You misunderstand my statement. A lack of selective pressure on a gene will account for the lack of variants for that gene. In other words there was no need to "modify" the gene.
Let us make a totally wild analogy: There are less variants of iPod (shuffle, nano, video) due to it's success at dominating the market. There are more variants of Creative's Zen players in an attempt to thrive (Vision, Vision M, Vision W, Neeon 2, V Plus, V, MicroPhoto, Neeon, and Nano Plus).
You're trying to stretch your examples to make my examples seem absurd.
Apple Inc still makes computers. The iPhone and the AppleTV, to Apple's internal design process, are two computers. To an end user they may seem like appliances, but they still have all the same components that an iMac or MacBook have.
Just because they aren't being sold as such does not remove their computer-ness.
Your microwave was never designed to be a computer. You could not repurpose it to be a web browser or email client, unlike the AppleTV or iPhone.
You don't have to void your warranty to mod it at all. Nothing is soldered. Nothing is replaced. You're just shifting bits on the harddrive, and that is trivially restored.
I can't speak for the iPhone, but conceptually you should be able to run Javascript and Flash programs on it. I fail to see how you can prevent people from uploading other software to the system.
Given the existing iPod sales and Mac sales, they are probably going to sell more iPhones in the next year than they will sell Macs. Fixing the Mac OS a few months late may affect some of those "switchers" and some of the existing base, but even if it's 20% of those users, that is still nearly half the estimated number of customers they can expect with an on time iPhone.
In other words: An on time iPhone may trigger 8 million purchases. An on time OS X may affect 6 million purchases. Slipping the phone has a bigger impact on Apple.
I speak as an Apple shareholder, btw, as well as a Mac user. I'm waiting for iLife 07.
Uh, there are hundreds of articles floating on the web on exactly how user configurable the AppleTV is; how it is running on an Intel CPU, with a version of OS X that is compatible with existing versions, and how you can update/upgrade the system to run a full version of OS X, as well as add more codecs, more software, etc.
You think the iPhone won't be similarly configurable either? Or do you think somehow that the AppleTV and iPhone are somehow not versatile?
The iPhone and AppleTV both have in common with an otherwise general purpose Mac: Mac OS X Storage Display (the Mac Pro and Mac mini lack displays!) Input devices UI Networking
Your microwave and mouse lack: An OS Storage Display (for the mouse) Networking (for either)
Who said they "added developers and QA towards the end of a project lifecycle"?
If it's the same engineers doing work on both the iPhone and Mac OS X operating systems, it means that they can't physically two do things at the same time. The time spent to do A for OS X for the iPhone takes away from the time spent on B for OS X in general.
They had a choice of either releasing a buggy OS X in June or a better OS X in October. The iPhone excuse is valid because it's the same OS.
And it makes sense. If iPods currently power 50% of their earnings and Macs currently power 40% of their earnings and Apple believes that they can sell 10m iPhones in the next year... 1) iPods, with existing growth, will pull in 40% of their earnings 2) iPhones will pull in 30% of their earnings 3) Macs will pull in 30% of their earnings 4) 2008 earnings will grow 50% over 2007 earnings
That isn't a bad tradeoff at all. Without the iPhone 2008 earnings would only be up about 30%, I think, over 2007 earnings.
There are 18 times as many PCs as Macs Sales of Vista rank only 10 times as much as sales of OS X
Why dump something growing 30% a year?
on
100 Million iPods
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
It would be more prudent for Microsoft to dump the XBox, the Zune, Live Search, and Zune Marketplace before Apple should dump the Mac.
Especially seeing how a little less than half of their profits each year stem from the Mac. Dumping the Mac would almost automatically require them to dump half their workforce, more or less.
Why so hard to believe?
on
100 Million iPods
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Even with a failure rate of 10% (which is extraordinary), that is still 90m iPods sold.
Apple has done extraordinarily well here with the iPod and is poised to shape the future of digital downloads (software and media) with their iTunes Store.
You mean the one they filed only because Apple had filed against Microsoft for developing Windows 2.0 and 3.0? At least according to Wikipedia:
In a twist midway through the suit, Xerox filed a lawsuit against Apple, claiming Apple had infringed copyrights Xerox held on its GUIs. Xerox had invested in Apple and had invited the Macintosh design team to view their GUI computers at the PARC research lab; these visits had been very influential on the development of the Macintosh GUI. Xerox's lawsuit appeared to be a defensive move to ensure that if Apple v. Microsoft established that "look and feel" was copyrightable, then Xerox would be the primary beneficiary, rather than Apple. The Xerox case was dismissed because the three year statute of limitations had passed (i.e. Xerox waited too long to file suit.)
