So then you won't participate in a debate, because you don't care at all.
You seem to be having a hard time with this. I explicitly said I have and do participate in debates in where I don't care about the eventual outcome. Scientific debates are often like this. I might not actually care what the outcome is and I often don't have a position of my own (I'm neutral) but I do have an interest in the debate based in curiosity and an interest in the truth. I don't really care if dinosaurs had feathers or not and I am neutral on the subject but I am interested in whatever the answer turns out to be. Even when the issue at hand is solely a matter of opinion then sometimes people will debate the issue because they like to debate - not because they actually have a position of their own. Hang around law school students sometime. They LOVE to debate and don't really give a shit about whatever is being debated all the time.
Ok, so that's still a position.
Yes it is. A neutral one. The argument was that you cannot be simultaneously neutral on an issue and debate it. I'm explaining (for the last time) that that is demonstrably not true. I understand plenty of issues well enough to argue one position or the other while my own opinion on the matter at hand is neutral. I don't care if emacs is better than vi or vice-versa but on occasion in years far past I have taken one side or the other just to point out that someone isn't being factual. I don't actually have a preference between the two and use both but the debate itself I find rather pointless and annoying hence my "position" of "a pox on both your houses".
it's very common for them to not-really be arguing about the thing that they're officially arguing about.
Very true. Most of the time it is something tribal. You see our "leaders" in washington holding or disputing opinions based solely on whether the other side holds that opinion.
If I bother to argue that position, then it must mean that I have some interest
Not necessarily in the position being argued. Sometimes my only interest is in promoting a factual discussion. That means I am neutral on the issue. Scientific debate is often like this. I don't really care about what the outcome of scientific issues actually is (because the nature of the world doesn't care about my opinion of it) and I often don't understand the nuances well enough to have a well formed opinion of my own. But I do care that the debate happens, that it is accurate and that whatever is being debated gets sorted out.
So you're not neutral. You're picking a side that you feel is under-represented, and you're taking that position.
Sometimes I genuinely am neutral. Just because I understand both sides of an issue doesn't mean I necessarily give a crap about the issue. To give a rather silly example I genuinely do not care one way or the other about the relative merits of emacs versus vi. I understand the arguments and can articulate them if someone seems to misunderstand something but I genuinely do not care about either side of that debate. I am the very definition of neutral there. (Actually my opinion is something along the lines of "a pox on both your houses") Whatever agenda I have has nothing to do with favoring one side or the other, hence I am neutral.
on some level, you need to be interested, and you need to have some kind of agenda-- even if that agenda is just "entertainment at flexing my intellectual capacity".
Interest is not the same thing as opinion. There are lots of things I like to understand but don't really care about the relative merits of one side or the other.
I debate things all the time that I have a neutral viewpoint on. Usually I do this to point out that there is another side to an argument that has some validity that the person I'm debating is not acknowledging. Sometimes I debate a topic to help figure out what I believe about a topic. Only an idiot takes a side in a debate without first trying to understand the relative merits of the different sides being debated. Having a debate where the goal is to poke and prod arguments rather than to convince the other side can be extremely useful.
Hell slashdot itself is pretty much clear evidence that you do not actually have to believe in a position to debate the issue at hand.
It is ludicrous that the mainstream media is only now getting a clue. This says much about the media in general.
No insult intended but I'm guessing you haven't had to deal with "mainstream media" much directly. I have on several occasions and let's just say that they were severely clueless. This sort of technical argument is WAY too subtle for them to deal with properly given that it isn't the sort of thing most people really care about or notice in their daily lives. They could do it but it requires too much effort and doesn't draw enough eyeballs. Furthermore a lot of them have some built in conflicts of interest. NBC is owned by Comcast. I very much doubt they are capable of being truly independent reporters on this issue.
It depends if having more models sells more devices. Apple clearly thinks that having two memory sizes will sell more iPhones.
And they seem to have a pretty compelling case for that notion. Apple also explicitly does not try to be all things to all people. They make a few products that appeal to a lot of people but they don't really spend a lot of effort customizing to a wider but harder to serve audience. Apple is maximizing profit rather than revenue. The thing they have to be careful of is that leaves a foothold for competitors in the parts of the market they aren't serving. But by taking the most profitable bits of the market they manage to suck a lot of the oxygen out of the room for competitors. It's risky but they've pulled it off so far.
They must have concluded that tailoring to each market would boost sales enough to overcome the extra cost of having multiple models.
Sometimes the extra expense of product variations is worth it. Other times it simply means that the product isn't good enough. It always costs more money to have more variations. The question is whether the increase in marginal revenue exceeds the increase in marginal cost. As long as it does then it is arguably worth doing. As soon as marginal cost equals or exceeds marginal revenue then profits will decrease.
There was a time that a citizen could walk right up to the white house.
Back when rather few people actually traveled any significant distance. Also back in those days the federal government mattered rather less than it does today. It's only since the Civil War that the federal government has started to play more of a role than state government in the every day lives of people.
What has changed with our society that our president needs to live in a castle with a moat and defense force?
A lot has changed. Maybe the fact that every president since Johnson has been the target of known assassination attempts or plots. Four presidents have been assassinated (Kennedy, Lincoln, McKinley and Garfield) and two were wounded by would-be assassins (Reagan and Teddy Roosevelt). When you are the leader of a nation there are some crazy people out there who will kill you if they have the chance.
Losing your nation's leader is a BIG deal. It causes very serious problems no matter what country you are talking about.
The fact that the Secret Service does not even provide a lock for the front door of the White House demonstrates its arrogance.
On what is arguably the most heavily guarded building on the planet some idiot thinks a little lock on the front door is going to keep the bad guys out? Exactly what would be the point of this little door lock? What would it protect against?
Talk about someone with no clue when it comes to security.
The benefit of laser cutting is that it is predictable and repeatable.
