How is the competition "blowing them away", especially with turds like Windows 10?
If you mean Android, that has its issues too, but it doesn't really matter if it's still far and away better/cheaper than iPhones because Apple users will not abandon Apple, no matter what. Those absurdly-high price tags on their devices guarantee that Apple stuff is the best, after all, even if it means they're forced into buying ultra-expensive Beats wireless headphone to listen to music on them.
Oh please, MS is doing just fine. What are angry Windows 10 users going to do, switch to Macs where they can't even use regular headphones? And what are angry Apple users going to do, switch to Windows 10, where the interface is horrible and none of their software works?
Face it, the users on both platforms aren't going anywhere, no matter what those companies do.
You're completely forgetting about the placebo effect: Apple users will think the Beats Bluetooth headphones sound far better than any wired headphones ever made.
I'm looking forward to that day. It'll be funny as hell watching all the Apple users pay $$$ for Apple Compatible BT headphones and speakers. And I have zero doubt that they will.
Hopefully they won't wait too long before putting some special Apple-only DRM on their Bluetooth so that people are forced to buy special Apple-compatible BT PAs or adapters.
Nah, Apple's just being an idiot about this. But hey, they thought a trashcan and a bunch of desk warts was "professional", so at least they're being consistent in their blundering along the path of abject stupidity.
There's nothing stupid about this; it's a very smart move, and considering they're the most profitable company in the world, calling their management decisions "stupid" seems rather disconnected.
If you don't want wires, bluetooth is already there.
Yes, but the jack itself takes up space and costs money to build in. They can improve profits by leaving it out.
If anything wears out, it'll almost certainly be your relatively less expensive headphones / earbuds.
Why should Apple care about saving its users money when things wear out?
And your phone will almost certainly last longer, too.
Why would they care about that?
Look, it's simple: every good Apple user is going to buy a brand-new iPhone every 2 years, so that's as long as they need to last. Leaving out the headphone port is smart: it saves money and increases profits, and then increases profits even more because Apple users will then toss out their old headphones and buy brand-new wireless Beats headphones for hundreds of dollars, or perhaps a set of wired headphones that use a Lightning connector, which Apple makes money on the licenses of. If they wear out their lightning connector, they'll just buy a new iPhone (or if they break the cable side, they'll buy a new cable from the Apple store for the low price of $30...).
Reading people like you rant and rave about Apple's moves is rather entertaining. You clearly just don't get it.
building their devices at home rather than in child-labour suicide factories.
Why should they do that? Their customers aren't going to penalize them for exploiting child labor.
actually paying their fucking tax bills
Why should they do that? The government isn't going to force them to, or at the very worst give them a tiny slap on the wrist that doesn't come close to the amount of money they saved by not paying taxes.
I suspect shafting their own customer base certainly does take some courage.
It just takes a customer base that's perfectly happy to get shafted, and then begs for more .
Do they really expect these users to hook up an adapter to use Bluetooth, USB, or thunderbolt for audio out to professional equipment?
If they want to keep using Apple equipment, then yes.
Who do these users think they are anyway? Why do they think Apple gives two shits about their petty concerns? This move by Apple is smart: they can save money by eliminating parts, thus improving profit margins, and then they can make even more money by selling massively overpriced adapters (or Lightning licenses). How is this not a good move on their part?
Just watch, all these "Pro" users are going to bitch and complain about this, and then they're going to run out and spend a fortune on a new MacBook Pro and a horribly overpriced adapter.
Nothing wrong with separating fools from their money.
I still think you're exaggerating. "Most of North and South America?" There's a grand total of 2 countries in North America that are definitely better than Russia. Mexico isn't. Central America isn't (the most violent countries on the planet are in Central America), except Costa Rica. South America doesn't have many, perhaps Uruguay and Argentina and maybe Chile but that's about it. There aren't *that* many separate countries in the Caribbean (USVI and BVI and PR don't count), and much of Asia is very, very poor outside Japan, SK, and China.
50, probably. 100? I don't think so.
