HA! If you really believe that you need to educate yourself about judges. They're just as human and subject to emotion as anyone else. The entire reason we have juries in the first place is precisely because judges are prone to emotion and irrationality and error and bias.
Yes, this is an extremely common use case. Tesla will likely fix it. But it does suggest that they have not put the appropriate thought into the thousands of less common use cases that will creep up when this product gets into the hands of more people.
I've said it before but I'll say it again. This is a case of "Regulations are written in blood" in the sense that there will be a human cost involved in figuring out what works and what doesn't and fixing it so it doesn't happen again. Automated driving technologies are going to cost some number of lives and injuries to develop. I don't know how many, I just know the number will be greater than zero. There will be innumerable corner cases to work out before the technology meets its full potential and we will only learn about some of these by someone getting injured.
People bitch about regulations but they tend to forget the human cost that led to the regulation in the first place. New technologies rarely come without a human cost involved. Even something as seemingly innocuous as text messaging has resulted in fatalities because we didn't fully anticipate the degree of distraction it caused to drivers.
But once you bottle the water it becomes food, and food can contain pretty much anything.
Not even remotely true but thanks for trying. While there is (unfortunately) a lot of wiggle room, food production, marketing, and sales is actually pretty heavily regulated by the FDA and USDA among others.
Well-paid CEO isn't responsible for reducing tax liability - that's the bean counters job.
Speaking as a certified bean-counter, it absolutely is a (small) part of the CEOs job. Everything that goes on in the company is the CEO's responsibility and I assure you that if the CEO isn't overseeing measures to minimize tax liability that the board of directors will (or should) notice because it directly affects profits. Since profits are the CEO's job, so are taxes. The bean counters are there to carry out the task (along with lawyers and auditors) but the responsibility definitely is a portion of the CEO's job. It's also the responsibility of other people as well since business is a team sport.
You could remove most CEOs, CIOs, CTOs, etc., and as long as nobody noticed, the company would be better off.
If you believe this then you have no idea what those jobs entail. Believe me there is plenty to criticize about how CEOs do their job and how their are compensated without idiotic sound bites.
And how much should internet service cost? I was paying $80 per month for 40 Mbps down but only ever getting 20 and often getting about 2. As it turned out, they were willing to lower my bill to about $35 per month and no doubt they're still making a profit. So where was that extra $45 going?
That my friend is about the closest thing to pure profit in the known universe. It costs them essentially the same amount to provide you 1Mbps access as it does 100Mbps access once the equipment is installed. Like text messaging for phone companies they are charging for something that otherwise would be an underutilized asset. Worse, in a lot of places there is just one option for customers so they have little incentive to compete on price or improve service. Where I live my options are Comcast or MUCH slower service from Frontier Communications or to cut the cord and go LTE though my cell phone. Kind of a Hobson's choice really.
It's kind of like seats on an airplane. People have different willingness to pay for what in reality are very minor differences and so they charge different amounts to maximize profit.
Most Netflix content has been off the air for years. It's cheaper content.
That's actually why I dropped my subscription (twice). I like the concept but I had two problems with Netflix. One was that it was a pain in the rear to find something interesting to watch that I hadn't already seen or had no interest in seeing. I would spend 30-60 minutes searching through their (crappy) interface to try to find something to watch and eventually give up. The other problem was that their catalog was decidedly lacking in more recent content. Oh they had some but it was very hit or miss for their streaming. I haven't seen any original content from them that piqued my interest enough to bother subscribing again and I doubt I will. Most movies I actually care enough to watch more than once I already own on DVD or BluRay. Also much of what I would watch on Netflix I can watch for free on Youtube or elsewhere, including cable.
This isn't saying Netflix is a bad service and I love the concept but for me personally I didn't find it to be good value for money. I do pay $35/month for a cable subscription but surprisingly I find that to be better value for money than Netflix was. I just didn't use Netflix enough to justify the (admittedly reasonable) subscription. Ideally I'd like to get some form of ala-carte programming but neither the streaming nor the cable options have nailed the magic formula for me at least.
Okay, so what would be an innovation in drivelines that would be so disruptive to the industry?
Room temperature superconducting motors at economically viable price points. That would be a very substantial innovation and there is no known opportunity for equivalent improvement in fossil fuel drivetrains. You seem to have missed the point. I'm saying that EV drivetrains have more room to improve than fossil fuel ones in automobiles. I'm not saying they aren't already very good - they are.
You think Apple is doing all this so they can beat out infineon on power switch topologies?
I have no idea what Apple is doing and don't pretend to. Whatever improvements they might bring to the car industry probably won't be in the area of drivetrains, battery technology, or (probably) chassis design. Frankly unless they want to mimic what Tesla is doing I'm not really sure what Apple brings to the table as a car manufacturer. Maybe something in human interface design or software.
