In the mobile space, Apple is dominating on both price and profit share because they have been able to leverage economies of scale through large purchases or flash storage and other components months in advance on a scale that none of their competitors have dared to do.
I don't see Apple dominating the mobile space. Apple has a few percent of the mobile market. And even if you limit yourself to smart phones, Apple is only one of many players.
The only way a competitor can approach competing on price is to take a loss on each unit sold or cut down the features and size.
You get full-fledged Android phones comparable in performance, features, and quality for about half of what iPhones cost, so I think that's pretty clearly wrong. And the iPad competitors give you comparable or better hardware for about the same price as iPad.
I was pretty sure Apple's contention was that it lowers the quality of the user experience, not necessarily that it decreases sales.
Apple is a corporation, and their goal is to maximize shareholder value, nothing else. They don't give a f*ck about user experience, except as a means to that end.
As a dev that works on iOS and Android apps, they are entirely correct... I can ensure much easier a uniform and high-quality experience for my apps on iOS than on an arbitrary Android device.
Well, your inability to do a decent job at software development isn't exactly Android's problem.
Yeah, get your head out of that goat.se hole and get some basic economic facts about the US: the densely populated areas is where most of the productivity is located and where most of the economic activity happens; the rural areas are net recipients of thousands of dollars of per-capita government subsidies.
Normal kids would find it gross? Only because they've been raised by a namby-pamby society that tells them it is.
Who do you think you're kidding? Your idea of "nature" consists of being cruel to animals with all the conveniences of modern life behind you: canteens, weapons, nylon, medical resources, industrially created food. You're confusing being a redneck with being close to nature.
Normal kids find hunting and killing animals gross because it is gross (not to mention dangerous, unhygienic, and inefficient).
As to the 'infrastructure being financed by others; that's true for everything; even the roads you drive on in your big cities are financed by everyone.
Let me explain it so that even you get it: there is a huge net transfer of dollars from people in the urban states to people in the rural states (we're talking thousands of dollars per year per resident of rural states--talk about "welfare families"). People in rural states don't pay their fair share into the federal coffers.
That same "beautiful culture" also had a caste system and a history of enormous inequality and poverty stretching back three millennia. While the British certainly did some damage, a lot of India's social and cultural problems are old and home-made.
Just where do these kids get outdoors living in a city? Where can they go fishing, or hiking or hunting--like normal kids should?
Is that a joke? Normal kids do not go "fishing, hiking, or hunting". Normal kids don't have the money to do that, and most normal kids would find it gross.
If you grew up "fishing, hiking, and hunting", you basically had your lifestyle financed by the taxes of families who couldn't afford to do such things: they paid for the roads and infrastructure that allowed you to live out in the countryside.
But the rest of the world doesn't care, because it [just] works and it's a very good price for what it is.
Provided by "just works" you mean "doesn't let you do much", "makes you navigate through endless menus", and "requires you to install and deal with cumbersome and buggy desktop software".
Sure, but there are about a magnitude more Android phone models out there versus iPhone models so one would EXPECT more sales
According to Apple, bringing out dozens of phone models confuses users, fragments the platform, and therefore hurts sales.
Factor in the fact that Apple itself holds about 51% of all profits for global smartphone sales and I doubt they really care. To them, having potentially less sales but clearly far more profit is to them more important.
Apple has done that before with Macs and they almost went bankrupt from it; it's not a long-term viable strategy.
Yes, it's actually an "apples vs apples" comparison: Apple claims that by not licensing iOS, they are maximizing the success of the iOS platform, whereas Google believes that by making Android widely available, they are maximizing the success of Android. Therefore, it is entirely valid to compare the success of both strategies. Apple is, after all, free to permit others to make iOS devices any time they like.
Are you kidding? Android is even more popular overseas than in the US. The only place I can think of where iOS is even close to beating Android is the UK, but the UK is totally unrepresentative of the rest of the world.
But since they're ditching Android and turning into ARM based phones, it only means they're going to get Windows Phone 7. A good choice, as the developer tools are rock solid.
No native code. No multitasking. Lots of missing APIs. Need I go on? Windows 7 is a joke.
