They won the battle but lost the war. They managed to secure a good chunk of the professional market, but the real money was in the consumer market due to the sheer size. There might have been thousands of stations buying Betacam equipment and tapes, but there were hundreds of millions of consumers buying VHS equipment and tapes.
Sort of. They weren't the first, they were one of a bunch of competing formats, and eventually the industry standards body agreed on a new format based on (but different from) Sony's offering. So they didn't invent them, but they can lay claim to having been a key player. But that wasn't really a Sony format war since their standard wasn't adopted as-is...
In fact, except for BluRay, Sony has lost every format war they've ever fought. BetaMax/VHS (VHS crushed beta), NT casette/microcasette (nobody remembers NT casettes), MiniDisc/Flash (held on in Asia, but flash and HDD and CDs won), DAT/CD (DAT never made it beyond professional use), MMCD/SD (MMCD abandonned, SD became DVD), VCD/DVD (VCDs saw some use, but DVD came out two years later and started killing it), MemoryStick/MMC/SD/CF/Xd/etc (SD won, even some Sony products use SD rather than MS, CF only sees some professional use), ATRAC/MP3 (ATRAC never saw much adoption outside of MiniDisc), SACD/DVD-Audio (made irrelevant by digital distribution).
So, Sony has had some success with BluRay (which is itself embroiled in a format war with digital distribution), and I guess you could argue that as the basis for the eventual 3.5" floppy they sort of won that one, but not the rest. Many of the format wars they've been involved in have involved Sony pushing a format that is more proprietary (or has less other companies backing it) versus a more open standard. MemoryStick is backed by Sony, while SD is backed by the SD Card Association co-founded by Matsushita (Panasonic), SanDisk, and Toshiba, with many other companies on the board.
Re:Horse and buggy companies didn't make it either
on
The Rise and Fall of Kodak
·
· Score: 5, Informative
No, they didn't make the first DSLR 20 years ago. What they did was basically sell an add-on that attached to your Nikon SLR to make it digital. Kodak never made any DSLRs themselves; they were always digital backs, or based on Canon or Nikon bodies, or sometimes just rebranded Canons or Nikons.
There's a huge market for camera components. Film is dead (at least for stills, film is slowly moving that way), but the DSLR market is alive and well, and companies like Sony are making a fortune selling camera modules to go into the iPhone and other devices.
Kodak could have been selling millions of mobile camera modules, or competing with Nikon and Canon for the high-end, but they're not.
And to clarify the "can then be redistributed freely" bit, the license on the CDs specifically says that they can be copied and distributed freely so long as they're not sold. Hence why the Fifth Imperium site has all the CDs available for download.
In actual fact, a large percentage of Baen's catalog is available legally for free download because of those CDs. Almost all of the Baen books by David Weber, Eric Flint, Mercedes Lackey, Lois McMaster Bujold, John Ringo, and David Drake, and then various other books and stories by other authors. Except books published since the respective CDs were...
Scifi, fantasy, alt history... But that makes sense, since they're a scifi publisher.
They have more than just old books and short stories. Two of their most popular series are David Weber's Honor Harrington scifi series and Eric Flint's 1632 alt-history series, both of which still have new books coming out.
How about $6, DRM-free, in ePub and any other format you might want? Baen's eBooks tend to be $4-6. Some are free (and not crappy samples, usually the first few books in major series).
Not all eBooks are so expensive. Baen prices theirs at mostly $4 to $6, with a whole lot for $0. Yes, their ARCs (advanced reader copies) are $15, but those are a special case for hardcore fans (basically pre-release manuscripts direct from the author before they've been edited), and if you don't want to pay the $15, just wait for it to get edited and published and the cost will be in the $4-6 range as expected.
Most of my eBook purchases are from Baen. Cheap prices, free books, any format you could want, and no DRM? What's not to like?
For those who are curious about the "free books" part, Jim Baen and his authors discovered that giving away the first book or two in a series actually increased sales, and ended up putting a huge number of their books up for free download. And by "free" I mean "just like ones you pay for, DRM-free in all formats." Their free library's site can be found here:
This sort of behaviour from content creators and publishers should be rewarded, so go check out some of the free books. There's so many to choose from, from so many authors, you're bound to find something you like! And if this post reads like an advertisement, well, I think they deserve it.
