Except music from iTunes at this point doesn't contribute to Apple lock-in. There's no DRM on them, and AAC is supported by most major hardware vendors at this point.
Videos and Apps, but not music. And it's not like there isn't a problem going the other way if someone wants to move from Android or Windows Mobile or Palm to iPhone if they've got an investment in apps on that platform.
Besides, if someone ships a seriously compelling alternative to your current platform of choice, is $100 in content really going to stop you from switching, considering we're talking about several hundred dollar cell phones or tablets you replace every couple years.
There are several apps in the app store where the user is redistributing the source outside the App store. JWZ has the iPhone and iPad ports included in xdaliclock for example: http://www.jwz.org/xdaliclock/
It suffers from the same problem Windows has though. There's a limited subset of users who really have a use for a desktop OS in a tablet form factor, which is going to relegate those products to niche status forever. Touch-oriented OSes on lower-powered devices that trade compatibility and advanced capability for ease of use, portability, and battery life are going to own the majority market share.
Telecommunications companies are different. They have extra rights granted to them to allow running limited private infrastructure over public property, and because of that granted a limited monopoly by the local government. In return, they have to play fair because there is no competition. Comcast has the legal right to run a cable through my back yard and access it for maintenence and to service other customers in the area. Along the same lines, you can't have 200 companies in every market stringing cables everywhere. If Comcast digs up my yard ever few years, it's no big deal, but if some startup or another is doing it every weekend, nobody would stand for it.
The alternative is you require every utility to outright own a strip of land adjacent to every property in town to run their infrastructure on, and that obviously doesn't work either.
Requiring a company that has been granted exceptional access to the market on monopoly terms to behave is far different than requiring Apple to adopt a business model they consider harmful, when there's other players in the market capable of adopting the business model you want.
Also, while you were selling on Amazon at $2.49, they were taking a 70% cut. (74 a copy to you)
Now you're selling on Apple AND Amazon, and they're both taking a 30% cut. If you drop your price to $1.99, you're still taking home almost twice as much at $1.39 a copy, and you're reaching a larger market, and you're selling more at a lower price. Also, not only do you have a second storefront, but there's now a boatload of iPads floating around with the Kindle app too, so even Amazon's market just grew some.
IANAAL, but they can probably claim under the Agency model that Apple isn't a reseller. The publisher sets the price and Apple or Amazon takes a fixed cut. It's more like the ebook store is just renting shelf space and payment processing to the publisher, they're not buying stock from the publisher and then reselling it.
Most of the weight in an iPad is the massive batteries to power the larger screen and the glass plate over the screen, which is thicker than an iPhone since it has a larger span. The whole thing weighs a pound and a half, and that's after leaving off all the I/O ports and subsequent case thickness everyone on here wants from a "real tablet" competitor like 3 USB ports, HDMI out, a removable battery, and a floppy drive.
The JooJoo doesn't get anywhere near the same battery life, and it weighs 60% more at two and a half pounds.
What makes you think MS or anyone else could actually ship a dual screen Courier that wouldn't end up weighing somewhere near three pounds by the time it made it out of manufacturing anyway.
So if Google's already shown if a state considers that information a state secret they'll recind publishing it, who wants to bet there will be a bill in Congress by tomorrow classifying it in the states too?
A Macbook is about 4-5 lbs, and an EeePC about 2. But personally I use my Milestone to keep in touch with people.
My MacBook Pro is about 5 lbs. Plus about a 1/2 lb for the A/C adapter. That's still 4 lbs more than an iPad, and a hell of a lot more useless in cattle class on your typical airliner these days.
That's your (or your employer's) choice to make it that complicated.
Depends on what you're doing too. My MBP usually has 5 cables plugged in: Monitor, ethernet, power, USB hub, and security cable. During the day, I've usually got somewhere near a half dozen to a dozen SSH connections open to various engineering machines, 3 or 4 automounted NFS volumes, and Eclipse or VI sessions open on a dozen source files from those NFS volumes. And maybe a distributed build or two running in the background.
It's far easier for me to leave that setup as it is 99% of the time if I leave my desk during the day and want to stay connected, and the iPad fits that for me. It also fits other uses for me where a laptop or netbook is really the wrong form factor.
But, as I said, other people have different problems, different solutions, and different personal weightings for various engineering tradeoffs, and that's fine. Classifying someone who therefore makes different decisions than you do as an idiot or sheep or blind fanboy is either ignorant or just trolling.
And FWIW, I agree with you on if the Appliance/App Store model extends into OS X. I don't have a problem with it on consumer oriented mobile devices though.
