Not everyone gets to go to a college where they "really" have fun and make friends. Some save money by going to community college during the best party years and then have to get serious when they finally go to a real school.
Some just never make a connection in college. I went to a big state school and had a great time, no regrets really. But thirty years later I have a dozen facebook friends from HS and only 1 from college, and that one is pretty tenuous.
The interface to the iPhone is via iTunes. I tried to put a pdf on my wife's iPhone for her because she couldn't figure out how and I couldn't figure out how to do it via iTunes either. Finally, a friend with an iPhone told me the easiest way to do it is to email it and use the phone to grab the emailed file. Doesn't Apple think that people use their phones for anything but listening to music and looking at photos? Oh yeah, there are all sorts of apps, but how does anyone who works for a living get business related stuff on and off the phone?
This was one of the "features" of iTunes that Apple put in place to placate the piracy crazed record labels. Dragging and dropping MP3s from computer to iPod and back again through the file system was regarded as a piracy enabler and the record labels wanted to at least keep it from being so easy that any 13 year old noob could do it. That is, after all, their target market. Apple went one step farther and extended that process to every kind of file on the i[Pod|Phone|Pad]. Then as the iTunes market matured they've been relaxing those restrictions just a bit.
I spose the other tablet manufacturers need to do a better job of marketing. Archos has had several 7" and 10" tablets in the $200 to $300 range, and the B&N Nook has been out for a year at a similar price point (and I suspect the Fire is a direct response to the Nook)...
I think all the Archos products got bad reviews, in the "wrong touchscreen technology, slow processor, last years OS and no Apps store" level. The Fire doesn't have all those strikes against it. The Nook Color needs to be hacked to be a full featured tablet and that shuts a lot of the market out.
The most unlikely part of the planted explosives theory is that the demolition charges could've survived the plane crashes and ensuing fires without any malfunctions. Remote controlled, wired or wireless demolition charges don't do very well in really hot fires. The wires lose their insulation and short. The explosives themselves melt and/or catch fire. If there are wireless receivers involved they are susceptible to all kinds of fire damage and radio transmission interference problems. And videos of the collapse of WTC 1 and 2 show very clearly that the collapses started exactly where the airplanes struck, so the hijackers would have to have aimed exactly where those indestructible demolition charges were planted, on different floors on each tower, for some reason. It just strains credulity way too far.
Maybe Apple just hasn't looked at the home theater market that much, beyond trying to build an iTunes store for it through the AppleTV.
But technical challenges? Really? If a mouse and keyboard vendor like Logitech can make a halfway decent IR remote like the Harmony a big league player like Apple can do it better. I suppose the big challenge is making an XBox360 or PS3 work too? Really mind blowing challenges there I'm sure.
I think you're dead wrong about the user interface. Apple could improve on the general home theater experience in many ways and make a huge impact on the market. Imagine if they make a TV user interface that'll control an entire home theater setup, one that'll put the Logitech Harmony and the equivalent to shame. Apple is definitely capable of doing this, and it's a market that is looking for a better solution. This is Apple's kind of niche. It would also blow the Google TV out of the water, since a complete home theater controller that also happens to bundle a movie and TV show on-demand service would be several steps beyond Google TV.
Apple also has the money and visibility to make deals with the ISPs to allow their content to flow at full speed, or to lobby Congress for neutrality laws to ensure that it does. Hulu and Netflix don't have that kind of visibility.
I friended my daughter as soon as I joined. She is 13 and didn't make a big deal about it. I also friended two of her old friends just because I was a newbie and hadn't put much thought into it. It's very obvious to me which friends don't have their parents on facebook. They're the ones that don't think twice about what dumb or obscene things they post.
If I knew their parents better I'd drag them to a computer and walk them through the crap their kids are spewing on facebook.
If future employers are really going to look at your facebook page using some advanced data mining app that finds all the dirt about you the best thing you can do is act like everything that goes there will be read by your parents.
