This is just how Dell operates; you can never know what the price will be for a given configuration on a given day until you go to the Web site that day and spec it out. If you don't want to play games with price, you don't buy a Dell.
Oh, I'm sure that purchasing a new model will indeed make more sense than a used one in two years. However, I don't believe that the battery has much to do with it, or creates "lock-in". All devices will have some maintenance cost, and the built-in battery increases those maintenance costs slightly, but it's hard to see a scenario where that increase would dramatically alter the economics of the overall situation.
used iPhone (2009) -- $300 cell service for two years -- $1500 Battery (physical part, typical retail) -- $30 Battery (Apple replacement service cost, minus typical part cost) -- $60
Conclusion: the extra costs of the battery replacement service represent about 3.2% of TCO for someone who wishes to buy a used iPhone. Anyone who decides not to purchase a used iPhone based on the built-in battery is an idiot.
you wont be able to get your work done. The oh's and aw's wont put the powerpoint on the screen
Kudos to you, sir! In a mere paragraph, you have single-handedly deconstructed the Apple anti-fanboy. Your biting satire demonstrates the three steps:
1. Find some obscure missing feature 2. Claim that absolutely everyone absolutely needs this feature 3. There is no step 3!
Others, mere trolls, might fixate on something such as lack of EDGE, or no keyboard, or the fact that the user cannot replace the microphone when it fails (!) -- but drawing in that perennial productivity-killer, the corporate mind-eating-monster itself, Microsoft Powerpoint, is a mark of true brilliance. After that, there is no more need for discussion, and I can go watch the skateboarding dog again.
Seriously, I can't understand why anyone is confused about this, or going on about lock-in.
Has anyone ever looked at promotional materials for an Apple device? They go on and on about how thin it is, how it has good battery life, and how it's designed by people with all these awards. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that a battery compartment has costs to these goals -- extra plastic for the housing means either a larger device or a smaller battery, and the compartment itself affects the device cosmetically. You'll notice that the iPhone has a much-admired solid metal back -- are you going to cut a big hole in that?
As for people throwing the device away, the fact is that most people don't own these devices for long enough to replace the battery in the first place. For instance, by the time my last cell phone's battery had died out, the mic didn't work too well either. The one before that, the buttons started flaking out before the battery did. Ironically, my old 3rd-gen iPod has lasted through about two cell phones, and the battery still works, though it doesn't last as long as it used to. It may help that a more sealed design keeps out dust and moisture.
Uh, maybe because you can't define a device exclusively by its limitations? Do you think a device with no limitations of any kind would fit in your pocket?
those R&D folks should be canned for making so many obvious mistakes and omissions on the released product
Actually, I wonder if many other product designers fall into a trap of non-omission, that is, a need to include everything. After a few days with an iPhone I can say, sure, there are things that aren't there, but the things that are included are very good. For instance, there is no MMS, but the SMS is great. I figure that every product design team has limited resources, and maybe it was better to have great SMS that doesn't support MMS than to have mediocre SMS with MMS included.
Of course every product is a trade-off, but every criticism of the iPhone I hear seems to be a lot of anger about missing features that I, personally, don't really have a use for. To me, it's better to have a great product that is incomplete in some ways than a product that is complete and poorly-done, but that's just me.
Well, maybe you're right, and maybe not. The article in question speculates that time and space may have existed before the Big Bang occurred. If that's the case, it may be that asking what's before the Big Bang is more like asking what's north of Alaska.
God, I hope not. With the iPhone, we already had to hear enough crap about how it was nothing new, how this feature or that was available already. If Apple were to make a tablet? Everyone would forget that Microsoft's attempt was an abject failure and accuse Apple of stealing.
The very concept "karma buffers" is the kind of idiocy I'd only expect from someone with a UID over a million, at least. Anyone who has been on this site for long enough to earn the karma bonus has figured out long ago that it's absurdly easy to get as much karma as you want. All you have to do is write a few posts cleverly designed to piss some people off, and put at the end "I'll probably get modded down for this..." Slashdot mods are almost universally shallow people (who else would care enough to bother passing out grades for posts?) and they'll rally around anyone who manages to convey an air of unfair persecution.
So lay off it, UbuntuDupe. Nobody cares about karma, and it's obnoxious to see stupid posts about it cluttering up our nice pretty message board.
And go ahead -- mod me down, if you really are as shallow as I think, but it's still an important point.
Nonsense. It shows that the interviewer cared about the guy's work and accomplishments, not just his alleged crimes. For someone who has been sitting in prison, going to court hearings and meetings with lawyers and talking about nothing else, it was probably nice to talk filesystems for a change. I imagine the interviewer was the first person he'd seen in months who knew what a filesystem even was.