Given the platform's focus, I find that extremely unlikely. If it were to somehow happen, I'd start buying elsewhere, but I'm not going to base current purchasing decisions on some hypothetical nightmare scenario for the future of the platform.
It's not "Shut up and go away", it's "put your money where your mouth is".
Apple's made their direction on iPhone OS products pretty clear. If as a user or shareholder you disagree, there are forums (bugreport.apple.com and shareholder's meetings) to deliver those complaints to Apple where they can be weighed against other users and the executive vision for the products. If that fails, vote with your wallet, buy competing platforms, and invest in other companies.
As an Apple shareholder, I believe they're executing a plan that seems to be working and making profit. As an Apple user, I'm glad I get devices where effort has been made to focus on user experience and general quality over the desires of a handful of external developers.
One who finds lost property under circumstances which give him knowledge of or means of inquiry as to the true owner, and who appropriates such property to his own use, or to the use of another person not entitled thereto, without first making reasonable and just efforts to find the owner and to restore the property to him, is guilty of theft.
At the point he realized it was an unreleased prototype (and thus worth selling to Gizmodo), the only logical conclusion was it was property of Apple. He didn't need to hunt down the guy who left it in the bar, just call the switchboard at 1 Infinite Loop.
So make a better open platform instead of whining about the fact that a company that apparently knows how to make a platform is making decisions you don't like.
Slashdot Mirror
Or alternately, people have different opinions on what the big issue is, and don't regard engineering tradeoffs as "evil".
Linux/Android/OSS fanboys are outspoken about ignoring practical usability issues and focusing on it being "open".
In addition to MEMS gyroscopes, you can make a gyro with lasers too: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_laser_gyroscope which are pretty popular for avionics use now.
Because AT&T changed their data plans?
Because they carrier locks the iPad.
In the US, the iPhone is carrier locked to AT&T. The iPad is not.
Uh, OS X and the Airport base stations have had IPv6 support out of the box for many years.
Except music from iTunes at this point doesn't contribute to Apple lock-in. There's no DRM on them, and AAC is supported by most major hardware vendors at this point.
Videos and Apps, but not music. And it's not like there isn't a problem going the other way if someone wants to move from Android or Windows Mobile or Palm to iPhone if they've got an investment in apps on that platform.
Besides, if someone ships a seriously compelling alternative to your current platform of choice, is $100 in content really going to stop you from switching, considering we're talking about several hundred dollar cell phones or tablets you replace every couple years.
iPhone OS 4.0 will have the ability for a user app to receive background events from major location changes.
There are several apps in the app store where the user is redistributing the source outside the App store. JWZ has the iPhone and iPad ports included in xdaliclock for example: http://www.jwz.org/xdaliclock/
You can get a Desktop OS X powered tablet from a third party: http://www.axiotron.com/index.php?id=modbook . They take a normal MacBook or MacBook Pro and mod it.
It suffers from the same problem Windows has though. There's a limited subset of users who really have a use for a desktop OS in a tablet form factor, which is going to relegate those products to niche status forever. Touch-oriented OSes on lower-powered devices that trade compatibility and advanced capability for ease of use, portability, and battery life are going to own the majority market share.
People act Elitist with a low UID, I hope to reverse that trend.
Let me know how that work out for you, filthy 7-digiter.
Yes, they can: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Sail
Massless doesn't mean they don't have momentum.
Telecommunications companies are different. They have extra rights granted to them to allow running limited private infrastructure over public property, and because of that granted a limited monopoly by the local government. In return, they have to play fair because there is no competition. Comcast has the legal right to run a cable through my back yard and access it for maintenence and to service other customers in the area. Along the same lines, you can't have 200 companies in every market stringing cables everywhere. If Comcast digs up my yard ever few years, it's no big deal, but if some startup or another is doing it every weekend, nobody would stand for it.
The alternative is you require every utility to outright own a strip of land adjacent to every property in town to run their infrastructure on, and that obviously doesn't work either.
Requiring a company that has been granted exceptional access to the market on monopoly terms to behave is far different than requiring Apple to adopt a business model they consider harmful, when there's other players in the market capable of adopting the business model you want.
JWZ just published a port of xdaliclock to the iPhone and iPad, and released the source: http://www.jwz.org/xdaliclock/
There's no rule in effect that you can't publish source for a released app targeted to a released version of the OS.
