The problem is, Apple presumes all users are stupid.
No, not really.
you can have smart users plus multitasking and not recharge more often; rather, just a more productive user. (...) Apple is excluding smart users from their target audience.
As a 'smart' user, I completely agree with Apple's approach. What you fail to take into account that while I may be able to deal with a multitasking OS, I might not necessarily want to. When I get home after >8 hrs of work, I just want to sit on my couch, browse the interweb, watch some youtube video's and play a silly game without having to think about all the technical details. When I'm off work I want to be a 'stupid' user too, especially since no one is paying me to be a 'smart' user at that time.
I used to have a Toshiba laptop that only had a clit and no trackpad. I hated that thing with a passion, completely useless. I ended up carrying a mouse around all the time.
For some people, like me, it's the exact opposite. I rarely use my phone to make calls, maybe 5 minutes a month. For a phone call I have to stop what I'm doing, it's a huge and wasteful context-switch. Send me an IM message or an email, I can handle those asynchronously.
The roaming charges are often completely absurd, and I don't see the free market taking care of it anytime soon.
The most ridiculous thing is that most of these operators have presence in a lot of EU countries. yet you pay the much higher roaming tariff even if you're using a network owned by the very same company you're already paying for domestic use.
I recall reading not long ago about European phones using a different system (or maybe it was that particular carrier?) in various other parts of the world.
You've got that the wrong way around. Some carriers in the US use a different system (CDMA) than the rest of the world. The few operators that use the standard system use it on a non-standard frequency. Every phone on the market today in the EU has support for multiple bands (usually 4 or 5), this is such a standard feature that they stopped advertising it years ago.
So that is why the National Federation of the Blind posted this press release after the iPad's launch commending Apple for how accesible the iPad is to the blind ?
Sure, for real work I prefer an actual keyboard, a full-blown operating system and lots of RAM and disk space. I also want that keyboard to be full-size, I want that disk to be fast, I want that OS to run on a fast CPU and show on a big screen.
For me, netbooks are useless, even normal laptops are a garbage as far as I'm concerned. The keyboard is too small and in an unergonomic place, the screen is tiny, the disk is slow, the CPU is either slow or eats li-ion batteries for lunch.
The iPad is great at what it does: surfing the web and reading email on the couch, netbooks suck at that. My 24" iMac is great at what is does: being a full-fledged computer with a nice big screen that I can use for real work, netbooks suck at that too.
There is no one-size-fit's-all device, netbooks and laptops are one-size-fit's-nowhere.
50Mbit on fiber? Am I the only one who thinks that is ridiculous ?
I'm getting hooked up to fiber in 2 weeks and I'm quite annoyed that they offer nothing better than 200/200. I would have expected at least gbit on fiber, I don't see a reason they need to limit it at all and gbit seems to be a good point since most consumer grade computers come with gbit NIC's nowadays.
After a certain point, it doesn't really matter how fast your internet connection is, you're not going to use any more bandwidth anyway. I have about 500-600GB of traffic a month on 120Mbit cable, this will not significantly change if I go to 200/200 or gbit. All the limits do is ensure I have to wait a little longer for a download to finish, they are waisting my time for no good reason.
If you start working on that phone now, you might even get a few months use out of it once you're finished. Don't expect too many GSM networks to still be around in a few years time.
I don't know how people can doublethink away the idea that Pirates stealing 5x the number of copies being sold legitimately for a top selling game [torrentfreak.com] somehow DOESN'T hurt the industry.
Really ?
Consider this: Water falls out of the sky for free. Alternatively, you can buy it in a very convenient way from your water company at about a tenth of a cent per liter.
Yet, there are companies selling 0,5 liter bottles of water for several euro's. And this is of inferior quality to tap water that costs ~0,1 cent/liter.
They are selling an inferior product, for a much higher price, when the a better product that is orders-of-magnitude cheaper is available literally everywhere. And they are apparently making a healthy profit doing so as lots of people buy this stuff.
So why is the copyright maffia whining about piracy and games being available for free on the internet ? Water being available for free doesn't stop the bottled-water industry from making loads of money.
A range lasts only 3 months (ie a 'season') so by the time something new is out and proven popular it's too late to copy it because we're already moving onto the next season.
Thus just goes to prove how crappy the designs are if everyone is already sick of it after 3 months.
Or, you go to the Andriod station, borrow a pump for free, sell your 100 litres of gas, and go home with all your profit.
I'm gonna stop with the car analogies here. Android is also problematic for a lone developer, the problem in 2 words is: device fragmentation.