You're right, they didn't license it; they gave Xerox some Apple stock in exchange for those visits to the lab.
You must not have been alive in 2001 when iPods had amazing tech specs and capabilities: 5gb in the same form factor as a 128mb flash player Transfer speeds in excess of 12mb/s, compared to the local reigning champ, the Nomad Jukebox, at 1mb/s Single transfer+charge cable 12 hour battery life One handed UI, when the reigning champ had 11 buttons for two hands
It took Creative four years to release a similar product using a 1.8" HDD; it took them two years to figure out how to simplify the UI and adopt USB2 instead of USB1 or a serial port. The Zen Vision is STILL twice as thick as an iPod.
Five years later Microsoft releases the Zune; it took Microsoft 5 years to release a competitor. Don't discount Apple's skill here.
1) When you mount an iPod, it too is a drive. 2) How do you generate the folders with MP3s? iTunes does it for you 3) iTunes copies these folders with MP3s for you so you don't have to. 4) Quicker and easier than your proposed method because you don't have to do any of the following:
A) Import music B) Organize music C) synchronize music
iTunes does all of the above without any user interaction.
I understand you may find comfort in organizing and sorting your music, but really, computers are good at that. Why don't you just relax and hit play instead?
When the iPod came on the scene in 2001 the MP3 universe had already exploded and there had been hardware to serve the MP3 player role for over two years and every computer could play, share, and rip MP3. The iPod was LATE to the market.
Today the video universe is barely starting. There is the first flush of video players (of which the iPod was current with) but the bandwidth, computing power, and storage necessary for video really is only catching on NOW.
You think that there are other players in the market that the consumer has a feel for right now? You think it's the TiVo? As I understand it only 10-12 million DVRs have been sold of which TiVos only account for 40% of. Then there is the fact that, right now, only about a quarter of Americans have broadband!
So the video market is far from dead. If Microsoft can play the Zune, now, 5 years an 90m iPods later, Apple can release an AppleTV 8 years after the first TiVo.
It's especially telling that TiVo's first six years were unprofitable, isn't it?
The really important thing that either Apple failed to realize or just discounted for whatever reason is that while there has always been something of a defacto standard in music formats (mp3), there has never been a similar standard in video formats. They are now trying to impose h.264 as a standard, while supporting their own earlier QuickTime formats, but seriously - other than stuff you've purchased on iTunes (which can't be that much because they don't offer that much), how much video do you really have stored in these formats?
Unlike music, however, Apple is joining the party BEFORE divx has become the de facto standard. Imagine if Apple had released the iPod in the year 1996 instead of 2001; MP3 would have been limited to college campuses and people running Pentiums. It wasn't possible for the majority of people to encode, or play, in real time and everyone was still on modems.
Today the situation is like this: The majority of people have P3s and P4s that cannot encode video in real time, much less decode HD video. Only 25% of the population has the bandwidth necessary to download DivX files. Yes there are a lot of videos out there, but Apple's goal is not to enter an established market, like it did with the iPod; it is trying to "ride the wave" of the next one.
Right now Apple has only hit 10% of the population with iPods, and there are more iPods than all the media extenders and XBoxes combined. The AppleTV market is on the cusp of maturity, so trying to support 'baroque' video formats is unnecessary. If they had released the AppleTV in three years then your arguments would be crucial to Apple's TV success. As it is TiVo is losing money and seems to be headed out, Windows Media Extenders and Media Centers are too expensive, especially compared to a $299 AppleTV.
It sucks that Apple is ignoring the tech-geek, but then again the true teck-geek will buy the AppleTV to hack into a wireless streaming MythTV frontend anyway.
At the time people thought the Creative Nomad WAS a popular product.
Apple then released the iPod and now there are about 1 iPod for every 10 people.
As of March last year the ENTIRE market of DVRs was only about 9% penetration. Put another way, more people own iPods than DVRs, much less TiVos. There is still room for Apple to carve a niche, even if it is only 10% of the population.
Slashdot Mirror
You misunderstand.
MS Quarterly earnings divided by number of PCs shipped by OEMs ~= $40 per PC
That is why I said each copy costs $40 bundled with a PC.
If you look at their quarterly/yearly earnings, each copy of Vista will net them about $40 bundled with a PC.
You will also see that about 1/3 of their operating profit comes from OSes.
So reducing the price by $100 would lose them money AND reduce their operating profit by half.
