I think Amazon is going to step in and compete very competently in the streaming arena.
The lynchpin of this whole issue is that Netflix's streaming library completely blows. Nobody wants to switch over to that completely because they can't watch anything they really want to watch - hence the backlash about the DVD service and the price increases. People were okay with using streaming every now and again, since it was free, but when you are reduced to watching made-for-TV quality tripe instead of desirable, first run movies, who's going to pay more for it?
All it would take is a basic streaming service with a decent library. The content is what people pay for.
Exactly. Apple is like Wal-Mart - they practically own the suppliers. They buy up all capacity and tell them at what price they are allowed to sell their products to Apple.
Apple isn't selling hardware at a loss. I would guess that they spend more money on things that matter visually, like displays and the cases for the devices, but the internals are probably similar in cost to what Lenovo or anyone else is using.
It's sold at a $10 loss, according to the article here the other day.
So on the 1% of devices that will never spend money on anything Amazon, they break even. On all others they profit handsomely from the 1's and 0's they push to it.
In IT, you can't generally advance within a company as well as you can by switching companies. This is because a company with a current employee has (short-sighted, self-serving) incentive to minimize the increases in total compensation, while a hiring company must attract the person they want.
It's also been studied that most people who accept counter offers to stay are still gone within 6 months to a year.
You are but a resource to your company. If they thought it would save them a few units of your favorite currency in the long run, they'd fire you yesterday. They don't feel any human attachment to you. This is all just business. You work, and at the end of the week they pay you, and then you're even. You don't owe them and they don't owe you. Do what's best for you and your family.
I think for most people, it's a great feature if you have all your music with you all the time, be it on your smartphone, your tablet, or your PC. If those can all sync up without me interacting, that's really cool.
The Fire offers something like this with cloud storage, but it's not essential, obviously, in this device. I'd say it's a nice-to-have.
OTA television is making a comeback due to the spiraling cost of cable TV service, not due to the virtues of OTA TV itself.
I think most of this trend can be attributed to changing consumer tastes. Gone are the days of the 80s/90s where people just sat down and watched a block of sitcoms every night. Most people, particularly the coming generation, spend more time using the internet than watching TV. Using the internet and social media as well as streaming services have made people more social and less inclined to uni-directional entertainment. We don't need to sit through commercials or wait for our program to come on a certain night of the week. We stream them later, or DVR them for later.
Cable TV is an antiquated technology. It's analogous to the newspaper and will see a similar decline. That doesn't mean the companies won't fight to limit people's choice, their ability to get the entertainment they want without paying the piper.
The cable companies know that bandwidth caps are their best defense against people canceling cable TV. If they essentially say the Xbox (or Netflix, or whatever) plan is limited, but cable TV is "unlimited", then they still have a competitive edge they can try to wield.
What consumers really need is real, effective choice in who their ISP is. Competition is the key to delivering value.
As long as Comcast, et al., have monopoly power to wield, prices are going to be suspended artificially high and consumers will continue to cut the cord.
If I pay twice as much for something, and the additional half is going to the government, how am I going to "make twice as much"?
The government has spent zillions to create 0 jobs. That money isn't going to help me. It's going to guarantee loans for politically connected companies, it might bail out politically connected banks, it may be spent on some war we don't even have the guts to finish, but it isn't going to help me.
This is a legitimate gripe in a way, but really, 60GB isn't enough to store all of my audio, either.
If I have to section off 8GB or 60GB of my music collection and maintain that, it's about the same amount of trouble either way - maybe even more trouble to maintain the larger list.
There are impacts to even those of us who are working, such as inflation. Inflation is being under-reported, and it is being hidden in the government's official numbers by the horrendous housing market.
Not only is the price of everything at the grocery store rising, you go to the bank and they're slapping new fees on everywhere, state and local governments are raising fees and taxes... there is nothing that isn't becoming a lot less affordable, it would seem, except gasoline and that's a symptom of the economy.
I agree that "In this economy" is a dumb phrase and defeatist thinking, but his point is a salient one.
This is an internet appliance, basically. It's predicated on internet access. Just as laptops and desktops aren't that much good without internet access, neither will this be.