There's also the question of what you're going to do in any particular country: if you're not independently wealthy, you need to work for a living, and if you're a software engineer or something like that, moving to some random south Pacific island probably will leave you penniless because there's no jobs there. There's also the language problem: in more developed nations, lots of people speak English as a 2nd/3rd language so it's easier to jump in and start living there without having to learn the language first. That won't work in many nations, such as most Spanish-language nations in Latin America.
I actually kinda prefer the "blow it all up" scenario. Nothing's going to get better under Hillary, so maybe it's better to just blow it all up with Trump and maybe we'll get back to something good after rebuilding. It didn't take Germany long to rebuild into a major economic and technological power after losing in 1945 and being bombed to smithereens.
Why they're successful really isn't that hard to understand. Most of it comes down to marketing, along with their particular aesthetics, inertia/reputation, and people simply preferring the walled-garden experience where they're limited to whatever Apple tells them to do and want. For that last one, it's easy to understand: most people are followers, and like to be told what to do, especially if the person in authority seems to know what they're doing. Unlike Microsoft, for instance, with their absolutely horrid design and clunky and problematic software (how long did your last Windows 10 update take, and did it force itself on you at an inconvenient time?), Apple actually makes generally decent design decisions. if you don't mind have little freedom with their devices.
As for "some vague Apple cult", you do realize cults actually exist, don't you? You should take your own advice: "when a person does something you think dumb or wrong, assume that there's reasons and try to figure out what they are." So, following your advice, why exactly would someone join a cult like the Branch Davidians or the Jim Jones Kool-Aid Kult? There's real and underlying psychological reasons why this happens. And it's not just statistically insignificant numbers of people; look at Nazi Germany. As I said before, most people are followers, like to be told what to do, want to be part of something bigger than themselves. These same psychological flaws are exploited by marketers all the time, to get people to "feel good" about buying from some brand for emotional rather than logical reasons.
And it's not like any decision to buy Apple at any time is or was a bad decision. The first iPhone was a huge improvement over the then-current clunky WinCE phones and business-only Blackberrys. The early iPods had some great qualities (that scroll wheel was very easy to use) (the file system OTOH, was terrible, with its forced renaming of all files). But these days, in 2016, given the competition that exists for iPhones in particular, it simply isn't a good purchasing decision to buy one; there's many phones that are a much better value.
Here's an article about it. It seems the hurricane-force winds aren't that big a deal, probably because they're constantly moving across the planet, in one direction, rather then in a tight swirl the way they do with Earth-based hurricanes, and also because if you're living in a big balloon, it'll just move with the winds. The problem with hurricane-force winds here on Earth is that we're trying to stay in one place on the ground, fighting against the wind. The article even cites the wind as an advantage, because it'd give the colony a more normal-length day (a day on Venus is 243 Earth days due to its slow rotation).
But yeah, the "why bother?" question is foremost. I guess it'd be kinda cool for tourism, but I can't think of any other reason.
This is our destiny to live among the stars and not to be limited to this rock.
Says who?
Just like we went to the new world, we will populate the galaxy. It is our manifest destiny to do so.
What a bunch of jingoist crap.
Face it, we're never leaving this planet. Leave that to superior species. We'll be lucky if we're not extinct within a century or two. Most likely, some interstellar explorers will come across this planet in a few centuries and find the ruins of our civilization, and send some xenoarchaeologists to investigate and see where we went terribly wrong. They'll probably spend a short amount of time and then decide there's much more interesting and accomplished civilizations to investigate out there than us.
Maybe we've already been visited: we used to have a lot of eerie reports about UFOs. These days, they're all gone. Probably because they came, they saw, and they decided we were a waste of their time.
There's plenty of great parts of the US perhaps you didn't visit any of them.
The national parks are unparalleled, and totally fantastic. There's also a lot of excellent state parks.
The places with lots of people aren't anything too special for the most part. There's some fantastic museums in DC and NYC, and some interesting tourist stuff to see in different parts. But daily life for middle-class people in the US isn't that great, and is getting worse and worse.
