Most of her clothing doesn't have pockets big enough to fit an iPhone, so she got a dead-end phone with an antiquated OS because she's not going to carry a giant phone around. Her friends all think it's fantastic.
That's because her friends don't have to actually use it. The size might actually be fantastic but that doesn't mean the phone is. I used to have a Nokia E70 "smartphone" with a fold out keyboard. It looked cool and everyone would say so but the screen was too small for practical use and the software interface sucked hard. It was easier to carry but it was a crappy phone. As you say, her phone is antiquated and there is a price to pay for that. My wire carries her phone in a belt holder for the same reason (small or nonexistent pockets). That works too and her phone is the same as mine.
Some of the android phones I've seen are starting to border on tablet size and I'm not sure they'd fit comfortably in a pocket. While I like a big screen as much as anyone, this seems like an attempt to differentiate more than filling any actual need for me at least. As long as I can fit it in my pocket and view the screen comfortably, I'm not too fussy about the exact size. Could be a bit bigger or smaller and I wouldn't care much.
So are you saying that the premium we pay for Apple products is because of the OS?
Primarily though not entirely. Oh sure there is the brand and the design. Those are not free but by themselves they aren't enough. At the end of the day Apple is a software company. Put Windows or linux on a Mac and you would be hard pressed to tell it from a Dell or HP without seeing the Apple logo. If the only difference was the hardware Apple could not command the premiums they do. (That's true for the iPad, iPod and iPhone as well - put Android on them and there really isn't much difference) What truly differentiates Apple is their software. They bundle it with some well designed hardware and it's different enough that people are willing to pay a premium for it. Apple could sell their software on other people's hardware and it would still be a differentiated product. The reverse is not true - Windows on a Mac is pretty much the same as Windows on any other machine. They don't sell their software standalone for some very good competitive reasons but it is the core of what allows Apple to have the profit margins they do.
I ended up getting an HP laptop with all or better specs than a comparable Ibook and at less than half the cost.
Really? You found an HP that runs OS X? Also where is this "Ibook" you are referring to? Apple does not sell any laptop branded Ibook or IAnything for that matter. And very much doubt you found anything that is truly similar for "less than half the cost" once you include ALL the hardware including the case and the rest of it. I've compared ultrabooks running Windows from various vendors to Apple's offerings myself. While Apple certainly wasn't the cheapest they weren't a whole lot more expensive once you compared their stuff to the most similar stuff from HP and the rest.
The only difference is my laptop is not ultra-thin, which is unimportant to me.
So the hardware is not the same. If you don't like Apple's products that's fine. Nothing wrong with that. My own laptop is an Acer and it is excellent. But unless you compared extremely similar hardware you weren't doing a serious comparison.
The problem with most of these sorts of analysis is that they have no real way to know what sort of volume discounts Google or Amazon are getting. You can ask what the prices are but when you start getting into millions of units that usually takes more than a phone call. Pricing on electronics components is strongly a function of volume. (I know because I buy them daily in my day job) Spot market rates aren't usually the same as contract rates either and for the sorts of volumes Google would deal in we're probably talking contract rates.
In short, they may have made some assumptions about volume discounts but unless they have inside information they cannot possibly actually know what Google is paying.
I bought a MacBook for the HARDWARE. It mostly runs Linux
Well played Sir!
However I have to ask... "Mostly runs Linux"? What else might you be hiding on that hard drive? Hmmm... I suppose it doesn't matter. Run along and play with the 3 other people who traded in OS X for Linux on a Mac.
Umm, why are we giving what is almost certainly a crappy piece of equipment with a marketing tie in to a bizarre cult the time of day? Someone who is dumb enough or deluded enough to buy one of these they certainly isn't reading slashdot. If people want to go off and read their weird, nonsensical stories about invisible friends in the sky, fine. But this certainly isn't news for nerds nor is it stuff that matters.
As a software company, it's in Microsoft's best interest to prevent "new hardware" from being a barrier to entry for buying their software.
That's because you are not really Microsoft's customer. Relatively few of us actually buy any version of Windows directly from Microsoft. Mostly it is purchased through OEMs. You are not Microsoft's customer. HP, Dell, Asus, Acer, etc are Microsoft's customers. They sell a license to them and those companies resell it to you. The result is that Microsoft has a hard time paying attention to their users and it shows in the experience of using their products.
As a hardware company, Apple mostly uses their software to try to entice you into buying new hardware.