Android's device requirements are not nearly strict enough. Want to play back video in your Android app ? Chances are you'll have to provide several different versions of the video because not all devices have the same codec support.
The specs say, for example, that the device should be able to play back mpeg4, but it doesn't specify the bitrates, profiles, resolutions, etc. that should be supported.
So you'll still need to buy every popular Android device just to check if your video will actually work. And that's just video.
Ford wants to exploit these fools even more. So they create their own line of gas stations, that sell the same fuel as everywhere else, but at five times the cost.
Your analogy completely misses the point. Apple is not selling their own gas, they act as a broker for other people selling gas and take a cut.
Say I find a small oil well in my backyard, build a DIY refinery and I produce 100 gallons of gasoline each day. I can go to the apple-branded gas station and ask them to sell the gas for me, they take a 30% cut of the selling price.
Your alternative is that I operate my own gas station, just to sell 100 liters of gas each day. Running the station will probably cost more than the profit I make selling the gas.
Running your own chain of gas stations is fine if you're a big ass oil company, not if you're a small time seller. Forcing everyone to resell through the same brand of gas stations levels the playing field.
The reason for the app store has nothing to do with security and everything about Apple wringing every last penny out of developers by taking an arbitrary cut of their sales and providing only limited QC and indexing that could easily be provided by any other site or service.
Really ? If I want to create an app as a hobby project, what are my alternatives ?
I'd have to get hosting for my app to be downloadable, eating my profits. If my app gets really popular, it could effectively DDOS the server.
How would people even know my app exists and where to find it, I'd need to pay for advertising, etc. Again eating my profits.
If it's a paid app, I'd need to be able to handle credit card transactions, paypal, direct debit, etc. That's a HUGE pain in the arse due to all the security issues and not to mention, costly.
A website with a webshop doesn't write itself. I'd either have to pay someone to do it, do it myself, or configure and modify an open-source webshop to suit my needs.
Then there's copy protection, also a PITA.
Either I do all that extra work, pay al that extra money and hope I sell a lot of copies to earn back my investment and make a profit or I let Apple handle that stuff and make a profit on the first sale, not having to worry about anything other than just my app.
Easy choice for me. IMHO the power of the whole app-store model is that it empowers small time (hobby) developers to play in the same league as the big boys. That also partly explains the huge amount of apps available.
I'm pretty happy with my iMac too, doesn't mean I wouldn't like a tablet for surfing the web on the couch. At the moment, I use my iPhone for this and and spend more times browsing the web on that than on my desktop machine, although I'd prefer a bigger screen for this.
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No, not really.
As a 'smart' user, I completely agree with Apple's approach. What you fail to take into account that while I may be able to deal with a multitasking OS, I might not necessarily want to. When I get home after >8 hrs of work, I just want to sit on my couch, browse the interweb, watch some youtube video's and play a silly game without having to think about all the technical details. When I'm off work I want to be a 'stupid' user too, especially since no one is paying me to be a 'smart' user at that time.
If it included Flash they would have to lower the price to offset the inconvenience. Flash is a misfeature, I'd pay extra not to have it.
I used to have a Toshiba laptop that only had a clit and no trackpad. I hated that thing with a passion, completely useless. I ended up carrying a mouse around all the time.
For some people, like me, it's the exact opposite. I rarely use my phone to make calls, maybe 5 minutes a month. For a phone call I have to stop what I'm doing, it's a huge and wasteful context-switch. Send me an IM message or an email, I can handle those asynchronously.
HDMI can transport DSD, some SACD players have an HDMI output.
The most ridiculous thing is that most of these operators have presence in a lot of EU countries. yet you pay the much higher roaming tariff even if you're using a network owned by the very same company you're already paying for domestic use.
Really ? So if you visit Europe with your US phone you don't pay any extra ?
Remember: In Europe 'roaming' means going to another country, not another part of the same country.
You've got that the wrong way around. Some carriers in the US use a different system (CDMA) than the rest of the world. The few operators that use the standard system use it on a non-standard frequency. Every phone on the market today in the EU has support for multiple bands (usually 4 or 5), this is such a standard feature that they stopped advertising it years ago.
Nokia, SonyEricsson, LG and Samsung are making boatloads of phones like that.
I love how the article uses crappy low-res, heavily compressed flash video to demonstrate the quality of the camera.
So that is why the National Federation of the Blind posted this press release after the iPad's launch commending Apple for how accesible the iPad is to the blind ?