The reason is simple: Google doesn't want a tide of cheap Android 3.0 tablets coming from low-cost Chinese manufacturers. You can already buy WiFi-only Android 2.x tablets for less than $150, and many of them are pretty reasonable devices.
They want to give HTC and Motorola a little time to make some money. And, frankly, I don't blame them: Android tablets really need a lot of brand recognition, advertising and marketing in order to compete with the iPad 2. A tide of cheap, mediocre Chinese tablets would kill the platform before it catches on.
Just because it is that way in another country does not mean it is appropriate for our country.
But the US cell phone market isn't working efficiently: it provides worse service at a higher price.
It is anti-competitive to require a single standard when there is a fierce competitive market for cellular chipsets. The US would be legislating one or more companies out of business, and that runs afoul of numerous constitutional provisions.
The US government picks winners and losers through standards setting all the time; there is nothing illegal or even unusual about it.
There are many markets and groups that have to be represented. The corporations have rights just as the citizens do, and it is the government's job to protect all of them.
The US government has the right to regulate what communications protocols people use on the public airwaves; there is no legal, moral, or economic obstacle to such regulations.
The fact is that the market in the US supports a slower cell network because consumers are willing to pay for the slow service
Price elasticity itself is not an indication of a free market, let alone an efficient free market; the same effect you observe also existed, for example, when there was a phone monopoly.
I would also venture a guess that cellular service in Europe is NOT cheaper than in the US when government subsidies are taken into account.
Wow, now you even invent facts to counter arguments.
Cellular service in Europe is, of course, not subsidized by the government; it is actually taxed more than it is taxed in the US.
So, you may not like the idea of taking private land to ensure that the wireless telephone utility functioned properly, but the Supreme Court firmly disagrees, and I take their word over yours.
I didn't say it was "unconstitutional", I called into question whether it was either fair or effective.
Can't you read? I didn't say that the USSR would have lasted, and I implied that democratization would have happened eventually.
But without opposition and the Cold War, they would have turned much of Europe and the ME into socialist client states, and that would have easily delayed democratization by decades, if not centuries.
It is not technically possible for all handsets to work on all carriers. The way the phones communicate with the towers is different between the carriers. (GSM v. CDMA, etc..)
Well, geez, that's my point: the US government should require a single cell phone standard for all carriers, the way it's done in many other countries.
The only way to make all handsets work on all carriers is to eliminate competition in chipsets and the mountains of valuable IP licensing behind them, and I don't see how that is helping a competitive market to flourish.
Instead of reasoning from ideological principles, look at the facts: wireless service in the US (with multiple standards) is slower and much more expensive than in Europe (with effectively a single standard), consumers have less choice among handsets, and they are locked into expensive contracts.
Yes, free markets and competition are a good thing. But the US doesn't have that, and the multiple standards hinder, rather than encourage, competition. Furthermore, multiple standards in the cell phone industry have not given the US a technological advantage over nations using the GSM standard. If there were meaningful competition, then a company with the better standard should eat up companies with worse standards, but that isn't happening; instead, the three systems are merely using the incompatibilities to limit competition and choice.
Cell phone companies should enjoy the same preemption against local zoning, and should be granted whatever easements on private land are required to make the system work.
So you are willing to trample all over property rights in order to make cell phone companies rich? I don't think so.
No, raw citation rates are worthless as a measure of quality. Furthermore, putting citation rates in relation to publication rates like this is also bogus.
As for the ecological fallacy, well, yes: a few highly cited individuals do not make an "important scientific center".
As for the abuse of statistical significance testing, you cannot use statistical significance to rank anything; it is mathematically wrong.
What the U.S. did with Egypt, and Europe did for Tunisia, was enrich the upper class and create a larger middle class, not eliminate poverty.
And that contradicts what I said... how? That's how democratic change usually works: a growing middle class sees its rights, interests, and future threatened by authoritarian regimes.
What exactly do you think the US should have done instead? Invade Egypt and impose a democracy through force? Impose a trade embargo? Let Israel and Egypt bomb each other into the stone age? Or maybe Egypt should have just fallen behind the iron curtain; it could then have democratized when the USSR fell, right? What, Mr. Smartypants, would you have done, even with the benefit of hindsight?