My bet: it's not subsidized so the plans will be cheaper than all their other 2-year plans. It hasn't been announced yet so that it will be big news next Wednesday.
Not that I'd place a whole ton of money on that, mind you, but based on their current strategy of announcing last-minute improvements, it makes sense. It wouldn't make sense to hold off this long if it was going to be more expensive.
Let's stick with the iPod for a second, here. The iPod+iTunes combo maintains a database of all your music, with about two dozen fields for each song, including everything from "beats per minute" to "play count". Inside iTunes, you can make playlists based on any combination of these attributes. So "all rock songs rated (by me) as four stars or more, that I haven't played in the last month" is a trivial query to construct in iTunes and sync to the iPod. Live updates continue even on the iPod, so if you re-rate or play a song it would be added to, or bumped from, that list. Of course, inside iTunes you can manage these attributes quickly with keystroke commands.
Most people who own iPods have no clue that this sort of thing is possible, and you simply don't see it on the commercials (which are advertising, not how-to guides). And very little of this sort of in-depth management existed on the players that preceded the iPod.
As for the "real" web, I'm sure you've heard of the "mobile web"? The W3C even has a "Mobile Web Initiative". "Fake web" is a good term for it, since it sucks. Also, I'd appreciate it if you (and others) would stop implying that anyone who happens to like any particular Apple product is awed by the smooth styling or ad campaign. You can see I've got a sensible line of reasoning, even if you don't agree with it.
I'd like to know where the photographer got that "perfect" lens and infinite-resolution film to get that PERFECT image in the first place.
All sound formats, including analog ones, are lossy. The question isn't whether compression artifacts will be present, but whether and to what degree they are noticeable.
Even for the "best possible" (with our current technology) you'd need a way higher bitrate than CD, and then you truly are talking about impractical file sizes for consumer use.
the iPhone is catering to the "we chew your food for you" computing crowd
This is the point I disagree with, and that you haven't supported well. Since we've established that interfaces are important, I'm sure nobody will come in here and claim that it must be true because other, competing phones already have the iPhone's features. The point being that it's possible, in theory, for Apple to have made a phone with a better (not merely simpler) interface, and that such a phone could be more useful even for someone that's not stupid.
Whether they have actually done so is a question that will have to wait until the thing is released and smart people try to use it. I just don't see how you can argue that the iPhone's interface is only designed for idiots based on a handful of 30-second videos. But if we go back in time, and compare the iPod to the other portable music players that were available at the time of its release, I think it's fair to say that Apple has made substantial interface improvements in the past.
Oh, come on, try to see past the end of your nose. Leaving aside the GP's dumb choice of the command-line interface as an example of a crappy interface, one thing that Slashdotters need to get through their heads is that you can't fix a truly crappy interface simply by learning how to use it.
Apple makes better interfaces because they make interfaces that are more functional once you've learned to use them. Anyone can make an interface that simply takes less time to learn to use; you just add a button for every possible function.
Now, we can argue this-or-that about whether the iPod has the best interface out there, or whether someone thinks their Treo has an awesome interface, or whatever. But don't come out here and say that better interfaces only help idiots; that's just asking someone to inflict a car analogy on you.
I'll tell you what would hurt more than abandoning it -- working on it for another year and then releasing a bad game. Now, I'm a big fan of Will Wright's previous games, and I'm sure hoping that Spore will be great, but lots of great game designers have made really bad games in the past.
Remember Daikatana? It's possible to delay a bad game again and again, and still end up releasing a bad game. If EA can't make Spore into a good game, it would still be better to cancel it.
Nah... my speculation is that what's happening here is that they've developed all this grand vision stuff, and put it together... and it didn't work. Not that the technology wasn't there but that it didn't work as a game. With something that has such a large scope it's easy to end up with an excessively loose experience that feels more like using a spreadsheet than playing God.
At this point, they've thrown so much money into the project that they're falling victim to the sunk cost fallacy, trying to find a way to fit the pieces together so that it'll be worth releasing. It would almost certainly be better to abandon the project now and make something a little less ambitious.
Youth soccer is very, very popular in the US. For various reasons most kids stop playing in their early teens.
As for spending money on a soccer field versus playing in any open land, well, that's America for you; lots of money around means lots of money wasted.
Slashdot Mirror
This is just how Dell operates; you can never know what the price will be for a given configuration on a given day until you go to the Web site that day and spec it out. If you don't want to play games with price, you don't buy a Dell.