Secondly, I actually want to challenge you on your philosophy.
I don't expect him to answer you, so I'll give the official libertarian answers for your questions.
You want an intentionally libertarian state, but how exactly do you intend to fix our issues?
What makes you think these issues are actual problems, and need to be fixed?
How do you think the free state project is going to provide care for the elderly and sick?
Their friends or family members can choose to pay for their care, or they can die.
What about education, who is going to fund that?
The people who want an education can buy it themselves.
Do you think have a rich elite at the very top of the poor is a good idea?
Yes. Survival of the fittest.
If I pay for your library, I should get to dictate what goes into it, correct? What's to stop me from stocking the whole thing with books that heavily favor my opinion of history and such? It would be a library, sure, but it wouldn't be very useful at all, and it's very unlikely there'd be any competition because you'd be too poor to run one either.
Yes. Nothing. Yes, it would be useful; it'd have information the library owner deems most useful.
Lastly, what about people who do need collective help?
Too bad.
What about the disabled or the unemployed?
Let them die. They aren't serving society any more, so they're a waste.
Under your philosophy, there only approach to help is to either beg for help on their knees, or die when they can't feed themselves. Is that really what you stand for?
Yes.
Note: I'm not personally advocating this, as I'm not a libertarian. I'm just telling you what his philosophy is. As I said, I don't expect him to actually answer you. Such people do believe in this amoral stuff, but they also are unable to defend it to regular people, so they tend to just hang around each other in an echo chamber.
Lastly, I'd also like to mention your movement. The Free Keene people as a group are not very nice
No, it's because they don't care. Just read all the political message forums. No one actually cares about what's morally right, they only care about their "team". Whatever the politicians on their team say or do is OK, but the same thing from the other team is wrong. The hypocrisy is beyond belief.
Long gone are the days when politicians did anything because it was morally right. I doubt such days ever really existed.
They absolutely did exist. George Washington could have been crowned king if he wanted, but he refused and insisted on having a republic form of government without any kind of monarch or dictator.
Not true. If I am audio chatting with a friend, I want packets delivered in milliseconds. But if I am running a torrent in the background, anytime in the next hour or so is good enough. It would be nice to be able to set my own preferences.
You can already do QOS on your own systems. It's easy to get a consumer-grade router and set it so that VoIP packets have the highest priority and BitTorrent packets the lowest.
However, that only works up to your connection to the ISP.
The problem is that your neighbors think their BitTorrent packets and Facebook packets are more important than your VoIP packets. What are you going to do about that?
The worst case scenario is that his buddy Putin spurns him and he decides to launch nukes in retaliation. This is the first election where I'm actually fearful for the country if a major party candidate would win the election.
When I express concerns about someone with Hillary's terrible medical and mental state having access to nuclear weapons, the Hillary supporters tell me that it isn't just up to one person to launch them, and there's nothing to worry about in case she has a serious mental lapse.
100 countries better than Russia? Russia definitely has a lot of problems like you mentioned, but I'd have a hard time listing 100 countries that would be better to live in. Western Europe doesn't have *that* many countries in it. I sincerely hope you're exaggerating here.
Personally, if I had to be exiled from the US, I'd want it to be in Norway, Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark, etc. Heck, even Iceland wouldn't be bad: it's a small, remote island with only about 250k people, perfect for exile!
But there's a lot of much-worse places than Russia to live. Somalia comes to mind, along with just about any place in the middle east, many parts of Africa (and of course northern Africa), Central America (in Honduras a man has a 1 in 9 chance of being murdered), etc.
Slashdot Mirror
How is the competition "blowing them away", especially with turds like Windows 10?
If you mean Android, that has its issues too, but it doesn't really matter if it's still far and away better/cheaper than iPhones because Apple users will not abandon Apple, no matter what. Those absurdly-high price tags on their devices guarantee that Apple stuff is the best, after all, even if it means they're forced into buying ultra-expensive Beats wireless headphone to listen to music on them.