Even if they made a superconducting motor that took up half the space of Tesla's oversized induction motor, that is hardly going to be the tech that breaks the market open.
You seriously think a superconducting motor that worked without exotic coolant for reasonable cost wouldn't matter? Gonna have to disagree on that.
If you think that is where the big advances in electric vehicles are coming from then you can't see the wood for the trees. Give some real examples of areas in the drive train that are ripe for disruption or stop pretending to be an expert.
I think the BIG advances in electric vehicles are going to come from battery research. I think there is substantial though lesser room for improvement in EV drive trains as they relate to automobiles.
Really there is huge gains to be made in the drive trains for electric vehicles? May I scathingly ask where?
You may although there is no need to get scathing about it. If you want to skip the incremental improvements we can go straight to superconductivity. Supercapacitors are in kind of a grey area between power source and drive train controls and probably are an opportunity. You noted some of the other opportunities (transmissions, electronics, controls, etc) which are more incremental in nature. There also are economic opportunities for improvement. Electric drivetrains are comparatively expensive at the present. Driving cost out will require a combination of scale and technology improvements.
Basically I think there are more opportunities for technology improvement left in electric power trains than in gas ones. I would agree that as a general proposition that EV drive trains are pretty good in a lot of ways already. It's more a question of marginal improvement than anything else and adapting them to the specific use case of automobiles.
Improvement in electric vehicles will all come from the power source...
That is unquestionable the biggest. You are quite correct about that. Particularly power density, weight, recharge times and number of recharge cycles.
You apparently haven't been paying attention for the past 40 years. Apple considers itself, first and foremost, to be a hardware company.
You seem to have overlooked the video of Steve Jobs himself stating point blank that "Apple is a software company" and that the hardware is just the "pretty box" to enable them to sell their software. I'll take his opinion on the matter over yours.
Apple also makes software. That makes them a Software Company? But I haven't paid for a iOS or Mac OS upgrade in years.
What's your point? I haven't paid for a Windows upgrade in the last 15 years either but that doesn't mean Microsoft isn't a software company. Don't take my word for it, Steve Jobs himself said it and he's right. Apple completely outsourced their hardware manufacturing. All of it aside from some industrial design. You don't outsource the stuff that makes you money. They did not outsource ANY of their software. People pay a premium for Apple software, ergo they are a software company. The hardware is just the pretty box they sell their software in. They effectively sell their hardware at cost or for a minor profit and the markup you pay is for the software on it. If you tried to sell a Mac with just Windows on it, hardly anyone would pay a premium for that. We know they cannot sell their hardware for huge markups because it isn't really much different from their competitors products. Hell Apple sued and admitted in court that Samsung's products were basically almost indistinguishable knockoffs. Why would people consistently pay more for an identical product? Brand has some value but no brand will get you from 10% net margins to 25% net margins for decades at a time.
Almost without exception the software on my phone and Mac is free: Xcode, GarageBand, iMovie, iDVD, iTunes, Maps, etc.
It's not free at all. You pay for it every time you buy a piece of Apple hardware. Just because the cost is rolled in with other expenses doesn't make it free. I'm an accountant and when I quote products I roll cost together like this all the time. Apple's sales strategy is symbiotic with their hardware sales but make no mistake that absolutely none of that stuff is actually free.
What if Apple doesn't sell these cars? What if they lease them, or even more likely, you sign up for an Apple Car Subscription Service? iJaunter.
What if they do? That's an easily replicated business model and why should anyone buy or lease a car just because it has an Apple logo on the side? What value is Apple providing here? People buy their current products because they like the software better than the alternatives and the hardware is (usually) first rate. They provide value to people. What could Apple provide in a car rental that GM couldn't easily replicate.
There are other opportunities here- Taxis, Car Rentals, Events, Vacation Travel... all those times that you need a Car, without the bother of owning one. And there are all the Side Services; Apple Pay is already in place for the various daily, weekly, monthly or yearly Payments, but there is also Insurance, Music and other media to consume on the road, and well, Apple could lose money on the Manufacture of every car initially, and still make tons of money down the road.
You've described business concepts, not business plans and certainly not a path to profitability. You're doing kind of a hand waive and presuming profitability is inevitable with these things and nothing could be further from the truth. Show me a credible business model where you get to profitability and you might have a point. As it is your argument has no substance behind it at all. You're just saying "maybe they're doing something else" but you have no idea what that might be or how they would make money at it.
This quaint concept- One hands over a huge chunk of money and you get a ton or two of metal and plastic on four wheels, to do whatever you want with for as long as you want, is dying.
There is no evidence whatsoever to support that. Furthermore most of our infrastructure is predicated on exactly that system. People continue to buy cars at near record levels and there is no evidence of that slowing down in any meaningful way any time soon.
