If they could have gotten a 2G model down to the $99 price point it would have destroyed the market for ALL flash based players over night.
The hard drive is only a portion of the cost of the player. Shaving off 1/2 the hard drive capacity would not have reduced the cost 60%. It might have saved $50 though, allowing them to sell at $199, which people would have been happy with I think.
People want something small to play music on. This costs more than the iPod, will be bigger and no doubt ugly, which will be the most important factor for Mac owners;^) With people not entirely enthused by the price of iPods, why would they pay more for one of these media centres? They're going to rely on sales to people who want to watch movies on the go, on a small screen and have the money to pay for it.
This is the Office of media players - expensive and bloated with features most people don't want. The key difference here is that they can't allow piracy to get their market share up.
This was my point: that there is no obvious correlation between frequencies of gun ownership and gun crime.
I know. Just providing a bit more data. I would argue, however, that low gun ownership generally equates to low gun crime, while gun crime levels in countries with high gun ownership varies.
And btw, gun control in Sweden is pretty harsh.
Bad choice of words. I should have said ownership. I'm sure those controls help the crime levels somewhat.
Yes, read that again: Guns are not more common in the US than in most other Western nations. In rural Canada, hunting is so common that more or less everybody owns a rifle or two. In Sweden (where I live), I was somewhat surprised when a date of mine once took me home to proudly show me her.45 Magnum (note; this was in northern Sweden). In Switzerland, most adult men are equipped with an assault rifle to keep in their homes, in order to make up an effective guerilla militia in case of invasion.
That's not a very representative sample. Most other European countries have much stricter gun control. Though the gun crime is pretty low in the ones you've mentioned.
Less than doubling. Without knowing the rate at which it was rising per annum before banning of handguns, you can't speculate about what effect the ban has had. Even knowing, correlation does not mean causation. There are plenty of other possible reasons.
I agree that it's a pain not being able to easily access the battery, but I don't think the motives are quite as nefarious as you think (though I concede that as a business out to make money, it's entirely possible). The iPod was designed to be small and durable. Taken in conjunction, that means that it's not going to be able to use a standard battery (so consumers will be unlikely to be able to get hold of one) and access to the innards will have to be difficult in order to keep them safe from harm. Apple could either make something small and durable or make something where the consumer could easily replace the battery. I don't see an affordable way to combine the two. I thought about this when I bought my iPod and don't look forward to the day when the battery will die, but I knew what I was getting myself into and the current situation, with AA battery supplies, 3rd party battery replacements for sale and Apple's own replacement policy seems quite reasonable for anyone thinking of buying an iPod now.
Of course it's also possible that Jobs fell victim to his own reality distortion field and forgot that most people can't afford to spend hundreds of pounds/dollars every few years to keep a functional music playing device. That said, after 3 years, the new iPods would be considerably better than the old ones and people may well feel its worth their money to invest in a new one and leave the old plugged into the wall, hooked up to a Hi-Fi. It would be daft not to offer the option of replacing batteries, but if they really did drop the ball, maybe that was a part of their logic. I'm envious enough of the newer ones just 18 months later.
And yes, we do know that Apple had no battery replacement plan in place because they TOLD the guy in the aforementioned article that he should BUY A NEW IPOD because it would be too difficult/expensive to replace the battery.
I didn't say they had a program in existence, I said it was possible they were planning on introducing one at some point further down the road. Until introduced, however, their best advice would be to buy a new iPod.
The fact that you think that I always only think the negative of Apple makes me wonder if you read my post. I SAID right in there that I didn't think this was indicative at all of their general business practices. Most of the Apple detractors on Slashdot wouldn't even give them that much credit.
Actually I was hoping it would make you realise how ridiculous ti was to accuse me of the opposite. Perhaps you understand your error now?
Apple really dropped the ball on the battery deal. Everyone drops the ball now and again - it's not indicative of Apple necessarily as a buisness in an overall sense. What CAN be generalized in this situation, however, is that people like you will always, in every possible situation, always believe that Apple is in the right, and refuse to ever think that they could do something stupid and/or unscrupulous, EVER.
Then again, there are those who will always assume the worst of Apple. Or assume that any positive thought about Apple means that person in a fanboy. I actually have issues with them - like the poor design of laptop AC adaptors that means a slight break in the wire near the connector means that you have to pay 60 for a new one, instead of 1 to fix it yourself. That is something they dropped the ball on. I'm also a little irritated that lots of the the new iPod gadgets are only available for the latest generation, rather than the first couple. As far as I can see, all it would take is a slight reshaping of some of the stuff and maybe a firmware upgrade for older iPods. It's a classic example of trying to get people to upgrade and something I"m not at all happy with them for.