You misunderstand my statement. A lack of selective pressure on a gene will account for the lack of variants for that gene. In other words there was no need to "modify" the gene.
Let us make a totally wild analogy: There are less variants of iPod (shuffle, nano, video) due to it's success at dominating the market. There are more variants of Creative's Zen players in an attempt to thrive (Vision, Vision M, Vision W, Neeon 2, V Plus, V, MicroPhoto, Neeon, and Nano Plus).
Which means our genepool is larger just in case there is a need for a classically unselected gene.
It's only conventional if you don't understand evolution.
The selective pressures on both species were/are different so different amounts of evolution will occur.
Microsoft (MSFT)'s quarterly and annual reports detail exactly how much the XBox and XBox 360 is losing them money.
Every quarter except for one, so far, they have lost money on those products. The only profitable quarter was the release of Halo2. That's it.
You're trying to stretch your examples to make my examples seem absurd.
Apple Inc still makes computers. The iPhone and the AppleTV, to Apple's internal design process, are two computers. To an end user they may seem like appliances, but they still have all the same components that an iMac or MacBook have.
Just because they aren't being sold as such does not remove their computer-ness.
Your microwave was never designed to be a computer. You could not repurpose it to be a web browser or email client, unlike the AppleTV or iPhone.
Re: Configurability of AppleTV
You don't have to void your warranty to mod it at all. Nothing is soldered. Nothing is replaced. You're just shifting bits on the harddrive, and that is trivially restored.
I can't speak for the iPhone, but conceptually you should be able to run Javascript and Flash programs on it. I fail to see how you can prevent people from uploading other software to the system.
Given the existing iPod sales and Mac sales, they are probably going to sell more iPhones in the next year than they will sell Macs. Fixing the Mac OS a few months late may affect some of those "switchers" and some of the existing base, but even if it's 20% of those users, that is still nearly half the estimated number of customers they can expect with an on time iPhone.
In other words: An on time iPhone may trigger 8 million purchases. An on time OS X may affect 6 million purchases. Slipping the phone has a bigger impact on Apple.
I speak as an Apple shareholder, btw, as well as a Mac user. I'm waiting for iLife 07.
Uh, there are hundreds of articles floating on the web on exactly how user configurable the AppleTV is; how it is running on an Intel CPU, with a version of OS X that is compatible with existing versions, and how you can update/upgrade the system to run a full version of OS X, as well as add more codecs, more software, etc.
You think the iPhone won't be similarly configurable either? Or do you think somehow that the AppleTV and iPhone are somehow not versatile?
You misunderstand.
The iPhone and AppleTV both have in common with an otherwise general purpose Mac:
Mac OS X
Storage
Display (the Mac Pro and Mac mini lack displays!)
Input devices
UI
Networking
Your microwave and mouse lack:
An OS
Storage
Display (for the mouse)
Networking (for either)
Does it not occur to you that both the AppleTV and the iPhone are computers?
Albeit smaller, more usable, and more affordable than the traditional Mac?
Who said they "added developers and QA towards the end of a project lifecycle"?
If it's the same engineers doing work on both the iPhone and Mac OS X operating systems, it means that they can't physically two do things at the same time. The time spent to do A for OS X for the iPhone takes away from the time spent on B for OS X in general.
They had a choice of either releasing a buggy OS X in June or a better OS X in October. The iPhone excuse is valid because it's the same OS.
And it makes sense. If iPods currently power 50% of their earnings and Macs currently power 40% of their earnings and Apple believes that they can sell 10m iPhones in the next year...
1) iPods, with existing growth, will pull in 40% of their earnings
2) iPhones will pull in 30% of their earnings
3) Macs will pull in 30% of their earnings
4) 2008 earnings will grow 50% over 2007 earnings
That isn't a bad tradeoff at all. Without the iPhone 2008 earnings would only be up about 30%, I think, over 2007 earnings.
Think about it.
There are 18 times as many PCs as Macs
Sales of Vista rank only 10 times as much as sales of OS X
It would be more prudent for Microsoft to dump the XBox, the Zune, Live Search, and Zune Marketplace before Apple should dump the Mac.
Especially seeing how a little less than half of their profits each year stem from the Mac. Dumping the Mac would almost automatically require them to dump half their workforce, more or less.
Even with a failure rate of 10% (which is extraordinary), that is still 90m iPods sold.
Apple has done extraordinarily well here with the iPod and is poised to shape the future of digital downloads (software and media) with their iTunes Store.