The New Car advertisements rarely even mention purchase price any longer, just how much the monthly Lease costs.
If you are in the business of leasing cars then you are in the business of selling used cars as well. Leasing doesn't change anything except the financing.
Tesla has not yet shown that they can make money in the car market despite having a dominant position in the high end EV market. They are still pumping huge amounts of cash into the operation. I don't see how Apple can do any better, and they have a lot more at risk.
Exactly. The folks at Tesla are very smart and the business was built from the ground up to be a car company and they still are having a rough go of it financially. Just because Apple was good at consumer electronics is no reason to believe they would be good at making cars. That's like someone who runs a very successful restaurant and is good at it and making lots of money trying to get into the farming business. Maybe they can do it but there is no particular reason to assume they would succeed even if well funded.
Making electric car components is not hard, and there are few real gains to be made in the drive train.
Speaking as someone who makes electronic car components for a living, I'd say you have no idea what you are talking about if you think making them isn't hard. I think there are substantial gains still to be made in the drive trains, particularly for EVs and hybrid vehicles. I think gasoline and diesel engines are probably well into the diminishing returns though.
The biggest area remaining for innovation/cost reduction is the batteries, and I doubt that Apple wants to become the world's biggest battery company
Any company that wants to compete in EVs in a big way is going to have to become a battery company or have VERY tight relations with one. I agree that batteries are probably the biggest area in need of advancement and the most likely to see it happen.
Odds are, Apple will have the car rolling off existing production lines in China, avoiding Tesla's production woes, and they have plenty of cash to set up infrastructure - you'd probably use existing independent repair shops for your service network.
I'm in the auto industry and I've done the sort of sourcing you are talking about. The fact is that there simply isn't enough margin in a car to outsource production like that, especially in light of the costs involved. Tooling for a piece of consumer electronics you can sell by the millions for a fat markup is NOTHING like tooling for a car which you will sell by the thousands for a thin markup. Unless you are competing in tiny volume production you simply have to build it yourself to make any money. Apple has no particular cost advantage nor any particular technology advantage when it comes to building a car and they won't be able to charge huge markups - not on a product costing tens of thousands of dollars. If they want to sell it and make a profit they'll have to watch costs very carefully. They are simply not going to be able to sell a vehicle and get 25% net margins like they are used to. The financing alone prevents it.
Tesla is actually doing EXACTLY the right thing by going vertical with their production. Every time you outsource something to another company you are hemorrhaging margin and potentially quality. Tesla would be bankrupt already if they tried to outsource production the way Apple does it's hardware. There is a reason that companies like GM and Ford and Tesla insist on doing final assembly themselves in most cases. I do contract manufacturing for a living and I can assure you that Apple couldn't afford to outsource to anywhere near the degree they do in their current products without giving away the bits that actually make money for them.
Sure, the Apple Car is high risk, but the EV is in just the sort of state that the PC, MP3 player and Phone markets were in when Apple stepped in.
That is a wildly unsupported assertion. Not saying you are necessarily wrong but proving it won't happen for quite some time. People in tech tend to assume every market works like tech and it doesn't. The auto industry could not be more different. While I think there is a ton of room for innovation (Tesla is proving that) it isn't going to be easy to turn that industry on its head by just building another type of car.
Hardware makers have tight margins. Software companies not so much. See below.
Apple's ludicrous mark-ups? Somehow Apple makes ludicrous markups while managing in most cases to undercut the prices of their competitors.
Apple makes their big margins because Apple is a software company at its core. People pay those big markups for the software which just happens to come with a nice piece of hardware. If you put Windows on a Mac and sold it as a regular PC, Apple's margins would evaporate faster than you could say "shareholder lawsuit". The hardware is nothing particularly special - the motherboard is basically the same as any comparably equipped PC. Same for the iPhone. It's nice but there are Android phones that are similarly nice kit. But put Android on an iPhone and Apple couldn't charge the margins they do. People pay hefty margins for the software because that is what makes it "special".
Now to the point, I have a hard time seeing Apple as a car company. The most profitable car companies in the world (Toyota, Porsche, etc) have net margins around 10% - compared with Apple's 25% net margins. And culturally being a manufacturing company is quite different than what Apple does as well. So to make cars they are going to have to accept far lower margins, dump vast amounts of cash into building the business, conduct a complete culture change on the company and build a product that is more mechanical than software. That sounds like a heck of a gamble to me.
Moral of the story is Don't leave evidence on your phone. Or anywhere else for that matter.
Idiotic statement. Sometimes what isn't actually evidence of anything can be used against you. Just because you have nothing to hide does NOT mean you have nothing to fear.
your fingerprints aren't a testimony against yourself. Read the damn thing. "nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself."
