Well, in this case it's some capitalists taking advantage of a business opportunity to spy on you. What bothers me is I don't recall signing any sort of release on this, when someone wants to look where I've been driving my car.
You don't have to sign a release to be recorded in public as you have no expectation of privacy. Unless a law is passed making it illegal use public images to track an individual or vehicle there is nothing to stop this sort of thing.
That law would not be Constitutional in the US.
It's their camera, on their car. You are in a public place. They can record the shit out of you. They can manipulate the recording data however they want. They can sell the data to whomever they want, for whatever price they can get. If the government ban that shit paparazzi would be illegal. Which means that a) it's unconstitutional to stop private companies from creating Big Data, and b) the government doesn't need a warrant to look at records held by Big Data. Which means that opposing a lot of NSA dragnets makes sense, but if you make it impossible for the government to use things like license-plate cameras on it's own they'll simply pay some private business to do it and you've lost privacy rights because the businesses entire job is to violate your privacy rights.
This is actually the Constitutional weakness that always hurts us in the US. Our Constitution restricts the government's use of it's own powers, but it says nothing about what we can do to each-other.
Reread the Fourth Amendment. There is no right to freedom from search without a warrant. There is a right to freedom from unreasonable search without a warrant. And the "reasonable" standard is incredibly low. That's why the Courts ruled was perfectly Constitutional for the NYPD to frisk every black man in the City several years in a row, as long as said NYPD put something besides race on thew paperwork. Except that one Judge, who was censured by her colleagues.
Moreover you're being silly with your example. Your call to the cops is probable cause to get a warrant, it's an anonymous tip. That's how they get almost all their warrants. Therefore you don't have to trespass, and they don't have to search without a warrant.
You're also intentionally misinterpreting his statements. He's being pretty clear that he's talking about the government stopping you from using your vehicle unsafely. He hasn't said that flat-out because it's ridiculous to interpret his statements any other way, but hey.
Ahh, a slippery slope argument. Which mean's it's by definition complete and total BS. The real world is not governed by momentum. The fact that we allow one thing today (ie: gay marriage), does not mean we must necessarily tweak the law that direction again next month (ie: allow underage marriage).
The issue here is the very simple balance between your private right to do things your way, and my right not to be fucked up if you decide dumb. It is exactly the kind of decision the Fourth Amendment allows us to make, in the actual text of the Amendment, whereby it specifies that all Reasonable searches and seizures are legal without a warrant. The government is allowed to order us not to use unsafe vehicles on the road. It is allowed to make very sophisticated (and thus by definition contradictory) rules about what constitutes "safe" vs. "unsafe." For example, the state will declare you can run your horse and buggy on some of it's roads, but not all. In particular they don't want you any place where other people are breaking 45.
Therefore the courts will rule that it is reasonable for the government to have the physical ability to force you to accept software updates, as long as it only uses that ability in cases where it's actually clear your vehicle is unsafe without the update. But it's unlikely that will happen. Which means that in practical terms this probably analogous to the President's power to draft your ass, it exists but it's very difficult to imagine a scenario where it's used.
Keep in mind that this isn't an application that needs great service. Your data rates do not have to be Netflix via high-speed broadband in every County. They just have to be quicker then driving the car to a dealership and waiting for the service tech to get around to setting shit up. For example, if you simply include an ethernet jack on the dashboard you've got a much better system then the one Toyota's using.
I think you're underestimating the caliber of the enemies a car company has to pay attention to.
Let's say I was dictator of some small, incredibly rich, petro-state. The local pro-Democracy loves Ford. Why shouldn't I offer some low-level engineer 10 years salary for the database of Auto firmware update keys? Hell, let's say the dictator doesn;t do any of this bad shit, but the pro-democracy activist has a car accident because his hobby is driving with a blood alcohol level of 0.25, how the fuck is Ford supposed to convince people they are safe in Fords?
And that's a podunk dictator, not somebody who can get Court Orders, or some semi-dictatorial regime like Venezuala and Russia where your employees might start to experience 'random street crime' if the key to Wladimir Klitschko's doesn't appear pronto.
I'm not saying the car companies are right to be paranoid about this shit, I'm just saying they aren't being insane in being paranoid about this shit.
> Why are you so sadistic that you want to force people to work as garbage men?