Actually Apple is fundamentally a software company. Nobody buys a Macintosh because of the hardware. Load Windows on Mac Hardware and without seeing the Apple badge on it you'd be hard pressed to tell the difference between an Apple PC and a Dell PC. Sure the hardware is nice and given the price charged it darn well better be. No, the difference comes in the software. You buy Apple hardware to get Apple software. They make their money by bundling the two. Same with the iPhone, iPod and iPad. You can get similar hardware for similar or lesser prices. People might like the iPad or iPhone but if you loaded Android on them there is nothing to differentiate them. People buy the iPhone and iPad for the software when all is said and done. The design and branding is just extra.
Because you believe the media's portrayal of RIM -- a company with no debt, $2 billion in assets, positive cash flow, extensive global market share in enterprise and military markets, and a newly reshuffled leadership and pared-down workforce -- as hopelessly crippled merely because they're losing market share in the US consumer market, an area where they have never been a stellar performer.
They have been bleeding cash for four consecutive quarters, losing market share globally, have precisely zero products that consumers are interested in, and are even losing market share among corporate types. While they do have cash they don't seem to be using it to particularly good effect. They've had a unbroken string of mediocre to bad products. Replacing the management team is not cause for celebration, it is cause for worry. Same with reducing headcount. Those might be necessary steps but they weren't taken because RIM is in good shape.
People said the same thing about Apple not that long ago, and that demise seemed at least as imminent, if not more.
Research In Motion isn't Apple. Apple was/is an exceedingly unusual case. While I agree it is too early to pronounce them dead, there also is absolutely no evidence yet that they are in anything other than a death spiral. I strongly suspect RIM will get bought out, probably by someone like Microsoft.
But they have the right to enter you're property with any work dealing with their meter.
Unless there is an easement permitting access for that purpose, they have no right to be on your property at all. If they have an easement they only have a right to be on the property defined by the easement. If they set one foot off the easement they are trespassing. Odds are that the power company has an easement to meter but not necessarily. I have seen cases where the meter was not on an easement and the power company (technically) had to get permission to come on the property to read it.
The mini needs to be a little bigger so it can have been cooling and a easier to open case.
If it was bigger then it wouldn't be a mini now would it?
But what apple really needs is a $1000-$1500 (base price) desktop with a mid-range video card in a X16 slots + 1-2 open pci-e slots. with 4 ram slots and at least 2 hdd bays.
I think you are confusing what you want with what Apple needs. What you are describing is a PC with OS X. If that is what you want, build it yourself. Fact is that most people never open their PCs ever. The few that do aren't really much concern to Apple. Desktop PCs like what you describe are a market with a limited future. Laptop and tablet sales are where the profit and the demand is. Why would Apple introduce a product in a dying market segment with features that hardly anyone will use? Makes no business sense at all.
People must be blind if they can't see how much current intellectual property regulations are stifling innovation.
Probably true but slavishly copying someone else's innovations does not advance society either. I don't pretend to know if Apple has a valid case here or not. However, a court of competent jurisdiction has looked at the facts and concluded that Samsung is being a free rider which is exactly the problem that patents were created to solve. There is far less incentive to create new and innovative works if other can simply copy your efforts at much lower cost. In this case the court has ruled that the cost *to society* as well as Apple are sufficiently harmful to this incentive to create. Maybe the court is full of $*** in this case but the basis of the problem they are ruling on is very important.
Now I very much agree that many of the current regulations as written are creating a huge number of problems. I think patents on certain types of innovations need to be either shortened or eliminated altogether. 20 years is an eternity in information technology so even if we allow patents for that, they need to be much shorter in duration. I also see no point in utilizing patents to protect innovation where copyright will suffice - most software is adequately protected by copyright IMO. There are of course other problems besides...
When they helped the company earn that $14 B, I don't think charity is a word that applies.
They were paid for their services that helped earn that $14B. If those services are no longer needed and they are still being paid, that is charity. They were hired to do a job, paid for that job and the job is done. There is no further obligation on either side aside from any residual contractual obligations.
When GM was doing well it was making something like $14 billion a year.
The largest profit in GM's history was in $7.6 billion in 2011.
Yet they were still laying off workers.
And that likely was the correct decision. If you close a factory and don't need the work force elsewhere, keeping them employed is incredibly stupid. Having a profitable year one year means absolutely nothing the next year. When the economy turns down (and it inevitably does), keeping workers that are not needed means you simply will be digging a bigger hole to bury to company in. It's not just about making profits this year, it's about having a strong enough balance sheet to survive the years that aren't so good.
What is so wrong with making $13 billion a year and keeping the workers, especially those that gave a significant part of their lives to that company.
