I've been using Parallels over VMWare Fusion for a few years now (there has been some good bundle pricing on it, and there were some features it had that VMWare lacked at the time when I was deciding, though I don't recall what those were now).
Unless this turns out to be a tempest in a teacup or otherwise invented or overblown, I won't be doing that anymore, and VMWare will have gained back a customer.
In the US it is probably the military industry, and so on
Nah, over here it's the financial services industry.
Y'know, the ones who just recently broke the whole system for everyone in the western world, and then got the government to pay them to make sure they didn't stop doing the same things that led to the crisis.
I'm not sure I entirely agree with your first sentence—I did some poking a few years ago, and if you need a minivan to carry your 2 kids and all the luggage on a 5-hour drive once a year, and the rest of the time you just need to carry the aforementioned kids, it would be more economical to own a small car and rent the minivan.
Sure, if it is just for one trip a year. What if it is for one trip a week? The problem with current car rental systems is that they don't really handle short-duration rental well (some services are starting to take off, but they usually don't involve minivans, and they're only in major cities). You can't rent a minvan for two separate 15-minute trips 90 minutes apart. Even just renting it for 2h isn't really practical in most cases. With automation you could basically do that (really just a fancy cab service).
Sure, when you've got requirements that are a little odder, you're going to run into more problems with the current situation, and a sensible setup with self-driven cars will be a great boon to you. My experience, though, is that the 80% solution right now really is to own a small car and rent a minivan or truck (depending on your occasional need).
Like I said, I think the (hopefully) coming shift is going to be fantastic, and make things a lot better for nearly everyone—some people in more ways than others. I just don't think that most people today really need their 2-ton pickup truck, 8-seater minivan, or off-road-capable 4WD SUV.
Yes, freedom by definition includes being able to break rules. Such as speeding when your pregnant wife is about to give birth, or when someone has been seriously injured and you need to get to a hospital FAST in order to save their life. Traffic rules may not be the best example, but in general I think it is pretty important to be able to break rules when the rules are bad or broken.
Yes, that means living with the assholes. Freedom is a bitch, there's no question about it. I'd rather have it than the alternative, however.
No, it doesn't. All it means is having a special override specifically for medical emergencies, that tells the car to go at the maximum speed it can safely drive (which is way faster than the maximum speed you can safely drive!) to either the nearest hospital, or one you select (if, for instance, the nearest one doesn't have a maternity ward, or whatever). It could even operate similarly to an official emergency vehicle, in that it warns other self-driving cars to get out of the way for you.
The override will also notify the authorities that it was used, and they'll make sure that you were using it for an actual or genuinely perceived medical emergency, and not just using it to get to the coffee shop a block down from the hospital fast, or even just joyriding for the fun of it.
No need to be an asshole if you can just watch the game in the car. The need to get from point A to B as quickly as you can changes when you can do most all the things in the car that you would be doing at home or whatever. The vast majority of airplane and train passengers are perfectly patient to wait out the trip and most of them don't even have the luxury of their own space to do whatever they want in.
Still, you make a good point.
Sure, but people aren't thinking along those lines. They're not seeing "self-driving car" as opening up different options for them—they're seeing themselves sitting in the drivers' seat, with the steering wheel turning itself and the pedals working themselves, while they just fume and curse at being unable to get there in time because the car won't go faster than the speed limit.
Slashdotters' views of self-driving cars tend to be a lot more forward-thinking than your average Joe;-)
While I agree that most people have cars larger than they need, today short-term car rentals really aren't a practical option in the way that they would be in a day of autonomous vehicles. If you don't have a trunk today then you have to call a cab every time you go to a store, which might be 3-4x a week. Cab rides are expensive - owning a larger car is cheaper. If cabs were autonomous it might cost $3 to have your groceries driven home, which makes the cab a viable option.
I'm not talking about not having a trunk. I'm not suggesting that everyone be driving Mini Coopers or Smart Cars around. I'm talking about 2/3 of the parking lot at the grocery store being filled up with either gigantic pickup trucks or SUVs the same size.