It's not sadism. It's pragmatism. Someone has to do the shit jobs and chances are that there aren't enough people naturally inclined to do them. The real challenge of Earth in the Federation universe is what you do with a bunch of people that are economically pointless.
Why do there have to be shit jobs?
Seriously.
We've already gotten rid of most of the shit jobs our grandparents had. Most dangerous manufacturing, back-breaking farming, etc. jobs simply no longer exist. They've been automated. Some remain, but things like the Roomba and Google drive are promising that even more shit jobs will be gone before our grandkids can take them.
What makes Star Trek SciFi is that it postulates that technology will continue until almost all shit jobs are gone. Yeah there will be some that remain, but the Federation will be able to pay people in Starships so that they still get done, and still afford so much welfare that even the shittiest potter can live a perfectly full life as a potter.
Actually it would be quite easy to sustain a population double or triple our current population. Switch to a vegetable-heavy diet (ie: cut meat by 2/3), moving to a relatively compact city where you don't need to drive 20 miles a day, and you reduce your demands on the environment by an order of magnitude.
And that's assuming the UN population estimate isn't a trailing indicator. Very few wealthy (or even sorta-wealthy) nations are producing babies above the replacement rate. Most of the poor are getting to sorta-wealthy. The UN is using models based on the population growth of not-really-wealthy, pre-feminist 1970s countries. IMO it's likely they won't pan out.
You must be really, really old. Like my dad's age.
Every industrial society is producing babies at below the replacement rate. As you go up the income scale the problem gets worse. In most of the industrialized world the population is stable. In the rest it's either falling off a cliff (Ukraine), or rising solely due to poor brown-skinned economic migrants. The US is in the latter category.
So, no, in the real world overpopulation is simply not a problem.
It's really easy for them to go away when a couple companies (like IBM) get cheap, the rest else declare the new cheapness to be the industry standard; and everyone gets screwed. If the CEO is sufficiently dickish you can win one or two battles like this one; but unless every single job applicant asks about a specific benefit before taking the job they might change their minds; and if the government forces them to stop cutting benefits they will; but most of the time that shit just doesn't work. Hell most beneficiaries of 401ks probably don't know whether their company matches their contributions annually or per pay period.
OTOH if there's just one government program (like Social Security or Medicare), then everyone knows exactly what Congress is doing about it, and you can't screw beneficiaries without everyone knowing it.
How does this lead to two million dollars in expenses? Is he running his own insurance company for the employees?
It's possible. Self-insurance is a thing a lot of companies do. Granted that typically doesn't happen in health insurance, but it is possible.
It's slightly more likely that their insurer jacked up it's rates due to increased costs, or jacked up rates for no reason and claimed it was due to those costs.
What's most likely is that somebody told him about the "distressed babies," and he used that as a rationalization for being a dick on the 401ks.
It still doesn't support your case very well. It looks like the iPod division is dragging down Apple's results until '04. Then Apple's result is worse then the year the iMac was introduced.
My case isn't that Apple's making it's billions solely off the Mac division, but rather that it's making enough money that selling the thing off to Lenovo doesn't make much sense. It also makes enough money to support research into new technologies which do make $billions upon $billions.
This is extremely unusual. Most PC companies have been killed by the fact that anyone can make a PC, and all PCs act pretty much the same, so competing on quality is very difficult. Since competing on price wins you one sale today, but no long-term relationship with customers, there is a lot of churn in major PC companies. As I said the only major US PC company besides Apple that's been a major US PC company every year since the era Schiller mentioned (late 70s/early 80s) is Acer. And they aren't exactly the first, second, third, or even fifth company you think of when you think of PC Builders.
If you care about such things (for example, maybe you're VP of Apple marketing, or me) that's a very interesting factoid and extremely worthy of discussion.
If you don't (and most people don't) then it's boring.
So you say HP built PCs because they had a product they called PC, I point out that logic only works if IBM can't get a trademark on the term for their PC, and I'm the one not making sense?
If you want to prove a statement is de3ad wrong you might actually have to prove it. You know think a little.
Where are you getting these numbers? I ask partly due to curiosity (I couldn't find any info on Apple profitability from the late 90s from a free site), and partly because they don't really support either of our stories.
The iPod was introduced in '01, aka: the year on your list that has a loss after Jobs came back. 2004 isn't interesting due to the iPod hardware taking off (as a piece of hardware the iPod had been a hit the whole time), but because that's the first full year of the iTunes store, which launched in April 2003.