If you need the answer to that, you simply have to fast forward a few years. GM couldn't shed payroll and benefits costs fast enough in 2008-2009 and they went bankrupt as a result. Keeping someone employed that the company does not actually need does no one any favors in the long run. Not management and not the workers. By postponing the pain you are simply making it worse later on for everyone.
On their core products MS have much higher margins
That wasn't what you were arguing before. You said "MS have much fatter profit margins then Apple..." which is demonstrably not true. You did not bring up market segments. At the end of the day, Microsoft has gotten into a number of business segments by choice. When you buy MSFT stock, you are buying all of the business, not just the core businesses. So even where true, saying the core business is more profitable is a meaningless statement unless you expect them to get rid of the non-core businesses.
While it is (generally) true that software normally has a higher profit margin than hardware, at the end of the day people buy Apple products for their software. (people make a big deal about the design stuff and that is important but what *really* differentiates Apple stuff is the software - put Windows on a Macintosh and there really isn't much to set it apart from any PC from Dell or HP) While Apple does sell some software as a standalone product (and realizes margins on it similar to Microsoft), most of their software products are bundled with hardware. Fundamentally they are both software companies but it is hard to compare the two because of the bundling.
The vast majority of their products have negligible unit costs, and development costs which were recovered long ago.
This is a huge misconception about software. While the software itself can be reproduced cheaply, the main costs in ANY software company are sales, marketing and overhead. Engineering only amounts to about 10-15% of a typical software company's costs. But it costs serious coin to sell the software, even for a company like Microsoft. The unit costs are nowhere near negligible (we're talking billions of $) even on their Windows and Office products.
I didn't buy that either side would actually go through with it, no matter how much posturing was done. What person really wants to be responsible for the termination of life on earth?
Probably no one but there are numerous documented cases of the USA and USSR almost launching nukes at each other due to equipment malfunctions and other errors. The safes with the launch codes were kept with a combination of 0000000 (or something similar) to make it easier to launch. Solar effects caused monitoring satellites to falsely report launches and the only thing that stopped a retaliation was a level headed military officer.
While the chances of a nuclear war were/are low, they weren't and aren't zero. People aren't always rational and all it takes is a small number of crazy people to cause a huge problem. Worse, it should be obvious by now that there are some people who are suicidal and would be perfectly content to take you and a million of your closest friends with them to the grave.
Does the US not have any part of the US constitution that forbids laws from discriminating like that?
Yes. The 14th Amendment is probably what you are looking for. It mandates equal protection under the law and was the basis for landmark civil rights decisions such as Brown vs Board of Education.
M$ profit margin is, I believe, higher than Apple's. M$ charges $400 for a copy of Office - digital download. What's the margin on that do you think?
You would be wrong to think that. Apple has a (slightly) higher profit margin as of the most recent fiscal quarter. (MSFT around 29.3% and AAPL at 29.6%) Apple does enough volume that they can drive the margins on the hardware they have made for them pretty thin for their suppliers. Believe it or not, with the right products you can have very good profit margins selling physical objects. You just can't sell a commodity product for big margins. That doesn't presently apply to Apple. Apple's hardware is nice but what really sets their products apart is the software and design. People have proven they are willing to pay a fairly steep markup for the value those add.
Apple spent years perfecting their supply chain management and they've done the engineering but stayed out of manufacturing itself which explains a lot of their profit margin. Can M$ get that smart that quickly?
Microsoft is arguably just as experienced in supply chain management. It's not as if they manufacture the Xbox themselves. MSFT has some pretty good engineers too even if they are hamstrung by bad decisions from years past. The problem Microsoft has is that they are built around selling through channels and don't have the experience Apple does in designing an integrated platform. Their company culture is built around software only and it is pretty hard to shift that. Luckily for MSFT, they have a huge war chest to work with and that insulates them from the mistakes they are almost certain to make.
This thing is indeed pretty harmless, but it scares me that vendors can set different prices based on arbitrary criteria
Companies do this all the time. It's perfectly normal and perfectly legal in a wide variety of circumstances. If you've every bought an airplane ticket, you've experienced this. Any time you can segment a market you should expect it to occur. The proper name for it is price discrimination. The word discrimination has acquired a bad connotation but it really is a neutral term that economists use.
We'd be in for all kinds of confusion, as comparison sites and review sites could no longer be objective.
Whatever makes you think they were objective in the first place?
Why did a simple ultrasound of my heart, performed by a technician who was not a doctor, not a nurse, just someone who'd completed "Be an ultrasound technician!" at night school, and which took about 15 minutes, cost over $1000.00? No reason. It's a random number.