It's the other way around that I have to go, though. I've got an HD-SDI source arriving at projectors that can only do HDMI. I don't remember which brand we rented, might have been AJA. They were reclocking HD-SDI to HDMI adapters; my rental invoice doesn't specify which brand we got. They worked well enough. It was IMAG for a variety of events, and there were a few concerts involved, but it was video-only, so sound sync wasn't much of an issue (other than just getting as little delay in the video path as possible was enough). We had hired a company to handle the stage/lighting/audio/etc.
The HDMI to HD-SDI part was easy, because the mixer had HDMI inputs. I only used HD-SDI for the three cameras and the runs to the two projectors. I wanted to use it for distributing the signal to two other rooms, but the venue informed me at the last minute that they couldn't run HD-SDI over their distribution network, only SDI, so I just settled for composite; much cheaper and my budget was super tight at that point, so saving the money on converters was nice. It turns out that composite video downsampled from 1080p using a very high quality composite source looks pretty decent on a big screen, even after running a few thousand feet over a distribution network. I was pleasantly surprised; it was good enough for our needs.
The ImagePro looks neat, and costs half as much as the mixer I used, but this was for primarily live video, so I needed a mixer that could do smooth transitions from five or six sources of varying types, rather than a hard switch between sources. I wanted something with a t-bar for the technician to be able to switch smoothly as fast or slow as he felt was needed. But I'll admit that I went into all this blind, knowing nothing about professional video or mixing. It was all "the supplier wanted $14k to do video with one camera. Here's a $4k budget to do it yourself with three cameras. Make it happen in." So after a hell of a lot of time and research, and a big of begging for a few hundred bucks extra, it did work out in the end. But I'm damned if I know how I'm going to pull it off next year, where I'll probably need to run distances farther than HD-SDI is rated for, and do it on bigger screens than require pro-grade projectors rather than semi-pro, and I really doubt I'm going to get much of a budget increase. I have a few ideas from experience doing it the first time about how to save a few hundred here and there (don't actually need HD-SDI on a fixed camera when it's only a few feet from the mixer, HDMI would do if the camera rental company still only has one less HD-SDI camera than I need, forcing me to pay five times more from a second supplier), but it'll be a challenge. The problem is there doesn't really seem to be any online community for professional video that I can go to for advice on this sort of stuff.
It's getting there, sure, but not quite. SSDs are coming down in costs, but you can't price consumer SSDs based on giant MIRs and black friday sales when you're really in need of enterprise-grade SSDs;)
But yeah, it's getting closer and closer. Linode uses nothing but 15K RPM SAS drives in RAID10, I figure eventually they'll probably start moving towards SSDs if they don't decide to go SATA.
Throwing dirt cheap SATA drives (well, dirt cheap before the flood) onto SAS controllers is exactly what I do on my home file server. A two-port LSI RAID card can also be used as an 8-port SATA controller, with the right firmware (which they provide on their site easy enough). Combined with a hotswap bay that puts five 3.5" drives in three 5.25" bays, and a case whose entire front behind the door is nine 5.25" bays, and you've got yourself a decent file server. Of course, I really should be putting RE4 greenpower drives in the thing instead of regular greenpower drives...
I've read elsewhere that HDCP strippers are typically made from the chips pulled from displays themselves (perhaps they're desoldering them from broken displays). If this is the case, wouldn't HDCP revocations be rendering many random displays useless? Unlike on a BluRay player, there's no way to update the HDCP key on devices that tend not to have updatable firmware (like displays or TVs).
A combination of the Thailand floods, Black Friday sales, and mail-in rebates created a bizarre situation today... A class of SSDs dropped lower in price per-gig than a class of traditional HDDs...
15K RPM SAS drives aren't cheap, and since the flood, they're over $1 per gig. NewEgg was charging ~$1.44 per gig or more last I checked, for the Cheetah models.
Today, NCIX had Intel 320 SSDs on sale with MIR bringing the 80, 120, and 160GB models down to slightly under $1 per GB after MIR...