To be fair, around here, maybe 20% of the people driving those will actually need either the carrying capacity of the pickups or the good performance in snow of the SUVs. But the other 80% could get by just fine with a Honda Civic or similar car.
Today people need to get a car that is big enough to do everything they do 99% of the time - anything else is just uneconomical. With autonomous rentable cars people it will make more sense to buy a car that will do 70% of what you do, with frequent rentals to cover the rest. You could just have a button on your phone that says "have a car meet me at the door to take me home" and hit it while at the checkout line and you'd find a rental car ready to take your stuff home as soon as you step out the door, and you'd get the $3 bill on your credit card. Obviously you'd also have such a button to summon your own car as well. Grocery stores would probably also have delivery services which might be even cheaper (it could make multiple stops in a single trip).
I'm not sure I entirely agree with your first sentence—I did some poking a few years ago, and if you need a minivan to carry your 2 kids and all the luggage on a 5-hour drive once a year, and the rest of the time you just need to carry the aforementioned kids, it would be more economical to own a small car and rent the minivan. That was when gas was cheaper, too. The rest, though...mmm, yes please.
2. Tailgating and driving under the speed limit will also not happen. Cars will zoom along at uniform speed, and will pull aside before decellerating so as to not hold anybody else up.
But if they can't tailgate, how can they assert their superiority and express their RAGE?!
Most people also will not need larger cars - they'll just rent them when needed.
Pff. Most people do not need larger cars now. For most people who have them, they're just a way to say, "I'm a bigger man than you!"
I think that, in general, you're missing the point that these are people who want to act in an antisocial manner, because it makes them feel bigger and better.
This differs from the American version which is life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
There is no guarantee of such in any American document that has force of law.
That phrase is from the Declaration of Independence, which, while it has value in guiding our legislators, jurists, and other leaders in making and interpreting law, has direct value only for its historical significance.
You do know you can drive hard without breaking the road rules (or being dangerous at all).
Sure, but driving for the thrill of it isn't what I'm talking about. I fully realize that some people love to drive hard and drive impressive cars because of the thrill it gives them, and as long as they aren't doing it dangerously, I have no problem with that—and, indeed, I believe that there should be cars to permit this type of thing even once self-driving cars are the norm (perhaps with a special license, that requires a little more proof that you can handle yourself than a current driver's license). As should be pretty clear from my post, what I was talking about was specifically people who want to drive aggressively, dangerously, and in ways that break the rules of the road because they're jerks.
You've missed the point here. They do have a specific "freedom" in mind here:
The freedom to break the rules of the road.
The people talking about self-driving cars taking away their "freedom" are afraid they'll no longer be able to drive 75 mph in a 55 mph zone, or run that red light, or tailgate that person who's got the sheer audacity to drive a few miles an hour under the speed limit when they need to get home to watch the game so close they leave paint on their bumper...!
In other words, they're afraid that if everyone's got self-driving cars, they won't be allowed to be assholes anymore.
Don't make the mistake of thinking that getting money from the government when you file your tax return means you're paying negative taxes.
Most people in the USA—people drawing a regular W-2 paycheck from their employer, and probably some others—get their taxes automatically deducted from every paycheck. Tax return time is when you and the government get together and figure out whether the amount that you've paid over the course of the last year is more or less than the actual amount of taxes you owed for that year. Then if you already paid more taxes than you owed, you get money back. If you paid less than you owed, then you send the government a check.
Aside from the inherent stupidity - have these people heard of bookmarks?
The, I don't know for sure, probably 3rd feature or so the very first browser got?
If they really are that dumb, making friends has never been easier - just show them how bookmarks work. They'll think you are a computing god.:-/
Hah! You'd think so, wouldn't you?
But no, what they'll actually do is give you a Look, make a huffy noise, and then either tell you in no uncertain terms that Their Way (typing everything, including facebook.com, into a Google search—sometimes by first typing google.com into the address bar) is better, or just wait until you go away and go back to doing it Their Way.
Almost without fail. It has been my experience that the type of person who is already typing URLs into the Google search bar just isn't interested in any more sensible way of getting to the websites they want.