Your fingerprints absolutely can be evidence against you. That's not even a question. The police have a long established right to take your fingerprints when you are arrested and to compare them with gathered evidence.
That said I have a hard time reconciling this with the right against self incrimination in the Constitution. In principle I feel a biometric pass code should be legally no different than a memorized one. Either way you are being forced to potentially incriminate yourself. But I suspect that the legal system will rule that they are different and so if you want your phone to be secure against search and seizure you must avoid biometric pass codes unfortunately. The problem here is that they are not comparing your fingerprints against evidence they have found. They are in effect forcing you to open a lock on their behalf. I don't have a problem with them having the right to search but I don't see why the target of the investigation should be forced to aid in that search. If they can break down a door to do a search (with a warrant) then have that right but I don't see why I should have to hand over the key to the house so to speak.
Actually the debate has some very firm conclusions with several deaths (mostly child deaths) directly linked to drinking raw milk. There was one in January here in the UK and in December 2014, one deaths and 4 serious injuries were caused by children consuming raw milk in Australia.
Presuming what you are claiming is factual (I won't dispute it here), one death in an entire country is insufficient to constitute strong evidence one way or the other. In the US alone there are 3000 deaths and 128,000 hospitalizations for food borne illnesses every year. You'll find more than a few of those come from dairy products that have been pasteurized. One child dying per year is a tragedy but it's not enough by itself to draw any firm conclusions for or against raw milk. I think the evidence thus far tends to indicate that any benefits from raw milk are minor in comparison to the problem of food-borne pathogens but the benefits of raw milk do not appear to be fully understood at this time. For myself I'll stick with pasteurized milk until there is strong evidence against it.
The debate is out about homogenisation, but the debate over pasteurisation is very clear cut.
If you will bother to read what I wrote, you'll not that I agree that pasteurization has a clear net benefit nor did I even hint that we should stop doing it. Whatever benefits raw milk has are poorly understood at present and the risks seem to significantly outweigh the known benefits. That's what evidence based policies are all about.
Personally I dont mind letting adult nutters have their dangerous milk, my problem is when they try to force their bad life choices onto others, especially kids who couldn't know any better.
I'm guessing you don't have any children of your own because there is absolutely no way that you can have kids and not force some of your own bad life choices on them. You (hopefully) won't mean to but it cannot be helped. We all make mistakes and bad choices in our life and our kids just have to live with them to varying degrees. One just hopes that you can avoid forcing the really bad ones on them like religion, lack of vaccines, etc.
there is such a thing as "good bacteria" but never mind, this process will kill it all. sterilizing away most of the nutritional benefit.
Most studies to date have concluded that pasteurization has minimal to negligible effect on the nutritional content of milk. Most of the nutritional value on milk has nothing whatsoever to do with any microbes in the product. The majority of the nutritional value comes from protein, fat, carbohydrates, minerals and vitamins which are largely unaffected by pasteurization. The largest impact seems to be on taste. Any impact on the gut fauna from pasteurization appears to be small and more than offset by the reduction in illness from various pathogens killed in the process.
While I'm no expert I have a crude idea. Do you? You seem to be conflating bio-availability some other concepts. It's a lot more complex than raw food = good bacteria = healthy person.
Many of those bacteria help us digest stuff we lost the ability to digest after infancy.
You are grossly oversimplifying the process. Bacteria help us digest stuff throughout our life. Remove them and we can barely survive at any age. We aren't born with all the bacteria we need to digest stuff and our gut flora change as we age. Some comes from mom, some comes from the geography and environment around us, some comes from our diet. Antibiotics have a strong effect on our gut flora.
The debate about the health benefits of raw vs pasteurized milk has not yet yielded much in the way of firm conclusions. A few things seem clear. Pasteurizing does unquestionably kill harmful (and helpful) microbes and on balance it seems clear that it has a net benefit in reducing illness and mortality from pathogens. Most studies conducted so far that have found benefits to raw milk have not controlled for the fact that the individuals studied lived on a farm (hard to get raw milk elsewhere) and there are many variables relating to that so it is hard to draw any strong conclusions. There may be benefits but we haven't clearly teased them out yet. The available evidence and studies so far seems to show that any negative impact on nutrition from pasteurization is small to negligible though future studies may revise that conclusion as more data is gathered.
Slashdot Mirror
Judges don't deal in emotions like a jury does.
HA! If you really believe that you need to educate yourself about judges. They're just as human and subject to emotion as anyone else. The entire reason we have juries in the first place is precisely because judges are prone to emotion and irrationality and error and bias.
Yes, this is an extremely common use case. Tesla will likely fix it. But it does suggest that they have not put the appropriate thought into the thousands of less common use cases that will creep up when this product gets into the hands of more people.