Yes, it's comparing the extremes (high end extreme of HDDs and low end extreme of SSDs), but I still didn't expect it to happen, even with sales.
hd-sdi is awesome (why are BNC connectors so damned rare these days? A connector that quickly and securely locks beats RCA or HDMI any day), but unless you've got pro-grade projectors, you're not going to have hd-sdi input on them. Even semi-pro multi-lamp projectors are lacking it. So you end up having to use hd-sdi to hdmi adapters, which work great, but cost a fortune. Not that an hd-sdi mixer doesn't already cost a fortune, although those can often be rented at somewhat reasonable prices, unlike projectors. I rented a Roland V1600-HD for three days for 7% of replacement cost, but projector rentals seem to be up to 25-50% for a three day rental, it's insane.
Yeah, if you've got the budget, it doesn't really matter, but sometimes you need to do pro-grade stuff with a small budget (perhaps because the people holding the purse strings don't want to give you enough money to do it right), and the rental price disparities become an obstacle.
You can do it with two SATA3 SSDs, although three is safe. But three sufficiently large SSDs aren't cheap. Then again, nobody said you had to rip it all in one go. Three small SSDs; rip a chunk, copy it to a slow big drive, rip another chunk, slow big drive. Regardless, the real reason that it's not useful for pirates is because it's rare that a pirate would even want to do this. bluray was thoroughly cracked ages ago, and OTA or satellite broadcasts (or itunes downloads) are probably going to have better quality than any streaming service you might want to rip.
What I don't get is why this is even news. Devices to strip HDCP have been on the market for years; the hdfury people have a whole product lineup for stripping HDCP and converting to various analog formats, or even hdmi-to-hdmi (the "dr hdmi" product, I believe). Is this news because it's now DIY, rather than a commercial product that does it? I assume there are other similar devices on the market.
I don't think the Nook Tablet is a toy, I just think it's a different class of device. You can compare it in that they're both tablets, but it's not fair to say the iPad is overpriced because it costs more than the Nook; you're basically saying that all 10" tablets are overpriced because they cost more than the Nook. That's the point I'm trying to make. To qualify something as overpriced, you have to compare it to similar devices. If you want to compare it to a Nook, you can only say that it's expensive, not that it's overpriced...
Although I guess the counterargument there might be, if a tablet was 10% bigger but 100% more expensive, it would be overpriced, even though they're different sizes, but hopefully you understand what I mean. Overpriced versus expensive. I won't say that Apple products aren't expensive. They ARE expensive. But they seem to generally be favourably priced compared to similar products from other companies, at least shortly after they come out. I used the mac air in another reply; ultrabooks have changed the dynamic a bit, but compare a mac air to a comparable notebook from Sony or Toshiba and the price is about the same for similar specs. They're all expensive, but the mac air isn't overpriced for that class of device. It's more fair to say thin and lights are expensive in general, since you pay a premium to get notebooks that involve a lot more custom design and exotic materials and parts and such.
Steam lists all prices in Canada in USD, and doesn't charge us any tax (since they have no presence in Canada). I assumed that the situation was the same everywhere (USD prices used, hence the same prices everywhere). Does Steam force you to buy from the Australia store? We lose a bit in the currency exchange, but that only amounts to a 1.5-2.5% difference.
The list price of the Acer Iconia seems to be $50 less than a comparable iPad 2, true. But it got mediocre reviews, it's thicker, heavier, slower, etc. I was trying to compare an iPad 2 to the most similar Android tablet. But we're not talking about a huge difference in price here. Yeah, you can save a bit by getting a budget-brand tablet, but you don't always want to.
I'd probably have to own more than one modern Apple product for that. My windows desktop, windows laptop, solaris server, and linux VPS probably didn't please Steve too much.
No, you can't. Because you obviously weren't willing to consider any $500 Android tablets either.
You can get a nice thin and light laptop for $1000, or you can get a similarly spec'd thick and chunky laptop for half that. That doesn't mean that the thin and light is overpriced, it means that you're not even looking at that market segment.
The 16GB Transformer has an enormously slower GPU, can't decode h.264 properly (blame nVidia's really horrible Tegra 2 GPU, something they thankfully fixed in Tegra 3, mostly), and is much thicker and heavier. Not to mention shorter battery life. It's not all bad, since the screen is a bit higher res, but it's not a comparable tablet. Heck, evne the Galaxy Tab I mentioned isn't exact (GPU is still slower), but it's closer in terms of physical size at least.