I'm confused. You list all these ways you can't get Netflix, then strongly imply that you have a streaming-capable Internet connection.
Are you not, in fact, aware that the main way you get Netflix is through a streaming Internet connection? Or is your connection just not good enough to receive any random stream out there (but your ISP optimizes it for specific streams that pay them)?
Clsid, my comment was supposed to be just a joke, don't take me serious:)
Unfortunately, without appropriate faux-tagging, it was completely indistinguishable from the kinds of comments the anti-Apple crowd around here really posts.
And that's not a joke (though it is kind of ridiculous).
I dunno. My understanding of the reason that burnable optical disks degraded was that it was inherent in the structure of the disks themselves—the dye just wasn't stable long-term, no matter how you burned it.
Unfortunately, it's not really my field, and no one whose field it is seems to have weighed in, so I guess I'll just have to settle for "YMMV".:-)
No current inexpensive optical media is likely to last more than about a decade (and some cheap stuff lasts a lot less long than that). There exist archival-quality optical disks, but they are much more expensive and hard to find than the regular stuff.
People always say that.
But I've got burned CD-Rs from ~15 years ago that work fine.
Not just audio CD and data CDs, either: I've got old PSX backups which should be particularly fragile (due to Sony's use of Mode 2), and particularly difficult to read (the reader in the original Playstation did not win any awards for reliability), and they work fine too.
Now, granted, some of these are indeed "archival" disks: Then-expensive gold Kodak media that is supposed to be good for 90 years and TDK Certified+, to name a couple of types I used to buy.
But I don't notice any difference between those expensive disks, and whatever crap I'd gotten at Black Friday sales at Staples eons ago.
And in all cases, the disks are stored properly, though not particularly specially: In a jewel case, either on a shelf or in a box.
Indeed, the only degradation that I've noticed is that which occurred from mishandling.
*shrug*
That's interesting to know. I've never actually tested it out purposely, though I have had disks that either I or one of my colleagues burned 3-10 years ago show up unreadable (in whole or in part) without enough visible scratches to account for the problems.
Sounds like you may have gotten lucky. Or we got unlucky. Or both.;-)
The downside to HDDs (and for that matter SSDs) is that they need babysitting, the one thing I'd like optical media for is if they can promise me high-capacity discs I can put in a drawer (or more likely a safety deposit box), forget for 20-100 years and still read fine. Wouldn't even need to be a home burner, as long as I could have a home reader - I'd upload a disc image to some burning service, they'd ship the finished disc in the mail. There's a lot of static data I'd like to keep without having to copy from HDD to HDD regularly in order to keep it alive.
No current inexpensive optical media is likely to last more than about a decade (and some cheap stuff lasts a lot less long than that). There exist archival-quality optical disks, but they are much more expensive and hard to find than the regular stuff.
Just because you can put an optical disk in a safe deposit box and not have it suffer from magnetic degradation doesn't mean it's not going to suffer from any degradation over time. (IIRC, the dye used in burnable optical disks degrades over time, so after X years, the whole disk looks like it's been burned, and is utterly unreadable.)
1. Investors are obsessed with growth. Obviously China is the biggest growth market there is. If you hadn't noticed, Apple's stock has gone from its all time high of $700 a mere 10 months ago to its current price of $440.
Right, because it was the victim of a pump-and-dump scheme by some influential pundits. There is absolutely nothing about Apple's actual actions or prospects that drove the massive fluctuations in its stock.
2. Every report that comes out saying Android has gained more market share makes it appear as though Apple is losing the war for the hearts and minds of mobile phone users -- and people tend to have an aversion to joining the "losing" team. The fact that Apple has massive profits, as you pointed out, is not exactly a selling point to consumers.
Don't worry, I'm sure you'll still be able to buy Apple hardware for years to come, but it's increasingly looking like the case in 5-10 years will be that iPhones have a 10% market share a la Windows vs. Mac, but this time around, instead of Apple being the product of choice for hip artsy types because "it's better for music and graphic design", it will be the product of choice for old fartsy types (like my parents) because "I don't want to learn something new".