Sure, for real work I prefer an actual keyboard, a full-blown operating system and lots of RAM and disk space. I also want that keyboard to be full-size, I want that disk to be fast, I want that OS to run on a fast CPU and show on a big screen.
For me, netbooks are useless, even normal laptops are a garbage as far as I'm concerned. The keyboard is too small and in an unergonomic place, the screen is tiny, the disk is slow, the CPU is either slow or eats li-ion batteries for lunch.
The iPad is great at what it does: surfing the web and reading email on the couch, netbooks suck at that. My 24" iMac is great at what is does: being a full-fledged computer with a nice big screen that I can use for real work, netbooks suck at that too.
There is no one-size-fit's-all device, netbooks and laptops are one-size-fit's-nowhere.
50Mbit on fiber? Am I the only one who thinks that is ridiculous ?
I'm getting hooked up to fiber in 2 weeks and I'm quite annoyed that they offer nothing better than 200/200. I would have expected at least gbit on fiber, I don't see a reason they need to limit it at all and gbit seems to be a good point since most consumer grade computers come with gbit NIC's nowadays.
After a certain point, it doesn't really matter how fast your internet connection is, you're not going to use any more bandwidth anyway. I have about 500-600GB of traffic a month on 120Mbit cable, this will not significantly change if I go to 200/200 or gbit. All the limits do is ensure I have to wait a little longer for a download to finish, they are waisting my time for no good reason.
If you start working on that phone now, you might even get a few months use out of it once you're finished. Don't expect too many GSM networks to still be around in a few years time.
Really ?
Consider this: Water falls out of the sky for free. Alternatively, you can buy it in a very convenient way from your water company at about a tenth of a cent per liter.
Yet, there are companies selling 0,5 liter bottles of water for several euro's. And this is of inferior quality to tap water that costs ~0,1 cent/liter.
They are selling an inferior product, for a much higher price, when the a better product that is orders-of-magnitude cheaper is available literally everywhere. And they are apparently making a healthy profit doing so as lots of people buy this stuff.
So why is the copyright maffia whining about piracy and games being available for free on the internet ? Water being available for free doesn't stop the bottled-water industry from making loads of money.
No, but you are welcome to visit and copy my TV and stereo any time you want.
Thus just goes to prove how crappy the designs are if everyone is already sick of it after 3 months.
Yes, and now we have an iPad shortage.
They could at least have waited until after the release before they enforced their code of conduct.
Months ? Years probably.
And rightfully so, how can you educate children if you're not educated yourself ?
I'm gonna stop with the car analogies here. Android is also problematic for a lone developer, the problem in 2 words is: device fragmentation.
Android's device requirements are not nearly strict enough. Want to play back video in your Android app ? Chances are you'll have to provide several different versions of the video because not all devices have the same codec support.
The specs say, for example, that the device should be able to play back mpeg4, but it doesn't specify the bitrates, profiles, resolutions, etc. that should be supported.
So you'll still need to buy every popular Android device just to check if your video will actually work. And that's just video.
Your analogy completely misses the point. Apple is not selling their own gas, they act as a broker for other people selling gas and take a cut.
Say I find a small oil well in my backyard, build a DIY refinery and I produce 100 gallons of gasoline each day. I can go to the apple-branded gas station and ask them to sell the gas for me, they take a 30% cut of the selling price.
Your alternative is that I operate my own gas station, just to sell 100 liters of gas each day. Running the station will probably cost more than the profit I make selling the gas.
Running your own chain of gas stations is fine if you're a big ass oil company, not if you're a small time seller. Forcing everyone to resell through the same brand of gas stations levels the playing field.
Really ? If I want to create an app as a hobby project, what are my alternatives ?
Either I do all that extra work, pay al that extra money and hope I sell a lot of copies to earn back my investment and make a profit or I let Apple handle that stuff and make a profit on the first sale, not having to worry about anything other than just my app.
Easy choice for me. IMHO the power of the whole app-store model is that it empowers small time (hobby) developers to play in the same league as the big boys. That also partly explains the huge amount of apps available.
Really ? I've never seen anyone use it like that, is this a US thing ?
What is 3G GSM ? As far as I know GSM is a 2G standard.
This encryption is also used in UMTS, which is the successor of GSM and a 3G standard.
I'm pretty happy with my iMac too, doesn't mean I wouldn't like a tablet for surfing the web on the couch. At the moment, I use my iPhone for this and and spend more times browsing the web on that than on my desktop machine, although I'd prefer a bigger screen for this.