Miniaturization, fanless operation, full-surface touchscreen, convenience (easier to tote), and longer battery life must be worthless qualities to some people.
I'm sure there were similar laptop vs. desktop arguments back in the day.
There are good Android tablets *now*, because the iPad demonstrated a huge market for similar devices. There weren't any back in 2007.
In real history, Android as a touchscreen phone OS first went beta late 2007, version 1 wasn't available on phones until mid-late 2008, and Android wasn't declared tablet-ready until 2011. In an alternate reality where the iPad was released in 2007, Android as a phone OS may have taken longer to release, and might have stuck with its original Blackberry-inspired interface with minimal touchscreen capabilities. It might not have occurred to them that an all-touchscreen tablet OS might threaten their phone market, nor would they have moved into all-touchscreen tablets, especially if this 2007 iPad had failed to take off--why waste time and money to enter a dud market?
Handwriting or not, a good stylus is essential to the tablet "experience". Jobs was unimaginably wrong on that one. Here's hoping that future tablets take a cue from the Galaxy Note. I'd bet that good stylus product from Microsoft or RIM could easily take-out a second-rate tablet like iPad.
I wish I could be as "unimaginably wrong" as Jobs was on that one. I imagine that I could retire on the profits from a day or two of iPad sales.
10+ years of tablets and PDAs with this "essential" stylus, and it never, ever took off with consumers. It wasn't just cost, business people rarely used them to get "real work" done, and swivel tablets were used in laptop mode more often than not.
Of course, a stylus is better suited to things where pixel-precision is needed, and maybe the next generation of non-iPad tablets will give styluses another go, now that users have experienced the limitations of touchscreen-only devices. But to claim Jobs was "unimaginably wrong" and that a stylus is "essential" to the tablet experience flies in the face of reality.
Incidentally, (patent) laws and lawyers are exactly why this mess exists in the first place. It's as if the fraternity of lawyers is making work for its members...
>>>and so does the competition, which is selling products at the same price as Apple.
Not true. See my signature [Bought an i7-equipped PC for $650. An equal-speced MacMini costs almost double that.:-o].
I'm curious what make/model you bought, or what parts and components you used if you built it yourself.
One of the appeals of the Mini (maybe not to you, though) is its small size. In this discussion they were having a hard time finding Mac mini-sized, fan-less PCs that weren't crippled with slower CPUs or graphics. Admittedly Apple cheated a bit by excluding a built-in optical drive.
From your link: "The first release of Google Desktop Search was released as a beta version on October 14, 2004."
From GP link to patent: Filing Date: Dec 1, 2004
BUT: "application is a continuation of U.S. application Ser. No. 09/478,009, filed on Jan. 5, 2000 now U.S. Pat. No. 6,847,959"
And wiki article on Apple's Spotlight: "Spotlight was first announced at the June 2004 Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, and then released with Mac OS X v10.4 in April, 2005."
Maybe there's valid prior art to this patent, but Google Desktop is not it.
In fact, bureaucrats say Apple is virtually non-existent in Washington, and that their absence will bite them in the long run (translation: that's a nice operation you have, a shame if anything were to happen to it... where's my entitlement^Hbribe^Hpolitical contribution?)
Perhaps Apple is getting influence in more subtle ways, but lobbying is not it.
It should be clear to anyone I'm talking about hardware running Android--hell, I explicitly said it 2 out of the 3 times I mentioned "Android" to avoid exactly your misinterpretation, but pedants will jump on the silliest omission, while completely and willfully ignoring the original comment that sparked the response.
I had already tempered my reply to that comment (unlike you to mine; swearing is so very effective at convincing others you have a point), in case it was a joke. Otherwise I'd have flat out called him out on the popular but blatant lie about Apple releasing new generations of the same product every few months.
Companies have a choice: do they prioritize unit sales (market share), or revenue/profit per unit?
Everyone else goes with the former, because margins are thin and there's little to distinguish competing units on the low end, so they need to pump up numbers.