Oh please, MS is doing just fine. What are angry Windows 10 users going to do, switch to Macs where they can't even use regular headphones? And what are angry Apple users going to do, switch to Windows 10, where the interface is horrible and none of their software works?
Face it, the users on both platforms aren't going anywhere, no matter what those companies do.
You're completely forgetting about the placebo effect: Apple users will think the Beats Bluetooth headphones sound far better than any wired headphones ever made.
Exactly.
If you can afford $$$$ for an Apple laptop, you can certainly afford multiple pairs of Beats wireless headphones for $$$ each.
Removing compatibility and functionality is not 'innovation' nor is it good design.
Yes, it is, when it makes your company more profit.
people need to be able to use their headphones longer than 5 hours without charging.
No, they don't *need* any such thing. Apple users will happily change their expectations to match Apple's prescribed use-cases.
I'm looking forward to that day. It'll be funny as hell watching all the Apple users pay $$$ for Apple Compatible BT headphones and speakers. And I have zero doubt that they will.
Hopefully they won't wait too long before putting some special Apple-only DRM on their Bluetooth so that people are forced to buy special Apple-compatible BT PAs or adapters.
Nothing's being forced on anyone. If you don't like the new headphone-jack-less iDevices, don't buy one.
The thing is, this isn't going to hurt their sales one iota, and will increase profitability, so why shouldn't they do it?
It has cost them, just like this will.
Judging by their financial reports, it doesn't look like it's cost them at all.
Nah, Apple's just being an idiot about this. But hey, they thought a trashcan and a bunch of desk warts was "professional", so at least they're being consistent in their blundering along the path of abject stupidity.
There's nothing stupid about this; it's a very smart move, and considering they're the most profitable company in the world, calling their management decisions "stupid" seems rather disconnected.
If you don't want wires, bluetooth is already there.
Yes, but the jack itself takes up space and costs money to build in. They can improve profits by leaving it out.
If anything wears out, it'll almost certainly be your relatively less expensive headphones / earbuds.
Why should Apple care about saving its users money when things wear out?
And your phone will almost certainly last longer, too.
Why would they care about that?
Look, it's simple: every good Apple user is going to buy a brand-new iPhone every 2 years, so that's as long as they need to last. Leaving out the headphone port is smart: it saves money and increases profits, and then increases profits even more because Apple users will then toss out their old headphones and buy brand-new wireless Beats headphones for hundreds of dollars, or perhaps a set of wired headphones that use a Lightning connector, which Apple makes money on the licenses of. If they wear out their lightning connector, they'll just buy a new iPhone (or if they break the cable side, they'll buy a new cable from the Apple store for the low price of $30...).
Reading people like you rant and rave about Apple's moves is rather entertaining. You clearly just don't get it.
building their devices at home rather than in child-labour suicide factories.
Why should they do that? Their customers aren't going to penalize them for exploiting child labor.
actually paying their fucking tax bills
Why should they do that? The government isn't going to force them to, or at the very worst give them a tiny slap on the wrist that doesn't come close to the amount of money they saved by not paying taxes.
I suspect shafting their own customer base certainly does take some courage.
It just takes a customer base that's perfectly happy to get shafted, and then begs for more
.
Do they really expect these users to hook up an adapter to use Bluetooth, USB, or thunderbolt for audio out to professional equipment?
If they want to keep using Apple equipment, then yes.
Who do these users think they are anyway? Why do they think Apple gives two shits about their petty concerns? This move by Apple is smart: they can save money by eliminating parts, thus improving profit margins, and then they can make even more money by selling massively overpriced adapters (or Lightning licenses). How is this not a good move on their part?
Just watch, all these "Pro" users are going to bitch and complain about this, and then they're going to run out and spend a fortune on a new MacBook Pro and a horribly overpriced adapter.
Nothing wrong with separating fools from their money.