From those numbers it looks like the Mac alone was a decent line of business for Apple. They aren't making Billion$, but they're well into the black every year. Then the iPod hits and something causes their net income to crater until they open the iTubnes store, and it recoversw to '98 levels (but not the '99 and '00 levels).
And this is even worse trolling them the other three posts of yours I responded to. No facts at all. It's pure ad hominem.
What are you thinking? That you'll make me run home and cry to my mommy? How much is Apple paying you?
I'm serious. You're bothering to respond to posts, which takes time, but you're not actually saying anything at all. This post admitted that you have no argument, because it included no argument, but you're still bothering to make the post. That means either you're a psycopath or somebody is paying you. It's clearly not HP paying you, because with the anti-bullying fad going around this post has got to cost them a couple pennies worth of brand equity. But OTOH since it makes all critics of Apple look like schoolyard bullies it raises Apple's brand equity.
Because HP didn't file a trademark for the term? Really, are you that stupid? Oh, you're an iSheeple, of course you are.
And if you had an ounce of intelligence you'd stop defending what was clearly an incorrect statement made by a PR person from a company infamous for making incorrect statements regarding their accomplishments.
Classic troll. Instead of responding to arguments with arguments you respond with ad hominem attacks. And very bad trolling because the ad hominem to fact ratio is way to high. It should be about 50%. Like this post.
As for the one actual thought in your poorly written series of ad hominems, in trademark law you can only get a trademark for a specific geographic market and a specific industry. that's why there can be Jim's Burgers and a Jim's Electrical Supply. If HP's Personal Computers had actually been in the same market as current personal computers IBM's trademark would have been invalid.
BTW, I'm leaning away from 'trolling' and towards 'paid Apple shill,' because if you simply said the word "Acer" I would have been forced to agree with you. But since that would actually have involved making Apple's critics look like human beings with minds of their own you didn't do it, instead you're focusing on the easily dismissed claims of HP.
You're a really bad troll. Jobs returned in '96, profitability followed shortly, and then a couple years after that the iPod appeared. How much is Apple paying you to make it's critics look bad on the internet?
I mean that very seriously. I need one of those internet jobs that allows you to make $80 an hour, and somebody is clearly paying you something.
As for Lenovo, read the quote from MacWorld, not the version HP paid Slashdot to put on the front page. It says every other PC manufacturing company company is gone from the PC Market. IBM is gone from the PC Market. If you actually wanted to make a counter-example that wasn't ridiculous you'd be using Acer. This is my clue that the people paying you must be Apple, because you're carefully avoiding the one piece of evidence that makes your case reasonable.
“Every company that made computers when we started the Mac, they’re all gone,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, in an interview on Apple’s Cupertino campus Thursday. “We’re the only one left. We’re still doing it, and growing faster than the rest of the PC industry because of that willingness to reinvent ourselves over and over.”
If you understand how adjectival phrases work you understand that he's saying those companies are gone from making computers, not that God came down from the heavens and smote them with lightnings. If you're gonna be an anal-retentive dick about the specific definition of computer you're faced with the problem that he explained that the computers he was talking about are the ones made by the "PC industry" in a subsequent sentence.
As for HP, can you name a single model they made between 1985-1995? Hell can you link to a source that mentions their market share in 1980? They were making PC-like objects in the early 80s, but that's arguably outside of his time range (Mac development started a couple years before their first machine was launched), and they made so little impact on the market that nobody outside of HP remembered the damn things until they decided to sic their marketing shills on Schiller.
In other words I'd call you a troll, but effective trolling requires there to be something vaguely resembling substance to your case, so I'm forced to conclude you are a) an incredibly inept HP shill, b) an incredibly effective paid Apple shill, or c) a guy who commented without bothering to read the entire quote and is pretending he knew what he was talking about.
Really, you have a perfect counter-example in Acer, but you're repeating the HP marketing drone's obvious marketing BS, how can you possibly expect anyone to take you seriously?
And a really shitty one. I mean terrible. I'm almost positive you're a paid Apple shill, because frankly any human who could read your post and not be more pro-Apple at the end has no soul.