Apple has always gone with the latter across all their product lines. You never see discounts on Apple stuff unless a new generation has replaced the old, or during rare events like the annual Black Friday sale. This does mean that sales will slow in the months leading up to an expected new generation; no one wants to pay full price for something a day before it's replaced with a newer model.
There's plenty of things to slam Apple for, the myth that they refresh products quickly is not one of them. Apple is actually not releasing new hardware fast enough to keep up with Android; once a year for both iPhone and iPad, versus a dozen new Android models each year from Samsung alone. People who slam Apple but give Android makers a pass are hypocrites.
HTC even extended their USB mini socket to include some extra pins while remaining compatible with normal USB cables.
So, some HTC devices need a special, non-standard cable for full functionality (I'm assuming they didn't add extra pins just for fun), that just happens to look like a normal USB cable?
What if you buy something from another manufacturer which has added their own pins to mini-USB, which don't do the same thing? Now you're back to carrying more than one cable.
I always figured it had to be the government. Who else would invent something designed to spread viruses, botnets and prn?
Microsoft Windows and Novell network equipment in computer labs were doing this long before they got hooked up to the internet.
Who else would create a monopoly service with no accountability?
Again, Microsoft, to name one. Government tried breaking that monopoly up by holding them accountable to antitrust laws and fair business dealings, the next government halted that effort in its tracks.
Who else would create something to keep me paying over and over again for the same software?
You mean like annual fees and software "upgrade assurance" for various software and services, including Windows at the corporate level? I'm not even sure what "software" you're talking about that you're paying again and again, just to connect to the internet.
Who else would create a communications network that is so unsecure that it took a decade to figure out how to safely use it for simple payment transactions (and even now isn't all that safe).
Simple payment systems were not a design goal of the original, non-commercial internet.
And I'll throw up Microsoft as an example again of how a multi-billion dollar private enterprise that fits your description. Almost all the Internet-based malware attacks would have worked just as effectively even if limited to a large LAN (botnets and C&C systems are an obvious exception), because of the swiss-cheese security of Windows back in the day.
For example, "net send" was a great tool for sending simple messages to someone on a Windows network... except if you didn't specify a recipient, it sent to ALL computers on the local network (a very stupid default, who was the genius who thought that up?). Someone at the company I worked at in 2000 sent a fake virus warning as a joke, but forgot to include his coworker's computer name. Thousands of employees saw it, and IT was flooded with panicked calls. IT was understandably pissed. Actual malware started exploiting Messenger service vulnerabilities not long after, and Microsoft finally disabled it by default in WinXP SP2.
It is not "the Internet's" responsibility to stop malware, any more than it is a telephone system's responsibility for catching and preventing phone fraud.
The benefits to connecting computers are obvious. Had the government not created the internet, private companies would have created competing internets. At first it would have been networks of networks within single companies. The later companies that do business together would have connected eventually forming networks of companies that do related business. Then companies would have realized they can market to smaller businesses and eventually even computer owning individuals. An internet, or perhaps a few internets, would have grown up
And at each step of the way, viruses would have been intolerable. Companies running networks or internetworks known to have viruses or to be otherwise unsafe would be pariahs. Security and accountability would have been built in at the beginning. Competing internetworks would try different technologies with the best becoming more popular.
The "best" becoming most popular and beating out inferior competitors? The more/most *popular* technologies are rarely the "best" even for its time. Windows; monitors limited to 1920x1080 pixels regardless of size; the iPod; VHS tapes; mp3s; Internet Explorer; etc.
What technologies would they have developed to make a better internet?
Of course we'll never know. The government jumped in and did it so no one else could.
And thank goodness they did, and the protocols and language for the world wide web were made available freely without license instead of held by a private companies, otherwise the modern "internet" after a half dozen corporate mergers would be as barren a wasteland as cable TV, despite over 500 channels, and online freedoms would have been locked down and restricted far earlier.
conviction that everything must be either good or bad is obviously the sign of a failed intellect. How did your politics become so meaningless and manipulable by marketing exercises? Is it just the way media has become so powerful or is it that Americans have become stupid?