Except that there's no evidence that that's the direction things are headed in. Samsung isn't gaining marketshare at Apple's expense—it's gaining marketshare at the expense of all the other players in the market, and by expanding the market to new customers on the low end.
An awful lot of problems occur because this is a hackish attempt at socialised medicine designed to piss off the least amount of big business. Just go full socialised medicine already.
But that's communism! Do you want Stalin to rule America?
But that's taking my hard-earned money (I get from my capital gains)! Do you want to kill jobs?
But that's giving a free ride (to people who are doomed by the country's education and employment structure to be forever un- or under-employed)! Do you want brown people to have the same chance of surviving till retirement as real people like me?!?!
*attempts to dislodge his tongue from his cheek, which takes some time*
While you are correct that there are some people who will buy it regardless of what it built with, those days are fading, as many people are fed up with the slow pace of change in the Apple phone arena, and Apple wouldn't want to incur the delay penalty of a switch, when they can accomplish the same goals with their current hardware.
Many pundits are fed up with the "slow" pace of change in the Apple phone arena, because they need new clickbait twice a day. I have yet to hear from anyone who actually owns an iPhone that they're anything of the kind. Most people buy a new phone every 2 years or less frequently. The current iPhone is a significant improvement over the 2-year-old iPhone I have now.
Or are you trying to say that "many people" know or care about things like NFC, fingerprint scanners, or other check-boxable features that most people who don't read Slashdot have never heard of and wouldn't care about if they did? Because the actual numbers of iPhone sales don't seem to bear out that kind of view...
Slashdot Mirror
I've been using Parallels over VMWare Fusion for a few years now (there has been some good bundle pricing on it, and there were some features it had that VMWare lacked at the time when I was deciding, though I don't recall what those were now).
Unless this turns out to be a tempest in a teacup or otherwise invented or overblown, I won't be doing that anymore, and VMWare will have gained back a customer.
Dan Aris
In the US it is probably the military industry, and so on
Nah, over here it's the financial services industry.
Y'know, the ones who just recently broke the whole system for everyone in the western world, and then got the government to pay them to make sure they didn't stop doing the same things that led to the crisis.
Dan Aris
Why use a Dell if you don't use what makes it different from countless PCs out there?
There's nothing that does. Dell is about as generic as it comes these days.
Dan Aris
So it is your contention that these things which you do not like could not be good features for anyone in the world?
Dan Aris
I'm not sure I entirely agree with your first sentence—I did some poking a few years ago, and if you need a minivan to carry your 2 kids and all the luggage on a 5-hour drive once a year, and the rest of the time you just need to carry the aforementioned kids, it would be more economical to own a small car and rent the minivan.
Sure, if it is just for one trip a year. What if it is for one trip a week? The problem with current car rental systems is that they don't really handle short-duration rental well (some services are starting to take off, but they usually don't involve minivans, and they're only in major cities). You can't rent a minvan for two separate 15-minute trips 90 minutes apart. Even just renting it for 2h isn't really practical in most cases. With automation you could basically do that (really just a fancy cab service).
Sure, when you've got requirements that are a little odder, you're going to run into more problems with the current situation, and a sensible setup with self-driven cars will be a great boon to you. My experience, though, is that the 80% solution right now really is to own a small car and rent a minivan or truck (depending on your occasional need).
Like I said, I think the (hopefully) coming shift is going to be fantastic, and make things a lot better for nearly everyone—some people in more ways than others. I just don't think that most people today really need their 2-ton pickup truck, 8-seater minivan, or off-road-capable 4WD SUV.
Dan Aris
Yes, freedom by definition includes being able to break rules. Such as speeding when your pregnant wife is about to give birth, or when someone has been seriously injured and you need to get to a hospital FAST in order to save their life. Traffic rules may not be the best example, but in general I think it is pretty important to be able to break rules when the rules are bad or broken.
Yes, that means living with the assholes. Freedom is a bitch, there's no question about it. I'd rather have it than the alternative, however.