I assure you the number isn't remotely random and there are a LOT of costs most people never consider. The machine has a capital cost which is not going to be cheap, probably six figures easily. Even without considering any other costs you have to do a lot of procedures to recoup that cost. The technician still has to have all their work signed off and examined by a physician even if the MD is not present in the room. There is gobs of paperwork and administrative costs. There are salaries and benefits. There is overhead in various and sundry forms (lights, electricity, rent, computers, network, software, legal, etc), insurance (workers comp, business interruption, liability, health, etc), You also have to factor in that insurance companies take a profit and the difference between a profit and a loss for most doctors offices is based on how well they can beat up the insurance agencies. Insurance companies aren't stupid (usually) regarding reimbursement rates.
No, it isn't a random number. I promise you it was quite carefully calculated and while they likely are making a decent profit, it is no where near what you seem to think it is.
So, can someone tell me why a hearing aid should be so expensive?"
Two reasons. One is that as others have mentioned, insurance is usually involved so there is less pressure to contain costs. The second and probably more important reason is that the volumes are low. There is a LOT of fixed cost that goes into design, tooling, and production of these units. This has to be recouped over a number of units and if the volumes aren't large enough the price HAS to be high. Given that the state of technology in these things is advancing, I suspect that the fixed costs simply cannot be amortized over sufficient numbers of units to cause a significant price drop.
I actually am an accountant and $3000 for a hearing aid produced in even moderate volumes (like personal computers 20 years ago) sounds like a rational price once you factor in a profit margin. My company assembles custom wire harnesses and many of our products cost hundreds of dollars because the complexity is high and the volumes are (relatively) low.
I live in the northeast, and the only visible call for HPC skillsets is at places like Goldman Sachs.
Two things there. First is that most jobs of that sort won't be publicly visible much of the time. Only a very few are published. Second is that the ocean is a LOT bigger than Goldman Sachs. You live near the hedge fund capital of the universe. There is a definite need for computing talent and believe it or not, some of the firms involved actually do have some ethical scruples. My biggest beef with doing that sort of work is that it tends to be unfulfilling rather than unethical. You spend you spend a lot of time and effort trying to shave milliseconds off trading times and processing analysis faster but don't actually produce anything. It's a little like card counting, possibly profitable and perfectly ethical but not very interesting to actually do.
I think the most interesting opportunities lie in biomedical research for high performance computing. Lots of that is going on near where you live and even in academic labs the pay does not always suck. There are lots of interesting little and big companies doing pretty interesting stuff that might be worthy of your attention.
I'm not ethically opposed to all industries that could conceivably be linked to suffering, only those industries that seem outrageously indifferent to it.
I happen to married to a physician. I also have a lot of very close friends who are involved in pharmaceutical research. Not one of them could even remotely be described as indifferent or blind to the suffering involved. Nor are any of them unaware of the conflicts of interest that exist. The reason they got involved in the first place is precisely because they hoped to do something about it. You don't have to be blind to the failings of others to be a force for good. In fact I'd say much of our economic success depends on people hoping/believing that they can do something about it.
Finance, at least the kind of finance that has a need for HPC, is a weirder case. It's hard to see the corpses (though they exist), but it's not hard to see that the entire "industry" is a simply a compulsory casino.
I won't deny that some aspects of secondary market finance bear a strong resemblance to a casino. And I won't deny that the industry attracts a disproportionate share of, for lack of a better term, greedy assholes. I really am an accountant and I think you are being too kind when you say it is "hard to see the corpses". It isn't hard at all if you know where to look. Nevertheless, the fundamental purpose of the financial industry is, like medicine, incredibly important to the proper functioning of our society. The importance of financing and economics and the flow of capital they enable to our society almost cannot be overstated. There is a lot more to the financial world than just trading stocks on the NYSE. You can do very good work in the financial world that helps a lot of people (and yourself) and it is not even especially difficult to do so ethically. Frankly the confidence in our financial system depends to a large degree on our confidence in the ethics of the people involved. Companies that lie, cheat and steal are eventually found out and punished by denying them access to capital and sometimes worse.
Regarding simulation, my first job out of college was doing engineering simulations for manufacturing companies. (my undergrad degree is in engineering) There is an ongoing need for physics simulations in all sorts of high end manufacturing. Any very large manufacturing concern will have some amount of need for simulation and many have significant R&D efforts. I'd strongly suggest looking there.
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Most of her clothing doesn't have pockets big enough to fit an iPhone, so she got a dead-end phone with an antiquated OS because she's not going to carry a giant phone around. Her friends all think it's fantastic.