It's not an "or" question, both are true.
Of course that's generalizing; not all Americans are so easily manipulated, but are moderates/centrists who can see two (or more) sides of an issue and aren't blinded by partisanship. Unfortunately, that means they're "fence-sitters", "indecisive", "flip-floppers" and other derogatory terms to ideologues on both sides.
Sniper rifle (slow repeat rate) vs automatic (rapid-fire) weapon. Immobile, isolated position (bell tower) vs front area of theatre with lots of space, and line-of-sight to gunman potentially blocked by panicking people if you're seated higher up. Clear day vs room filled with teargas.
And a huge difference between Whitman and this incident, and the attack on Rep. Giffords: "Around 20 minutes later, once Whitman began facing return fire from the authorities and armed civilians who had brought out their personal firearms to assist police..."
It was 20 minutes before he *started* getting return fire, if the wiki article is correct. Granted it's not easy to determine where a sniper is firing from at first, but regardless, that is a lot of time for an armed group under fire to retreat to relative safety, collect themselves, and organize a response.
Not saying that armed civilian population can't do some good, and you did answer the GP's request for an example, but I wouldn't say the Whitman shooting is close enough to yesterday's circumstances to say it's proof that an armed population could've limited the number of dead and injured.
Why aren't US soldiers on-base allowed to carry loaded (or easy-to-load) weapons? Soldiers defending a country whose Bill of Rights specifically forbids government from taking away arms... have their guns taken from them at their own military base.
I also ask because higher up, we had a comment about Israeli soldiers carrying their assigned weapon almost all the time in-country, because they are personally responsible for any (mis)use even if it wasn't them who pulled the trigger.
You've hit the distinction though--"if the product arrives in..."
You've already ordered it, based on whatever research you've done (or not done). At that point you don't care what the packaging looks like when it's delivered to you.
Mass-consumer goods sitting on store shelves or behind security glass, on the other hand, *haven't* been bought yet, and it's competing with other products for your attention.
Of course, this means any shiny packaging on expensive goods (especially Apple gear) must themselves be put into plain shipping boxes if they're actually delivered to you, lest they attract the attention of thieves.
Don't get me wrong, I fully agree with what you say, I keep and reuse lots of stuff myself. But, I also acknowledge the unfortunate reality that visual presentation and impression is the very first thing people notice, and marketing people exploit this as much as possible.
People keep the packaging for returns and because selling your mint condition iDevice with mint condition packaging means you get higher resell value on eBay.
Ah, the joys of owning an iDevice. You have to constantly plan ahead financially for when the next version comes out.
So, the takeaway is, what? Only iDevice/Apple owners plan ahead financially for stuff?
I guess this explains a) the housing and economic crisis the last few years, and b) why Apple stuff has been utterly recession-proof so far, despite not playing in the cheap, low-margin space of any product category.
GP was wrong about Apple being the first phone with a good capacitive touch screen, and that it was "the only real inventive thing" that Apple brought to (smartphone) devices.
Everyone keeps dismissing the interface. The full browser, a well-thought out user interface geared for touchscreen, pinch-and-zoom, orientation sensor, visual voicemail. All taken for granted today, but what other phones had these, let alone brought all of them together, before the iPhone?
Meanwhile, you are wrong by implying the iPhone was a copy of the LG Prada.
The Prada was announced December 2006, the iPhone less than 1 month later in January 2007. The Prada was "unveiled" and won the iF Design Award in September 2006, I assume this is the design conference you speak of.
This is less than 4 months before the iPhone was publicly demoed, live, with all major features working, and zero glitches. No company, not even one with the resources of Apple, can pull that off in 4 months. Especially not with the detail-obsessed Steve Jobs at the helm.
Look at how long it took to get Android out the door. It took Google 10 months after the iPhone's public demo to release a buggy public beta of Android--they weren't even confident enough to demo its features live, they released a video so every edited shot of the device was done under controlled conditions. The first release version wasn't ready until 11 months after *that* (i.e. closing on 2 years after iPhone was demo'ed). And we knew they'd been working on a phone for quite some time, having bought Android in August 2005.