I was debating getting a new laptop to replace my aging desktop, but I pre-ordered one of these instead.
For the larger tasks like writing emails or for mass storage, I'll just keep my desktop plugged in somewhere in the house but powered down. For email, media, and day to day web surfing I'll use the Fire.
I am wondering how often I will end up booting the old desktop PC...
This device, at $200, can actually give people on limited budgets an entry way to using the internet the way more well-heeled people do. They can stream media, read ebooks, store music in the cloud, access the internet - it's hard to even find a decent netbook at $200, or at least one that performs well at all these tasks.
It could be something that allows the lower income into the web today, instead of the web as it was 5-10 years ago.
This is the first competitor to the iPad at the working-class level. It's priced affordably and contains most of the features people will actually use.
Is it as full-featured as the iPad, of course not, but you don't need $500-600 to get into one. This device could bring apps, cloud storage, streaming media, and these kinds of things down to a crowd that couldn't afford the pay the Apple premium before.
Some will gripe about there not being cameras or a huge amount of onboard storage, but for the average consumer, this will give them 80% of the iPad at 40% of the price
A browser's popularly, history has shown, is temporary until it's overrun with kajillions of security exploits (ie) or becomes slow when it used to be fast (ie, firefox).
Slashdot Mirror
I think Amazon is going to step in and compete very competently in the streaming arena.
The lynchpin of this whole issue is that Netflix's streaming library completely blows. Nobody wants to switch over to that completely because they can't watch anything they really want to watch - hence the backlash about the DVD service and the price increases. People were okay with using streaming every now and again, since it was free, but when you are reduced to watching made-for-TV quality tripe instead of desirable, first run movies, who's going to pay more for it?
All it would take is a basic streaming service with a decent library. The content is what people pay for.
Personally, I'm amazed the CEO still has a job after this dumbassery has reduced the stock price by half in only a couple of months.
I will repeat my assessment of Netflix. It's a company that had a good idea once, and hasn't had a good one since.
Exactly. Apple is like Wal-Mart - they practically own the suppliers. They buy up all capacity and tell them at what price they are allowed to sell their products to Apple.
Apple isn't selling hardware at a loss. I would guess that they spend more money on things that matter visually, like displays and the cases for the devices, but the internals are probably similar in cost to what Lenovo or anyone else is using.
It's sold at a $10 loss, according to the article here the other day.
So on the 1% of devices that will never spend money on anything Amazon, they break even. On all others they profit handsomely from the 1's and 0's they push to it.
This should be modded up insightful.
In IT, you can't generally advance within a company as well as you can by switching companies. This is because a company with a current employee has (short-sighted, self-serving) incentive to minimize the increases in total compensation, while a hiring company must attract the person they want.
It's also been studied that most people who accept counter offers to stay are still gone within 6 months to a year.
You are but a resource to your company. If they thought it would save them a few units of your favorite currency in the long run, they'd fire you yesterday. They don't feel any human attachment to you. This is all just business. You work, and at the end of the week they pay you, and then you're even. You don't owe them and they don't owe you. Do what's best for you and your family.
I think for most people, it's a great feature if you have all your music with you all the time, be it on your smartphone, your tablet, or your PC. If those can all sync up without me interacting, that's really cool.
The Fire offers something like this with cloud storage, but it's not essential, obviously, in this device. I'd say it's a nice-to-have.
OTA television is making a comeback due to the spiraling cost of cable TV service, not due to the virtues of OTA TV itself.
I think most of this trend can be attributed to changing consumer tastes. Gone are the days of the 80s/90s where people just sat down and watched a block of sitcoms every night. Most people, particularly the coming generation, spend more time using the internet than watching TV. Using the internet and social media as well as streaming services have made people more social and less inclined to uni-directional entertainment. We don't need to sit through commercials or wait for our program to come on a certain night of the week. We stream them later, or DVR them for later.
Cable TV is an antiquated technology. It's analogous to the newspaper and will see a similar decline. That doesn't mean the companies won't fight to limit people's choice, their ability to get the entertainment they want without paying the piper.