Read the quote. Schiller is clearly saying that no major PC company in the US from the late 70s/early 80s is still a major PC company except Apple. He's not saying IBM has been destroyed by the hand of god, he's saying they're gone from the PCs-to-ordinary Americans industry. Which they are, because they sold it to Lenovo. Neither HP nor Dell shipped millions of computers prior to 1985. Sony did, but they were almost all in Japan. Which means your list of counter-examples is Acer.
Acer's not nothing, but it's also got even worse market-share then Apple.
For the record, no Mac user gives a damn about market-share. We give a damn about profitability. And Apple has that.
If HP was making personal computers in the 70s how did IBM get the trademark?
Really if you were any good at this trolling thing, you wouldn't be using some of the most ridiculous BS a marketer ever concocted to attack a statement that is among the most reasonable marketers have ever concocted.
This is a quote from the VP of Marketing, not an engineer. You know he didn't crack open the inaugural PC world, make a list of all PC-selling companies in the magazine, and then order his horde of marketing flaks to search Google high and low for anything that could easily be adapted into being a general-purpose PC on their websites today.
What he probably did was remember back to those days, look at the list of the biggest companies that actually tried to sell computers to ordinary Americans, and he noticed the only one on that list still trying to sell PCs to consumers was Apple. And since IBM made a big deal about leaving the PC-to-consumer business a few years ago they don't really count even if a truly fanatical IBM customer could buy something a lot like a PC from them. Acer might count, because I vaguely remember they had PCs widely available in some ancient PC Worlds I read when I was bored at the library in the mid-90s, but so far I have yet to see any other potential examples of companies who were big in the PCs-to-ordinary-American-idiots market in the late 70s/early 80s, and are still big in the PCs-to-ordinary-American-idiots market.
His point was that being a PC manufacturer sucks. If you don't make a Wintel clone it's very difficult to convince the masses to buy your machine. If you do make a Wintel clone some asshole will under-cut your prices. Literally. Anybody with a screwdriver and the brains to read can build his own damn computer. And if you make the sale to the cheapskate you're gonna have to put up with (and pay for) a lot of tech support calls from idiots who installed adware. You can make money if you re-badge your PCs as "servers," sell support contracts to most of you customers, and laugh in the face on anyone without a contract who calls, but even that doesn't seem to be too lucrative as IBM is exiting the field.
Dell (1984), IBM (1981, now owned by Lenovo), Gateway (1985, now owned by Acer), and Acer (1981).
But go on, tell us more about how you are the only ones left from that time making personal computers. And how you created the GUI. And the portable music player. And the smartphone. And the tablet computer. Oh yes, tell us more...
WTF did you expect from a marketing VP? A sober, reasoned, and totally fair-minded assesment of Apple's place in computing history.
Hell, if you actually read Schiller's quote (which you clearly have not done), you'll note that it's quite accurate for BS from a marketing drone. He's saying that in the era when Apple was creating the Mac (late 70s/early 80s) there were a lot of computer companies selling PCs to the public. None of the major ones except Apple is still selling PCs to the public. Of the 15-20 I could name from that era, Acer is the closest thing I can think of to an exception, and it's not exactly a titan of the computing field. Slashdot certianly wouldn't publish a blurb from their VP of marketing.
Of the current major ones Dell almost makes it (his first company was founded 10 months after the mac's release), but he wasn't a major player at the time. HP, according to the timeline linked to in this very article, didn't "enter the home computing market" until 1995. Half the remainder were big in their Asian home markets in the early 80s, but not the US market, and the remainder are newish Chinese companies.
1979, and that date is relevant only upon him meaning the date they started working on it versus the date it was released. The quote is unclear. The IBM-PC started development at roughly the same time, as did Acer's development of the Micro-Professor MPF-I. He doesn't specifically say "personal computers", so if you want to be a stickler, both HP and IBM had "computers" long before Apple even existed, let alone started development of the Mac.
Actually he did say PCs. You just didn't bother reading the actual quote in MacWorld, because you were too busy fuming.
So please, continue to educate us with your deep analysis of a quote you clearly haven't bothered to read.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, in this case it's some capitalists taking advantage of a business opportunity to spy on you. What bothers me is I don't recall signing any sort of release on this, when someone wants to look where I've been driving my car.
You don't have to sign a release to be recorded in public as you have no expectation of privacy. Unless a law is passed making it illegal use public images to track an individual or vehicle there is nothing to stop this sort of thing.