I still think you're exaggerating. "Most of North and South America?" There's a grand total of 2 countries in North America that are definitely better than Russia. Mexico isn't. Central America isn't (the most violent countries on the planet are in Central America), except Costa Rica. South America doesn't have many, perhaps Uruguay and Argentina and maybe Chile but that's about it. There aren't *that* many separate countries in the Caribbean (USVI and BVI and PR don't count), and much of Asia is very, very poor outside Japan, SK, and China.
50, probably. 100? I don't think so.
There's also the question of what you're going to do in any particular country: if you're not independently wealthy, you need to work for a living, and if you're a software engineer or something like that, moving to some random south Pacific island probably will leave you penniless because there's no jobs there. There's also the language problem: in more developed nations, lots of people speak English as a 2nd/3rd language so it's easier to jump in and start living there without having to learn the language first. That won't work in many nations, such as most Spanish-language nations in Latin America.
I actually kinda prefer the "blow it all up" scenario. Nothing's going to get better under Hillary, so maybe it's better to just blow it all up with Trump and maybe we'll get back to something good after rebuilding. It didn't take Germany long to rebuild into a major economic and technological power after losing in 1945 and being bombed to smithereens.
Why they're successful really isn't that hard to understand. Most of it comes down to marketing, along with their particular aesthetics, inertia/reputation, and people simply preferring the walled-garden experience where they're limited to whatever Apple tells them to do and want. For that last one, it's easy to understand: most people are followers, and like to be told what to do, especially if the person in authority seems to know what they're doing. Unlike Microsoft, for instance, with their absolutely horrid design and clunky and problematic software (how long did your last Windows 10 update take, and did it force itself on you at an inconvenient time?), Apple actually makes generally decent design decisions. if you don't mind have little freedom with their devices.
As for "some vague Apple cult", you do realize cults actually exist, don't you? You should take your own advice: "when a person does something you think dumb or wrong, assume that there's reasons and try to figure out what they are." So, following your advice, why exactly would someone join a cult like the Branch Davidians or the Jim Jones Kool-Aid Kult? There's real and underlying psychological reasons why this happens. And it's not just statistically insignificant numbers of people; look at Nazi Germany. As I said before, most people are followers, like to be told what to do, want to be part of something bigger than themselves. These same psychological flaws are exploited by marketers all the time, to get people to "feel good" about buying from some brand for emotional rather than logical reasons.
And it's not like any decision to buy Apple at any time is or was a bad decision. The first iPhone was a huge improvement over the then-current clunky WinCE phones and business-only Blackberrys. The early iPods had some great qualities (that scroll wheel was very easy to use) (the file system OTOH, was terrible, with its forced renaming of all files). But these days, in 2016, given the competition that exists for iPhones in particular, it simply isn't a good purchasing decision to buy one; there's many phones that are a much better value.
Here's an article about it. It seems the hurricane-force winds aren't that big a deal, probably because they're constantly moving across the planet, in one direction, rather then in a tight swirl the way they do with Earth-based hurricanes, and also because if you're living in a big balloon, it'll just move with the winds. The problem with hurricane-force winds here on Earth is that we're trying to stay in one place on the ground, fighting against the wind. The article even cites the wind as an advantage, because it'd give the colony a more normal-length day (a day on Venus is 243 Earth days due to its slow rotation).
But yeah, the "why bother?" question is foremost. I guess it'd be kinda cool for tourism, but I can't think of any other reason.
This is our destiny to live among the stars and not to be limited to this rock.
Says who?
Just like we went to the new world, we will populate the galaxy. It is our manifest destiny to do so.
What a bunch of jingoist crap.
Face it, we're never leaving this planet. Leave that to superior species. We'll be lucky if we're not extinct within a century or two. Most likely, some interstellar explorers will come across this planet in a few centuries and find the ruins of our civilization, and send some xenoarchaeologists to investigate and see where we went terribly wrong. They'll probably spend a short amount of time and then decide there's much more interesting and accomplished civilizations to investigate out there than us.
Maybe we've already been visited: we used to have a lot of eerie reports about UFOs. These days, they're all gone. Probably because they came, they saw, and they decided we were a waste of their time.