That doesn't mean doing it is trivial at large production scales. People have this naive notion that just because you have a machine with excellent capability that it is suddenly easy to realize the full benefit of that capability. Doesn't work that way. My company operates some very cool presses that can spit out parts every 3 seconds when running smoothly. But getting them running like that isn't easy and requires a lot of expertise and planning even when the machine is running properly which it doesn't always. Furthermore some materials are more difficult to work with than others. I've worked with laser cutters on in previous jobs and they are very cool but they definitely have their challenges.
Laser cutting has a lot of benefits. As you mention it can be very predictable and reliable in many cases. It ablates the material in many cases meaning it vaporizes the scrap. You don't have to worry about mechanical shearing. There are drawbacks to laser cutting however. High power consumption, does not work with some materials (copper and aluminum are problematic), slight tapering of the cut in some cases (laser beams aren't a perfect cylinder), fumes in some cases (particularly with plastics), difficulty working with bulk removal of material (thicker than around 6-7mm), and others.
It's far easier to laser-cut millions of holes with tight tolerances with near perfect repeatability with a laser cutter than it is to do it with a mill, provided that the surface being cut lends itself to laser cutting.
That depends entirely on the task at hand. I can provide plenty of use cases where it is much easier to use cutting tools. But you missed the key point. Just because a technology is an improvement over an older technology for some use cases does not mean that the task being accomplished is suddenly trivial. Easier is not the same as easy.
The problem of positioning the laser is no more complex than the problem of positioning the part on a mill
The challenges in laser cutting are considerably deeper than simply positioning the part.
That's why laser cutting has become so popular, to say nothing of its ability to handle materials which cannot practically be machined. Then again, laser cutting a fat billet isn't really practical either, so clearly both approaches have their benefits.
And some things can be machined that cannot be laser cut. Laser cutting is the best technology for SOME applications. If it wasn't then they wouldn't use it. Cutting tools, water jets, plasma cutters, etc all have their relative advantages and disadvantages. However under no circumstances is manufacturing any product in large quantities with tight tolerances and good repeatability a trivial endeavor, even on the most automated of assembly lines. Design, setup, maintenance, supply, breakdowns, and much more all are involved and none of them are trivial activities. Just having a machine that is capable of producing the parts you want with the tolerances you want is only a first step among many to getting production volumes with good quality and low scrap.
HTC seemed to manage just fine building devices of the quality of Apple or even better.
It's possible to match the product Apple makes but HTC isn't making much money doing it. Virtually all the profits in the smartphone market go to Apple or Samsung. HTC makes some fine products but so far they haven't found a way to make good products and do much better than breakeven profits. Unfortunately I haven't seen anything from them that I believe will change that equation either. They aren't the low cost manufacturer (that's probably Samsung) and they don't control the software platform and their competitors use the same software platform so there is nothing to really set them apart even if their hardware is marginally better.
I've seen and held my share of iPhones, and IMHO HTCs devices are better.
The piece of the equation that you are missing is that they don't run the same software. Apple's devices are almost always very nice but there are plenty of companies that can make a nice piece of hardware. What makes Apple products different is the software. You could install Android on the iPhone hardware but then there is no real reason anyone would pay extra for it over devices from HTC or Samsung or others. Same is true for the Macintosh - you can put Windows on it but then there is really nothing to make it any different from a Dell. Apple in reality is a software company that sells their software bundled on some really nice devices. While Apple hardware is among the best out there (often anyway) nobody really buys it for the hardware. They buy it for the software which they know comes in a nice package.
Floppies allowed transferring and backup of files. They were great!
First off floppies were NOT "great". They were necessary but were obsolete at least 15 years before we finally were rid of them. The floppy is dead and we are better off for it. Second, there are lots of ways to transfer and backup files, not the least of which is through a wireless network. These are available any user of iDevices so I'm puzzled why anyone would really want to deal with the headache and extra expense of a postage stamp sized ersatz floppy disk.
I think the no external storage policy is to protect iTunes and prevent piracy.
A nonsensical argument because you can transfer the files off the iDevice in a variety of ways.
Ironically, I think the reliance on iTunes hinders Apple's concept of the "post- PC era".
This we agree on. iTunes is important strategically to Apple but it's been stretched WAY beyond what it ever should have been asked to do. Fortunately I don't have to deal with it directly very often these days.
Those many different models are often just variations.
That's true but every different option adds cost and complexity to the supply chain. The fewer versions of a product you make the lower your costs will be. Every product variation has extra administrative overhead cost, engineering cost, manufacturing cost, freight cost, inventory cost, etc. Whenever you buy from a company offering lots of options you are paying extra for them even if you don't actually take advantage of them because some of the costs are shared.
Sometimes there are good reasons to offer products with extra options or multiple products but a lot of companies don't really think it through. My company produces a wire harness that goes into some SUVs. We produce two versions of this product which are identical except for a grommet. There was no technical requirement for the grommets to be different but two engineers in different wings of the company couldn't be bothered to talk with each other and so we now have to maintain two SKU numbers, two order books, two bills, get worse pricing on grommets because the volume on each is lower, pay more in freight, have to stock more inventory etc.
What I have sometimes pondered is why Google has not become its own hard disk drive manufacturer.
Because it is a relatively low margin cut throat business and Google has no particular expertise or advantage to bring to the table aside from a lot of cash. With the volume they purchase nobody gets hard drives cheaper than Google does so why would they get into this line of business? All it would accomplish is to drive down their margins and possibly even invite anti-trust scrutiny if they became a big enough player.
That doesn't mean all CNC machines are equal or that they can all meet the same specifications, run rates or handle the same products.
laser drilling isn't really rocket science
I think you have no idea what you are talking about. Drilling one hole with a laser isn't too hard. Drilling millions of holes with tight tolerances with near perfect repeatability IS as difficult as "rocket science". (as if that is some sort of valid comparison...) That's exactly what make manufacturing hard.
packaging have been done better etc.
Really? Name me one consumer electronics manufacturer that provides better packaging than Apple does.
If the startup made the same huge profit margins that Apple does, I don't see why doing any of these things would be a problem.
And if someone dropped billions of dollars in my hands I could do some pretty cool stuff too. What exactly is your point since that is a purely hypothetical conjecture? Startups don't have the kind of money that Apple does which is exactly the point.
