doing it so that as a developer and a customer you'll get the benefit of the platform no matter what you purchase power.
And of course as a consumer you should take note of the benefits as well. I think the one screaming difference is the battery power where an iPhone 4/4S will last 2-3 days while majority of Android based phones are hard pressed to last a day at decent usage. Then the usage experience must be good as well because Apple has the best user retention statistics (sorry couldn't find a newer plot). And the vertically integrated ecosystem with paying customers being able to watch movies across devices with seamless syncing etc etc does lock one into the ecosystem quite well and provides a plethora of options inside it that you don't even want to go looking outside the system as there's no other such integration there yet.
Well the flash part they do own now as they recently made an acquisition in that field. However they "own" also the rest of the supply lines in the sense that they have exclusive (or close to it) contracts with manufacturers that they have pre-payed. A number of factories in the world have been built with Apple funding it close to 100% and getting an exclusive right for the production results. I think no supplier would want to screw them over as they fines are probably not describable in 7-8 figures.
I guess if you consider the company value highly inflated, then you just don't know economics that much. The value in comparison to most companies is dead cheap. Based purely on cash flows and earnings you can assign a value to Apple and it's very reasonable and actually cheap for a company that keeps growing earnings in 80-100% range YoY every quarter. Apple also doesn't have any dept and has a shitload of cash that they can secure the supply line no matter what. At worst if they see some manufacturer start to screw them slowly they'll just invest into other companies to build alternate factories and let the original company take the hit of lost sales (Samsungs biggest client is Apple, losing that would hit them very very hard, possibly killing off also the smartphone business that might slightly be subsidized by the components business).
Well for the car analogy you can still have an Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution X GSR that is manual shift and allows you to turn off the traction control for loads and loads of fun (I'd know, I drive one). So enjoy your M5 (i.e. N9) while I enjoy my Evo X (i.e. iPhone). :P
First off, it was someone else who posted the initial thing. And you'd have to have invested in a narrow window to not be in profit right now. Apple's at 584 usd / share and was over 600 for a short period of time only. It's still up 40% this year and is cruising near all time highs. There is no larger company and I'm pretty sure there has never been a company at 500B market cap that features 80-100% growth rate YoY.