No, it doesn't. All it means is having a special override specifically for medical emergencies, that tells the car to go at the maximum speed it can safely drive (which is way faster than the maximum speed you can safely drive!) to either the nearest hospital, or one you select (if, for instance, the nearest one doesn't have a maternity ward, or whatever). It could even operate similarly to an official emergency vehicle, in that it warns other self-driving cars to get out of the way for you.
The override will also notify the authorities that it was used, and they'll make sure that you were using it for an actual or genuinely perceived medical emergency, and not just using it to get to the coffee shop a block down from the hospital fast, or even just joyriding for the fun of it.
See? Solvable problem. No assholes required.
Dan Aris
No need to be an asshole if you can just watch the game in the car. The need to get from point A to B as quickly as you can changes when you can do most all the things in the car that you would be doing at home or whatever. The vast majority of airplane and train passengers are perfectly patient to wait out the trip and most of them don't even have the luxury of their own space to do whatever they want in.
Still, you make a good point.
Sure, but people aren't thinking along those lines. They're not seeing "self-driving car" as opening up different options for them—they're seeing themselves sitting in the drivers' seat, with the steering wheel turning itself and the pedals working themselves, while they just fume and curse at being unable to get there in time because the car won't go faster than the speed limit.
Slashdotters' views of self-driving cars tend to be a lot more forward-thinking than your average Joe ;-)
Dan Aris
Most people do not need larger cars now.
While I agree that most people have cars larger than they need, today short-term car rentals really aren't a practical option in the way that they would be in a day of autonomous vehicles. If you don't have a trunk today then you have to call a cab every time you go to a store, which might be 3-4x a week. Cab rides are expensive - owning a larger car is cheaper. If cabs were autonomous it might cost $3 to have your groceries driven home, which makes the cab a viable option.
I'm not talking about not having a trunk. I'm not suggesting that everyone be driving Mini Coopers or Smart Cars around. I'm talking about 2/3 of the parking lot at the grocery store being filled up with either gigantic pickup trucks or SUVs the same size.
To be fair, around here, maybe 20% of the people driving those will actually need either the carrying capacity of the pickups or the good performance in snow of the SUVs. But the other 80% could get by just fine with a Honda Civic or similar car.
Today people need to get a car that is big enough to do everything they do 99% of the time - anything else is just uneconomical. With autonomous rentable cars people it will make more sense to buy a car that will do 70% of what you do, with frequent rentals to cover the rest. You could just have a button on your phone that says "have a car meet me at the door to take me home" and hit it while at the checkout line and you'd find a rental car ready to take your stuff home as soon as you step out the door, and you'd get the $3 bill on your credit card. Obviously you'd also have such a button to summon your own car as well. Grocery stores would probably also have delivery services which might be even cheaper (it could make multiple stops in a single trip).
I'm not sure I entirely agree with your first sentence—I did some poking a few years ago, and if you need a minivan to carry your 2 kids and all the luggage on a 5-hour drive once a year, and the rest of the time you just need to carry the aforementioned kids, it would be more economical to own a small car and rent the minivan. That was when gas was cheaper, too. The rest, though...mmm, yes please.
Dan Aris
2. Tailgating and driving under the speed limit will also not happen. Cars will zoom along at uniform speed, and will pull aside before decellerating so as to not hold anybody else up.
But if they can't tailgate, how can they assert their superiority and express their RAGE?!
Most people also will not need larger cars - they'll just rent them when needed.
Pff. Most people do not need larger cars now. For most people who have them, they're just a way to say, "I'm a bigger man than you!"
I think that, in general, you're missing the point that these are people who want to act in an antisocial manner, because it makes them feel bigger and better.
Dan Aris
This differs from the American version which is life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
There is no guarantee of such in any American document that has force of law.
That phrase is from the Declaration of Independence, which, while it has value in guiding our legislators, jurists, and other leaders in making and interpreting law, has direct value only for its historical significance.
Dan Aris
You do know you can drive hard without breaking the road rules (or being dangerous at all).