Anyway, we don't know whether they already had a battery replacement planned or not. Would make sense to have one available, which is why I think they do. Either way, it's not something they can be sued over, which is the main point I was taking issue with.
Your post above is a textbook example of this.
Yes, that would be why I said:
'Maybe it happened the way you say, maybe it happened the way I say. We don't know. It's not something they can be sued over though.'
indicating that I believed it was possible that Apple had actually got it wrong.
Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with you?
Generally speaking, when ad hominens start being thrown at you, it's the other guy's argument that's in trouble.
Apple never promised even 18 weeks, let alone 18 months. And most people's iPods are still working fine after 18 months. They're behaving exactly the way you would expect a device with a Li-Poly battery to behave. No-one is being misled here.
For Apple to suggest that the best recourse of action was to just buy another iPod was absoultely ridiculous and they rightly were excoriated by the kid who made that famous video.
So you think they should be sued for wanting to make money? No-one who bought an iPod was promised that they'd be able to replace the battery. To sue Apple as if they had promised it would be sheer stupidity. We knew they were Li-Poly cells. We knew there was no quick and easy method to replace the battery ourselves. Who exactly did Apple mislead here and how? What did they do that they can be sued for?
After Apple got a lot of negative press on the issue, they miraculously came up with a batttery replacement plan. Why? Because they knew they had been caught in the wrong.
That's possible. Then again, knowing that someday the batteries would run out and people would want replacements, they were planning on offering them. Given that Li-Poly batteries should last a couple of years, why would they spend money running a replacement service before any batteries actually fail? Surely it makes more sense for them to plan such a service to be launched around the time when they expect batteries to stop working? Like now. Maybe it happened the way you say, maybe it happened the way I say. We don't know. It's not something they can be sued over though.
The thing about this issue that repulses me and will prevent me from ever buying an Apple product is this was nothing more than planned obsolescence. Apple admits that they make no money on selling music. Their money is made from pushing iPods. They made a clear business decision to not provide a battery replacement plan because they wanted people to buy more iPods.
What, you can suddenly read their minds now and know they planned on never offering them? Please. I think they'd realise people would want them replaced at some point. Take off the tin-foil hat. And remember, they never promised to replace the batteries or even make them user serviceable.
Apple is squandering both, by screwing their own loyal customer-base with lack of support (to force upgrades) and products that are grossly overpriced and simply don't last (re: the older 5 gig ipods in particular have a terminal problem with the rechargable batteries).
That's two (possible) class action lawsuits from Apple's own hardcore users!
The first has been settled already and the second can't go anywhere because anyone who bought an iPod expecting the battery to last forever, or for Apple to change it for free, when they had said nothing of the kind, is an idiot.
I didn't list III in my great or good section. I would call it 'ok' but not terrible. Besides, the accusation was that everything past 3 was rubbish, which I disagree with.
Besides, can you think of *any* film franchise that has gone beyond 3 without sucking a very large one? Please, no-one say Police Academy.
Star Trek. 2, 6 and 8 were arguably the best, followed by 4 and 7, then the rest. The only one that really sucked big time in my opinion was 5 and even it has rewatchable bits.
There are no religious riots in Northern Ireland. There are a lot of people who fight because of fear of losing what they perceive to be their cultural identity. It is a historical coincidence that there is a strong correlation between religion, culture and politics. And while France may have a Catholic culture, I'm sure less than 9% have Catholic beliefs, let alone 90%.
Apple disbles iTunes functionality through software update
What functionality? They fixed a bug that people were exploiting and was never emant to be a feature.
Apple initially hesitates to update 10.2 for various security problems (and hasn't updated [a very vulnerable] 10.1 for a LONG time)
What hesitation? They never said they weren't going to update it. I fact, there very first announcement on the matter was to confirm that they were after people had leapt to the wrong conclusion.
Apple obsoletes beige G3 Macs for 10.3
A computer that's 5 or 6 years old and likely has hardware that isn't really up to the job any more. I'm curious, does Windows XP run on a PII?
Now, Apple rakes one of its own developers over the coals for a piece of open source software (which runs on a platform built with gcc)
That's a rather misleading way of putting it as it suggests that Apple's problem is with OSS, when the truth is very different.
They are in negotiations with other countries to get permission to sell music. Trouble is that there are a lot of other countries, each with their own music associations and laws. It takes a while to get it all sorted out.
I've never been in a situation where numerical integration is required to be done without having a computer handy. In Physics at least, thee is no need for a calculator that can do numerical integration until you've finished your degree (or are doing a poject). Any time you do need to do it, a calculator would be a poor second choice to a computer.
I'm curious, why so much bitterness and agression?
Well, I was thinking about pysicists and mathematicians and he appeared to be referring to maths courses. If he did indeed mean engineers, then fair enough, there is a valid use there.