The Transformer Prime still has a much slower GPU, but the much faster CPU would make up for that. Thickness is about the same, and it's a bit lighter. But you're missing one critical thing: the Transformer Prime doesn't even have an official release date yet, while the iPad 2 has been on the market for 8 months. A closer comparison would be the Transformer Prime and iPad 3, when it comes out; the gap between them will likely be pretty small.
By the time the Prime comes out, it will probably be ~9 months away from the iPad 2. If we assume the iPad 3 comes out one year after the iPad 2, the gap between the two tablets then would be only 3 months, a much fairer comparison.
You just have to check, unfortunately. But you know Valve is going to have sales for any major holiday, so it would be prudent to check around black friday, boxing day, Halloween, etc. Me, I was remiss and didn't check, and was notified by stories in my RSS feed from the likes of Kotaku.
Compare a 13" macbook air to a Toshiba r830, which I believe is the current in that line, and the specs are pretty similar at the ~$1300 pricepoint... That's what I paid for my r700 (I'm not a mac user), and not long after, the mac air refreshed and had better specs for the same price.
It's not necessarily fair to compare Apple's price/performance to every other vendor at any time, because Apple can't refresh their product lineup daily. Some PC company is always coming out with something new, and any product that's just been refreshed is going to be ahead of the curve...
A proper comparison between a mac and another notebook would have to match up every spec as closely as possible, and then compare the price. If the mac air 13" has a 128GB SSD, you've gotta spec out the r830 with a 128GB SSD. Match the memory. Match the resolution, if possible. That sort of thing.
Depends for what store. A lot of Canadian stores have Black Friday deals, even though Thanksgiving was over a month ago here. Some US stores which operate or ship to Canada have the sales, like NewEgg (although their sale this year for Canada sucks).
Steam's prices are the same in every country, and they've got some amazing deals. Yesterday had Mass Effect 2 (or 1) for $5, Portal 2 for $10, that sort of thing. That sale is over, but there's a new set for today, and there's some less aggressive sales that are valid all week.
Slashdot Mirror
They won the battle but lost the war. They managed to secure a good chunk of the professional market, but the real money was in the consumer market due to the sheer size. There might have been thousands of stations buying Betacam equipment and tapes, but there were hundreds of millions of consumers buying VHS equipment and tapes.
Sort of. They weren't the first, they were one of a bunch of competing formats, and eventually the industry standards body agreed on a new format based on (but different from) Sony's offering. So they didn't invent them, but they can lay claim to having been a key player. But that wasn't really a Sony format war since their standard wasn't adopted as-is...
In fact, except for BluRay, Sony has lost every format war they've ever fought. BetaMax/VHS (VHS crushed beta), NT casette/microcasette (nobody remembers NT casettes), MiniDisc/Flash (held on in Asia, but flash and HDD and CDs won), DAT/CD (DAT never made it beyond professional use), MMCD/SD (MMCD abandonned, SD became DVD), VCD/DVD (VCDs saw some use, but DVD came out two years later and started killing it), MemoryStick/MMC/SD/CF/Xd/etc (SD won, even some Sony products use SD rather than MS, CF only sees some professional use), ATRAC/MP3 (ATRAC never saw much adoption outside of MiniDisc), SACD/DVD-Audio (made irrelevant by digital distribution).
So, Sony has had some success with BluRay (which is itself embroiled in a format war with digital distribution), and I guess you could argue that as the basis for the eventual 3.5" floppy they sort of won that one, but not the rest. Many of the format wars they've been involved in have involved Sony pushing a format that is more proprietary (or has less other companies backing it) versus a more open standard. MemoryStick is backed by Sony, while SD is backed by the SD Card Association co-founded by Matsushita (Panasonic), SanDisk, and Toshiba, with many other companies on the board.
No, they didn't make the first DSLR 20 years ago. What they did was basically sell an add-on that attached to your Nikon SLR to make it digital. Kodak never made any DSLRs themselves; they were always digital backs, or based on Canon or Nikon bodies, or sometimes just rebranded Canons or Nikons.
There's a huge market for camera components. Film is dead (at least for stills, film is slowly moving that way), but the DSLR market is alive and well, and companies like Sony are making a fortune selling camera modules to go into the iPhone and other devices.