NO startup can possibly match Apple's manufacturing costs. Very few companies of any size are able to match Apple when it comes to manufacturing costs on the products they make because Apple can buy stuff at such enormous scales. Read up on economies of scale. Apple only produces a small number of products so even companies like Samsung are unlikely to be able to match their costs because they spread out their purchases among more products. Apple is able to economically do things that set their products apart that at smaller scales would be economically impractical. This makes the gap even harder to close since it gives their products features that actually differentiate them from the competition in ways other than price.
The iPhone 6 isn't close to what you had on a 5 year laptop.
Could you stick that 5 year old laptop in a shirt pocket? I didn't think so. Why do you insist on comparing devices with wildly different heat, power and size budgets as if they are somehow the same thing?
In an age where 16 GB is available as RAM on many desktops and laptops, it's stupid to sell/buy a computer with only 16 GB persistent storage.
If that is all people actually need then why it it stupid? I'm pretty sure Apple and other smartphone makers have a much more accurate idea of how much storage actually gets used than you do.
The iPhone is just an underpowered palm computer with touch interface instead of keyboard/mouse of a laptop.
I dispute your framing of this issue. iPhones and other smartphones are hardly "underpowered". In fact they are incredibly powerful especially given the engineering challenges in play including battery life, heat, size and budget limitations. If you think these issues are trivial then by all means dazzle us with your brilliance and make a better product.
Is the portability premium so high, or the case so shiny, that we have to pay 2 times the cost of a powerful laptop while getting computing power/memory of a 5 year old laptop?
Short answer? Yes. Long answer? You are comparing apples to oranges. The heat, power, size and performance requirements of those two devices are wildly different. Do you really want a cooling fan in your cell phone? Because heat is a HUGE problem and speed = heat. Given the size of battery that is in a cell phone you simply don't have the power budget to crank up the performance to that of a current laptop.
Because 16GB it is considered useless with todays ever growing Application, Photo and Video sizes...and ironically OS Sizes.
Maybe among the slashdot crowd but that's not even remotely true among the General Public. I'm pretty sure Apple and other device makers have a pretty accurate idea how much space actually gets used on most devices. Furthermore they have options available for those who actually do need more storage space.
National newspapers are discussing it
They also spend a lot of time discussing vital matters such as the latest escapades of the Kardashian family. Do you have a point?
Then add a microSD slot with support for 64GB memory slot.
You seem to think that a microSD card is an unambiguously positive feature. It is not. You seem to understand the upside but let me lay out the downsides:
1) It adds bulk to the phone for a feature that most customers do not care about and will not use 2) It adds to the cost of the product for design, manufacturing, warranty, and support (again for a feature few will actually use) 3) It reduces the reliability of the device by a small but statistically significant amount. When you are selling these in the millions that adds up to substantial expense. 4) Adding the microSD card comes at the expense of other features that could occupy that space such as additional battery capacity. 5) It is a vector for dust and debris to enter the phone (see point 3 above) 6) It requires supporting third party hardware that may have compatibility issues 7) SD cards come in a variety of speeds and people will inevitably buy SD cards that are not fast, incompatible or have other performance issues 8) It complicates the software on the device and almost certainly will result in bugs. 9) The functionality can be replicated in other ways that may (and in fact are) preferable to other people such as wirelessly syncing data to other devices. 10) SD cards basically are modern day floppy disks. Do we *really* need to go back to those?
I can keep going. If you want a microSD card on your phone because that is critical to you then there are plenty of excellent options available to you, particularly among Android phones. Pick one and stop trying to tell everyone that they are stupid because they don't care to do things just like you would.
All of my Android phones include the ability to add a MicroSD card.
Great! Sounds like you are a satisfied customer of Android phones.
I don't care how much memory is on the phone, my data (pictures etc) doesn't reside there
Fair enough. I don't personally care to store my photos etc on an SD card but to each their own. I'd rather sync my stuff wirelessly to a remote drive and not worry about storing my stuff on a modern day floppy disk. If you want to go old school that's fine but don't presume the rest of us want to follow your lead.
Apple's continued refusal to add a MicroSD slot is just more of their way of ripping off their customers.
So because Apple provides an extremely popular product but doesn't provide the exact product you want they are "ripping people off"? Curious and rather condescending logic. I'm pretty confident that most people could not care less about the presence or absence of a MicroSD card slot. It adds to the cost, adds to the bulk, adds to the complexity, is one more layer of unnecessary complexity and in most cases wouldn't get used much if at all. Personally I'd rather the space be taken up with additional battery if anything because that is FAR more useful to me.
First, scale. It moves more product than Amazon and Ebay COMBINED, and that's before even entering the US market. The network effect will dominate.
That doesn't mean a damn thing once a company leaves their home country. Alibaba dominating in China doesn't mean they are assured of any kind of success on the other side of the Pacific. There are innumerable examples of companies that dominate their home markets that struggle in new markets including Walmart, Google, eBay and others. Alibaba might be a great investment and dominate the Chinese market but it isn't remotely certain they will be anywhere near as successful outside of China.
Second the vast majority of what Amazon and (especially!) Ebay sells is made in factories in China anyway.
Demonstrably not true. Supply chains are a lot more complicated than "made in China" and people greatly overestimate the amount of stuff that is actually made in China. A lot of stuff is made in China but far more is not. China produces about 18-19% of the worlds exports by dollar value. Furthermore people greatly underestimate the amount of stuff that is manufactured domestically. The US also produces somewhere around 18% of the worlds exports.
Alibaba will allow cheaper prices for the same products without having to go through the middlemen and let Ama/Eba skim off profits in the middle.
You're presuming Amazon and Ebay provide no value. I buy a lot through Amazon because their delivery is second to none and their prices are generally reasonable. There is nothing wrong with buying through a middleman if they actually add value and many do. I buy electronic components through distributors on a daily basis for my day job and there is a huge amount of value in that. You buy toilet paper from your local grocery store because the convenience is worth the markup. The internet has flattened the supply chain somewhat but don't think for a moment that there is no need for middle men anymore.