The problem is that Watchmen was a comic book story for adults, more or less. But adults expect a comic book movie to be a comic book movie and Watchmen was an anti-hero story with a high level of complexity.
If it had been promoted as a serious movie it might've sold a bit better, but in the end it was promoted as a comic book. My 8 year old got a Watchmen poster in some sort of promotional giveaway. Has he ever seen it? Not yet. I was a bit intrigued about it myself based on the cast and the promise of some good old fashioned nudity but I waited until it hit Redbox.
The iMac I bought 2 years ago had trial versions of their iWork suite (Pages, Keynote, Numbers). I think this meets the dictionary definition of bloatware, though not nearly as annoying as a Windows box with a web browser loaded with 16 useless toolbars and a nagging virus program subscription.
Is exactly the same battle as Apple vs. Microsoft a decade ago. And Apple will lose again for the same reasons: Inflated price, locked platform, and developer exclusion. Woz sees the obvious. Jobs apparently does not.
I keep hearing this argument that it is the same, and I don't see it at all. First and foremost Apple is not charging premium prices. The iPhone 4 retails for the same price as the comparable Android phones. OK, instead giving you a micro SD slot for expansion capacity they've given you a solid Gorilla glass and stainless steel phone body. It's a trade-off. At the $99 level they're selling the iPhone 3GS which is very competitive if not better on specs than what you can get elsewhere.
This is nothing like the Mac vs. PC market in sales price.
The applications market is again different. Apple still has the dominant applications market position and the easiest one to navigate. Android has great potential but it isn't winning the race yet and may never get there.
I can see a family with two cars getting one all-electric vehicle. Probably 90% of the driving my family does is within the round-trip range of an EV. But right now I'm not seeing a really mass-market EV. An EV should be cheaper to manufacture than a gasoline powered car if you compare the complexities of the drive systems. EV: Battery, electric motor, differential and final drive system. Gasoline engine: Battery, ignition system, fuel tank, fuel pumps, fuel injectors, air intake, air filter, intake manifold, pistons, crankshaft, valves, cam shaft, coolant pumps, radiator, coolant thermometer, exhaust pipes, EGR valves, muffler, catalytic converter, flywheel, clutch, transmission, differential and final drives. The number of moving parts in a gasoline engine that need lubrication is huge. In an electric motor there is one. Lithium batteries are somewhat exotic and expensive but so are the precious metals they put in your catalytic converter.
I think the manufacturers are happier selling you a hybrid vehicle with two engine systems and charging you more than a gasoline powered car instead of selling you an all electric vehicle and charging less. Or they'd rather make a pure EV that is so exotic they can charge Porsche prices for it, like the Tesla. The only possible exception coming soon is the Nissan Leaf. It'll be interesting to see how Nissan does with it.
That looks like vaporware at the moment. Or maybe my Google-fu in lacking but the search results from google all seem to be variations on a product press release or leak from late August promising the battery would be available "real soon now, September for sure". And here it is almost November and it's not out. Here in the US I doubt it'll even work as the US market Galaxy variants all seem to have a case shape tweak to allow the carriers to dominate the accessory market for their phones.
But will Apple allow me to install OSX on Dell PCs?
Even better, can I sell PC's with OSX on them and call them Apple compatibles?
Apple is evil
Apple is a hardware company. If hacking leads to more iPad sales with a minimal bump in overhead cost to cover iPads bricked under warranty Apple is all for it. If that bump in overhead looks too large they might oppose it.
But they won't sell the OS at retail stores because they're a hardware company, selling a product that partially differentiates itself from the commodity PC market with a different and perhaps better OS. Don't like it? Buy an OS you can buy retail or download for free.
Another use is for the business traveler stuck with a locked-down corporate laptop. After hours in the hotel room, why haul out the corporate laptop and deal with the limitations the IT department has imposed on it? Pack another 1 lb. device to play your movies, games and music on, and browse all the sketchy websites you want.