The interesting thing is that the poor would not be coordinating the revolt through their Internet-connected smartphones. The enfranchised, well-fed, upper classes revolted, and before they became so poor that they had to choose between food and their net connection.
You obviously don't have the slightest idea of what was going on in Egypt.
Any international GSM phone will work on pretty much any prepaid plain in most EU countries. You can get really cheap plans and pay by day or month.
In the US, that's a different story. AT&T has a prepaid GSM plan, but you pay $20 for 100 Mbytes and 30 days limit. For that to work, you need a phone that's compatible with AT&T's frequencies. T-Mobile has no usable prepaid data plan. Sprint, Verizon, MetroPCS, and Virgin Mobile use networks that only work in the US.
Your best bet is to get a European Android phone (whichever you like, you can get a cheap one starting at around EU 150), use it in Europe with a prepaid plan, and in the US over WiFi.
Or just get two phones. Virgin Mobile has a decent prepaid plan, but the Android phone is Virgin Mobile only (it's also cheap: $150 unlocked, no contract).
Misuse of statistical significance testing, false identification of measurements with high level concepts ("highly cited" = "high quality"), and the ecological fallacy, all rolled into one paper! That's quite an achievement!
The problem with the US cell phone market is that there is not enough competition, and competition is stymied by technical incompatibilities and bad contracts. This merger won't make things any worse.
What really needs to be done is more regulation to allow a competitive market to function: all handsets must work on all carriers, customers need to be able to switch any time without penalties, and nebulous phone subsidies should be prohibited (carriers can still offer zero percent interest financing on phones, but the prices need to be transparent).
A few people associated with Wikileaks did what the U.S. could not with the trillions of dollars they've put into their attempts to influence policy in the region.
And why do you think the people of Egypt even had the ability to do what they did? Egypt was at peace with its neighbors and has developed economically over the last few decades, in part thanks to US help. And that is why it can democratize now.
Isn't it interesting that social media and modern technology have done more for the desire for democratization than most of our cold-war efforts ever did?
Without the Cold War, much of the world would have been overrun by the USSR; I suspect democratization would have taken much longer then.
You can't help those that don't want to be helped. You ought to believe that people are entitled to make mistakes, if only because you want the right to take actions that others believe are mistaken.
No, but you can inform the uninformed and then let them make informed choices.
By that reasoning, no device is ever designed for it's specific task if any significant portion of code is reused.
Nonsense. We're not talking about code reuse, we're talking about "design". iOS wasn't "designed from the ground up" for mobile devices, it was retrofitted from a desktop OS. There are tons of other systems that have been "designed from the ground up" for mobile and embedded systems. That doesn't necessarily make them better, but it means that claiming that "iOS was designed from the ground up for a mobile, battery dependent device" is a marketing lie. Furthermore, iOS isn't any better in terms of battery life than other operating systems if you make the comparison. If some iOS devices have good battery life, it's for other reasons.
You could very well be correct, but that very much remains to be seen.
No, it's already happening: the old iPod Touch devices don't support many of the new features (and not even because of the hardware, but just because Apple doesn't want them to).
Most Android phones are not officially supported (ie get software updates) by the manufacturer ever, never mind support for 2-3 years. That's not a fault of the OS, but inseparable from the cost/benefit analysis of the entire device.
Yes, and the cost/benefit analysis is: for about 1/3 the price of an equivalent iOS device you get an Android device with fewer restrictions, and you have the option of either upgrading its software or buying a new device and still coming out ahead.
Besides, discussion of the price of the phone are silly when you consider the TCO, a la 2 years of service charges. The price of the device ends up looking like a rounding error in many cases.
That's because the service plans you get with iPhone are overpriced in order to subsidize the hardware, and because service in the US is generally ridiculously overpriced to begin with. Elsewhere in the world you get decent phone service and Internet access for $5-10/month and then the difference between Android and iPhone matters a great deal.
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I don't see Apple dominating the mobile space. Apple has a few percent of the mobile market. And even if you limit yourself to smart phones, Apple is only one of many players.
You get full-fledged Android phones comparable in performance, features, and quality for about half of what iPhones cost, so I think that's pretty clearly wrong. And the iPad competitors give you comparable or better hardware for about the same price as iPad.