If i can buy a part directly from the manufacturer in China for $3.99, I'm not going to pay $11.99 for Amazon to deliver it to me or even $5.99 for an Ebay reseller.
Sure you will because you want it TOMORROW. You want it from a source you trust. You want the ability to return it and be assured of a refund. You also are conveniently forgetting freight costs which are extremely NOT trivial. I run a manufacturing company that buys parts from around the globe. I buy a lot of stuff including a lot of parts that originate in China, Japan, Germany and other places. We deal with distributors all the time because they add value, shorten lead times, reduce risk and that has real value. Am I supposed to tell a customer that they will have to wait 12-16 weeks for a part (a very typical lead time from China) because I want to source it from some manufacturer I've never heard of in China? Better be buying a LOT of product and be willing to take a lot of inventory risk if you want to do that. It comes by boat unless you want to pay some outrageous markups on airfare.
China could easily become an aggressor much the same way Russia is with the Ukraine.
Or the way the US is/was with Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq, Vietnam, Panama, Cuba (Bay of Pigs), etc. Furthermore have you forgotten how the US was founded? (Hint, it wasn't populated with white people 200 years ago.) Have you forgotten the number of dictators that the US has installed and supported including but not limited to Saddam Hussein, Francisco Franco, Hosni Mubarak, Augusto Pinochet and many many more.
Let's not pretend the US has been some paragon of virtue over the years, shall we?
If China were to get in a war with Japan over Japan's northern islands, the share value of these companies could evaporate overnight.
If that happens, the value of a few companies should frankly be the least of your concerns. I'd be a lot more concerned about WWIII starting.
As much as investing in BRICs is tempting, it can not be forgotten that most of these places are not democracies.
Precisely half of the BRIC countries are democracies, specifically Brazil and India. Russia ostensibly is a democracy though in reality not so much these days. China is the only one that is not a democracy. Some people include Indonesia (BRIIC) which is among the most populous countries in the world (currently #4) and it too is a democracy.
They never anticipated a new manufacturer showing up who didn't want to sell through dealers.
I disagree. I think they (meaning the dealers) understood this possibility perfectly which explains some of the current fighting. They just never had to worry about it much because starting a successful new car company is damn near impossible. Plenty have tried but it takes very deep pockets to get into that business, particularly in mature markets like the US. Tesla is really the first company to try.
The states have been regulating comercial car sales new and used for a long time now.
Regulation does not require the use of a mandatory middle man. Particularly one that adds as little value as most dealers do. The reasons we have the dealer system we do are largely historical and anachronistic. Regulations can come in many form and pretty much all (legal) transactions are regulated to some degree (see the Uniform Commercial Code). I have no problem with states requiring manufacturers to play nice with their dealers but I have a HUGE problem with states requiring me to buy a car through a dealer even when it makes zero economic sense for me to do so.
I do not see why anyone should be able to skirt that.
First off, just because something is the law doesn't make it right. There are plenty of unjust, cruel or even just stupid laws out there that deserve to be ignored.
Obsolete laws and business models deserve to go the way of the dodo. Furthermore it isn't obvious that Tesla is skirting any law and even if they were I REALLY do not care in this case. Independent car dealers provide me not a single service I genuinely need. They have a very well deserved reputation for behavior that borders on criminal. I would much rather deal with Ford or Toyota or BMW directly than most any independent dealer.
More and more of the new appliances these day (especially air conditioners) are able to be remotely controlled / throttled by the utility to prevent overloads.
The question is by who? If the power company isn't careful and routes those controls over a public network that they do not fully control then all bets are off regarding who controls the system.
By the time these new smart systems become deployed on a large scale i expect most appliances will have this ability.
I'm thinking you haven't worked too closely with a power company lately. The grid is positively archaic and certainly doesn't have the fine grained control you seem to think it does. The power company around me actively resists investing in upgrading their service faster than a pace that you could describe as glacial. They also seriously do not give a shit about their customers because they don't have to. Where else are they going to go?
In the last 24 months I have power company employees damage my property, start a fire (no joke), kill some wildlife, trespass, and cut down trees they had no right to cut down and cause enough trouble that our township supervisor (our version of a mayor) actually came on site to find out what the problem was. And I'm supposed to believe these people will have the competence and diligence to worry about some clever hacker turning on my AC? Yeah, I doubt it.
I still don't understand which problem these smart devices would solve for me. It's a light switch. It's on when I want the lights on. It's off when I flick it.
There are plenty of use cases though they may or may not apply to you. I have controls on certain lights in my house because I forget to turn them off. It's also nice to be able to control multiple lights at the same time for specific purposes. If I'm setting up to watch a movie it's nice to not have to hit several switches, dim the lights, turn on a bunch of devices, etc. Instead of me wandering through the house turning stuff off at night, I can simply push one button and set everything. Same with when I come home. I can check if I've left lights on or turn them on remotely if needed. It's certainly a luxury and not a necessity I'll admit but that doesn't mean it isn't useful or that I don't have a use for it.
Furthermore fine grained controls can save power. While the technology is still new so the economic payback is sometimes iffy, I do get satisfaction out of not wasting power needlessly.
The thermostat requires my attention four times per year, when the season changes -- and software doesn't help because the floor registers need to be adjusted manually, and it's still no more than 5 minutes of "effort" per year.
Sounds like that may not apply to you. I tinker with my thermostat more often than that and having some controls actually is pretty helpful to me. I have a Nest thermostat and I've found it pretty helpful to be able to control and check the house temperature through my smartphone.
I sure as hell ain't letting software turn on my oven
But you might want the ability to turn it off in case you left it running for some reason. It's quite possible to make a control that only turns things off. It's also possible to have it notify you that it is on if you leave the premises.
How about solving a problem that I have, instead of trying to convince me that I have a problem?
Be careful generalizing your own situation. There are plenty of us out here who actually do find some of this stuff useful.
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So then you won't participate in a debate, because you don't care at all.