They are computers for folks that don't do "general purpose" computing. Folks that want to browse some websites, check their facebook and e-mail, carry their photos around and play some games. All without waiting for a general purpose OS to boot or worrying about a virus protection subscription. If a general purpose computer is for folks aged 13-70, iPad like tablets are for the 9-90 year olds.
They're also a good secondary device the rest of us for low intensity after hours computing like the above mentioned activities. The size and screen resolution make them better than smartphones for this, and the instant-on Android/iOS applications environment make them better than netbooks for this.
More realistically, an iPhone owner can comfortably say that he has the tools (iTunes) to restore his phone (apps, data and all) from any exploit that may be used on it, back at home.
How does that compare to an exploited Android phone? Do they come with a backup software package or do you have to rely on your local phone store to restore it, with or without your apps and data. I'm not being facetious here. As an iPhone/Android fencesitter with 3 months left on my phone contract I'm genuinely curious.
I can walk into a Best Buy today and easily find an employee that will tell me the same thing about their computers. Hell, they come with a 90 day trial version of McAfee, right? What more do you need?
What about Von Neumann Probes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_spacecraft? Why haven't we even seen any of them? They would hypothetically proliferate much faster than giant colony ships and should also be here by now.
Another huge factor is the quality of the glass. The lowest-noise, highest-contrast, most-linear, biggest Dmax sensor in the world isn't going to give you good results if it has a cheap-o plastic lens in front of it. (Unless you're looking for that effect, like you get with a Lens Baby.)
Futhermore, designing and manufacturing high-quality lenses is really quite difficult. Putting high-quality glass in a phone-sized device is, currently at least, impossible.
To make things worse a lens made for a smaller sensor needs to be better than the lens made for your DSLR. If you're trying to get the same resolving power out of the lens
made for a sensor that is 4 mm x 5 mm, the manufacturing tolerances need to be 4x better than the lens made for a 16mm x 20mm sensor. With a cheap lens on a tiny sensor
you get the worst of both technologies.
Exactly. This time last year I spent a few weeks travelling with some of my employers big time road warriors. Along with their corporate laptops they all carried netbooks. The netbooks gave them a personal e-mail, media and lightweight web browsing device that they could use in their off hours without having to worry about infecting the corporate machines with viruses or having the corporate snooping brigade finding out what they did in their off hours.
The iPad is a perfect replacement for that netbook market niche. It's a better media and casual browsing machine due to the instant on nature of the OS and the "walled garden" that protects you from web site shenanigans.
How much of the long gone and best forgotten CDE was Sun's fault? The horrible dull blue on dull gray theme seems to tie into their hardware offerings and the standard Java UI look and feel so I've always given them a large share of the blame for it. I hated CDE. Dullest windowing environment ever, and not at all free.
Sure, the camera companies will build wi-fi in their cameras at some point. But do you want to buy a new $1000 camera body just to get one with a $25 wi-fi chipset built-in? That's how the camera companies will solve this problem.
Is the JPEG limitation in this a function of how the Eye-fi firmware works or something that can be fixed in the Python script?
I'll agree that the war isn't over yet in the DSLR world, but in the point&shoot world there really is no point in going any higher than they have achieved. If you shove 12 megapixels into a sensor that is 1/4 the surface area of an APS-C sensor you should really couple it with a lens system that is 4 times more precise than the one used on your APS-C camera to get equivalent resolution. But the camera makers aren't doing anything like that. They're putting out junk lenses and big sensors because that's what marketing tells them to do.
Aside from the well designed "cool factor" of the Apple Store the other thing it has going for it is working products and helpful sales people. When you go to a Best Buy type store you're lucky if half the computers are even working. Most of them are screen locked and even if you get someone to unlock it all you'll get to see is the bundled software that comes with it. At the Apple Store the machines are unlocked and they have a lot of extra software loaded on them. You want to see Photoshop CS4 in action on a high end desktop? You can do that at an Apple store. You can't at Best Buy. Want to test out some headphones on the MP3 players? Good luck with that at the Buy More.