Kodak could have been selling millions of mobile camera modules, or competing with Nikon and Canon for the high-end, but they're not.
Were all those books published with Baen? They won't have non-Baen books from her on the CDs.
And to clarify the "can then be redistributed freely" bit, the license on the CDs specifically says that they can be copied and distributed freely so long as they're not sold. Hence why the Fifth Imperium site has all the CDs available for download.
In actual fact, a large percentage of Baen's catalog is available legally for free download because of those CDs. Almost all of the Baen books by David Weber, Eric Flint, Mercedes Lackey, Lois McMaster Bujold, John Ringo, and David Drake, and then various other books and stories by other authors. Except books published since the respective CDs were...
Scifi, fantasy, alt history... But that makes sense, since they're a scifi publisher.
They have more than just old books and short stories. Two of their most popular series are David Weber's Honor Harrington scifi series and Eric Flint's 1632 alt-history series, both of which still have new books coming out.
How about $6, DRM-free, in ePub and any other format you might want? Baen's eBooks tend to be $4-6. Some are free (and not crappy samples, usually the first few books in major series).
Not all eBooks are so expensive. Baen prices theirs at mostly $4 to $6, with a whole lot for $0. Yes, their ARCs (advanced reader copies) are $15, but those are a special case for hardcore fans (basically pre-release manuscripts direct from the author before they've been edited), and if you don't want to pay the $15, just wait for it to get edited and published and the cost will be in the $4-6 range as expected.
Most of my eBook purchases are from Baen. Cheap prices, free books, any format you could want, and no DRM? What's not to like?
For those who are curious about the "free books" part, Jim Baen and his authors discovered that giving away the first book or two in a series actually increased sales, and ended up putting a huge number of their books up for free download. And by "free" I mean "just like ones you pay for, DRM-free in all formats." Their free library's site can be found here:
http://www.baen.com/library/default.asp
And the books themselves can be downloaded from here (and also indirectly at the above link):
http://www.webscription.net/c-1-free-library.aspx
This sort of behaviour from content creators and publishers should be rewarded, so go check out some of the free books. There's so many to choose from, from so many authors, you're bound to find something you like! And if this post reads like an advertisement, well, I think they deserve it.
It's the other way around that I have to go, though. I've got an HD-SDI source arriving at projectors that can only do HDMI. I don't remember which brand we rented, might have been AJA. They were reclocking HD-SDI to HDMI adapters; my rental invoice doesn't specify which brand we got. They worked well enough. It was IMAG for a variety of events, and there were a few concerts involved, but it was video-only, so sound sync wasn't much of an issue (other than just getting as little delay in the video path as possible was enough). We had hired a company to handle the stage/lighting/audio/etc.
The HDMI to HD-SDI part was easy, because the mixer had HDMI inputs. I only used HD-SDI for the three cameras and the runs to the two projectors. I wanted to use it for distributing the signal to two other rooms, but the venue informed me at the last minute that they couldn't run HD-SDI over their distribution network, only SDI, so I just settled for composite; much cheaper and my budget was super tight at that point, so saving the money on converters was nice. It turns out that composite video downsampled from 1080p using a very high quality composite source looks pretty decent on a big screen, even after running a few thousand feet over a distribution network. I was pleasantly surprised; it was good enough for our needs.
The ImagePro looks neat, and costs half as much as the mixer I used, but this was for primarily live video, so I needed a mixer that could do smooth transitions from five or six sources of varying types, rather than a hard switch between sources. I wanted something with a t-bar for the technician to be able to switch smoothly as fast or slow as he felt was needed. But I'll admit that I went into all this blind, knowing nothing about professional video or mixing. It was all "the supplier wanted $14k to do video with one camera. Here's a $4k budget to do it yourself with three cameras. Make it happen in." So after a hell of a lot of time and research, and a big of begging for a few hundred bucks extra, it did work out in the end. But I'm damned if I know how I'm going to pull it off next year, where I'll probably need to run distances farther than HD-SDI is rated for, and do it on bigger screens than require pro-grade projectors rather than semi-pro, and I really doubt I'm going to get much of a budget increase. I have a few ideas from experience doing it the first time about how to save a few hundred here and there (don't actually need HD-SDI on a fixed camera when it's only a few feet from the mixer, HDMI would do if the camera rental company still only has one less HD-SDI camera than I need, forcing me to pay five times more from a second supplier), but it'll be a challenge. The problem is there doesn't really seem to be any online community for professional video that I can go to for advice on this sort of stuff.