You seem to be having a hard time with this. I explicitly said I have and do participate in debates in where I don't care about the eventual outcome. Scientific debates are often like this. I might not actually care what the outcome is and I often don't have a position of my own (I'm neutral) but I do have an interest in the debate based in curiosity and an interest in the truth. I don't really care if dinosaurs had feathers or not and I am neutral on the subject but I am interested in whatever the answer turns out to be. Even when the issue at hand is solely a matter of opinion then sometimes people will debate the issue because they like to debate - not because they actually have a position of their own. Hang around law school students sometime. They LOVE to debate and don't really give a shit about whatever is being debated all the time.
Ok, so that's still a position.
Yes it is. A neutral one. The argument was that you cannot be simultaneously neutral on an issue and debate it. I'm explaining (for the last time) that that is demonstrably not true. I understand plenty of issues well enough to argue one position or the other while my own opinion on the matter at hand is neutral. I don't care if emacs is better than vi or vice-versa but on occasion in years far past I have taken one side or the other just to point out that someone isn't being factual. I don't actually have a preference between the two and use both but the debate itself I find rather pointless and annoying hence my "position" of "a pox on both your houses".
it's very common for them to not-really be arguing about the thing that they're officially arguing about.
Very true. Most of the time it is something tribal. You see our "leaders" in washington holding or disputing opinions based solely on whether the other side holds that opinion.
If I bother to argue that position, then it must mean that I have some interest
Not necessarily in the position being argued. Sometimes my only interest is in promoting a factual discussion. That means I am neutral on the issue. Scientific debate is often like this. I don't really care about what the outcome of scientific issues actually is (because the nature of the world doesn't care about my opinion of it) and I often don't understand the nuances well enough to have a well formed opinion of my own. But I do care that the debate happens, that it is accurate and that whatever is being debated gets sorted out.
So you're not neutral. You're picking a side that you feel is under-represented, and you're taking that position.
Sometimes I genuinely am neutral. Just because I understand both sides of an issue doesn't mean I necessarily give a crap about the issue. To give a rather silly example I genuinely do not care one way or the other about the relative merits of emacs versus vi. I understand the arguments and can articulate them if someone seems to misunderstand something but I genuinely do not care about either side of that debate. I am the very definition of neutral there. (Actually my opinion is something along the lines of "a pox on both your houses") Whatever agenda I have has nothing to do with favoring one side or the other, hence I am neutral.
on some level, you need to be interested, and you need to have some kind of agenda-- even if that agenda is just "entertainment at flexing my intellectual capacity".
Interest is not the same thing as opinion. There are lots of things I like to understand but don't really care about the relative merits of one side or the other.
If they're neutral, they wouldn't debate.
I debate things all the time that I have a neutral viewpoint on. Usually I do this to point out that there is another side to an argument that has some validity that the person I'm debating is not acknowledging. Sometimes I debate a topic to help figure out what I believe about a topic. Only an idiot takes a side in a debate without first trying to understand the relative merits of the different sides being debated. Having a debate where the goal is to poke and prod arguments rather than to convince the other side can be extremely useful.
Hell slashdot itself is pretty much clear evidence that you do not actually have to believe in a position to debate the issue at hand.
It is ludicrous that the mainstream media is only now getting a clue. This says much about the media in general.
No insult intended but I'm guessing you haven't had to deal with "mainstream media" much directly. I have on several occasions and let's just say that they were severely clueless. This sort of technical argument is WAY too subtle for them to deal with properly given that it isn't the sort of thing most people really care about or notice in their daily lives. They could do it but it requires too much effort and doesn't draw enough eyeballs. Furthermore a lot of them have some built in conflicts of interest. NBC is owned by Comcast. I very much doubt they are capable of being truly independent reporters on this issue.
It depends if having more models sells more devices. Apple clearly thinks that having two memory sizes will sell more iPhones.
And they seem to have a pretty compelling case for that notion. Apple also explicitly does not try to be all things to all people. They make a few products that appeal to a lot of people but they don't really spend a lot of effort customizing to a wider but harder to serve audience. Apple is maximizing profit rather than revenue. The thing they have to be careful of is that leaves a foothold for competitors in the parts of the market they aren't serving. But by taking the most profitable bits of the market they manage to suck a lot of the oxygen out of the room for competitors. It's risky but they've pulled it off so far.
They must have concluded that tailoring to each market would boost sales enough to overcome the extra cost of having multiple models.
Sometimes the extra expense of product variations is worth it. Other times it simply means that the product isn't good enough. It always costs more money to have more variations. The question is whether the increase in marginal revenue exceeds the increase in marginal cost. As long as it does then it is arguably worth doing. As soon as marginal cost equals or exceeds marginal revenue then profits will decrease.
There was a time that a citizen could walk right up to the white house.
Back when rather few people actually traveled any significant distance. Also back in those days the federal government mattered rather less than it does today. It's only since the Civil War that the federal government has started to play more of a role than state government in the every day lives of people.
What has changed with our society that our president needs to live in a castle with a moat and defense force?
A lot has changed. Maybe the fact that every president since Johnson has been the target of known assassination attempts or plots. Four presidents have been assassinated (Kennedy, Lincoln, McKinley and Garfield) and two were wounded by would-be assassins (Reagan and Teddy Roosevelt). When you are the leader of a nation there are some crazy people out there who will kill you if they have the chance.
Losing your nation's leader is a BIG deal. It causes very serious problems no matter what country you are talking about.
The fact that the Secret Service does not even provide a lock for the front door of the White House demonstrates its arrogance.
On what is arguably the most heavily guarded building on the planet some idiot thinks a little lock on the front door is going to keep the bad guys out? Exactly what would be the point of this little door lock? What would it protect against?
Talk about someone with no clue when it comes to security.
The benefit of laser cutting is that it is predictable and repeatable.