That law would not be Constitutional in the US.
It's their camera, on their car. You are in a public place. They can record the shit out of you. They can manipulate the recording data however they want. They can sell the data to whomever they want, for whatever price they can get. If the government ban that shit paparazzi would be illegal. Which means that a) it's unconstitutional to stop private companies from creating Big Data, and b) the government doesn't need a warrant to look at records held by Big Data. Which means that opposing a lot of NSA dragnets makes sense, but if you make it impossible for the government to use things like license-plate cameras on it's own they'll simply pay some private business to do it and you've lost privacy rights because the businesses entire job is to violate your privacy rights.
This is actually the Constitutional weakness that always hurts us in the US. Our Constitution restricts the government's use of it's own powers, but it says nothing about what we can do to each-other.
97.05% of the owners told their co-owner to fuck off, and Tim Cook (as their dutiful employee) agreed.
He was a bit of a dick about it, but when 97.05% of your bosses tell you to tell the other 2.95% to fuck off you ain't supposed to sugar-coat it.
Reread the Fourth Amendment. There is no right to freedom from search without a warrant. There is a right to freedom from unreasonable search without a warrant. And the "reasonable" standard is incredibly low. That's why the Courts ruled was perfectly Constitutional for the NYPD to frisk every black man in the City several years in a row, as long as said NYPD put something besides race on thew paperwork. Except that one Judge, who was censured by her colleagues.
Moreover you're being silly with your example. Your call to the cops is probable cause to get a warrant, it's an anonymous tip. That's how they get almost all their warrants. Therefore you don't have to trespass, and they don't have to search without a warrant.
You're also intentionally misinterpreting his statements. He's being pretty clear that he's talking about the government stopping you from using your vehicle unsafely. He hasn't said that flat-out because it's ridiculous to interpret his statements any other way, but hey.
Really depends on the state. I had a car in Ohio and Michigan for 5-6 years. It was not inspected at all, ever, for anything.
Ahh, a slippery slope argument. Which mean's it's by definition complete and total BS. The real world is not governed by momentum. The fact that we allow one thing today (ie: gay marriage), does not mean we must necessarily tweak the law that direction again next month (ie: allow underage marriage).
The issue here is the very simple balance between your private right to do things your way, and my right not to be fucked up if you decide dumb. It is exactly the kind of decision the Fourth Amendment allows us to make, in the actual text of the Amendment, whereby it specifies that all Reasonable searches and seizures are legal without a warrant. The government is allowed to order us not to use unsafe vehicles on the road. It is allowed to make very sophisticated (and thus by definition contradictory) rules about what constitutes "safe" vs. "unsafe." For example, the state will declare you can run your horse and buggy on some of it's roads, but not all. In particular they don't want you any place where other people are breaking 45.
Therefore the courts will rule that it is reasonable for the government to have the physical ability to force you to accept software updates, as long as it only uses that ability in cases where it's actually clear your vehicle is unsafe without the update. But it's unlikely that will happen. Which means that in practical terms this probably analogous to the President's power to draft your ass, it exists but it's very difficult to imagine a scenario where it's used.
Keep in mind that this isn't an application that needs great service. Your data rates do not have to be Netflix via high-speed broadband in every County. They just have to be quicker then driving the car to a dealership and waiting for the service tech to get around to setting shit up. For example, if you simply include an ethernet jack on the dashboard you've got a much better system then the one Toyota's using.
According to Wired:
http://www.wired.com/autopia/2...
The Tesla can either use it's own 3G connection, or use your home WiFi.
I think you're underestimating the caliber of the enemies a car company has to pay attention to.
Let's say I was dictator of some small, incredibly rich, petro-state. The local pro-Democracy loves Ford. Why shouldn't I offer some low-level engineer 10 years salary for the database of Auto firmware update keys? Hell, let's say the dictator doesn;t do any of this bad shit, but the pro-democracy activist has a car accident because his hobby is driving with a blood alcohol level of 0.25, how the fuck is Ford supposed to convince people they are safe in Fords?
And that's a podunk dictator, not somebody who can get Court Orders, or some semi-dictatorial regime like Venezuala and Russia where your employees might start to experience 'random street crime' if the key to Wladimir Klitschko's doesn't appear pronto.
I'm not saying the car companies are right to be paranoid about this shit, I'm just saying they aren't being insane in being paranoid about this shit.