Oh, I'm sure that purchasing a new model will indeed make more sense than a used one in two years. However, I don't believe that the battery has much to do with it, or creates "lock-in". All devices will have some maintenance cost, and the built-in battery increases those maintenance costs slightly, but it's hard to see a scenario where that increase would dramatically alter the economics of the overall situation.
used iPhone (2009) -- $300
cell service for two years -- $1500
Battery (physical part, typical retail) -- $30
Battery (Apple replacement service cost, minus typical part cost) -- $60
Conclusion: the extra costs of the battery replacement service represent about 3.2% of TCO for someone who wishes to buy a used iPhone. Anyone who decides not to purchase a used iPhone based on the built-in battery is an idiot.
Maybe it's just you that gets lost.
you wont be able to get your work done. The oh's and aw's wont put the powerpoint on the screen
Kudos to you, sir! In a mere paragraph, you have single-handedly deconstructed the Apple anti-fanboy. Your biting satire demonstrates the three steps:
1. Find some obscure missing feature
2. Claim that absolutely everyone absolutely needs this feature
3. There is no step 3!
Others, mere trolls, might fixate on something such as lack of EDGE, or no keyboard, or the fact that the user cannot replace the microphone when it fails (!) -- but drawing in that perennial productivity-killer, the corporate mind-eating-monster itself, Microsoft Powerpoint, is a mark of true brilliance. After that, there is no more need for discussion, and I can go watch the skateboarding dog again.
Seriously, I can't understand why anyone is confused about this, or going on about lock-in.
Has anyone ever looked at promotional materials for an Apple device? They go on and on about how thin it is, how it has good battery life, and how it's designed by people with all these awards. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that a battery compartment has costs to these goals -- extra plastic for the housing means either a larger device or a smaller battery, and the compartment itself affects the device cosmetically. You'll notice that the iPhone has a much-admired solid metal back -- are you going to cut a big hole in that?
As for people throwing the device away, the fact is that most people don't own these devices for long enough to replace the battery in the first place. For instance, by the time my last cell phone's battery had died out, the mic didn't work too well either. The one before that, the buttons started flaking out before the battery did. Ironically, my old 3rd-gen iPod has lasted through about two cell phones, and the battery still works, though it doesn't last as long as it used to. It may help that a more sealed design keeps out dust and moisture.
I get about 200Kb/s over EDGE almost everywhere I go. Lots of people have DSL connections that aren't much faster than that.
I'm still in the market for that laptop that fits in my pocket, though.
Uh, maybe because you can't define a device exclusively by its limitations? Do you think a device with no limitations of any kind would fit in your pocket?
Another way to help ensure that your posts are taken seriously is to not make them too damn long.
So tell me, where did they bury Captain Spelling? The libary?
those R&D folks should be canned for making so many obvious mistakes and omissions on the released product
Actually, I wonder if many other product designers fall into a trap of non-omission, that is, a need to include everything. After a few days with an iPhone I can say, sure, there are things that aren't there, but the things that are included are very good. For instance, there is no MMS, but the SMS is great. I figure that every product design team has limited resources, and maybe it was better to have great SMS that doesn't support MMS than to have mediocre SMS with MMS included.
Of course every product is a trade-off, but every criticism of the iPhone I hear seems to be a lot of anger about missing features that I, personally, don't really have a use for. To me, it's better to have a great product that is incomplete in some ways than a product that is complete and poorly-done, but that's just me.
Big difference, unless you'd be happy with a big 'ol bag of iPhone parts.
Well, maybe you're right, and maybe not. The article in question speculates that time and space may have existed before the Big Bang occurred. If that's the case, it may be that asking what's before the Big Bang is more like asking what's north of Alaska.
God, I hope not. With the iPhone, we already had to hear enough crap about how it was nothing new, how this feature or that was available already. If Apple were to make a tablet? Everyone would forget that Microsoft's attempt was an abject failure and accuse Apple of stealing.
The very concept "karma buffers" is the kind of idiocy I'd only expect from someone with a UID over a million, at least. Anyone who has been on this site for long enough to earn the karma bonus has figured out long ago that it's absurdly easy to get as much karma as you want. All you have to do is write a few posts cleverly designed to piss some people off, and put at the end "I'll probably get modded down for this..." Slashdot mods are almost universally shallow people (who else would care enough to bother passing out grades for posts?) and they'll rally around anyone who manages to convey an air of unfair persecution.
So lay off it, UbuntuDupe. Nobody cares about karma, and it's obnoxious to see stupid posts about it cluttering up our nice pretty message board.
And go ahead -- mod me down, if you really are as shallow as I think, but it's still an important point.