I've said it before but I'll say it again. This is a case of "Regulations are written in blood" in the sense that there will be a human cost involved in figuring out what works and what doesn't and fixing it so it doesn't happen again. Automated driving technologies are going to cost some number of lives and injuries to develop. I don't know how many, I just know the number will be greater than zero. There will be innumerable corner cases to work out before the technology meets its full potential and we will only learn about some of these by someone getting injured.
People bitch about regulations but they tend to forget the human cost that led to the regulation in the first place. New technologies rarely come without a human cost involved. Even something as seemingly innocuous as text messaging has resulted in fatalities because we didn't fully anticipate the degree of distraction it caused to drivers.
Tap water regulations are usually very strict.
Unless you live in Flint Michigan...
But once you bottle the water it becomes food, and food can contain pretty much anything.
Not even remotely true but thanks for trying. While there is (unfortunately) a lot of wiggle room, food production, marketing, and sales is actually pretty heavily regulated by the FDA and USDA among others.
Well-paid CEO isn't responsible for reducing tax liability - that's the bean counters job.
Speaking as a certified bean-counter, it absolutely is a (small) part of the CEOs job. Everything that goes on in the company is the CEO's responsibility and I assure you that if the CEO isn't overseeing measures to minimize tax liability that the board of directors will (or should) notice because it directly affects profits. Since profits are the CEO's job, so are taxes. The bean counters are there to carry out the task (along with lawyers and auditors) but the responsibility definitely is a portion of the CEO's job. It's also the responsibility of other people as well since business is a team sport.
You could remove most CEOs, CIOs, CTOs, etc., and as long as nobody noticed, the company would be better off.
If you believe this then you have no idea what those jobs entail. Believe me there is plenty to criticize about how CEOs do their job and how their are compensated without idiotic sound bites.
And how much should internet service cost? I was paying $80 per month for 40 Mbps down but only ever getting 20 and often getting about 2. As it turned out, they were willing to lower my bill to about $35 per month and no doubt they're still making a profit. So where was that extra $45 going?
That my friend is about the closest thing to pure profit in the known universe. It costs them essentially the same amount to provide you 1Mbps access as it does 100Mbps access once the equipment is installed. Like text messaging for phone companies they are charging for something that otherwise would be an underutilized asset. Worse, in a lot of places there is just one option for customers so they have little incentive to compete on price or improve service. Where I live my options are Comcast or MUCH slower service from Frontier Communications or to cut the cord and go LTE though my cell phone. Kind of a Hobson's choice really.
It's kind of like seats on an airplane. People have different willingness to pay for what in reality are very minor differences and so they charge different amounts to maximize profit.
Most Netflix content has been off the air for years. It's cheaper content.
That's actually why I dropped my subscription (twice). I like the concept but I had two problems with Netflix. One was that it was a pain in the rear to find something interesting to watch that I hadn't already seen or had no interest in seeing. I would spend 30-60 minutes searching through their (crappy) interface to try to find something to watch and eventually give up. The other problem was that their catalog was decidedly lacking in more recent content. Oh they had some but it was very hit or miss for their streaming. I haven't seen any original content from them that piqued my interest enough to bother subscribing again and I doubt I will. Most movies I actually care enough to watch more than once I already own on DVD or BluRay. Also much of what I would watch on Netflix I can watch for free on Youtube or elsewhere, including cable.
This isn't saying Netflix is a bad service and I love the concept but for me personally I didn't find it to be good value for money. I do pay $35/month for a cable subscription but surprisingly I find that to be better value for money than Netflix was. I just didn't use Netflix enough to justify the (admittedly reasonable) subscription. Ideally I'd like to get some form of ala-carte programming but neither the streaming nor the cable options have nailed the magic formula for me at least.
What the hell is an AR helmet?
Augmented Reality helmet. In principle a good idea though the technology probably Isn't-There-Yet (tm).
It would be kind of nice if these acronyms were clarified in the summary.
This is slashdot and you are expected to know how to look things up on google at minimum. Do try to keep up.
Okay, so what would be an innovation in drivelines that would be so disruptive to the industry?
Room temperature superconducting motors at economically viable price points. That would be a very substantial innovation and there is no known opportunity for equivalent improvement in fossil fuel drivetrains. You seem to have missed the point. I'm saying that EV drivetrains have more room to improve than fossil fuel ones in automobiles. I'm not saying they aren't already very good - they are.
You think Apple is doing all this so they can beat out infineon on power switch topologies?
I have no idea what Apple is doing and don't pretend to. Whatever improvements they might bring to the car industry probably won't be in the area of drivetrains, battery technology, or (probably) chassis design. Frankly unless they want to mimic what Tesla is doing I'm not really sure what Apple brings to the table as a car manufacturer. Maybe something in human interface design or software.