It's getting there, sure, but not quite. SSDs are coming down in costs, but you can't price consumer SSDs based on giant MIRs and black friday sales when you're really in need of enterprise-grade SSDs ;)
But yeah, it's getting closer and closer. Linode uses nothing but 15K RPM SAS drives in RAID10, I figure eventually they'll probably start moving towards SSDs if they don't decide to go SATA.
Throwing dirt cheap SATA drives (well, dirt cheap before the flood) onto SAS controllers is exactly what I do on my home file server. A two-port LSI RAID card can also be used as an 8-port SATA controller, with the right firmware (which they provide on their site easy enough). Combined with a hotswap bay that puts five 3.5" drives in three 5.25" bays, and a case whose entire front behind the door is nine 5.25" bays, and you've got yourself a decent file server. Of course, I really should be putting RE4 greenpower drives in the thing instead of regular greenpower drives...
I've read elsewhere that HDCP strippers are typically made from the chips pulled from displays themselves (perhaps they're desoldering them from broken displays). If this is the case, wouldn't HDCP revocations be rendering many random displays useless? Unlike on a BluRay player, there's no way to update the HDCP key on devices that tend not to have updatable firmware (like displays or TVs).
A combination of the Thailand floods, Black Friday sales, and mail-in rebates created a bizarre situation today... A class of SSDs dropped lower in price per-gig than a class of traditional HDDs...
15K RPM SAS drives aren't cheap, and since the flood, they're over $1 per gig. NewEgg was charging ~$1.44 per gig or more last I checked, for the Cheetah models.
Today, NCIX had Intel 320 SSDs on sale with MIR bringing the 80, 120, and 160GB models down to slightly under $1 per GB after MIR...
Yes, it's comparing the extremes (high end extreme of HDDs and low end extreme of SSDs), but I still didn't expect it to happen, even with sales.
What about existing HDCP strippers? They've been on the market for years.
hd-sdi is awesome (why are BNC connectors so damned rare these days? A connector that quickly and securely locks beats RCA or HDMI any day), but unless you've got pro-grade projectors, you're not going to have hd-sdi input on them. Even semi-pro multi-lamp projectors are lacking it. So you end up having to use hd-sdi to hdmi adapters, which work great, but cost a fortune. Not that an hd-sdi mixer doesn't already cost a fortune, although those can often be rented at somewhat reasonable prices, unlike projectors. I rented a Roland V1600-HD for three days for 7% of replacement cost, but projector rentals seem to be up to 25-50% for a three day rental, it's insane.
Yeah, if you've got the budget, it doesn't really matter, but sometimes you need to do pro-grade stuff with a small budget (perhaps because the people holding the purse strings don't want to give you enough money to do it right), and the rental price disparities become an obstacle.
You can do it with two SATA3 SSDs, although three is safe. But three sufficiently large SSDs aren't cheap. Then again, nobody said you had to rip it all in one go. Three small SSDs; rip a chunk, copy it to a slow big drive, rip another chunk, slow big drive. Regardless, the real reason that it's not useful for pirates is because it's rare that a pirate would even want to do this. bluray was thoroughly cracked ages ago, and OTA or satellite broadcasts (or itunes downloads) are probably going to have better quality than any streaming service you might want to rip.
What I don't get is why this is even news. Devices to strip HDCP have been on the market for years; the hdfury people have a whole product lineup for stripping HDCP and converting to various analog formats, or even hdmi-to-hdmi (the "dr hdmi" product, I believe). Is this news because it's now DIY, rather than a commercial product that does it? I assume there are other similar devices on the market.
I don't think the Nook Tablet is a toy, I just think it's a different class of device. You can compare it in that they're both tablets, but it's not fair to say the iPad is overpriced because it costs more than the Nook; you're basically saying that all 10" tablets are overpriced because they cost more than the Nook. That's the point I'm trying to make. To qualify something as overpriced, you have to compare it to similar devices. If you want to compare it to a Nook, you can only say that it's expensive, not that it's overpriced...