Nonsense. It shows that the interviewer cared about the guy's work and accomplishments, not just his alleged crimes. For someone who has been sitting in prison, going to court hearings and meetings with lawyers and talking about nothing else, it was probably nice to talk filesystems for a change. I imagine the interviewer was the first person he'd seen in months who knew what a filesystem even was.
My bet: it's not subsidized so the plans will be cheaper than all their other 2-year plans. It hasn't been announced yet so that it will be big news next Wednesday.
Not that I'd place a whole ton of money on that, mind you, but based on their current strategy of announcing last-minute improvements, it makes sense. It wouldn't make sense to hold off this long if it was going to be more expensive.
and the iPod is along the same vein
Let's stick with the iPod for a second, here. The iPod+iTunes combo maintains a database of all your music, with about two dozen fields for each song, including everything from "beats per minute" to "play count". Inside iTunes, you can make playlists based on any combination of these attributes. So "all rock songs rated (by me) as four stars or more, that I haven't played in the last month" is a trivial query to construct in iTunes and sync to the iPod. Live updates continue even on the iPod, so if you re-rate or play a song it would be added to, or bumped from, that list. Of course, inside iTunes you can manage these attributes quickly with keystroke commands.
Most people who own iPods have no clue that this sort of thing is possible, and you simply don't see it on the commercials (which are advertising, not how-to guides). And very little of this sort of in-depth management existed on the players that preceded the iPod.
As for the "real" web, I'm sure you've heard of the "mobile web"? The W3C even has a "Mobile Web Initiative". "Fake web" is a good term for it, since it sucks. Also, I'd appreciate it if you (and others) would stop implying that anyone who happens to like any particular Apple product is awed by the smooth styling or ad campaign. You can see I've got a sensible line of reasoning, even if you don't agree with it.
I'd like to know where the photographer got that "perfect" lens and infinite-resolution film to get that PERFECT image in the first place.
All sound formats, including analog ones, are lossy. The question isn't whether compression artifacts will be present, but whether and to what degree they are noticeable.
Even for the "best possible" (with our current technology) you'd need a way higher bitrate than CD, and then you truly are talking about impractical file sizes for consumer use.
the iPhone is catering to the "we chew your food for you" computing crowd
This is the point I disagree with, and that you haven't supported well. Since we've established that interfaces are important, I'm sure nobody will come in here and claim that it must be true because other, competing phones already have the iPhone's features. The point being that it's possible, in theory, for Apple to have made a phone with a better (not merely simpler) interface, and that such a phone could be more useful even for someone that's not stupid.
Whether they have actually done so is a question that will have to wait until the thing is released and smart people try to use it. I just don't see how you can argue that the iPhone's interface is only designed for idiots based on a handful of 30-second videos. But if we go back in time, and compare the iPod to the other portable music players that were available at the time of its release, I think it's fair to say that Apple has made substantial interface improvements in the past.
But... but... the files aren't even watermarked! It's just a tag!
C'mon, people, this is the worst FUD since the Alexis de Tor-something Institute spit out that paper on how Linux was a copy of Minix.
Oh, come on, try to see past the end of your nose. Leaving aside the GP's dumb choice of the command-line interface as an example of a crappy interface, one thing that Slashdotters need to get through their heads is that you can't fix a truly crappy interface simply by learning how to use it.
Apple makes better interfaces because they make interfaces that are more functional once you've learned to use them. Anyone can make an interface that simply takes less time to learn to use; you just add a button for every possible function.
Now, we can argue this-or-that about whether the iPod has the best interface out there, or whether someone thinks their Treo has an awesome interface, or whatever. But don't come out here and say that better interfaces only help idiots; that's just asking someone to inflict a car analogy on you.
I'll tell you what would hurt more than abandoning it -- working on it for another year and then releasing a bad game. Now, I'm a big fan of Will Wright's previous games, and I'm sure hoping that Spore will be great, but lots of great game designers have made really bad games in the past.
Remember Daikatana? It's possible to delay a bad game again and again, and still end up releasing a bad game. If EA can't make Spore into a good game, it would still be better to cancel it.
Nah... my speculation is that what's happening here is that they've developed all this grand vision stuff, and put it together... and it didn't work. Not that the technology wasn't there but that it didn't work as a game. With something that has such a large scope it's easy to end up with an excessively loose experience that feels more like using a spreadsheet than playing God.
At this point, they've thrown so much money into the project that they're falling victim to the sunk cost fallacy, trying to find a way to fit the pieces together so that it'll be worth releasing. It would almost certainly be better to abandon the project now and make something a little less ambitious.
Youth soccer is very, very popular in the US. For various reasons most kids stop playing in their early teens.
As for spending money on a soccer field versus playing in any open land, well, that's America for you; lots of money around means lots of money wasted.