That's because her friends don't have to actually use it. The size might actually be fantastic but that doesn't mean the phone is. I used to have a Nokia E70 "smartphone" with a fold out keyboard. It looked cool and everyone would say so but the screen was too small for practical use and the software interface sucked hard. It was easier to carry but it was a crappy phone. As you say, her phone is antiquated and there is a price to pay for that. My wire carries her phone in a belt holder for the same reason (small or nonexistent pockets). That works too and her phone is the same as mine.
Some of the android phones I've seen are starting to border on tablet size and I'm not sure they'd fit comfortably in a pocket. While I like a big screen as much as anyone, this seems like an attempt to differentiate more than filling any actual need for me at least. As long as I can fit it in my pocket and view the screen comfortably, I'm not too fussy about the exact size. Could be a bit bigger or smaller and I wouldn't care much.
So are you saying that the premium we pay for Apple products is because of the OS?
Primarily though not entirely. Oh sure there is the brand and the design. Those are not free but by themselves they aren't enough. At the end of the day Apple is a software company. Put Windows or linux on a Mac and you would be hard pressed to tell it from a Dell or HP without seeing the Apple logo. If the only difference was the hardware Apple could not command the premiums they do. (That's true for the iPad, iPod and iPhone as well - put Android on them and there really isn't much difference) What truly differentiates Apple is their software. They bundle it with some well designed hardware and it's different enough that people are willing to pay a premium for it. Apple could sell their software on other people's hardware and it would still be a differentiated product. The reverse is not true - Windows on a Mac is pretty much the same as Windows on any other machine. They don't sell their software standalone for some very good competitive reasons but it is the core of what allows Apple to have the profit margins they do.
I ended up getting an HP laptop with all or better specs than a comparable Ibook and at less than half the cost.
Really? You found an HP that runs OS X? Also where is this "Ibook" you are referring to? Apple does not sell any laptop branded Ibook or IAnything for that matter. And very much doubt you found anything that is truly similar for "less than half the cost" once you include ALL the hardware including the case and the rest of it. I've compared ultrabooks running Windows from various vendors to Apple's offerings myself. While Apple certainly wasn't the cheapest they weren't a whole lot more expensive once you compared their stuff to the most similar stuff from HP and the rest.
The only difference is my laptop is not ultra-thin, which is unimportant to me.
So the hardware is not the same. If you don't like Apple's products that's fine. Nothing wrong with that. My own laptop is an Acer and it is excellent. But unless you compared extremely similar hardware you weren't doing a serious comparison.
The problem with most of these sorts of analysis is that they have no real way to know what sort of volume discounts Google or Amazon are getting. You can ask what the prices are but when you start getting into millions of units that usually takes more than a phone call. Pricing on electronics components is strongly a function of volume. (I know because I buy them daily in my day job) Spot market rates aren't usually the same as contract rates either and for the sorts of volumes Google would deal in we're probably talking contract rates.
In short, they may have made some assumptions about volume discounts but unless they have inside information they cannot possibly actually know what Google is paying.
I bought a MacBook for the HARDWARE. It mostly runs Linux
Well played Sir!
However I have to ask... "Mostly runs Linux"? What else might you be hiding on that hard drive? Hmmm... I suppose it doesn't matter. Run along and play with the 3 other people who traded in OS X for Linux on a Mac.
Umm, why are we giving what is almost certainly a crappy piece of equipment with a marketing tie in to a bizarre cult the time of day? Someone who is dumb enough or deluded enough to buy one of these they certainly isn't reading slashdot. If people want to go off and read their weird, nonsensical stories about invisible friends in the sky, fine. But this certainly isn't news for nerds nor is it stuff that matters.
As a software company, it's in Microsoft's best interest to prevent "new hardware" from being a barrier to entry for buying their software.
That's because you are not really Microsoft's customer. Relatively few of us actually buy any version of Windows directly from Microsoft. Mostly it is purchased through OEMs. You are not Microsoft's customer. HP, Dell, Asus, Acer, etc are Microsoft's customers. They sell a license to them and those companies resell it to you. The result is that Microsoft has a hard time paying attention to their users and it shows in the experience of using their products.
As a hardware company, Apple mostly uses their software to try to entice you into buying new hardware.
Actually Apple is fundamentally a software company. Nobody buys a Macintosh because of the hardware. Load Windows on Mac Hardware and without seeing the Apple badge on it you'd be hard pressed to tell the difference between an Apple PC and a Dell PC. Sure the hardware is nice and given the price charged it darn well better be. No, the difference comes in the software. You buy Apple hardware to get Apple software. They make their money by bundling the two. Same with the iPhone, iPod and iPad. You can get similar hardware for similar or lesser prices. People might like the iPad or iPhone but if you loaded Android on them there is nothing to differentiate them. People buy the iPhone and iPad for the software when all is said and done. The design and branding is just extra.