Also, while you were selling on Amazon at $2.49, they were taking a 70% cut. (74 a copy to you)
Now you're selling on Apple AND Amazon, and they're both taking a 30% cut. If you drop your price to $1.99, you're still taking home almost twice as much at $1.39 a copy, and you're reaching a larger market, and you're selling more at a lower price. Also, not only do you have a second storefront, but there's now a boatload of iPads floating around with the Kindle app too, so even Amazon's market just grew some.
IANAAL, but they can probably claim under the Agency model that Apple isn't a reseller. The publisher sets the price and Apple or Amazon takes a fixed cut. It's more like the ebook store is just renting shelf space and payment processing to the publisher, they're not buying stock from the publisher and then reselling it.
Most of the weight in an iPad is the massive batteries to power the larger screen and the glass plate over the screen, which is thicker than an iPhone since it has a larger span. The whole thing weighs a pound and a half, and that's after leaving off all the I/O ports and subsequent case thickness everyone on here wants from a "real tablet" competitor like 3 USB ports, HDMI out, a removable battery, and a floppy drive.
The JooJoo doesn't get anywhere near the same battery life, and it weighs 60% more at two and a half pounds.
What makes you think MS or anyone else could actually ship a dual screen Courier that wouldn't end up weighing somewhere near three pounds by the time it made it out of manufacturing anyway.
That was Amazon: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html
People complain when an app they had paid for and downloaded is disabled by Apple after the fact.
Cite one instance where Apple went and forcibly removed or disabled an app from a user's iPhone. Hint: there are none.
Because it's not worth the extra engineering effort to cater to the 3 people on the planet who would base a purchasing decision on it.
So if Google's already shown if a state considers that information a state secret they'll recind publishing it, who wants to bet there will be a bill in Congress by tomorrow classifying it in the states too?
A Macbook is about 4-5 lbs, and an EeePC about 2.
But personally I use my Milestone to keep in touch with people.
My MacBook Pro is about 5 lbs. Plus about a 1/2 lb for the A/C adapter. That's still 4 lbs more than an iPad, and a hell of a lot more useless in cattle class on your typical airliner these days.
That's your (or your employer's) choice to make it that complicated.
Depends on what you're doing too. My MBP usually has 5 cables plugged in: Monitor, ethernet, power, USB hub, and security cable. During the day, I've usually got somewhere near a half dozen to a dozen SSH connections open to various engineering machines, 3 or 4 automounted NFS volumes, and Eclipse or VI sessions open on a dozen source files from those NFS volumes. And maybe a distributed build or two running in the background.
It's far easier for me to leave that setup as it is 99% of the time if I leave my desk during the day and want to stay connected, and the iPad fits that for me. It also fits other uses for me where a laptop or netbook is really the wrong form factor.
But, as I said, other people have different problems, different solutions, and different personal weightings for various engineering tradeoffs, and that's fine. Classifying someone who therefore makes different decisions than you do as an idiot or sheep or blind fanboy is either ignorant or just trolling.
And FWIW, I agree with you on if the Appliance/App Store model extends into OS X. I don't have a problem with it on consumer oriented mobile devices though.
Given the platform's focus, I find that extremely unlikely. If it were to somehow happen, I'd start buying elsewhere, but I'm not going to base current purchasing decisions on some hypothetical nightmare scenario for the future of the platform.
It's not "Shut up and go away", it's "put your money where your mouth is".
Apple's made their direction on iPhone OS products pretty clear. If as a user or shareholder you disagree, there are forums (bugreport.apple.com and shareholder's meetings) to deliver those complaints to Apple where they can be weighed against other users and the executive vision for the products. If that fails, vote with your wallet, buy competing platforms, and invest in other companies.
As an Apple shareholder, I believe they're executing a plan that seems to be working and making profit. As an Apple user, I'm glad I get devices where effort has been made to focus on user experience and general quality over the desires of a handful of external developers.
Sure, the engineer screwed up, but legal or not, it ain't right to keep the phone.
"Right" is subjective, but I'd agree that giving it back is the decent thing to do. It still isn't theft.
Actually, according to CA law, it is http://codes.lp.findlaw.com/cacode/PEN/3/1/13/5/s485 :
One who finds lost property under circumstances which give him knowledge of or means of inquiry as to the true owner, and who appropriates such property to his own use, or to the use of another person not entitled thereto, without first making reasonable and just efforts to find the owner and to restore the property to him, is guilty of theft.
At the point he realized it was an unreleased prototype (and thus worth selling to Gizmodo), the only logical conclusion was it was property of Apple. He didn't need to hunt down the guy who left it in the bar, just call the switchboard at 1 Infinite Loop.
So make a better open platform instead of whining about the fact that a company that apparently knows how to make a platform is making decisions you don't like.