Even if they made a superconducting motor that took up half the space of Tesla's oversized induction motor, that is hardly going to be the tech that breaks the market open.
You seriously think a superconducting motor that worked without exotic coolant for reasonable cost wouldn't matter? Gonna have to disagree on that.
If you think that is where the big advances in electric vehicles are coming from then you can't see the wood for the trees. Give some real examples of areas in the drive train that are ripe for disruption or stop pretending to be an expert.
I think the BIG advances in electric vehicles are going to come from battery research. I think there is substantial though lesser room for improvement in EV drive trains as they relate to automobiles.
Really there is huge gains to be made in the drive trains for electric vehicles? May I scathingly ask where?
You may although there is no need to get scathing about it. If you want to skip the incremental improvements we can go straight to superconductivity.
Supercapacitors are in kind of a grey area between power source and drive train controls and probably are an opportunity. You noted some of the other opportunities (transmissions, electronics, controls, etc) which are more incremental in nature. There also are economic opportunities for improvement. Electric drivetrains are comparatively expensive at the present. Driving cost out will require a combination of scale and technology improvements.
Basically I think there are more opportunities for technology improvement left in electric power trains than in gas ones. I would agree that as a general proposition that EV drive trains are pretty good in a lot of ways already. It's more a question of marginal improvement than anything else and adapting them to the specific use case of automobiles.
Improvement in electric vehicles will all come from the power source...
That is unquestionable the biggest. You are quite correct about that. Particularly power density, weight, recharge times and number of recharge cycles.
You apparently haven't been paying attention for the past 40 years. Apple considers itself, first and foremost, to be a hardware company.
You seem to have overlooked the video of Steve Jobs himself stating point blank that "Apple is a software company" and that the hardware is just the "pretty box" to enable them to sell their software. I'll take his opinion on the matter over yours.
Apple also makes software. That makes them a Software Company? But I haven't paid for a iOS or Mac OS upgrade in years.
What's your point? I haven't paid for a Windows upgrade in the last 15 years either but that doesn't mean Microsoft isn't a software company. Don't take my word for it, Steve Jobs himself said it and he's right. Apple completely outsourced their hardware manufacturing. All of it aside from some industrial design. You don't outsource the stuff that makes you money. They did not outsource ANY of their software. People pay a premium for Apple software, ergo they are a software company. The hardware is just the pretty box they sell their software in. They effectively sell their hardware at cost or for a minor profit and the markup you pay is for the software on it. If you tried to sell a Mac with just Windows on it, hardly anyone would pay a premium for that. We know they cannot sell their hardware for huge markups because it isn't really much different from their competitors products. Hell Apple sued and admitted in court that Samsung's products were basically almost indistinguishable knockoffs. Why would people consistently pay more for an identical product? Brand has some value but no brand will get you from 10% net margins to 25% net margins for decades at a time.
Almost without exception the software on my phone and Mac is free: Xcode, GarageBand, iMovie, iDVD, iTunes, Maps, etc.
It's not free at all. You pay for it every time you buy a piece of Apple hardware. Just because the cost is rolled in with other expenses doesn't make it free. I'm an accountant and when I quote products I roll cost together like this all the time. Apple's sales strategy is symbiotic with their hardware sales but make no mistake that absolutely none of that stuff is actually free.
What if Apple doesn't sell these cars? What if they lease them, or even more likely, you sign up for an Apple Car Subscription Service? iJaunter.
What if they do? That's an easily replicated business model and why should anyone buy or lease a car just because it has an Apple logo on the side? What value is Apple providing here? People buy their current products because they like the software better than the alternatives and the hardware is (usually) first rate. They provide value to people. What could Apple provide in a car rental that GM couldn't easily replicate.
There are other opportunities here- Taxis, Car Rentals, Events, Vacation Travel... all those times that you need a Car, without the bother of owning one. And there are all the Side Services; Apple Pay is already in place for the various daily, weekly, monthly or yearly Payments, but there is also Insurance, Music and other media to consume on the road, and well, Apple could lose money on the Manufacture of every car initially, and still make tons of money down the road.
You've described business concepts, not business plans and certainly not a path to profitability. You're doing kind of a hand waive and presuming profitability is inevitable with these things and nothing could be further from the truth. Show me a credible business model where you get to profitability and you might have a point. As it is your argument has no substance behind it at all. You're just saying "maybe they're doing something else" but you have no idea what that might be or how they would make money at it.
This quaint concept- One hands over a huge chunk of money and you get a ton or two of metal and plastic on four wheels, to do whatever you want with for as long as you want, is dying.
There is no evidence whatsoever to support that. Furthermore most of our infrastructure is predicated on exactly that system. People continue to buy cars at near record levels and there is no evidence of that slowing down in any meaningful way any time soon.