Because you believe the media's portrayal of RIM -- a company with no debt, $2 billion in assets, positive cash flow, extensive global market share in enterprise and military markets, and a newly reshuffled leadership and pared-down workforce -- as hopelessly crippled merely because they're losing market share in the US consumer market, an area where they have never been a stellar performer.
They have been bleeding cash for four consecutive quarters, losing market share globally, have precisely zero products that consumers are interested in, and are even losing market share among corporate types. While they do have cash they don't seem to be using it to particularly good effect. They've had a unbroken string of mediocre to bad products. Replacing the management team is not cause for celebration, it is cause for worry. Same with reducing headcount. Those might be necessary steps but they weren't taken because RIM is in good shape.
People said the same thing about Apple not that long ago, and that demise seemed at least as imminent, if not more.
Research In Motion isn't Apple. Apple was/is an exceedingly unusual case. While I agree it is too early to pronounce them dead, there also is absolutely no evidence yet that they are in anything other than a death spiral. I strongly suspect RIM will get bought out, probably by someone like Microsoft.
Why am I reminded of the Iraqi Propaganda Minister?
But they have the right to enter you're property with any work dealing with their meter.
Unless there is an easement permitting access for that purpose, they have no right to be on your property at all. If they have an easement they only have a right to be on the property defined by the easement. If they set one foot off the easement they are trespassing. Odds are that the power company has an easement to meter but not necessarily. I have seen cases where the meter was not on an easement and the power company (technically) had to get permission to come on the property to read it.
The mini needs to be a little bigger so it can have been cooling and a easier to open case.
If it was bigger then it wouldn't be a mini now would it?
But what apple really needs is a $1000-$1500 (base price) desktop with a mid-range video card in a X16 slots + 1-2 open pci-e slots. with 4 ram slots and at least 2 hdd bays.
I think you are confusing what you want with what Apple needs. What you are describing is a PC with OS X. If that is what you want, build it yourself. Fact is that most people never open their PCs ever. The few that do aren't really much concern to Apple. Desktop PCs like what you describe are a market with a limited future. Laptop and tablet sales are where the profit and the demand is. Why would Apple introduce a product in a dying market segment with features that hardly anyone will use? Makes no business sense at all.
As a minnesotan, I don't necessarily approve, but I would expect that the majority of those covicted with this equipment truely were drunk.
So your argument is that someone should be wrongly convicted because a bunch of other people probably were guilty? I pray you never become a judge.
People must be blind if they can't see how much current intellectual property regulations are stifling innovation.
Probably true but slavishly copying someone else's innovations does not advance society either. I don't pretend to know if Apple has a valid case here or not. However, a court of competent jurisdiction has looked at the facts and concluded that Samsung is being a free rider which is exactly the problem that patents were created to solve. There is far less incentive to create new and innovative works if other can simply copy your efforts at much lower cost. In this case the court has ruled that the cost *to society* as well as Apple are sufficiently harmful to this incentive to create. Maybe the court is full of $*** in this case but the basis of the problem they are ruling on is very important.
Now I very much agree that many of the current regulations as written are creating a huge number of problems. I think patents on certain types of innovations need to be either shortened or eliminated altogether. 20 years is an eternity in information technology so even if we allow patents for that, they need to be much shorter in duration. I also see no point in utilizing patents to protect innovation where copyright will suffice - most software is adequately protected by copyright IMO. There are of course other problems besides...
When they helped the company earn that $14 B, I don't think charity is a word that applies.
They were paid for their services that helped earn that $14B. If those services are no longer needed and they are still being paid, that is charity. They were hired to do a job, paid for that job and the job is done. There is no further obligation on either side aside from any residual contractual obligations.
When GM was doing well it was making something like $14 billion a year.
The largest profit in GM's history was in $7.6 billion in 2011.
Yet they were still laying off workers.
And that likely was the correct decision. If you close a factory and don't need the work force elsewhere, keeping them employed is incredibly stupid. Having a profitable year one year means absolutely nothing the next year. When the economy turns down (and it inevitably does), keeping workers that are not needed means you simply will be digging a bigger hole to bury to company in. It's not just about making profits this year, it's about having a strong enough balance sheet to survive the years that aren't so good.
What is so wrong with making $13 billion a year and keeping the workers, especially those that gave a significant part of their lives to that company.