The LG Prada was the first phone with a capacitive touchscreen interface, no honest Apple follower denies this. But the original Prada's interface was a carry-over from cheap candy bar phones, with T9-keypad input and hard-to-touch scrollbars even, and a browser so bad few reviewers bothered to mention it. The iPhone was in no way a copy of the Prada.
The difference between Cardassian and Kardashians is that one group are a bunch of cold, heartless, reptilian creatures, and the other is an alien race from a Star Trek series.
The truth is that Apple had irrefutable proof that Microsoft had copied source code from Quicktime, they were already in court over this before Steve Jobs came back with the NeXT purchase, and the $150 million investment was part of an out-of-court settlement that included cross-licensing and other terms. It was spun in a way that benefited both companies. To the layman it was a vote of confidence in Apple, to others it was a self-serving ploy by Microsoft to keep a competitor alive during its antitrust trial.
But dig deeper and you find the real story, reported at least as early as 1998. For more recent articles backing this up just google "microsoft apple quicktime 150 million".
Microsoft had to pay Apple a substantial amount of money as part of their out-of-court settlement; rumours put it between $500M and $2 billion over several years (near bottom of article). So Apple definitely benefited from an infusion of cash from Microsoft, but it wasn't the paltry $150 million investment the public heard about.
Could Apple have survived without the $150M investment, the PR value it gave them, and the up-to $2B in settlement money? Very likely--Apple had around $2B in cash in 1997, its single quarter loss of $700M due to restructuring was behind it. It would've been more shaky at the start and they might not have made as much, but they had enough to tide them over until the iMac era brought them back to profitability.
"I’ve been told things like ‘I hope you have an accident, die and go to hell.’ So that’s what I’ve been up against."
Friends have rejected him. “I used to be a good running friend with somebody who doesn’t live far from here. I mentioned on one occasion that I was an atheist and I’ve never seen him again I came here knowing this was the Bible Belt, but I didn’t realise it was a more like a totalitarian Christian society: you’re either one of them or you’re not and there’s no in between. So I’ve learnt this lesson, to keep it to myself as much as possible.”
Where is Apple? They spent a mere $0.5M, one-tenth what Google did. Dell, Intel, Amazon, Oracle, IBM, HP all outspent Apple. And unlike Facebook, Google and Microsoft, Apple has no political action committee.
It's true that Google lobbied for some worthwhile things like campaigning against SOPA, but if the amount of lobbying dollars are the measure by which you're predicting Apple wins in the court, you are way off base.
"I never once had a meeting with anybody representing Apple," said Jeff Miller, who served as a senior aide on the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Antitrust Subcommittee for eight years. "There have been other tech companies who chose not to engage in Washington, and for the most part that strategy did not benefit them."
Then on page 2 of article:
“There’s a difference between being quiet and uncooperative,” said a congressional aide who has dealt with Apple. “Part of the problem being behind the scenes is they have no identity. They have no corporate identity in this town because nobody knows them.” [...] And in the corridors of Congress, Apple has become a punching bag for lawmakers who understand the power of using a marquee name to reinforce their arguments about American companies dodging taxes, hiring overseas and mistreating foreign workers.
If lobbying dollars make the courts see things their way, as you imply, Apple should be losing every court case on home soil.
Slashdot Mirror
Miniaturization, fanless operation, full-surface touchscreen, convenience (easier to tote), and longer battery life must be worthless qualities to some people.
I'm sure there were similar laptop vs. desktop arguments back in the day.
There are good Android tablets *now*, because the iPad demonstrated a huge market for similar devices. There weren't any back in 2007.