If you need a calculator to do your calculus for you at college level then what you need even more is to learn some maths so you can do it yourself. At degree level, my calculator rarely gets touched, except when I reach the final stage of a calculation and want nto stick a couple of numbers in.
Learn how to do the maths, be able to do it in your head, then hve the calculator for a luxury. Until you graduate you're not going to run into anything that needs a calculator to do it for you.
Apparently you've never wanted to play your music on any non-apple product without first expanding your files to 12x their original size, and then possibly having to re-compress them to another format.
iTunes can stream music. Or you could just burn a CD.
I also imagine you've never had to deal with losing a hard disk full of all those precious songs and having to redownload and re-license them for your new machine because you can't just copy them over.
What gave you the idea that you can't make backups?
But that's okay, you keep racking up those charges on your credit card, while the rest of us will continue our boycott of the RIAA until they begin distributing a good product for a fair price.
What's wrong with $0.99? Do you think $0.00 is a fair price? Or are you honest enough to not download pirated music? If it is a genuine boycott, then fair play to you, I can respect that stance. Anyone who says they want a fair price, claims the moral high ground, then goes and downloads tracks for free, however, is a hypocrite without a leg to stand on.
Err, if the CPU is the problem, then you'll have to replace it anyway, regardless of the order things are checked in. How is that a frustrating problem on Apple's part?
Ah, I thought you were referring to all the.Mac software. I think Backup might be tied to the subscription, sadly. The rest of the software will keep working without it though.
Slashdot Mirror
The hard drive is only a portion of the cost of the player. Shaving off 1/2 the hard drive capacity would not have reduced the cost 60%. It might have saved $50 though, allowing them to sell at $199, which people would have been happy with I think.
People want something small to play music on. This costs more than the iPod, will be bigger and no doubt ugly, which will be the most important factor for Mac owners ;^) With people not entirely enthused by the price of iPods, why would they pay more for one of these media centres? They're going to rely on sales to people who want to watch movies on the go, on a small screen and have the money to pay for it.
This is the Office of media players - expensive and bloated with features most people don't want. The key difference here is that they can't allow piracy to get their market share up.
I know. Just providing a bit more data. I would argue, however, that low gun ownership generally equates to low gun crime, while gun crime levels in countries with high gun ownership varies.
Bad choice of words. I should have said ownership. I'm sure those controls help the crime levels somewhat.
That's not a very representative sample. Most other European countries have much stricter gun control. Though the gun crime is pretty low in the ones you've mentioned.
Less than doubling. Without knowing the rate at which it was rising per annum before banning of handguns, you can't speculate about what effect the ban has had. Even knowing, correlation does not mean causation. There are plenty of other possible reasons.
I agree that it's a pain not being able to easily access the battery, but I don't think the motives are quite as nefarious as you think (though I concede that as a business out to make money, it's entirely possible). The iPod was designed to be small and durable. Taken in conjunction, that means that it's not going to be able to use a standard battery (so consumers will be unlikely to be able to get hold of one) and access to the innards will have to be difficult in order to keep them safe from harm. Apple could either make something small and durable or make something where the consumer could easily replace the battery. I don't see an affordable way to combine the two. I thought about this when I bought my iPod and don't look forward to the day when the battery will die, but I knew what I was getting myself into and the current situation, with AA battery supplies, 3rd party battery replacements for sale and Apple's own replacement policy seems quite reasonable for anyone thinking of buying an iPod now.
Of course it's also possible that Jobs fell victim to his own reality distortion field and forgot that most people can't afford to spend hundreds of pounds/dollars every few years to keep a functional music playing device. That said, after 3 years, the new iPods would be considerably better than the old ones and people may well feel its worth their money to invest in a new one and leave the old plugged into the wall, hooked up to a Hi-Fi. It would be daft not to offer the option of replacing batteries, but if they really did drop the ball, maybe that was a part of their logic. I'm envious enough of the newer ones just 18 months later.
I didn't say they had a program in existence, I said it was possible they were planning on introducing one at some point further down the road. Until introduced, however, their best advice would be to buy a new iPod.
Actually I was hoping it would make you realise how ridiculous ti was to accuse me of the opposite. Perhaps you understand your error now?
Then again, there are those who will always assume the worst of Apple. Or assume that any positive thought about Apple means that person in a fanboy. I actually have issues with them - like the poor design of laptop AC adaptors that means a slight break in the wire near the connector means that you have to pay 60 for a new one, instead of 1 to fix it yourself. That is something they dropped the ball on. I'm also a little irritated that lots of the the new iPod gadgets are only available for the latest generation, rather than the first couple. As far as I can see, all it would take is a slight reshaping of some of the stuff and maybe a firmware upgrade for older iPods. It's a classic example of trying to get people to upgrade and something I"m not at all happy with them for.