That doesn't mean doing it is trivial at large production scales. People have this naive notion that just because you have a machine with excellent capability that it is suddenly easy to realize the full benefit of that capability. Doesn't work that way. My company operates some very cool presses that can spit out parts every 3 seconds when running smoothly. But getting them running like that isn't easy and requires a lot of expertise and planning even when the machine is running properly which it doesn't always. Furthermore some materials are more difficult to work with than others. I've worked with laser cutters on in previous jobs and they are very cool but they definitely have their challenges.
Laser cutting has a lot of benefits. As you mention it can be very predictable and reliable in many cases. It ablates the material in many cases meaning it vaporizes the scrap. You don't have to worry about mechanical shearing. There are drawbacks to laser cutting however. High power consumption, does not work with some materials (copper and aluminum are problematic), slight tapering of the cut in some cases (laser beams aren't a perfect cylinder), fumes in some cases (particularly with plastics), difficulty working with bulk removal of material (thicker than around 6-7mm), and others.
It's far easier to laser-cut millions of holes with tight tolerances with near perfect repeatability with a laser cutter than it is to do it with a mill, provided that the surface being cut lends itself to laser cutting.
That depends entirely on the task at hand. I can provide plenty of use cases where it is much easier to use cutting tools. But you missed the key point. Just because a technology is an improvement over an older technology for some use cases does not mean that the task being accomplished is suddenly trivial. Easier is not the same as easy.
The problem of positioning the laser is no more complex than the problem of positioning the part on a mill
The challenges in laser cutting are considerably deeper than simply positioning the part.
That's why laser cutting has become so popular, to say nothing of its ability to handle materials which cannot practically be machined. Then again, laser cutting a fat billet isn't really practical either, so clearly both approaches have their benefits.
And some things can be machined that cannot be laser cut. Laser cutting is the best technology for SOME applications. If it wasn't then they wouldn't use it. Cutting tools, water jets, plasma cutters, etc all have their relative advantages and disadvantages. However under no circumstances is manufacturing any product in large quantities with tight tolerances and good repeatability a trivial endeavor, even on the most automated of assembly lines. Design, setup, maintenance, supply, breakdowns, and much more all are involved and none of them are trivial activities. Just having a machine that is capable of producing the parts you want with the tolerances you want is only a first step among many to getting production volumes with good quality and low scrap.
HTC seemed to manage just fine building devices of the quality of Apple or even better.
It's possible to match the product Apple makes but HTC isn't making much money doing it. Virtually all the profits in the smartphone market go to Apple or Samsung. HTC makes some fine products but so far they haven't found a way to make good products and do much better than breakeven profits. Unfortunately I haven't seen anything from them that I believe will change that equation either. They aren't the low cost manufacturer (that's probably Samsung) and they don't control the software platform and their competitors use the same software platform so there is nothing to really set them apart even if their hardware is marginally better.
I've seen and held my share of iPhones, and IMHO HTCs devices are better.
The piece of the equation that you are missing is that they don't run the same software. Apple's devices are almost always very nice but there are plenty of companies that can make a nice piece of hardware. What makes Apple products different is the software. You could install Android on the iPhone hardware but then there is no real reason anyone would pay extra for it over devices from HTC or Samsung or others. Same is true for the Macintosh - you can put Windows on it but then there is really nothing to make it any different from a Dell. Apple in reality is a software company that sells their software bundled on some really nice devices. While Apple hardware is among the best out there (often anyway) nobody really buys it for the hardware. They buy it for the software which they know comes in a nice package.
Floppies allowed transferring and backup of files. They were great!
First off floppies were NOT "great". They were necessary but were obsolete at least 15 years before we finally were rid of them. The floppy is dead and we are better off for it. Second, there are lots of ways to transfer and backup files, not the least of which is through a wireless network. These are available any user of iDevices so I'm puzzled why anyone would really want to deal with the headache and extra expense of a postage stamp sized ersatz floppy disk.
I think the no external storage policy is to protect iTunes and prevent piracy.
A nonsensical argument because you can transfer the files off the iDevice in a variety of ways.
Ironically, I think the reliance on iTunes hinders Apple's concept of the "post- PC era".
This we agree on. iTunes is important strategically to Apple but it's been stretched WAY beyond what it ever should have been asked to do. Fortunately I don't have to deal with it directly very often these days.
Those many different models are often just variations.
That's true but every different option adds cost and complexity to the supply chain. The fewer versions of a product you make the lower your costs will be. Every product variation has extra administrative overhead cost, engineering cost, manufacturing cost, freight cost, inventory cost, etc. Whenever you buy from a company offering lots of options you are paying extra for them even if you don't actually take advantage of them because some of the costs are shared.
Sometimes there are good reasons to offer products with extra options or multiple products but a lot of companies don't really think it through. My company produces a wire harness that goes into some SUVs. We produce two versions of this product which are identical except for a grommet. There was no technical requirement for the grommets to be different but two engineers in different wings of the company couldn't be bothered to talk with each other and so we now have to maintain two SKU numbers, two order books, two bills, get worse pricing on grommets because the volume on each is lower, pay more in freight, have to stock more inventory etc.
What I have sometimes pondered is why Google has not become its own hard disk drive manufacturer.
Because it is a relatively low margin cut throat business and Google has no particular expertise or advantage to bring to the table aside from a lot of cash. With the volume they purchase nobody gets hard drives cheaper than Google does so why would they get into this line of business? All it would accomplish is to drive down their margins and possibly even invite anti-trust scrutiny if they became a big enough player.
CNC machines aren't made by only one company
That doesn't mean all CNC machines are equal or that they can all meet the same specifications, run rates or handle the same products.
laser drilling isn't really rocket science
I think you have no idea what you are talking about. Drilling one hole with a laser isn't too hard. Drilling millions of holes with tight tolerances with near perfect repeatability IS as difficult as "rocket science". (as if that is some sort of valid comparison...) That's exactly what make manufacturing hard.
packaging have been done better etc.
Really? Name me one consumer electronics manufacturer that provides better packaging than Apple does.
If the startup made the same huge profit margins that Apple does, I don't see why doing any of these things would be a problem.