In real history, Android as a touchscreen phone OS first went beta late 2007, version 1 wasn't available on phones until mid-late 2008, and Android wasn't declared tablet-ready until 2011. In an alternate reality where the iPad was released in 2007, Android as a phone OS may have taken longer to release, and might have stuck with its original Blackberry-inspired interface with minimal touchscreen capabilities. It might not have occurred to them that an all-touchscreen tablet OS might threaten their phone market, nor would they have moved into all-touchscreen tablets, especially if this 2007 iPad had failed to take off--why waste time and money to enter a dud market?
Handwriting or not, a good stylus is essential to the tablet "experience". Jobs was unimaginably wrong on that one. Here's hoping that future tablets take a cue from the Galaxy Note. I'd bet that good stylus product from Microsoft or RIM could easily take-out a second-rate tablet like iPad.
I wish I could be as "unimaginably wrong" as Jobs was on that one. I imagine that I could retire on the profits from a day or two of iPad sales.
10+ years of tablets and PDAs with this "essential" stylus, and it never, ever took off with consumers. It wasn't just cost, business people rarely used them to get "real work" done, and swivel tablets were used in laptop mode more often than not.
Of course, a stylus is better suited to things where pixel-precision is needed, and maybe the next generation of non-iPad tablets will give styluses another go, now that users have experienced the limitations of touchscreen-only devices. But to claim Jobs was "unimaginably wrong" and that a stylus is "essential" to the tablet experience flies in the face of reality.
Which is exactly why those demanding judges be elected are totally misguided. They are letting emotions control them instead of logic.
That's not how the law and lawyers works.
Incidentally, (patent) laws and lawyers are exactly why this mess exists in the first place. It's as if the fraternity of lawyers is making work for its members...
>>>and so does the competition, which is selling products at the same price as Apple.
Not true. :-o].
See my signature [Bought an i7-equipped PC for $650. An equal-speced MacMini costs almost double that.
I'm curious what make/model you bought, or what parts and components you used if you built it yourself.
One of the appeals of the Mini (maybe not to you, though) is its small size. In this discussion they were having a hard time finding Mac mini-sized, fan-less PCs that weren't crippled with slower CPUs or graphics. Admittedly Apple cheated a bit by excluding a built-in optical drive.
The gun the shooter use was already illegal in Colorado. How will further disarming the victims make anything better?
"Guns used in Colorado theatre shooting legal in Canada"
If these guns are legal in Canada with the right licenses and permits, I'm pretty sure they're legal in Colorado.
From your link: "The first release of Google Desktop Search was released as a beta version on October 14, 2004."
From GP link to patent: Filing Date: Dec 1, 2004
BUT: "application is a continuation of U.S. application Ser. No. 09/478,009, filed on Jan. 5, 2000 now U.S. Pat. No. 6,847,959"
And wiki article on Apple's Spotlight: "Spotlight was first announced at the June 2004 Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, and then released with Mac OS X v10.4 in April, 2005."
Maybe there's valid prior art to this patent, but Google Desktop is not it.
In which case Google should winning every legal battle against Apple, since they spend 10 times what Apple does on lobbying.
In fact, bureaucrats say Apple is virtually non-existent in Washington, and that their absence will bite them in the long run (translation: that's a nice operation you have, a shame if anything were to happen to it... where's my entitlement^Hbribe^Hpolitical contribution?)
Perhaps Apple is getting influence in more subtle ways, but lobbying is not it.
Read what I wrote again. Slowly.
It should be clear to anyone I'm talking about hardware running Android--hell, I explicitly said it 2 out of the 3 times I mentioned "Android" to avoid exactly your misinterpretation, but pedants will jump on the silliest omission, while completely and willfully ignoring the original comment that sparked the response.
I had already tempered my reply to that comment (unlike you to mine; swearing is so very effective at convincing others you have a point), in case it was a joke. Otherwise I'd have flat out called him out on the popular but blatant lie about Apple releasing new generations of the same product every few months.
Companies have a choice: do they prioritize unit sales (market share), or revenue/profit per unit?
Everyone else goes with the former, because margins are thin and there's little to distinguish competing units on the low end, so they need to pump up numbers.