> Why are you so sadistic that you want to force people to work as garbage men?
It's not sadism. It's pragmatism. Someone has to do the shit jobs and chances are that there aren't enough people naturally inclined to do them. The real challenge of Earth in the Federation universe is what you do with a bunch of people that are economically pointless.
Why do there have to be shit jobs?
Seriously.
We've already gotten rid of most of the shit jobs our grandparents had. Most dangerous manufacturing, back-breaking farming, etc. jobs simply no longer exist. They've been automated. Some remain, but things like the Roomba and Google drive are promising that even more shit jobs will be gone before our grandkids can take them.
What makes Star Trek SciFi is that it postulates that technology will continue until almost all shit jobs are gone. Yeah there will be some that remain, but the Federation will be able to pay people in Starships so that they still get done, and still afford so much welfare that even the shittiest potter can live a perfectly full life as a potter.
Actually it would be quite easy to sustain a population double or triple our current population. Switch to a vegetable-heavy diet (ie: cut meat by 2/3), moving to a relatively compact city where you don't need to drive 20 miles a day, and you reduce your demands on the environment by an order of magnitude.
And that's assuming the UN population estimate isn't a trailing indicator. Very few wealthy (or even sorta-wealthy) nations are producing babies above the replacement rate. Most of the poor are getting to sorta-wealthy. The UN is using models based on the population growth of not-really-wealthy, pre-feminist 1970s countries. IMO it's likely they won't pan out.
You must be really, really old. Like my dad's age.
Every industrial society is producing babies at below the replacement rate. As you go up the income scale the problem gets worse. In most of the industrialized world the population is stable. In the rest it's either falling off a cliff (Ukraine), or rising solely due to poor brown-skinned economic migrants. The US is in the latter category.
So, no, in the real world overpopulation is simply not a problem.
It's really easy for them to go away when a couple companies (like IBM) get cheap, the rest else declare the new cheapness to be the industry standard; and everyone gets screwed. If the CEO is sufficiently dickish you can win one or two battles like this one; but unless every single job applicant asks about a specific benefit before taking the job they might change their minds; and if the government forces them to stop cutting benefits they will; but most of the time that shit just doesn't work. Hell most beneficiaries of 401ks probably don't know whether their company matches their contributions annually or per pay period.
OTOH if there's just one government program (like Social Security or Medicare), then everyone knows exactly what Congress is doing about it, and you can't screw beneficiaries without everyone knowing it.
How does this lead to two million dollars in expenses? Is he running his own insurance company for the employees?
It's possible. Self-insurance is a thing a lot of companies do. Granted that typically doesn't happen in health insurance, but it is possible.
It's slightly more likely that their insurer jacked up it's rates due to increased costs, or jacked up rates for no reason and claimed it was due to those costs.
What's most likely is that somebody told him about the "distressed babies," and he used that as a rationalization for being a dick on the 401ks.
It still doesn't support your case very well. It looks like the iPod division is dragging down Apple's results until '04. Then Apple's result is worse then the year the iMac was introduced.
My case isn't that Apple's making it's billions solely off the Mac division, but rather that it's making enough money that selling the thing off to Lenovo doesn't make much sense. It also makes enough money to support research into new technologies which do make $billions upon $billions.
This is extremely unusual. Most PC companies have been killed by the fact that anyone can make a PC, and all PCs act pretty much the same, so competing on quality is very difficult. Since competing on price wins you one sale today, but no long-term relationship with customers, there is a lot of churn in major PC companies. As I said the only major US PC company besides Apple that's been a major US PC company every year since the era Schiller mentioned (late 70s/early 80s) is Acer. And they aren't exactly the first, second, third, or even fifth company you think of when you think of PC Builders.
If you care about such things (for example, maybe you're VP of Apple marketing, or me) that's a very interesting factoid and extremely worthy of discussion.
If you don't (and most people don't) then it's boring.
So you say HP built PCs because they had a product they called PC, I point out that logic only works if IBM can't get a trademark on the term for their PC, and I'm the one not making sense?
If you want to prove a statement is de3ad wrong you might actually have to prove it. You know think a little.
And yet you continue to respond. Again, without any ideas, just ad hominem.
Smart 12-year-olds pretend not to be 12.