Sure, but driving for the thrill of it isn't what I'm talking about. I fully realize that some people love to drive hard and drive impressive cars because of the thrill it gives them, and as long as they aren't doing it dangerously, I have no problem with that—and, indeed, I believe that there should be cars to permit this type of thing even once self-driving cars are the norm (perhaps with a special license, that requires a little more proof that you can handle yourself than a current driver's license). As should be pretty clear from my post, what I was talking about was specifically people who want to drive aggressively, dangerously, and in ways that break the rules of the road because they're jerks.
Dan Aris
You've missed the point here. They do have a specific "freedom" in mind here:
The freedom to break the rules of the road.
The people talking about self-driving cars taking away their "freedom" are afraid they'll no longer be able to drive 75 mph in a 55 mph zone, or run that red light, or tailgate that person who's got the sheer audacity to drive a few miles an hour under the speed limit when they need to get home to watch the game so close they leave paint on their bumper...!
In other words, they're afraid that if everyone's got self-driving cars, they won't be allowed to be assholes anymore.
Dan Aris
Tax time means money back.
Don't make the mistake of thinking that getting money from the government when you file your tax return means you're paying negative taxes.
Most people in the USA—people drawing a regular W-2 paycheck from their employer, and probably some others—get their taxes automatically deducted from every paycheck. Tax return time is when you and the government get together and figure out whether the amount that you've paid over the course of the last year is more or less than the actual amount of taxes you owed for that year. Then if you already paid more taxes than you owed, you get money back. If you paid less than you owed, then you send the government a check.
Dan Aris
Aside from the inherent stupidity - have these people heard of bookmarks?
The, I don't know for sure, probably 3rd feature or so the very first browser got?
If they really are that dumb, making friends has never been easier - just show them how bookmarks work. They'll think you are a computing god. :-/
Hah! You'd think so, wouldn't you?
But no, what they'll actually do is give you a Look, make a huffy noise, and then either tell you in no uncertain terms that Their Way (typing everything, including facebook.com, into a Google search—sometimes by first typing google.com into the address bar) is better, or just wait until you go away and go back to doing it Their Way.
Almost without fail. It has been my experience that the type of person who is already typing URLs into the Google search bar just isn't interested in any more sensible way of getting to the websites they want.
Dan Aris
I'm confused. You list all these ways you can't get Netflix, then strongly imply that you have a streaming-capable Internet connection.
Are you not, in fact, aware that the main way you get Netflix is through a streaming Internet connection? Or is your connection just not good enough to receive any random stream out there (but your ISP optimizes it for specific streams that pay them)?
Dan Aris
Clsid, my comment was supposed to be just a joke, don't take me serious :)
Unfortunately, without appropriate faux-tagging, it was completely indistinguishable from the kinds of comments the anti-Apple crowd around here really posts.
And that's not a joke (though it is kind of ridiculous).
Dan Aris
I dunno. My understanding of the reason that burnable optical disks degraded was that it was inherent in the structure of the disks themselves—the dye just wasn't stable long-term, no matter how you burned it.
Unfortunately, it's not really my field, and no one whose field it is seems to have weighed in, so I guess I'll just have to settle for "YMMV". :-)
Dan Aris
People always say that.
But I've got burned CD-Rs from ~15 years ago that work fine.
Not just audio CD and data CDs, either: I've got old PSX backups which should be particularly fragile (due to Sony's use of Mode 2), and particularly difficult to read (the reader in the original Playstation did not win any awards for reliability), and they work fine too.
Now, granted, some of these are indeed "archival" disks: Then-expensive gold Kodak media that is supposed to be good for 90 years and TDK Certified+, to name a couple of types I used to buy.
But I don't notice any difference between those expensive disks, and whatever crap I'd gotten at Black Friday sales at Staples eons ago.
And in all cases, the disks are stored properly, though not particularly specially: In a jewel case, either on a shelf or in a box.
Indeed, the only degradation that I've noticed is that which occurred from mishandling.
*shrug*
That's interesting to know. I've never actually tested it out purposely, though I have had disks that either I or one of my colleagues burned 3-10 years ago show up unreadable (in whole or in part) without enough visible scratches to account for the problems.