Although I guess the counterargument there might be, if a tablet was 10% bigger but 100% more expensive, it would be overpriced, even though they're different sizes, but hopefully you understand what I mean. Overpriced versus expensive. I won't say that Apple products aren't expensive. They ARE expensive. But they seem to generally be favourably priced compared to similar products from other companies, at least shortly after they come out. I used the mac air in another reply; ultrabooks have changed the dynamic a bit, but compare a mac air to a comparable notebook from Sony or Toshiba and the price is about the same for similar specs. They're all expensive, but the mac air isn't overpriced for that class of device. It's more fair to say thin and lights are expensive in general, since you pay a premium to get notebooks that involve a lot more custom design and exotic materials and parts and such.
Steam lists all prices in Canada in USD, and doesn't charge us any tax (since they have no presence in Canada). I assumed that the situation was the same everywhere (USD prices used, hence the same prices everywhere). Does Steam force you to buy from the Australia store? We lose a bit in the currency exchange, but that only amounts to a 1.5-2.5% difference.
The list price of the Acer Iconia seems to be $50 less than a comparable iPad 2, true. But it got mediocre reviews, it's thicker, heavier, slower, etc. I was trying to compare an iPad 2 to the most similar Android tablet. But we're not talking about a huge difference in price here. Yeah, you can save a bit by getting a budget-brand tablet, but you don't always want to.
I'd probably have to own more than one modern Apple product for that. My windows desktop, windows laptop, solaris server, and linux VPS probably didn't please Steve too much.
No, you can't. Because you obviously weren't willing to consider any $500 Android tablets either.
You can get a nice thin and light laptop for $1000, or you can get a similarly spec'd thick and chunky laptop for half that. That doesn't mean that the thin and light is overpriced, it means that you're not even looking at that market segment.
The 16GB Transformer has an enormously slower GPU, can't decode h.264 properly (blame nVidia's really horrible Tegra 2 GPU, something they thankfully fixed in Tegra 3, mostly), and is much thicker and heavier. Not to mention shorter battery life. It's not all bad, since the screen is a bit higher res, but it's not a comparable tablet. Heck, evne the Galaxy Tab I mentioned isn't exact (GPU is still slower), but it's closer in terms of physical size at least.
The Transformer Prime still has a much slower GPU, but the much faster CPU would make up for that. Thickness is about the same, and it's a bit lighter. But you're missing one critical thing: the Transformer Prime doesn't even have an official release date yet, while the iPad 2 has been on the market for 8 months. A closer comparison would be the Transformer Prime and iPad 3, when it comes out; the gap between them will likely be pretty small.
By the time the Prime comes out, it will probably be ~9 months away from the iPad 2. If we assume the iPad 3 comes out one year after the iPad 2, the gap between the two tablets then would be only 3 months, a much fairer comparison.
You just have to check, unfortunately. But you know Valve is going to have sales for any major holiday, so it would be prudent to check around black friday, boxing day, Halloween, etc. Me, I was remiss and didn't check, and was notified by stories in my RSS feed from the likes of Kotaku.
Compare a 13" macbook air to a Toshiba r830, which I believe is the current in that line, and the specs are pretty similar at the ~$1300 pricepoint... That's what I paid for my r700 (I'm not a mac user), and not long after, the mac air refreshed and had better specs for the same price.
It's not necessarily fair to compare Apple's price/performance to every other vendor at any time, because Apple can't refresh their product lineup daily. Some PC company is always coming out with something new, and any product that's just been refreshed is going to be ahead of the curve...
A proper comparison between a mac and another notebook would have to match up every spec as closely as possible, and then compare the price. If the mac air 13" has a 128GB SSD, you've gotta spec out the r830 with a 128GB SSD. Match the memory. Match the resolution, if possible. That sort of thing.
Depends for what store. A lot of Canadian stores have Black Friday deals, even though Thanksgiving was over a month ago here. Some US stores which operate or ship to Canada have the sales, like NewEgg (although their sale this year for Canada sucks).
Steam's prices are the same in every country, and they've got some amazing deals. Yesterday had Mass Effect 2 (or 1) for $5, Portal 2 for $10, that sort of thing. That sale is over, but there's a new set for today, and there's some less aggressive sales that are valid all week.