Apple has always gone with the latter across all their product lines. You never see discounts on Apple stuff unless a new generation has replaced the old, or during rare events like the annual Black Friday sale. This does mean that sales will slow in the months leading up to an expected new generation; no one wants to pay full price for something a day before it's replaced with a newer model.
There's plenty of things to slam Apple for, the myth that they refresh products quickly is not one of them. Apple is actually not releasing new hardware fast enough to keep up with Android; once a year for both iPhone and iPad, versus a dozen new Android models each year from Samsung alone. People who slam Apple but give Android makers a pass are hypocrites.
HTC even extended their USB mini socket to include some extra pins while remaining compatible with normal USB cables.
So, some HTC devices need a special, non-standard cable for full functionality (I'm assuming they didn't add extra pins just for fun), that just happens to look like a normal USB cable?
What if you buy something from another manufacturer which has added their own pins to mini-USB, which don't do the same thing? Now you're back to carrying more than one cable.
I always figured it had to be the government. Who else would invent something designed to spread viruses, botnets and prn?
Microsoft Windows and Novell network equipment in computer labs were doing this long before they got hooked up to the internet.
Who else would create a monopoly service with no accountability?
Again, Microsoft, to name one. Government tried breaking that monopoly up by holding them accountable to antitrust laws and fair business dealings, the next government halted that effort in its tracks.
Who else would create something to keep me paying over and over again for the same software?
You mean like annual fees and software "upgrade assurance" for various software and services, including Windows at the corporate level? I'm not even sure what "software" you're talking about that you're paying again and again, just to connect to the internet.
Who else would create a communications network that is so unsecure that it took a decade to figure out how to safely use it for simple payment transactions (and even now isn't all that safe).
Simple payment systems were not a design goal of the original, non-commercial internet.
And I'll throw up Microsoft as an example again of how a multi-billion dollar private enterprise that fits your description. Almost all the Internet-based malware attacks would have worked just as effectively even if limited to a large LAN (botnets and C&C systems are an obvious exception), because of the swiss-cheese security of Windows back in the day.
For example, "net send" was a great tool for sending simple messages to someone on a Windows network... except if you didn't specify a recipient, it sent to ALL computers on the local network (a very stupid default, who was the genius who thought that up?). Someone at the company I worked at in 2000 sent a fake virus warning as a joke, but forgot to include his coworker's computer name. Thousands of employees saw it, and IT was flooded with panicked calls. IT was understandably pissed. Actual malware started exploiting Messenger service vulnerabilities not long after, and Microsoft finally disabled it by default in WinXP SP2.
It is not "the Internet's" responsibility to stop malware, any more than it is a telephone system's responsibility for catching and preventing phone fraud.
The benefits to connecting computers are obvious. Had the government not created the internet, private companies would have created competing internets. At first it would have been networks of networks within single companies. The later companies that do business together would have connected eventually forming networks of companies that do related business. Then companies would have realized they can market to smaller businesses and eventually even computer owning individuals. An internet, or perhaps a few internets, would have grown up
And at each step of the way, viruses would have been intolerable. Companies running networks or internetworks known to have viruses or to be otherwise unsafe would be pariahs. Security and accountability would have been built in at the beginning. Competing internetworks would try different technologies with the best becoming more popular.
The "best" becoming most popular and beating out inferior competitors? The more/most *popular* technologies are rarely the "best" even for its time. Windows; monitors limited to 1920x1080 pixels regardless of size; the iPod; VHS tapes; mp3s; Internet Explorer; etc.
What technologies would they have developed to make a better internet?
Of course we'll never know. The government jumped in and did it so no one else could.
And thank goodness they did, and the protocols and language for the world wide web were made available freely without license instead of held by a private companies, otherwise the modern "internet" after a half dozen corporate mergers would be as barren a wasteland as cable TV, despite over 500 channels, and online freedoms would have been locked down and restricted far earlier.
conviction that everything must be either good or bad is obviously the sign of a failed intellect. How did your politics become so meaningless and manipulable by marketing exercises? Is it just the way media has become so powerful or is it that Americans have become stupid?