Microsoft might restore their image somewhat with a store that showplaces their product in as good a way as the Apple store showplaces Macs and iPods. The Best Buys of the world are all in a race to the bottom of the "low bottom line" market and this isn't a good environment to show off the products.
A better option might be VirtualBox and similar virtual machine environments. Run Windows with the 1 or 2 applications you can't make work in Linux, saving the 3rd application slot for a virtualized Linux that runs everything else you want. This way you're not limited to just whatever web apps you can find.
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Not everyone gets to go to a college where they "really" have fun and make friends. Some save money by going to community college during the best party years and then have to get serious when they finally go to a real school.
Some just never make a connection in college. I went to a big state school and had a great time, no regrets really. But thirty years later I have a dozen facebook friends from HS and only 1 from college, and that one is pretty tenuous.
The interface to the iPhone is via iTunes. I tried to put a pdf on my wife's iPhone for her because she couldn't figure out how and I couldn't figure out how to do it via iTunes either. Finally, a friend with an iPhone told me the easiest way to do it is to email it and use the phone to grab the emailed file. Doesn't Apple think that people use their phones for anything but listening to music and looking at photos? Oh yeah, there are all sorts of apps, but how does anyone who works for a living get business related stuff on and off the phone?
This was one of the "features" of iTunes that Apple put in place to placate the piracy crazed record labels. Dragging and dropping MP3s from computer to iPod and back again through the file system was regarded as a piracy enabler and the record labels wanted to at least keep it from being so easy that any 13 year old noob could do it. That is, after all, their target market. Apple went one step farther and extended that process to every kind of file on the i[Pod|Phone|Pad]. Then as the iTunes market matured they've been relaxing those restrictions just a bit.
I spose the other tablet manufacturers need to do a better job of marketing. Archos has had several 7" and 10" tablets in the $200 to $300 range, and the B&N Nook has been out for a year at a similar price point (and I suspect the Fire is a direct response to the Nook)...
I think all the Archos products got bad reviews, in the "wrong touchscreen technology, slow processor, last years OS and no Apps store" level. The Fire doesn't have all those strikes against it. The Nook Color needs to be hacked to be a full featured tablet and that shuts a lot of the market out.
The most unlikely part of the planted explosives theory is that the demolition charges could've survived the plane crashes and ensuing fires without any malfunctions. Remote controlled, wired or wireless demolition charges don't do very well in really hot fires. The wires lose their insulation and short. The explosives themselves melt and/or catch fire. If there are wireless receivers involved they are susceptible to all kinds of fire damage and radio transmission interference problems. And videos of the collapse of WTC 1 and 2 show very clearly that the collapses started exactly where the airplanes struck, so the hijackers would have to have aimed exactly where those indestructible demolition charges were planted, on different floors on each tower, for some reason. It just strains credulity way too far.
Maybe Apple just hasn't looked at the home theater market that much, beyond trying to build an iTunes store for it through the AppleTV.
But technical challenges? Really? If a mouse and keyboard vendor like Logitech can make a halfway decent IR remote like the Harmony a big league player like Apple can do it better. I suppose the big challenge is making an XBox360 or PS3 work too? Really mind blowing challenges there I'm sure.
I think you're dead wrong about the user interface. Apple could improve on the general home theater experience in many ways and make a huge impact on the market. Imagine if they make a TV user interface that'll control an entire home theater setup, one that'll put the Logitech Harmony and the equivalent to shame. Apple is definitely capable of doing this, and it's a market that is looking for a better solution. This is Apple's kind of niche. It would also blow the Google TV out of the water, since a complete home theater controller that also happens to bundle a movie and TV show on-demand service would be several steps beyond Google TV.
Apple also has the money and visibility to make deals with the ISPs to allow their content to flow at full speed, or to lobby Congress for neutrality laws to ensure that it does. Hulu and Netflix don't have that kind of visibility.
And Apple can
I friended my daughter as soon as I joined. She is 13 and didn't make a big deal about it. I also friended two of her old friends just because I was a newbie and hadn't put much thought into it. It's very obvious to me which friends don't have their parents on facebook. They're the ones that don't think twice about what dumb or obscene things they post.