If you need the answer to that, you simply have to fast forward a few years. GM couldn't shed payroll and benefits costs fast enough in 2008-2009 and they went bankrupt as a result. Keeping someone employed that the company does not actually need does no one any favors in the long run. Not management and not the workers. By postponing the pain you are simply making it worse later on for everyone.
On their core products MS have much higher margins
That wasn't what you were arguing before. You said "MS have much fatter profit margins then Apple..." which is demonstrably not true. You did not bring up market segments. At the end of the day, Microsoft has gotten into a number of business segments by choice. When you buy MSFT stock, you are buying all of the business, not just the core businesses. So even where true, saying the core business is more profitable is a meaningless statement unless you expect them to get rid of the non-core businesses.
While it is (generally) true that software normally has a higher profit margin than hardware, at the end of the day people buy Apple products for their software. (people make a big deal about the design stuff and that is important but what *really* differentiates Apple stuff is the software - put Windows on a Macintosh and there really isn't much to set it apart from any PC from Dell or HP) While Apple does sell some software as a standalone product (and realizes margins on it similar to Microsoft), most of their software products are bundled with hardware. Fundamentally they are both software companies but it is hard to compare the two because of the bundling.
The vast majority of their products have negligible unit costs, and development costs which were recovered long ago.
This is a huge misconception about software. While the software itself can be reproduced cheaply, the main costs in ANY software company are sales, marketing and overhead. Engineering only amounts to about 10-15% of a typical software company's costs. But it costs serious coin to sell the software, even for a company like Microsoft. The unit costs are nowhere near negligible (we're talking billions of $) even on their Windows and Office products.
Disclosure: I am an accountant
I didn't buy that either side would actually go through with it, no matter how much posturing was done. What person really wants to be responsible for the termination of life on earth?
Probably no one but there are numerous documented cases of the USA and USSR almost launching nukes at each other due to equipment malfunctions and other errors. The safes with the launch codes were kept with a combination of 0000000 (or something similar) to make it easier to launch. Solar effects caused monitoring satellites to falsely report launches and the only thing that stopped a retaliation was a level headed military officer.
While the chances of a nuclear war were/are low, they weren't and aren't zero. People aren't always rational and all it takes is a small number of crazy people to cause a huge problem. Worse, it should be obvious by now that there are some people who are suicidal and would be perfectly content to take you and a million of your closest friends with them to the grave.
Does the US not have any part of the US constitution that forbids laws from discriminating like that?
Yes. The 14th Amendment is probably what you are looking for. It mandates equal protection under the law and was the basis for landmark civil rights decisions such as Brown vs Board of Education.
M$ profit margin is, I believe, higher than Apple's. M$ charges $400 for a copy of Office - digital download. What's the margin on that do you think?
You would be wrong to think that. Apple has a (slightly) higher profit margin as of the most recent fiscal quarter. (MSFT around 29.3% and AAPL at 29.6%) Apple does enough volume that they can drive the margins on the hardware they have made for them pretty thin for their suppliers. Believe it or not, with the right products you can have very good profit margins selling physical objects. You just can't sell a commodity product for big margins. That doesn't presently apply to Apple. Apple's hardware is nice but what really sets their products apart is the software and design. People have proven they are willing to pay a fairly steep markup for the value those add.
Apple spent years perfecting their supply chain management and they've done the engineering but stayed out of manufacturing itself which explains a lot of their profit margin. Can M$ get that smart that quickly?
Microsoft is arguably just as experienced in supply chain management. It's not as if they manufacture the Xbox themselves. MSFT has some pretty good engineers too even if they are hamstrung by bad decisions from years past. The problem Microsoft has is that they are built around selling through channels and don't have the experience Apple does in designing an integrated platform. Their company culture is built around software only and it is pretty hard to shift that. Luckily for MSFT, they have a huge war chest to work with and that insulates them from the mistakes they are almost certain to make.
MS have much fatter profit margins then Apple...
No they don't. Both companies have net profit margins around 29.5% with Apple slightly higher in the most recent quarter than Microsoft.
This thing is indeed pretty harmless, but it scares me that vendors can set different prices based on arbitrary criteria
Companies do this all the time. It's perfectly normal and perfectly legal in a wide variety of circumstances. If you've every bought an airplane ticket, you've experienced this. Any time you can segment a market you should expect it to occur. The proper name for it is price discrimination. The word discrimination has acquired a bad connotation but it really is a neutral term that economists use.
We'd be in for all kinds of confusion, as comparison sites and review sites could no longer be objective.
Whatever makes you think they were objective in the first place?