Apple is a corporation, and their goal is to maximize shareholder value, nothing else. They don't give a f*ck about user experience, except as a means to that end.
Well, your inability to do a decent job at software development isn't exactly Android's problem.
Yeah, get your head out of that goat.se hole and get some basic economic facts about the US: the densely populated areas is where most of the productivity is located and where most of the economic activity happens; the rural areas are net recipients of thousands of dollars of per-capita government subsidies.
Who do you think you're kidding? Your idea of "nature" consists of being cruel to animals with all the conveniences of modern life behind you: canteens, weapons, nylon, medical resources, industrially created food. You're confusing being a redneck with being close to nature.
Normal kids find hunting and killing animals gross because it is gross (not to mention dangerous, unhygienic, and inefficient).
Let me explain it so that even you get it: there is a huge net transfer of dollars from people in the urban states to people in the rural states (we're talking thousands of dollars per year per resident of rural states--talk about "welfare families"). People in rural states don't pay their fair share into the federal coffers.
That same "beautiful culture" also had a caste system and a history of enormous inequality and poverty stretching back three millennia. While the British certainly did some damage, a lot of India's social and cultural problems are old and home-made.
Is that a joke? Normal kids do not go "fishing, hiking, or hunting". Normal kids don't have the money to do that, and most normal kids would find it gross.
If you grew up "fishing, hiking, and hunting", you basically had your lifestyle financed by the taxes of families who couldn't afford to do such things: they paid for the roads and infrastructure that allowed you to live out in the countryside.
Provided by "just works" you mean "doesn't let you do much", "makes you navigate through endless menus", and "requires you to install and deal with cumbersome and buggy desktop software".
According to Apple, bringing out dozens of phone models confuses users, fragments the platform, and therefore hurts sales.
Apple has done that before with Macs and they almost went bankrupt from it; it's not a long-term viable strategy.
Yes, it's actually an "apples vs apples" comparison: Apple claims that by not licensing iOS, they are maximizing the success of the iOS platform, whereas Google believes that by making Android widely available, they are maximizing the success of Android. Therefore, it is entirely valid to compare the success of both strategies. Apple is, after all, free to permit others to make iOS devices any time they like.
Are you kidding? Android is even more popular overseas than in the US. The only place I can think of where iOS is even close to beating Android is the UK, but the UK is totally unrepresentative of the rest of the world.
No native code. No multitasking. Lots of missing APIs. Need I go on? Windows 7 is a joke.
The reason is simple: Google doesn't want a tide of cheap Android 3.0 tablets coming from low-cost Chinese manufacturers. You can already buy WiFi-only Android 2.x tablets for less than $150, and many of them are pretty reasonable devices.
They want to give HTC and Motorola a little time to make some money. And, frankly, I don't blame them: Android tablets really need a lot of brand recognition, advertising and marketing in order to compete with the iPad 2. A tide of cheap, mediocre Chinese tablets would kill the platform before it catches on.
But the US cell phone market isn't working efficiently: it provides worse service at a higher price.
The US government picks winners and losers through standards setting all the time; there is nothing illegal or even unusual about it.
The US government has the right to regulate what communications protocols people use on the public airwaves; there is no legal, moral, or economic obstacle to such regulations.
Price elasticity itself is not an indication of a free market, let alone an efficient free market; the same effect you observe also existed, for example, when there was a phone monopoly.
Wow, now you even invent facts to counter arguments.
Cellular service in Europe is, of course, not subsidized by the government; it is actually taxed more than it is taxed in the US.
I didn't say it was "unconstitutional", I called into question whether it was either fair or effective.
Can't you read? I didn't say that the USSR would have lasted, and I implied that democratization would have happened eventually.
But without opposition and the Cold War, they would have turned much of Europe and the ME into socialist client states, and that would have easily delayed democratization by decades, if not centuries.
Well, geez, that's my point: the US government should require a single cell phone standard for all carriers, the way it's done in many other countries.
Instead of reasoning from ideological principles, look at the facts: wireless service in the US (with multiple standards) is slower and much more expensive than in Europe (with effectively a single standard), consumers have less choice among handsets, and they are locked into expensive contracts.