The cable companies know that bandwidth caps are their best defense against people canceling cable TV. If they essentially say the Xbox (or Netflix, or whatever) plan is limited, but cable TV is "unlimited", then they still have a competitive edge they can try to wield.
What consumers really need is real, effective choice in who their ISP is. Competition is the key to delivering value.
As long as Comcast, et al., have monopoly power to wield, prices are going to be suspended artificially high and consumers will continue to cut the cord.
Makes me want to buy two Kindles (which I've just done...)
Cheers to Amazon for stepping up the fight against ever more onerous taxation, including internet taxation.
If I pay twice as much for something, and the additional half is going to the government, how am I going to "make twice as much"?
The government has spent zillions to create 0 jobs. That money isn't going to help me. It's going to guarantee loans for politically connected companies, it might bail out politically connected banks, it may be spent on some war we don't even have the guts to finish, but it isn't going to help me.
Making everyone pay more for everything doesn't seem like the greatest recessionary policy.
This is a legitimate gripe in a way, but really, 60GB isn't enough to store all of my audio, either.
If I have to section off 8GB or 60GB of my music collection and maintain that, it's about the same amount of trouble either way - maybe even more trouble to maintain the larger list.
There are impacts to even those of us who are working, such as inflation. Inflation is being under-reported, and it is being hidden in the government's official numbers by the horrendous housing market.
Not only is the price of everything at the grocery store rising, you go to the bank and they're slapping new fees on everywhere, state and local governments are raising fees and taxes... there is nothing that isn't becoming a lot less affordable, it would seem, except gasoline and that's a symptom of the economy.
I agree that "In this economy" is a dumb phrase and defeatist thinking, but his point is a salient one.
This is an internet appliance, basically. It's predicated on internet access. Just as laptops and desktops aren't that much good without internet access, neither will this be.
I wasn't applauding it, I was just pointing out that both platforms have the same shortcoming.
And it's Stockholm Syndrome... I'm not sure what Helsinki syndrome would be... an insatiable desire for cabbage rolls and pea soup? :)
To be fair, if you look at U-6 which is a better measure of true employment misery, we're above 16%
I was debating getting a new laptop to replace my aging desktop, but I pre-ordered one of these instead.
For the larger tasks like writing emails or for mass storage, I'll just keep my desktop plugged in somewhere in the house but powered down. For email, media, and day to day web surfing I'll use the Fire.
I am wondering how often I will end up booting the old desktop PC...
Apple's model also continually farms cash via content acquisition.
This device, at $200, can actually give people on limited budgets an entry way to using the internet the way more well-heeled people do. They can stream media, read ebooks, store music in the cloud, access the internet - it's hard to even find a decent netbook at $200, or at least one that performs well at all these tasks.
It could be something that allows the lower income into the web today, instead of the web as it was 5-10 years ago.
This is the first competitor to the iPad at the working-class level. It's priced affordably and contains most of the features people will actually use.
Is it as full-featured as the iPad, of course not, but you don't need $500-600 to get into one. This device could bring apps, cloud storage, streaming media, and these kinds of things down to a crowd that couldn't afford the pay the Apple premium before.
Some will gripe about there not being cameras or a huge amount of onboard storage, but for the average consumer, this will give them 80% of the iPad at 40% of the price
what if Sprint were positioning itself to be acquired by Apple?
A browser's popularly, history has shown, is temporary until it's overrun with kajillions of security exploits (ie) or becomes slow when it used to be fast (ie, firefox).
You're right... this involves Android, and Android is exempt from all other /. rules of behavior/emoting...
1. Google the total cost of Iraq & Afghanistan divide by 10 years. (about 1 trillion / 10 = about $100 billion a year)
2. Google the size of the 2011 federal budget. (about $4 trillion in spending ($2.5 trillion in revenue...))
3. Use calc.exe to determine what percent of our problem the wars are. (approximately 2%)
Fun fact: The total cost of all 10 years of Iraq & Afghanistan are approximately equal to the interest we pay on the national debt in one year.
Fun fact 2: The national debt has increased by $4 trillion under Obama, more than under all other presidents combined.