Where are you getting these numbers? I ask partly due to curiosity (I couldn't find any info on Apple profitability from the late 90s from a free site), and partly because they don't really support either of our stories.
The iPod was introduced in '01, aka: the year on your list that has a loss after Jobs came back. 2004 isn't interesting due to the iPod hardware taking off (as a piece of hardware the iPod had been a hit the whole time), but because that's the first full year of the iTunes store, which launched in April 2003.
From those numbers it looks like the Mac alone was a decent line of business for Apple. They aren't making Billion$, but they're well into the black every year. Then the iPod hits and something causes their net income to crater until they open the iTubnes store, and it recoversw to '98 levels (but not the '99 and '00 levels).
And this is even worse trolling them the other three posts of yours I responded to. No facts at all. It's pure ad hominem.
What are you thinking? That you'll make me run home and cry to my mommy? How much is Apple paying you?
I'm serious. You're bothering to respond to posts, which takes time, but you're not actually saying anything at all. This post admitted that you have no argument, because it included no argument, but you're still bothering to make the post. That means either you're a psycopath or somebody is paying you. It's clearly not HP paying you, because with the anti-bullying fad going around this post has got to cost them a couple pennies worth of brand equity. But OTOH since it makes all critics of Apple look like schoolyard bullies it raises Apple's brand equity.
Because HP didn't file a trademark for the term? Really, are you that stupid? Oh, you're an iSheeple, of course you are.
And if you had an ounce of intelligence you'd stop defending what was clearly an incorrect statement made by a PR person from a company infamous for making incorrect statements regarding their accomplishments.
Classic troll. Instead of responding to arguments with arguments you respond with ad hominem attacks. And very bad trolling because the ad hominem to fact ratio is way to high. It should be about 50%. Like this post.
As for the one actual thought in your poorly written series of ad hominems, in trademark law you can only get a trademark for a specific geographic market and a specific industry. that's why there can be Jim's Burgers and a Jim's Electrical Supply. If HP's Personal Computers had actually been in the same market as current personal computers IBM's trademark would have been invalid.
BTW, I'm leaning away from 'trolling' and towards 'paid Apple shill,' because if you simply said the word "Acer" I would have been forced to agree with you. But since that would actually have involved making Apple's critics look like human beings with minds of their own you didn't do it, instead you're focusing on the easily dismissed claims of HP.
You're a really bad troll. Jobs returned in '96, profitability followed shortly, and then a couple years after that the iPod appeared. How much is Apple paying you to make it's critics look bad on the internet?
I mean that very seriously. I need one of those internet jobs that allows you to make $80 an hour, and somebody is clearly paying you something.
As for Lenovo, read the quote from MacWorld, not the version HP paid Slashdot to put on the front page. It says every other PC manufacturing company company is gone from the PC Market. IBM is gone from the PC Market. If you actually wanted to make a counter-example that wasn't ridiculous you'd be using Acer. This is my clue that the people paying you must be Apple, because you're carefully avoiding the one piece of evidence that makes your case reasonable.
To quote the entire quote:
“Every company that made computers when we started the Mac, they’re all gone,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, in an interview on Apple’s Cupertino campus Thursday. “We’re the only one left. We’re still doing it, and growing faster than the rest of the PC industry because of that willingness to reinvent ourselves over and over.”
If you understand how adjectival phrases work you understand that he's saying those companies are gone from making computers, not that God came down from the heavens and smote them with lightnings. If you're gonna be an anal-retentive dick about the specific definition of computer you're faced with the problem that he explained that the computers he was talking about are the ones made by the "PC industry" in a subsequent sentence.
As for HP, can you name a single model they made between 1985-1995? Hell can you link to a source that mentions their market share in 1980? They were making PC-like objects in the early 80s, but that's arguably outside of his time range (Mac development started a couple years before their first machine was launched), and they made so little impact on the market that nobody outside of HP remembered the damn things until they decided to sic their marketing shills on Schiller.
In other words I'd call you a troll, but effective trolling requires there to be something vaguely resembling substance to your case, so I'm forced to conclude you are a) an incredibly inept HP shill, b) an incredibly effective paid Apple shill, or c) a guy who commented without bothering to read the entire quote and is pretending he knew what he was talking about.
Really, you have a perfect counter-example in Acer, but you're repeating the HP marketing drone's obvious marketing BS, how can you possibly expect anyone to take you seriously?