You're right, they didn't license it; they gave Xerox some Apple stock in exchange for those visits to the lab.
They licensed it from Xerox Parc. It's pretty well documented, at that.
VR is here. It's called the Nintendo Wii and the Nintendo DS.
You must not have been alive in 2001 when iPods had amazing tech specs and capabilities:
5gb in the same form factor as a 128mb flash player
Transfer speeds in excess of 12mb/s, compared to the local reigning champ, the Nomad Jukebox, at 1mb/s
Single transfer+charge cable
12 hour battery life
One handed UI, when the reigning champ had 11 buttons for two hands
It took Creative four years to release a similar product using a 1.8" HDD; it took them two years to figure out how to simplify the UI and adopt USB2 instead of USB1 or a serial port. The Zen Vision is STILL twice as thick as an iPod.
Five years later Microsoft releases the Zune; it took Microsoft 5 years to release a competitor. Don't discount Apple's skill here.
1) When you mount an iPod, it too is a drive.
2) How do you generate the folders with MP3s? iTunes does it for you
3) iTunes copies these folders with MP3s for you so you don't have to.
4) Quicker and easier than your proposed method because you don't have to do any of the following:
A) Import music
B) Organize music
C) synchronize music
iTunes does all of the above without any user interaction.
I understand you may find comfort in organizing and sorting your music, but really, computers are good at that. Why don't you just relax and hit play instead?
In the 10 years Jobs has been at the helm there has only been one real flop: The Cube. The iMac G4 was just okay.
Successes:
1998: iMac
1999: iBook
2000: Cube
2001: Titanium PowerBook, iPod
2002: White iBook
2003: iMac G4, eMac, XServe
2004: iPod mini, iMac G5
2005: iPod shuffle, Mac mini, iPod nano
2006: MacBook, MacBook Pro, Mac Pro, iPod video
If you think again of the AppleTV as an iPod with an HDTV screen then it's niche is much easier to envision.
I think you misunderstand the existing market.
When the iPod came on the scene in 2001 the MP3 universe had already exploded and there had been hardware to serve the MP3 player role for over two years and every computer could play, share, and rip MP3. The iPod was LATE to the market.
Today the video universe is barely starting. There is the first flush of video players (of which the iPod was current with) but the bandwidth, computing power, and storage necessary for video really is only catching on NOW.
You think that there are other players in the market that the consumer has a feel for right now? You think it's the TiVo? As I understand it only 10-12 million DVRs have been sold of which TiVos only account for 40% of. Then there is the fact that, right now, only about a quarter of Americans have broadband!
So the video market is far from dead. If Microsoft can play the Zune, now, 5 years an 90m iPods later, Apple can release an AppleTV 8 years after the first TiVo.
It's especially telling that TiVo's first six years were unprofitable, isn't it?
Unlike music, however, Apple is joining the party BEFORE divx has become the de facto standard. Imagine if Apple had released the iPod in the year 1996 instead of 2001; MP3 would have been limited to college campuses and people running Pentiums. It wasn't possible for the majority of people to encode, or play, in real time and everyone was still on modems.
Today the situation is like this: The majority of people have P3s and P4s that cannot encode video in real time, much less decode HD video. Only 25% of the population has the bandwidth necessary to download DivX files. Yes there are a lot of videos out there, but Apple's goal is not to enter an established market, like it did with the iPod; it is trying to "ride the wave" of the next one.
Right now Apple has only hit 10% of the population with iPods, and there are more iPods than all the media extenders and XBoxes combined. The AppleTV market is on the cusp of maturity, so trying to support 'baroque' video formats is unnecessary. If they had released the AppleTV in three years then your arguments would be crucial to Apple's TV success. As it is TiVo is losing money and seems to be headed out, Windows Media Extenders and Media Centers are too expensive, especially compared to a $299 AppleTV.
It sucks that Apple is ignoring the tech-geek, but then again the true teck-geek will buy the AppleTV to hack into a wireless streaming MythTV frontend anyway.
At the time people thought the Creative Nomad WAS a popular product.
0 06/pi20060302_999595.htm
Apple then released the iPod and now there are about 1 iPod for every 10 people.
As of March last year the ENTIRE market of DVRs was only about 9% penetration. Put another way, more people own iPods than DVRs, much less TiVos. There is still room for Apple to carve a niche, even if it is only 10% of the population.
You say TiVo is very easy to use. I've used it; yes it is easy, but compared to iTunes, not easy ENOUGH.
http://www.businessweek.com/investor/content/mar2