The New Car advertisements rarely even mention purchase price any longer, just how much the monthly Lease costs.
If you are in the business of leasing cars then you are in the business of selling used cars as well. Leasing doesn't change anything except the financing.
Tesla has not yet shown that they can make money in the car market despite having a dominant position in the high end EV market. They are still pumping huge amounts of cash into the operation. I don't see how Apple can do any better, and they have a lot more at risk.
Exactly. The folks at Tesla are very smart and the business was built from the ground up to be a car company and they still are having a rough go of it financially. Just because Apple was good at consumer electronics is no reason to believe they would be good at making cars. That's like someone who runs a very successful restaurant and is good at it and making lots of money trying to get into the farming business. Maybe they can do it but there is no particular reason to assume they would succeed even if well funded.
Making electric car components is not hard, and there are few real gains to be made in the drive train.
Speaking as someone who makes electronic car components for a living, I'd say you have no idea what you are talking about if you think making them isn't hard. I think there are substantial gains still to be made in the drive trains, particularly for EVs and hybrid vehicles. I think gasoline and diesel engines are probably well into the diminishing returns though.
The biggest area remaining for innovation/cost reduction is the batteries, and I doubt that Apple wants to become the world's biggest battery company
Any company that wants to compete in EVs in a big way is going to have to become a battery company or have VERY tight relations with one. I agree that batteries are probably the biggest area in need of advancement and the most likely to see it happen.
Odds are, Apple will have the car rolling off existing production lines in China, avoiding Tesla's production woes, and they have plenty of cash to set up infrastructure - you'd probably use existing independent repair shops for your service network.
I'm in the auto industry and I've done the sort of sourcing you are talking about. The fact is that there simply isn't enough margin in a car to outsource production like that, especially in light of the costs involved. Tooling for a piece of consumer electronics you can sell by the millions for a fat markup is NOTHING like tooling for a car which you will sell by the thousands for a thin markup. Unless you are competing in tiny volume production you simply have to build it yourself to make any money. Apple has no particular cost advantage nor any particular technology advantage when it comes to building a car and they won't be able to charge huge markups - not on a product costing tens of thousands of dollars. If they want to sell it and make a profit they'll have to watch costs very carefully. They are simply not going to be able to sell a vehicle and get 25% net margins like they are used to. The financing alone prevents it.
Tesla is actually doing EXACTLY the right thing by going vertical with their production. Every time you outsource something to another company you are hemorrhaging margin and potentially quality. Tesla would be bankrupt already if they tried to outsource production the way Apple does it's hardware. There is a reason that companies like GM and Ford and Tesla insist on doing final assembly themselves in most cases. I do contract manufacturing for a living and I can assure you that Apple couldn't afford to outsource to anywhere near the degree they do in their current products without giving away the bits that actually make money for them.
Sure, the Apple Car is high risk, but the EV is in just the sort of state that the PC, MP3 player and Phone markets were in when Apple stepped in.
That is a wildly unsupported assertion. Not saying you are necessarily wrong but proving it won't happen for quite some time. People in tech tend to assume every market works like tech and it doesn't. The auto industry could not be more different. While I think there is a ton of room for innovation (Tesla is proving that) it isn't going to be easy to turn that industry on its head by just building another type of car.
And you think computers don't have tight margins?
Hardware makers have tight margins. Software companies not so much. See below.
Apple's ludicrous mark-ups? Somehow Apple makes ludicrous markups while managing in most cases to undercut the prices of their competitors.
Apple makes their big margins because Apple is a software company at its core. People pay those big markups for the software which just happens to come with a nice piece of hardware. If you put Windows on a Mac and sold it as a regular PC, Apple's margins would evaporate faster than you could say "shareholder lawsuit". The hardware is nothing particularly special - the motherboard is basically the same as any comparably equipped PC. Same for the iPhone. It's nice but there are Android phones that are similarly nice kit. But put Android on an iPhone and Apple couldn't charge the margins they do. People pay hefty margins for the software because that is what makes it "special".
Now to the point, I have a hard time seeing Apple as a car company. The most profitable car companies in the world (Toyota, Porsche, etc) have net margins around 10% - compared with Apple's 25% net margins. And culturally being a manufacturing company is quite different than what Apple does as well. So to make cars they are going to have to accept far lower margins, dump vast amounts of cash into building the business, conduct a complete culture change on the company and build a product that is more mechanical than software. That sounds like a heck of a gamble to me.
Can you say destruction of evidence is a crime?
There are many circumstances where it is a crime to destroy evidence.
Moral of the story is Don't leave evidence on your phone. Or anywhere else for that matter.
Idiotic statement. Sometimes what isn't actually evidence of anything can be used against you. Just because you have nothing to hide does NOT mean you have nothing to fear.