It's not an "or" question, both are true.
Of course that's generalizing; not all Americans are so easily manipulated, but are moderates/centrists who can see two (or more) sides of an issue and aren't blinded by partisanship. Unfortunately, that means they're "fence-sitters", "indecisive", "flip-floppers" and other derogatory terms to ideologues on both sides.
And if they're successful, your tax dollars goes to the bank.
More importantly, MY tax dollars also go to the bank for your selfishness.
I'll assume you were joking.
Sniper rifle (slow repeat rate) vs automatic (rapid-fire) weapon.
Immobile, isolated position (bell tower) vs front area of theatre with lots of space, and line-of-sight to gunman potentially blocked by panicking people if you're seated higher up.
Clear day vs room filled with teargas.
And a huge difference between Whitman and this incident, and the attack on Rep. Giffords: "Around 20 minutes later, once Whitman began facing return fire from the authorities and armed civilians who had brought out their personal firearms to assist police..."
It was 20 minutes before he *started* getting return fire, if the wiki article is correct. Granted it's not easy to determine where a sniper is firing from at first, but regardless, that is a lot of time for an armed group under fire to retreat to relative safety, collect themselves, and organize a response.
Not saying that armed civilian population can't do some good, and you did answer the GP's request for an example, but I wouldn't say the Whitman shooting is close enough to yesterday's circumstances to say it's proof that an armed population could've limited the number of dead and injured.
Why aren't US soldiers on-base allowed to carry loaded (or easy-to-load) weapons? Soldiers defending a country whose Bill of Rights specifically forbids government from taking away arms... have their guns taken from them at their own military base.
I also ask because higher up, we had a comment about Israeli soldiers carrying their assigned weapon almost all the time in-country, because they are personally responsible for any (mis)use even if it wasn't them who pulled the trigger.
You've hit the distinction though--"if the product arrives in..."
You've already ordered it, based on whatever research you've done (or not done). At that point you don't care what the packaging looks like when it's delivered to you.
Mass-consumer goods sitting on store shelves or behind security glass, on the other hand, *haven't* been bought yet, and it's competing with other products for your attention.
Of course, this means any shiny packaging on expensive goods (especially Apple gear) must themselves be put into plain shipping boxes if they're actually delivered to you, lest they attract the attention of thieves.
Don't get me wrong, I fully agree with what you say, I keep and reuse lots of stuff myself. But, I also acknowledge the unfortunate reality that visual presentation and impression is the very first thing people notice, and marketing people exploit this as much as possible.
People keep the packaging for returns and because selling your mint condition iDevice with mint condition packaging means you get higher resell value on eBay.
Ah, the joys of owning an iDevice. You have to constantly plan ahead financially for when the next version comes out.
So, the takeaway is, what? Only iDevice/Apple owners plan ahead financially for stuff?
I guess this explains a) the housing and economic crisis the last few years, and b) why Apple stuff has been utterly recession-proof so far, despite not playing in the cheap, low-margin space of any product category.
GP was wrong about Apple being the first phone with a good capacitive touch screen, and that it was "the only real inventive thing" that Apple brought to (smartphone) devices.
Everyone keeps dismissing the interface. The full browser, a well-thought out user interface geared for touchscreen, pinch-and-zoom, orientation sensor, visual voicemail. All taken for granted today, but what other phones had these, let alone brought all of them together, before the iPhone?
Meanwhile, you are wrong by implying the iPhone was a copy of the LG Prada.
The Prada was announced December 2006, the iPhone less than 1 month later in January 2007. The Prada was "unveiled" and won the iF Design Award in September 2006, I assume this is the design conference you speak of.
This is less than 4 months before the iPhone was publicly demoed, live, with all major features working, and zero glitches. No company, not even one with the resources of Apple, can pull that off in 4 months. Especially not with the detail-obsessed Steve Jobs at the helm.