Why did a simple ultrasound of my heart, performed by a technician who was not a doctor, not a nurse, just someone who'd completed "Be an ultrasound technician!" at night school, and which took about 15 minutes, cost over $1000.00? No reason. It's a random number.
I assure you the number isn't remotely random and there are a LOT of costs most people never consider. The machine has a capital cost which is not going to be cheap, probably six figures easily. Even without considering any other costs you have to do a lot of procedures to recoup that cost. The technician still has to have all their work signed off and examined by a physician even if the MD is not present in the room. There is gobs of paperwork and administrative costs. There are salaries and benefits. There is overhead in various and sundry forms (lights, electricity, rent, computers, network, software, legal, etc), insurance (workers comp, business interruption, liability, health, etc), You also have to factor in that insurance companies take a profit and the difference between a profit and a loss for most doctors offices is based on how well they can beat up the insurance agencies. Insurance companies aren't stupid (usually) regarding reimbursement rates.
No, it isn't a random number. I promise you it was quite carefully calculated and while they likely are making a decent profit, it is no where near what you seem to think it is.
So, can someone tell me why a hearing aid should be so expensive?"
Two reasons. One is that as others have mentioned, insurance is usually involved so there is less pressure to contain costs. The second and probably more important reason is that the volumes are low. There is a LOT of fixed cost that goes into design, tooling, and production of these units. This has to be recouped over a number of units and if the volumes aren't large enough the price HAS to be high. Given that the state of technology in these things is advancing, I suspect that the fixed costs simply cannot be amortized over sufficient numbers of units to cause a significant price drop.
I actually am an accountant and $3000 for a hearing aid produced in even moderate volumes (like personal computers 20 years ago) sounds like a rational price once you factor in a profit margin. My company assembles custom wire harnesses and many of our products cost hundreds of dollars because the complexity is high and the volumes are (relatively) low.
I live in the northeast, and the only visible call for HPC skillsets is at places like Goldman Sachs.
Two things there. First is that most jobs of that sort won't be publicly visible much of the time. Only a very few are published. Second is that the ocean is a LOT bigger than Goldman Sachs. You live near the hedge fund capital of the universe. There is a definite need for computing talent and believe it or not, some of the firms involved actually do have some ethical scruples. My biggest beef with doing that sort of work is that it tends to be unfulfilling rather than unethical. You spend you spend a lot of time and effort trying to shave milliseconds off trading times and processing analysis faster but don't actually produce anything. It's a little like card counting, possibly profitable and perfectly ethical but not very interesting to actually do.
I think the most interesting opportunities lie in biomedical research for high performance computing. Lots of that is going on near where you live and even in academic labs the pay does not always suck. There are lots of interesting little and big companies doing pretty interesting stuff that might be worthy of your attention.
I'm not ethically opposed to all industries that could conceivably be linked to suffering, only those industries that seem outrageously indifferent to it.
I happen to married to a physician. I also have a lot of very close friends who are involved in pharmaceutical research. Not one of them could even remotely be described as indifferent or blind to the suffering involved. Nor are any of them unaware of the conflicts of interest that exist. The reason they got involved in the first place is precisely because they hoped to do something about it. You don't have to be blind to the failings of others to be a force for good. In fact I'd say much of our economic success depends on people hoping/believing that they can do something about it.
Finance, at least the kind of finance that has a need for HPC, is a weirder case. It's hard to see the corpses (though they exist), but it's not hard to see that the entire "industry" is a simply a compulsory casino.
I won't deny that some aspects of secondary market finance bear a strong resemblance to a casino. And I won't deny that the industry attracts a disproportionate share of, for lack of a better term, greedy assholes. I really am an accountant and I think you are being too kind when you say it is "hard to see the corpses". It isn't hard at all if you know where to look. Nevertheless, the fundamental purpose of the financial industry is, like medicine, incredibly important to the proper functioning of our society. The importance of financing and economics and the flow of capital they enable to our society almost cannot be overstated. There is a lot more to the financial world than just trading stocks on the NYSE. You can do very good work in the financial world that helps a lot of people (and yourself) and it is not even especially difficult to do so ethically. Frankly the confidence in our financial system depends to a large degree on our confidence in the ethics of the people involved. Companies that lie, cheat and steal are eventually found out and punished by denying them access to capital and sometimes worse.
Regarding simulation, my first job out of college was doing engineering simulations for manufacturing companies. (my undergrad degree is in engineering) There is an ongoing need for physics simulations in all sorts of high end manufacturing. Any very large manufacturing concern will have some amount of need for simulation and many have significant R&D efforts. I'd strongly suggest looking there.