If you need an explanation why watch this video.
your fingerprints aren't a testimony against yourself. Read the damn thing. "nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself."
Your fingerprints absolutely can be evidence against you. That's not even a question. The police have a long established right to take your fingerprints when you are arrested and to compare them with gathered evidence.
That said I have a hard time reconciling this with the right against self incrimination in the Constitution. In principle I feel a biometric pass code should be legally no different than a memorized one. Either way you are being forced to potentially incriminate yourself. But I suspect that the legal system will rule that they are different and so if you want your phone to be secure against search and seizure you must avoid biometric pass codes unfortunately. The problem here is that they are not comparing your fingerprints against evidence they have found. They are in effect forcing you to open a lock on their behalf. I don't have a problem with them having the right to search but I don't see why the target of the investigation should be forced to aid in that search. If they can break down a door to do a search (with a warrant) then have that right but I don't see why I should have to hand over the key to the house so to speak.
Actually the debate has some very firm conclusions with several deaths (mostly child deaths) directly linked to drinking raw milk. There was one in January here in the UK and in December 2014, one deaths and 4 serious injuries were caused by children consuming raw milk in Australia.
Presuming what you are claiming is factual (I won't dispute it here), one death in an entire country is insufficient to constitute strong evidence one way or the other. In the US alone there are 3000 deaths and 128,000 hospitalizations for food borne illnesses every year. You'll find more than a few of those come from dairy products that have been pasteurized. One child dying per year is a tragedy but it's not enough by itself to draw any firm conclusions for or against raw milk. I think the evidence thus far tends to indicate that any benefits from raw milk are minor in comparison to the problem of food-borne pathogens but the benefits of raw milk do not appear to be fully understood at this time. For myself I'll stick with pasteurized milk until there is strong evidence against it.
The debate is out about homogenisation, but the debate over pasteurisation is very clear cut.
If you will bother to read what I wrote, you'll not that I agree that pasteurization has a clear net benefit nor did I even hint that we should stop doing it. Whatever benefits raw milk has are poorly understood at present and the risks seem to significantly outweigh the known benefits. That's what evidence based policies are all about.
Personally I dont mind letting adult nutters have their dangerous milk, my problem is when they try to force their bad life choices onto others, especially kids who couldn't know any better.
I'm guessing you don't have any children of your own because there is absolutely no way that you can have kids and not force some of your own bad life choices on them. You (hopefully) won't mean to but it cannot be helped. We all make mistakes and bad choices in our life and our kids just have to live with them to varying degrees. One just hopes that you can avoid forcing the really bad ones on them like religion, lack of vaccines, etc.
there is such a thing as "good bacteria" but never mind, this process will kill it all. sterilizing away most of the nutritional benefit.
Most studies to date have concluded that pasteurization has minimal to negligible effect on the nutritional content of milk. Most of the nutritional value on milk has nothing whatsoever to do with any microbes in the product. The majority of the nutritional value comes from protein, fat, carbohydrates, minerals and vitamins which are largely unaffected by pasteurization. The largest impact seems to be on taste. Any impact on the gut fauna from pasteurization appears to be small and more than offset by the reduction in illness from various pathogens killed in the process.
Do you not know how bioavailability works?
While I'm no expert I have a crude idea. Do you? You seem to be conflating bio-availability some other concepts. It's a lot more complex than raw food = good bacteria = healthy person.
Many of those bacteria help us digest stuff we lost the ability to digest after infancy.
You are grossly oversimplifying the process. Bacteria help us digest stuff throughout our life. Remove them and we can barely survive at any age. We aren't born with all the bacteria we need to digest stuff and our gut flora change as we age. Some comes from mom, some comes from the geography and environment around us, some comes from our diet. Antibiotics have a strong effect on our gut flora.
The debate about the health benefits of raw vs pasteurized milk has not yet yielded much in the way of firm conclusions. A few things seem clear. Pasteurizing does unquestionably kill harmful (and helpful) microbes and on balance it seems clear that it has a net benefit in reducing illness and mortality from pathogens. Most studies conducted so far that have found benefits to raw milk have not controlled for the fact that the individuals studied lived on a farm (hard to get raw milk elsewhere) and there are many variables relating to that so it is hard to draw any strong conclusions. There may be benefits but we haven't clearly teased them out yet. The available evidence and studies so far seems to show that any negative impact on nutrition from pasteurization is small to negligible though future studies may revise that conclusion as more data is gathered.
I've been able to buy it in both EU countries I have lived in. Where is it illegal?
You could have looked it up yourself.
But there's hope, the EU is about to make bovine exhaust filters mandatory.
Is that a euphemism for putting a muzzle on Trump?
Nah, in the EU we heat our cows to 70C routinely.
Damn you global warming!