Yes, but it's quite typical of the quality of Slashdot postings these days.
There's plenty of great parts of the US perhaps you didn't visit any of them.
The national parks are unparalleled, and totally fantastic. There's also a lot of excellent state parks.
The places with lots of people aren't anything too special for the most part. There's some fantastic museums in DC and NYC, and some interesting tourist stuff to see in different parts. But daily life for middle-class people in the US isn't that great, and is getting worse and worse.
Secondly, I actually want to challenge you on your philosophy.
I don't expect him to answer you, so I'll give the official libertarian answers for your questions.
You want an intentionally libertarian state, but how exactly do you intend to fix our issues?
What makes you think these issues are actual problems, and need to be fixed?
How do you think the free state project is going to provide care for the elderly and sick?
Their friends or family members can choose to pay for their care, or they can die.
What about education, who is going to fund that?
The people who want an education can buy it themselves.
Do you think have a rich elite at the very top of the poor is a good idea?
Yes. Survival of the fittest.
If I pay for your library, I should get to dictate what goes into it, correct? What's to stop me from stocking the whole thing with books that heavily favor my opinion of history and such? It would be a library, sure, but it wouldn't be very useful at all, and it's very unlikely there'd be any competition because you'd be too poor to run one either.
Yes. Nothing. Yes, it would be useful; it'd have information the library owner deems most useful.
Lastly, what about people who do need collective help?
Too bad.
What about the disabled or the unemployed?
Let them die. They aren't serving society any more, so they're a waste.
Under your philosophy, there only approach to help is to either beg for help on their knees, or die when they can't feed themselves. Is that really what you stand for?
Yes.
Note: I'm not personally advocating this, as I'm not a libertarian. I'm just telling you what his philosophy is. As I said, I don't expect him to actually answer you. Such people do believe in this amoral stuff, but they also are unable to defend it to regular people, so they tend to just hang around each other in an echo chamber.
Lastly, I'd also like to mention your movement. The Free Keene people as a group are not very nice
This doesn't surprise me much.
No, it's because they don't care. Just read all the political message forums. No one actually cares about what's morally right, they only care about their "team". Whatever the politicians on their team say or do is OK, but the same thing from the other team is wrong. The hypocrisy is beyond belief.
Long gone are the days when politicians did anything because it was morally right. I doubt such days ever really existed.
They absolutely did exist. George Washington could have been crowned king if he wanted, but he refused and insisted on having a republic form of government without any kind of monarch or dictator.
Not true. If I am audio chatting with a friend, I want packets delivered in milliseconds. But if I am running a torrent in the background, anytime in the next hour or so is good enough. It would be nice to be able to set my own preferences.
You can already do QOS on your own systems. It's easy to get a consumer-grade router and set it so that VoIP packets have the highest priority and BitTorrent packets the lowest.
However, that only works up to your connection to the ISP.
The problem is that your neighbors think their BitTorrent packets and Facebook packets are more important than your VoIP packets. What are you going to do about that?
The worst case scenario is that his buddy Putin spurns him and he decides to launch nukes in retaliation. This is the first election where I'm actually fearful for the country if a major party candidate would win the election.
When I express concerns about someone with Hillary's terrible medical and mental state having access to nuclear weapons, the Hillary supporters tell me that it isn't just up to one person to launch them, and there's nothing to worry about in case she has a serious mental lapse.
So which is it?
100 countries better than Russia? Russia definitely has a lot of problems like you mentioned, but I'd have a hard time listing 100 countries that would be better to live in. Western Europe doesn't have *that* many countries in it. I sincerely hope you're exaggerating here.
Personally, if I had to be exiled from the US, I'd want it to be in Norway, Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark, etc. Heck, even Iceland wouldn't be bad: it's a small, remote island with only about 250k people, perfect for exile!
But there's a lot of much-worse places than Russia to live. Somalia comes to mind, along with just about any place in the middle east, many parts of Africa (and of course northern Africa), Central America (in Honduras a man has a 1 in 9 chance of being murdered), etc.