So you're a troll.
And a really shitty one. I mean terrible. I'm almost positive you're a paid Apple shill, because frankly any human who could read your post and not be more pro-Apple at the end has no soul.
Read the quote. Schiller is clearly saying that no major PC company in the US from the late 70s/early 80s is still a major PC company except Apple. He's not saying IBM has been destroyed by the hand of god, he's saying they're gone from the PCs-to-ordinary Americans industry. Which they are, because they sold it to Lenovo. Neither HP nor Dell shipped millions of computers prior to 1985. Sony did, but they were almost all in Japan. Which means your list of counter-examples is Acer.
Acer's not nothing, but it's also got even worse market-share then Apple.
For the record, no Mac user gives a damn about market-share. We give a damn about profitability. And Apple has that.
If HP was making personal computers in the 70s how did IBM get the trademark?
Really if you were any good at this trolling thing, you wouldn't be using some of the most ridiculous BS a marketer ever concocted to attack a statement that is among the most reasonable marketers have ever concocted.
I don't believe that was ever the point.
This is a quote from the VP of Marketing, not an engineer. You know he didn't crack open the inaugural PC world, make a list of all PC-selling companies in the magazine, and then order his horde of marketing flaks to search Google high and low for anything that could easily be adapted into being a general-purpose PC on their websites today.
What he probably did was remember back to those days, look at the list of the biggest companies that actually tried to sell computers to ordinary Americans, and he noticed the only one on that list still trying to sell PCs to consumers was Apple. And since IBM made a big deal about leaving the PC-to-consumer business a few years ago they don't really count even if a truly fanatical IBM customer could buy something a lot like a PC from them. Acer might count, because I vaguely remember they had PCs widely available in some ancient PC Worlds I read when I was bored at the library in the mid-90s, but so far I have yet to see any other potential examples of companies who were big in the PCs-to-ordinary-American-idiots market in the late 70s/early 80s, and are still big in the PCs-to-ordinary-American-idiots market.
His point was that being a PC manufacturer sucks. If you don't make a Wintel clone it's very difficult to convince the masses to buy your machine. If you do make a Wintel clone some asshole will under-cut your prices. Literally. Anybody with a screwdriver and the brains to read can build his own damn computer. And if you make the sale to the cheapskate you're gonna have to put up with (and pay for) a lot of tech support calls from idiots who installed adware. You can make money if you re-badge your PCs as "servers," sell support contracts to most of you customers, and laugh in the face on anyone without a contract who calls, but even that doesn't seem to be too lucrative as IBM is exiting the field.
Dell (1984), IBM (1981, now owned by Lenovo), Gateway (1985, now owned by Acer), and Acer (1981).
But go on, tell us more about how you are the only ones left from that time making personal computers. And how you created the GUI. And the portable music player. And the smartphone. And the tablet computer. Oh yes, tell us more...
WTF did you expect from a marketing VP? A sober, reasoned, and totally fair-minded assesment of Apple's place in computing history.
Hell, if you actually read Schiller's quote (which you clearly have not done), you'll note that it's quite accurate for BS from a marketing drone. He's saying that in the era when Apple was creating the Mac (late 70s/early 80s) there were a lot of computer companies selling PCs to the public. None of the major ones except Apple is still selling PCs to the public. Of the 15-20 I could name from that era, Acer is the closest thing I can think of to an exception, and it's not exactly a titan of the computing field. Slashdot certianly wouldn't publish a blurb from their VP of marketing.
Of the current major ones Dell almost makes it (his first company was founded 10 months after the mac's release), but he wasn't a major player at the time. HP, according to the timeline linked to in this very article, didn't "enter the home computing market" until 1995. Half the remainder were big in their Asian home markets in the early 80s, but not the US market, and the remainder are newish Chinese companies.
1979, and that date is relevant only upon him meaning the date they started working on it versus the date it was released. The quote is unclear. The IBM-PC started development at roughly the same time, as did Acer's development of the Micro-Professor MPF-I. He doesn't specifically say "personal computers", so if you want to be a stickler, both HP and IBM had "computers" long before Apple even existed, let alone started development of the Mac.
Actually he did say PCs. You just didn't bother reading the actual quote in MacWorld, because you were too busy fuming.
So please, continue to educate us with your deep analysis of a quote you clearly haven't bothered to read.