Sounds like you may have gotten lucky. Or we got unlucky. Or both. ;-)
Dan Aris
The downside to HDDs (and for that matter SSDs) is that they need babysitting, the one thing I'd like optical media for is if they can promise me high-capacity discs I can put in a drawer (or more likely a safety deposit box), forget for 20-100 years and still read fine. Wouldn't even need to be a home burner, as long as I could have a home reader - I'd upload a disc image to some burning service, they'd ship the finished disc in the mail. There's a lot of static data I'd like to keep without having to copy from HDD to HDD regularly in order to keep it alive.
No current inexpensive optical media is likely to last more than about a decade (and some cheap stuff lasts a lot less long than that). There exist archival-quality optical disks, but they are much more expensive and hard to find than the regular stuff.
Just because you can put an optical disk in a safe deposit box and not have it suffer from magnetic degradation doesn't mean it's not going to suffer from any degradation over time. (IIRC, the dye used in burnable optical disks degrades over time, so after X years, the whole disk looks like it's been burned, and is utterly unreadable.)
Dan Aris
Capacity's all very good, but what about speed?
Current-gen optical disks are, as I understand it, dramatically slower than SSDs, which is where a lot of storage is moving these days.
If these new ones aren't significantly faster than the old, I don't really see them catching on in the mainstream.
Dan Aris
1. Investors are obsessed with growth. Obviously China is the biggest growth market there is. If you hadn't noticed, Apple's stock has gone from its all time high of $700 a mere 10 months ago to its current price of $440.
Right, because it was the victim of a pump-and-dump scheme by some influential pundits. There is absolutely nothing about Apple's actual actions or prospects that drove the massive fluctuations in its stock.
2. Every report that comes out saying Android has gained more market share makes it appear as though Apple is losing the war for the hearts and minds of mobile phone users -- and people tend to have an aversion to joining the "losing" team. The fact that Apple has massive profits, as you pointed out, is not exactly a selling point to consumers.
Don't worry, I'm sure you'll still be able to buy Apple hardware for years to come, but it's increasingly looking like the case in 5-10 years will be that iPhones have a 10% market share a la Windows vs. Mac, but this time around, instead of Apple being the product of choice for hip artsy types because "it's better for music and graphic design", it will be the product of choice for old fartsy types (like my parents) because "I don't want to learn something new".
Except that there's no evidence that that's the direction things are headed in. Samsung isn't gaining marketshare at Apple's expense—it's gaining marketshare at the expense of all the other players in the market, and by expanding the market to new customers on the low end.
Dan Aris
What, at this late date, makes anyone think Microsoft is actually capable of evolving...?
An awful lot of problems occur because this is a hackish attempt at socialised medicine designed to piss off the least amount of big business. Just go full socialised medicine already.
But that's communism! Do you want Stalin to rule America?
But that's taking my hard-earned money (I get from my capital gains)! Do you want to kill jobs?
But that's giving a free ride (to people who are doomed by the country's education and employment structure to be forever un- or under-employed)! Do you want brown people to have the same chance of surviving till retirement as real people like me?!?!
*attempts to dislodge his tongue from his cheek, which takes some time*
Dan Aris
Are you trying to use common sense and logic? On the Internet? Here at Slashdot? What did I tell you about doing that again??!
You're right. I sowwy.
Dan Aris
While you are correct that there are some people who will buy it regardless of what it built with, those days are fading, as many people are fed up with the slow pace of change in the Apple phone arena, and Apple wouldn't want to incur the delay penalty of a switch, when they can accomplish the same goals with their current hardware.
Many pundits are fed up with the "slow" pace of change in the Apple phone arena, because they need new clickbait twice a day. I have yet to hear from anyone who actually owns an iPhone that they're anything of the kind. Most people buy a new phone every 2 years or less frequently. The current iPhone is a significant improvement over the 2-year-old iPhone I have now.
Or are you trying to say that "many people" know or care about things like NFC, fingerprint scanners, or other check-boxable features that most people who don't read Slashdot have never heard of and wouldn't care about if they did? Because the actual numbers of iPhone sales don't seem to bear out that kind of view...
Dan Aris