And if someone dropped billions of dollars in my hands I could do some pretty cool stuff too. What exactly is your point since that is a purely hypothetical conjecture? Startups don't have the kind of money that Apple does which is exactly the point.
NO startup can possibly match Apple's manufacturing costs. Very few companies of any size are able to match Apple when it comes to manufacturing costs on the products they make because Apple can buy stuff at such enormous scales. Read up on economies of scale. Apple only produces a small number of products so even companies like Samsung are unlikely to be able to match their costs because they spread out their purchases among more products. Apple is able to economically do things that set their products apart that at smaller scales would be economically impractical. This makes the gap even harder to close since it gives their products features that actually differentiate them from the competition in ways other than price.
The iPhone 6 isn't close to what you had on a 5 year laptop.
Could you stick that 5 year old laptop in a shirt pocket? I didn't think so. Why do you insist on comparing devices with wildly different heat, power and size budgets as if they are somehow the same thing?
In an age where 16 GB is available as RAM on many desktops and laptops, it's stupid to sell/buy a computer with only 16 GB persistent storage.
If that is all people actually need then why it it stupid? I'm pretty sure Apple and other smartphone makers have a much more accurate idea of how much storage actually gets used than you do.
The iPhone is just an underpowered palm computer with touch interface instead of keyboard/mouse of a laptop.
I dispute your framing of this issue. iPhones and other smartphones are hardly "underpowered". In fact they are incredibly powerful especially given the engineering challenges in play including battery life, heat, size and budget limitations. If you think these issues are trivial then by all means dazzle us with your brilliance and make a better product.
Is the portability premium so high, or the case so shiny, that we have to pay 2 times the cost of a powerful laptop while getting computing power/memory of a 5 year old laptop?
Short answer? Yes. Long answer? You are comparing apples to oranges. The heat, power, size and performance requirements of those two devices are wildly different. Do you really want a cooling fan in your cell phone? Because heat is a HUGE problem and speed = heat. Given the size of battery that is in a cell phone you simply don't have the power budget to crank up the performance to that of a current laptop.
Because 16GB it is considered useless with todays ever growing Application, Photo and Video sizes...and ironically OS Sizes.
Maybe among the slashdot crowd but that's not even remotely true among the General Public. I'm pretty sure Apple and other device makers have a pretty accurate idea how much space actually gets used on most devices. Furthermore they have options available for those who actually do need more storage space.
National newspapers are discussing it
They also spend a lot of time discussing vital matters such as the latest escapades of the Kardashian family. Do you have a point?
Then add a microSD slot with support for 64GB memory slot.
You seem to think that a microSD card is an unambiguously positive feature. It is not. You seem to understand the upside but let me lay out the downsides:
1) It adds bulk to the phone for a feature that most customers do not care about and will not use
2) It adds to the cost of the product for design, manufacturing, warranty, and support (again for a feature few will actually use)
3) It reduces the reliability of the device by a small but statistically significant amount. When you are selling these in the millions that adds up to substantial expense.
4) Adding the microSD card comes at the expense of other features that could occupy that space such as additional battery capacity.
5) It is a vector for dust and debris to enter the phone (see point 3 above)
6) It requires supporting third party hardware that may have compatibility issues
7) SD cards come in a variety of speeds and people will inevitably buy SD cards that are not fast, incompatible or have other performance issues
8) It complicates the software on the device and almost certainly will result in bugs.
9) The functionality can be replicated in other ways that may (and in fact are) preferable to other people such as wirelessly syncing data to other devices.
10) SD cards basically are modern day floppy disks. Do we *really* need to go back to those?
I can keep going. If you want a microSD card on your phone because that is critical to you then there are plenty of excellent options available to you, particularly among Android phones. Pick one and stop trying to tell everyone that they are stupid because they don't care to do things just like you would.
All of my Android phones include the ability to add a MicroSD card.
Great! Sounds like you are a satisfied customer of Android phones.
I don't care how much memory is on the phone, my data (pictures etc) doesn't reside there
Fair enough. I don't personally care to store my photos etc on an SD card but to each their own. I'd rather sync my stuff wirelessly to a remote drive and not worry about storing my stuff on a modern day floppy disk. If you want to go old school that's fine but don't presume the rest of us want to follow your lead.
Apple's continued refusal to add a MicroSD slot is just more of their way of ripping off their customers.
So because Apple provides an extremely popular product but doesn't provide the exact product you want they are "ripping people off"? Curious and rather condescending logic. I'm pretty confident that most people could not care less about the presence or absence of a MicroSD card slot. It adds to the cost, adds to the bulk, adds to the complexity, is one more layer of unnecessary complexity and in most cases wouldn't get used much if at all. Personally I'd rather the space be taken up with additional battery if anything because that is FAR more useful to me.
First, scale. It moves more product than Amazon and Ebay COMBINED, and that's before even entering the US market. The network effect will dominate.
That doesn't mean a damn thing once a company leaves their home country. Alibaba dominating in China doesn't mean they are assured of any kind of success on the other side of the Pacific. There are innumerable examples of companies that dominate their home markets that struggle in new markets including Walmart, Google, eBay and others. Alibaba might be a great investment and dominate the Chinese market but it isn't remotely certain they will be anywhere near as successful outside of China.
Second the vast majority of what Amazon and (especially!) Ebay sells is made in factories in China anyway.
Demonstrably not true. Supply chains are a lot more complicated than "made in China" and people greatly overestimate the amount of stuff that is actually made in China. A lot of stuff is made in China but far more is not. China produces about 18-19% of the worlds exports by dollar value. Furthermore people greatly underestimate the amount of stuff that is manufactured domestically. The US also produces somewhere around 18% of the worlds exports.
Alibaba will allow cheaper prices for the same products without having to go through the middlemen and let Ama/Eba skim off profits in the middle.
You're presuming Amazon and Ebay provide no value. I buy a lot through Amazon because their delivery is second to none and their prices are generally reasonable. There is nothing wrong with buying through a middleman if they actually add value and many do. I buy electronic components through distributors on a daily basis for my day job and there is a huge amount of value in that. You buy toilet paper from your local grocery store because the convenience is worth the markup. The internet has flattened the supply chain somewhat but don't think for a moment that there is no need for middle men anymore.