Anyway, we don't know whether they already had a battery replacement planned or not. Would make sense to have one available, which is why I think they do. Either way, it's not something they can be sued over, which is the main point I was taking issue with.
Yes, that would be why I said:
'Maybe it happened the way you say, maybe it happened the way I say. We don't know. It's not something they can be sued over though.'
indicating that I believed it was possible that Apple had actually got it wrong.
Generally speaking, when ad hominens start being thrown at you, it's the other guy's argument that's in trouble.
Apple never promised even 18 weeks, let alone 18 months. And most people's iPods are still working fine after 18 months. They're behaving exactly the way you would expect a device with a Li-Poly battery to behave. No-one is being misled here.
So you think they should be sued for wanting to make money? No-one who bought an iPod was promised that they'd be able to replace the battery. To sue Apple as if they had promised it would be sheer stupidity. We knew they were Li-Poly cells. We knew there was no quick and easy method to replace the battery ourselves. Who exactly did Apple mislead here and how? What did they do that they can be sued for?
That's possible. Then again, knowing that someday the batteries would run out and people would want replacements, they were planning on offering them. Given that Li-Poly batteries should last a couple of years, why would they spend money running a replacement service before any batteries actually fail? Surely it makes more sense for them to plan such a service to be launched around the time when they expect batteries to stop working? Like now. Maybe it happened the way you say, maybe it happened the way I say. We don't know. It's not something they can be sued over though.
What, you can suddenly read their minds now and know they planned on never offering them? Please. I think they'd realise people would want them replaced at some point. Take off the tin-foil hat. And remember, they never promised to replace the batteries or even make them user serviceable.
The first has been settled already and the second can't go anywhere because anyone who bought an iPod expecting the battery to last forever, or for Apple to change it for free, when they had said nothing of the kind, is an idiot.
The influences with regards to the Newtonian mechanics would be from the show itself, rather than from another game.
About time someone said that. I'd mod you up if I had any points.
I didn't list III in my great or good section. I would call it 'ok' but not terrible. Besides, the accusation was that everything past 3 was rubbish, which I disagree with.
Star Trek. 2, 6 and 8 were arguably the best, followed by 4 and 7, then the rest. The only one that really sucked big time in my opinion was 5 and even it has rewatchable bits.
There are no religious riots in Northern Ireland. There are a lot of people who fight because of fear of losing what they perceive to be their cultural identity. It is a historical coincidence that there is a strong correlation between religion, culture and politics. And while France may have a Catholic culture, I'm sure less than 9% have Catholic beliefs, let alone 90%.
But how well?
I think it's well recognised that OS X requires a bit more muscle to run than other versions of *nix.
What functionality? They fixed a bug that people were exploiting and was never emant to be a feature.
What hesitation? They never said they weren't going to update it. I fact, there very first announcement on the matter was to confirm that they were after people had leapt to the wrong conclusion.
A computer that's 5 or 6 years old and likely has hardware that isn't really up to the job any more. I'm curious, does Windows XP run on a PII?
That's a rather misleading way of putting it as it suggests that Apple's problem is with OSS, when the truth is very different.
They are in negotiations with other countries to get permission to sell music. Trouble is that there are a lot of other countries, each with their own music associations and laws. It takes a while to get it all sorted out.
I've never been in a situation where numerical integration is required to be done without having a computer handy. In Physics at least, thee is no need for a calculator that can do numerical integration until you've finished your degree (or are doing a poject). Any time you do need to do it, a calculator would be a poor second choice to a computer.
I'm curious, why so much bitterness and agression?
Well, I was thinking about pysicists and mathematicians and he appeared to be referring to maths courses. If he did indeed mean engineers, then fair enough, there is a valid use there.
If you need a calculator to do your calculus for you at college level then what you need even more is to learn some maths so you can do it yourself. At degree level, my calculator rarely gets touched, except when I reach the final stage of a calculation and want nto stick a couple of numbers in.
Learn how to do the maths, be able to do it in your head, then hve the calculator for a luxury. Until you graduate you're not going to run into anything that needs a calculator to do it for you.
iTunes can stream music. Or you could just burn a CD.
What gave you the idea that you can't make backups?
What's wrong with $0.99? Do you think $0.00 is a fair price? Or are you honest enough to not download pirated music? If it is a genuine boycott, then fair play to you, I can respect that stance. Anyone who says they want a fair price, claims the moral high ground, then goes and downloads tracks for free, however, is a hypocrite without a leg to stand on.
Err, if the CPU is the problem, then you'll have to replace it anyway, regardless of the order things are checked in. How is that a frustrating problem on Apple's part?
Ah, I thought you were referring to all the .Mac software. I think Backup might be tied to the subscription, sadly. The rest of the software will keep working without it though.