If I knew their parents better I'd drag them to a computer and walk them through the crap their kids are spewing on facebook.
If future employers are really going to look at your facebook page using some advanced data mining app that finds all the dirt about you the best thing you can do is act like everything that goes there will be read by your parents.
The problem is that Watchmen was a comic book story for adults, more or less. But adults expect a comic book movie to be a comic book movie and Watchmen was an anti-hero story with a high level of complexity.
If it had been promoted as a serious movie it might've sold a bit better, but in the end it was promoted as a comic book. My 8 year old got a Watchmen poster in some sort of promotional giveaway. Has he ever seen it? Not yet. I was a bit intrigued about it myself based on the cast and the promise of some good old fashioned nudity but I waited until it hit Redbox.
I thought it was...OK.
The iMac I bought 2 years ago had trial versions of their iWork suite (Pages, Keynote, Numbers). I think this meets the dictionary definition of bloatware, though not nearly as annoying as a Windows box with a web browser loaded with 16 useless toolbars and a nagging virus program subscription.
I keep hearing this argument that it is the same, and I don't see it at all. First and foremost Apple is not charging premium prices. The iPhone 4 retails for the same price as the comparable Android phones. OK, instead giving you a micro SD slot for expansion capacity they've given you a solid Gorilla glass and stainless steel phone body. It's a trade-off. At the $99 level they're selling the iPhone 3GS which is very competitive if not better on specs than what you can get elsewhere.
This is nothing like the Mac vs. PC market in sales price.
The applications market is again different. Apple still has the dominant applications market position and the easiest one to navigate. Android has great potential but it isn't winning the race yet and may never get there.
I can see a family with two cars getting one all-electric vehicle. Probably 90% of the driving my family does is within the round-trip range of an EV. But right now I'm not seeing a really mass-market EV. An EV should be cheaper to manufacture than a gasoline powered car if you compare the complexities of the drive systems. EV: Battery, electric motor, differential and final drive system. Gasoline engine: Battery, ignition system, fuel tank, fuel pumps, fuel injectors, air intake, air filter, intake manifold, pistons, crankshaft, valves, cam shaft, coolant pumps, radiator, coolant thermometer, exhaust pipes, EGR valves, muffler, catalytic converter, flywheel, clutch, transmission, differential and final drives. The number of moving parts in a gasoline engine that need lubrication is huge. In an electric motor there is one. Lithium batteries are somewhat exotic and expensive but so are the precious metals they put in your catalytic converter.
I think the manufacturers are happier selling you a hybrid vehicle with two engine systems and charging you more than a gasoline powered car instead of selling you an all electric vehicle and charging less. Or they'd rather make a pure EV that is so exotic they can charge Porsche prices for it, like the Tesla. The only possible exception coming soon is the Nissan Leaf. It'll be interesting to see how Nissan does with it.
That looks like vaporware at the moment. Or maybe my Google-fu in lacking but the search results from google all seem to be variations on a product press release or leak from late August promising the battery would be available "real soon now, September for sure". And here it is almost November and it's not out. Here in the US I doubt it'll even work as the US market Galaxy variants all seem to have a case shape tweak to allow the carriers to dominate the accessory market for their phones.
Apple is a hardware company. If hacking leads to more iPad sales with a minimal bump in overhead cost to cover iPads bricked under warranty Apple is all for it. If that bump in overhead looks too large they might oppose it. But they won't sell the OS at retail stores because they're a hardware company, selling a product that partially differentiates itself from the commodity PC market with a different and perhaps better OS. Don't like it? Buy an OS you can buy retail or download for free.
Another use is for the business traveler stuck with a locked-down corporate laptop. After hours in the hotel room, why haul out the corporate laptop and deal with the limitations the IT department has imposed on it? Pack another 1 lb. device to play your movies, games and music on, and browse all the sketchy websites you want.