Look at how long it took to get Android out the door. It took Google 10 months after the iPhone's public demo to release a buggy public beta of Android--they weren't even confident enough to demo its features live, they released a video so every edited shot of the device was done under controlled conditions. The first release version wasn't ready until 11 months after *that* (i.e. closing on 2 years after iPhone was demo'ed). And we knew they'd been working on a phone for quite some time, having bought Android in August 2005.
The LG Prada was the first phone with a capacitive touchscreen interface, no honest Apple follower denies this. But the original Prada's interface was a carry-over from cheap candy bar phones, with T9-keypad input and hard-to-touch scrollbars even, and a browser so bad few reviewers bothered to mention it. The iPhone was in no way a copy of the Prada.
The difference between Cardassian and Kardashians is that one group are a bunch of cold, heartless, reptilian creatures, and the other is an alien race from a Star Trek series.
Stop perpetuating this myth
The truth is that Apple had irrefutable proof that Microsoft had copied source code from Quicktime, they were already in court over this before Steve Jobs came back with the NeXT purchase, and the $150 million investment was part of an out-of-court settlement that included cross-licensing and other terms. It was spun in a way that benefited both companies. To the layman it was a vote of confidence in Apple, to others it was a self-serving ploy by Microsoft to keep a competitor alive during its antitrust trial.
But dig deeper and you find the real story, reported at least as early as 1998. For more recent articles backing this up just google "microsoft apple quicktime 150 million".
Microsoft had to pay Apple a substantial amount of money as part of their out-of-court settlement; rumours put it between $500M and $2 billion over several years (near bottom of article). So Apple definitely benefited from an infusion of cash from Microsoft, but it wasn't the paltry $150 million investment the public heard about.
Could Apple have survived without the $150M investment, the PR value it gave them, and the up-to $2B in settlement money? Very likely--Apple had around $2B in cash in 1997, its single quarter loss of $700M due to restructuring was behind it. It would've been more shaky at the start and they might not have made as much, but they had enough to tide them over until the iMac era brought them back to profitability.
"I’ve been told things like ‘I hope you have an accident, die and go to hell.’ So that’s what I’ve been up against."
Friends have rejected him. “I used to be a good running friend with somebody who doesn’t live far from here. I mentioned on one occasion that I was an atheist and I’ve never seen him again I came here knowing this was the Bible Belt, but I didn’t realise it was a more like a totalitarian Christian society: you’re either one of them or you’re not and there’s no in between. So I’ve learnt this lesson, to keep it to myself as much as possible.”
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/ft/2012/02/atheism_in_america_why_won_t_the_u_s_accept_its_atheists_.single.html
When the ultra-religious right despise atheists more than gays and lesbians, I'd consider that "hate" even if they won't admit it.
Some real facts would've been nice, rather than a baseless implication.
Google spent over $5 million in lobbying in Q1 2012 alone. Microsoft spent $1.72M, Facebook $0.65M.
Where is Apple? They spent a mere $0.5M, one-tenth what Google did. Dell, Intel, Amazon, Oracle, IBM, HP all outspent Apple. And unlike Facebook, Google and Microsoft, Apple has no political action committee.
It's true that Google lobbied for some worthwhile things like campaigning against SOPA, but if the amount of lobbying dollars are the measure by which you're predicting Apple wins in the court, you are way off base.
In fact it's exactly the opposite:
"I never once had a meeting with anybody representing Apple," said Jeff Miller, who served as a senior aide on the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Antitrust Subcommittee for eight years. "There have been other tech companies who chose not to engage in Washington, and for the most part that strategy did not benefit them."
Then on page 2 of article:
“There’s a difference between being quiet and uncooperative,” said a congressional aide who has dealt with Apple. “Part of the problem being behind the scenes is they have no identity. They have no corporate identity in this town because nobody knows them.”
[...]
And in the corridors of Congress, Apple has become a punching bag for lawmakers who understand the power of using a marquee name to reinforce their arguments about American companies dodging taxes, hiring overseas and mistreating foreign workers.
If lobbying dollars make the courts see things their way, as you imply, Apple should be losing every court case on home soil.