If i can buy a part directly from the manufacturer in China for $3.99, I'm not going to pay $11.99 for Amazon to deliver it to me or even $5.99 for an Ebay reseller.
Sure you will because you want it TOMORROW. You want it from a source you trust. You want the ability to return it and be assured of a refund. You also are conveniently forgetting freight costs which are extremely NOT trivial. I run a manufacturing company that buys parts from around the globe. I buy a lot of stuff including a lot of parts that originate in China, Japan, Germany and other places. We deal with distributors all the time because they add value, shorten lead times, reduce risk and that has real value. Am I supposed to tell a customer that they will have to wait 12-16 weeks for a part (a very typical lead time from China) because I want to source it from some manufacturer I've never heard of in China? Better be buying a LOT of product and be willing to take a lot of inventory risk if you want to do that. It comes by boat unless you want to pay some outrageous markups on airfare.
China could easily become an aggressor much the same way Russia is with the Ukraine.
Or the way the US is/was with Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq, Vietnam, Panama, Cuba (Bay of Pigs), etc. Furthermore have you forgotten how the US was founded? (Hint, it wasn't populated with white people 200 years ago.) Have you forgotten the number of dictators that the US has installed and supported including but not limited to Saddam Hussein, Francisco Franco, Hosni Mubarak, Augusto Pinochet and many many more.
Let's not pretend the US has been some paragon of virtue over the years, shall we?
If China were to get in a war with Japan over Japan's northern islands, the share value of these companies could evaporate overnight.
If that happens, the value of a few companies should frankly be the least of your concerns. I'd be a lot more concerned about WWIII starting.
As much as investing in BRICs is tempting, it can not be forgotten that most of these places are not democracies.
Precisely half of the BRIC countries are democracies, specifically Brazil and India. Russia ostensibly is a democracy though in reality not so much these days. China is the only one that is not a democracy. Some people include Indonesia (BRIIC) which is among the most populous countries in the world (currently #4) and it too is a democracy.
They never anticipated a new manufacturer showing up who didn't want to sell through dealers.
I disagree. I think they (meaning the dealers) understood this possibility perfectly which explains some of the current fighting. They just never had to worry about it much because starting a successful new car company is damn near impossible. Plenty have tried but it takes very deep pockets to get into that business, particularly in mature markets like the US. Tesla is really the first company to try.
The states have been regulating comercial car sales new and used for a long time now.
Regulation does not require the use of a mandatory middle man. Particularly one that adds as little value as most dealers do. The reasons we have the dealer system we do are largely historical and anachronistic. Regulations can come in many form and pretty much all (legal) transactions are regulated to some degree (see the Uniform Commercial Code). I have no problem with states requiring manufacturers to play nice with their dealers but I have a HUGE problem with states requiring me to buy a car through a dealer even when it makes zero economic sense for me to do so.
I do not see why anyone should be able to skirt that.
First off, just because something is the law doesn't make it right. There are plenty of unjust, cruel or even just stupid laws out there that deserve to be ignored.
Obsolete laws and business models deserve to go the way of the dodo. Furthermore it isn't obvious that Tesla is skirting any law and even if they were I REALLY do not care in this case. Independent car dealers provide me not a single service I genuinely need. They have a very well deserved reputation for behavior that borders on criminal. I would much rather deal with Ford or Toyota or BMW directly than most any independent dealer.
More and more of the new appliances these day (especially air conditioners) are able to be remotely controlled / throttled by the utility to prevent overloads.
The question is by who? If the power company isn't careful and routes those controls over a public network that they do not fully control then all bets are off regarding who controls the system.
By the time these new smart systems become deployed on a large scale i expect most appliances will have this ability.
I'm thinking you haven't worked too closely with a power company lately. The grid is positively archaic and certainly doesn't have the fine grained control you seem to think it does. The power company around me actively resists investing in upgrading their service faster than a pace that you could describe as glacial. They also seriously do not give a shit about their customers because they don't have to. Where else are they going to go?
In the last 24 months I have power company employees damage my property, start a fire (no joke), kill some wildlife, trespass, and cut down trees they had no right to cut down and cause enough trouble that our township supervisor (our version of a mayor) actually came on site to find out what the problem was. And I'm supposed to believe these people will have the competence and diligence to worry about some clever hacker turning on my AC? Yeah, I doubt it.
I still don't understand which problem these smart devices would solve for me. It's a light switch. It's on when I want the lights on. It's off when I flick it.
There are plenty of use cases though they may or may not apply to you. I have controls on certain lights in my house because I forget to turn them off. It's also nice to be able to control multiple lights at the same time for specific purposes. If I'm setting up to watch a movie it's nice to not have to hit several switches, dim the lights, turn on a bunch of devices, etc. Instead of me wandering through the house turning stuff off at night, I can simply push one button and set everything. Same with when I come home. I can check if I've left lights on or turn them on remotely if needed. It's certainly a luxury and not a necessity I'll admit but that doesn't mean it isn't useful or that I don't have a use for it.
Furthermore fine grained controls can save power. While the technology is still new so the economic payback is sometimes iffy, I do get satisfaction out of not wasting power needlessly.
The thermostat requires my attention four times per year, when the season changes -- and software doesn't help because the floor registers need to be adjusted manually, and it's still no more than 5 minutes of "effort" per year.
Sounds like that may not apply to you. I tinker with my thermostat more often than that and having some controls actually is pretty helpful to me. I have a Nest thermostat and I've found it pretty helpful to be able to control and check the house temperature through my smartphone.
I sure as hell ain't letting software turn on my oven
But you might want the ability to turn it off in case you left it running for some reason. It's quite possible to make a control that only turns things off. It's also possible to have it notify you that it is on if you leave the premises.
How about solving a problem that I have, instead of trying to convince me that I have a problem?
Be careful generalizing your own situation. There are plenty of us out here who actually do find some of this stuff useful.