They are computers for folks that don't do "general purpose" computing. Folks that want to browse some websites, check their facebook and e-mail, carry their photos around and play some games. All without waiting for a general purpose OS to boot or worrying about a virus protection subscription. If a general purpose computer is for folks aged 13-70, iPad like tablets are for the 9-90 year olds.
They're also a good secondary device the rest of us for low intensity after hours computing like the above mentioned activities. The size and screen resolution make them better than smartphones for this, and the instant-on Android/iOS applications environment make them better than netbooks for this.
More realistically, an iPhone owner can comfortably say that he has the tools (iTunes) to restore his phone (apps, data and all) from any exploit that may be used on it, back at home.
How does that compare to an exploited Android phone? Do they come with a backup software package or do you have to rely on your local phone store to restore it, with or without your apps and data. I'm not being facetious here. As an iPhone/Android fencesitter with 3 months left on my phone contract I'm genuinely curious.
I can walk into a Best Buy today and easily find an employee that will tell me the same thing about their computers. Hell, they come with a 90 day trial version of McAfee, right?
What more do you need?
What about Von Neumann Probes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_spacecraft? Why haven't we even seen any of them? They would hypothetically proliferate much faster than giant colony ships and should also be here by now.
To make things worse a lens made for a smaller sensor needs to be better than the lens made for your DSLR. If you're trying to get the same resolving power out of the lens made for a sensor that is 4 mm x 5 mm, the manufacturing tolerances need to be 4x better than the lens made for a 16mm x 20mm sensor. With a cheap lens on a tiny sensor you get the worst of both technologies.
Exactly. This time last year I spent a few weeks travelling with some of my employers big time road warriors. Along with their corporate laptops they all carried netbooks. The netbooks gave them a personal e-mail, media and lightweight web browsing device that they could use in their off hours without having to worry about infecting the corporate machines with viruses or having the corporate snooping brigade finding out what they did in their off hours.
The iPad is a perfect replacement for that netbook market niche. It's a better media and casual browsing machine due to the instant on nature of the OS and the "walled garden" that protects you from web site shenanigans.
How much of the long gone and best forgotten CDE was Sun's fault? The horrible dull blue on dull gray theme seems to tie into their hardware offerings and the standard Java UI look and feel so I've always given them a large share of the blame for it. I hated CDE. Dullest windowing environment ever, and not at all free.
Sure, the camera companies will build wi-fi in their cameras at some point. But do you want to buy a new $1000 camera body just to get one with a $25 wi-fi chipset built-in? That's how the camera companies will solve this problem.
Is the JPEG limitation in this a function of how the Eye-fi firmware works or something that can be fixed in the Python script?
I'll agree that the war isn't over yet in the DSLR world, but in the point&shoot world there really is no point in going any higher than they have achieved. If you shove 12 megapixels into a sensor that is 1/4 the surface area of an APS-C sensor you should really couple it with a lens system that is 4 times more precise than the one used on your APS-C camera to get equivalent resolution. But the camera makers aren't doing anything like that. They're putting out junk lenses and big sensors because that's what marketing tells them to do.
Aside from the well designed "cool factor" of the Apple Store the other thing it has going for it is working products and helpful sales people. When you go to a Best Buy type store you're lucky if half the computers are even working. Most of them are screen locked and even if you get someone to unlock it all you'll get to see is the bundled software that comes with it. At the Apple Store the machines are unlocked and they have a lot of extra software loaded on them. You want to see Photoshop CS4 in action on a high end desktop? You can do that at an Apple store. You can't at Best Buy. Want to test out some headphones on the MP3 players? Good luck with that at the Buy More.
Microsoft might restore their image somewhat with a store that showplaces their product in as good a way as the Apple store showplaces Macs and iPods. The Best Buys of the world are all in a race to the bottom of the "low bottom line" market and this isn't a good environment to show off the products.
A better option might be VirtualBox and similar virtual machine environments. Run Windows with the 1 or 2 applications you can't make work in Linux, saving the 3rd application slot for a virtualized Linux that runs everything else you want. This way you're not limited to just whatever web apps you can find.