Yes, free markets and competition are a good thing. But the US doesn't have that, and the multiple standards hinder, rather than encourage, competition. Furthermore, multiple standards in the cell phone industry have not given the US a technological advantage over nations using the GSM standard. If there were meaningful competition, then a company with the better standard should eat up companies with worse standards, but that isn't happening; instead, the three systems are merely using the incompatibilities to limit competition and choice.
So you are willing to trample all over property rights in order to make cell phone companies rich? I don't think so.
No, raw citation rates are worthless as a measure of quality. Furthermore, putting citation rates in relation to publication rates like this is also bogus.
As for the ecological fallacy, well, yes: a few highly cited individuals do not make an "important scientific center".
As for the abuse of statistical significance testing, you cannot use statistical significance to rank anything; it is mathematically wrong.
And that contradicts what I said... how? That's how democratic change usually works: a growing middle class sees its rights, interests, and future threatened by authoritarian regimes.
What exactly do you think the US should have done instead? Invade Egypt and impose a democracy through force? Impose a trade embargo? Let Israel and Egypt bomb each other into the stone age? Or maybe Egypt should have just fallen behind the iron curtain; it could then have democratized when the USSR fell, right? What, Mr. Smartypants, would you have done, even with the benefit of hindsight?
You obviously don't have the slightest idea of what was going on in Egypt.
Any international GSM phone will work on pretty much any prepaid plain in most EU countries. You can get really cheap plans and pay by day or month.
In the US, that's a different story. AT&T has a prepaid GSM plan, but you pay $20 for 100 Mbytes and 30 days limit. For that to work, you need a phone that's compatible with AT&T's frequencies. T-Mobile has no usable prepaid data plan. Sprint, Verizon, MetroPCS, and Virgin Mobile use networks that only work in the US.
Your best bet is to get a European Android phone (whichever you like, you can get a cheap one starting at around EU 150), use it in Europe with a prepaid plan, and in the US over WiFi.
Or just get two phones. Virgin Mobile has a decent prepaid plan, but the Android phone is Virgin Mobile only (it's also cheap: $150 unlocked, no contract).
Misuse of statistical significance testing, false identification of measurements with high level concepts ("highly cited" = "high quality"), and the ecological fallacy, all rolled into one paper! That's quite an achievement!
The problem with the US cell phone market is that there is not enough competition, and competition is stymied by technical incompatibilities and bad contracts. This merger won't make things any worse.
What really needs to be done is more regulation to allow a competitive market to function: all handsets must work on all carriers, customers need to be able to switch any time without penalties, and nebulous phone subsidies should be prohibited (carriers can still offer zero percent interest financing on phones, but the prices need to be transparent).
And why do you think the people of Egypt even had the ability to do what they did? Egypt was at peace with its neighbors and has developed economically over the last few decades, in part thanks to US help. And that is why it can democratize now.
Without the Cold War, much of the world would have been overrun by the USSR; I suspect democratization would have taken much longer then.
No, but you can inform the uninformed and then let them make informed choices.
If you buy a $800 smart phone, you're a fool. You can get good Android phones for under $200 without a contract.
Nonsense. We're not talking about code reuse, we're talking about "design". iOS wasn't "designed from the ground up" for mobile devices, it was retrofitted from a desktop OS. There are tons of other systems that have been "designed from the ground up" for mobile and embedded systems. That doesn't necessarily make them better, but it means that claiming that "iOS was designed from the ground up for a mobile, battery dependent device" is a marketing lie. Furthermore, iOS isn't any better in terms of battery life than other operating systems if you make the comparison. If some iOS devices have good battery life, it's for other reasons.
No, it's already happening: the old iPod Touch devices don't support many of the new features (and not even because of the hardware, but just because Apple doesn't want them to).
Yes, and the cost/benefit analysis is: for about 1/3 the price of an equivalent iOS device you get an Android device with fewer restrictions, and you have the option of either upgrading its software or buying a new device and still coming out ahead.
That's because the service plans you get with iPhone are overpriced in order to subsidize the hardware, and because service in the US is generally ridiculously overpriced to begin with. Elsewhere in the world you get decent phone service and Internet access for $5-10/month and then the difference between Android and iPhone matters a great deal.