I don't know; I think it's fine if people believe this. It'll mean that a whole gaggle of competitors will try to make money the same way and there'll be hundreds of crappy tablets to buy on Woot.com by this time next year.
This. It's pretty simple, and Apple's been quite transparent about it. When they see a promising technology, they make a huge pre-purchase investment which allows the vendor to tool up quickly and supply in the quantities that Apple needs, gives Apple a great price and ensures some level of exclusivity. At a minimum, that exclusivity is for pricing, but it seems like they like to buy up the first 6-18 months worth of production on some items to make sure that the copycats are a little ways behind.
I'm sure their vendors are doing pretty well for the time being, but the tactic is somewhat reminiscent of what Walmart does; if Apple isn't careful to treat their vendors well, they could leave a similar trail of destroyed companies who bet everything on a big deal with the 800lb gorilla in the room.
I second the comment on VueScan. I have it for Mac OS X and it resurrected what would otherwise have been a perfectly-good-but-dead-due-to-lack-of-drivers Canon Lide 20 for me. $20 to VueScan saved me from wasting $40 additional dollars on another scanner, the effort associated with choosing that scanner, and equally important, it kept just a little bit of electronics waste out of some landfill in India (or whatever they do with "recycling" these days).
You know what would totally have been cool? If they had a Mac running VMWare running a Win7 installation running VMWare running a Vista installation running VMWare running an XP Installation running VMWare running Windows2000... does VMWare run on Win2k?
No, I understand completely what it means. But you're using the term in two different ways yourself. Their strategies are preventing them from producing the best possible product? What's the best possible product? For whom? Apple has an smash-hit product which they are clearly working on improving, and which has already outsold all of the tablet PCs that ever came before it. Many of those had USB ports, SD card ports, accessible file systems and so on. If they had done all that (and added a stylus on top), they would have had a me-too product copying a whole line of failed products.
I'm not saying that the iPad is perfect, nor that it will ever be all things to all people. But Apple these days seems like a fairly dynamic company which invests a lot in user experience. As with copy/paste, they didn't add it in until they were sure it could be done right, and they successfully shipped the first iPhones and iPod touches without it. People complained, and people maligned them for any number of reasons. But it wasn't a conspiracy or a strategy; it was simply an issue of releasing a good-enough product and then hitting some of the features that didn't make the version one list.
SD cards may indeed be on somebody's list somewhere, but it's just been deemed to not be a priority.
I'm with you on wireless iTunes synching. That would be awesome. The only way I've justified that being left out for the time being is that (a) if you're on the same wifi network with your iTunes-hosting computer, you're probably close enough to physically connect them anyway and (b) you probably want to be charging while you're doing an operation that has a high volume of data transfer as well as lots of read/write/erase operations on the device's long-term storage.
Oh, and one other thing. I've got an old Apple TV, and I'll tell you, when I fire up iTunes and it starts synching over the air, it's kind of a chore. I almost always cancel unless there's a good reason to synch at that time. Maybe they're not happy with their overall synching strategies, and they're going to introduce iPad/Phone/Pod synching over the air at some other time. We'll see.
But honestly, I see the Microsoft examples--don't let product A do this or it'll kill product B!--but I just don't think that's what's happening here with the iPad. I think it's a new product category that doesn't have all the features you want. Some it'll get, some it won't. Competitors may have a product that better fits your needs, and you'll buy it. Chances are Apple will see that coming and decide if there are enough of "you" to implement your desired features before the competition does. If they don't see that coming, then it'll be 1995 all over again.
I love that everyone is now bandying about this term, "strategy tax." It's not a tax, it's a business decision. When you call it a "strategy tax", you're implying that your desire for a feature actually represents a better product decision than they've made. I'm not saying that Apple is infallible, nor even that you're wrong to want this feature, but to just label it as a strategy tax because saying you disagree with their decision is, well, silly.
In case you haven't noticed, Apple's been working towards getting rid of removable media for a long time. Killing the floppy back in the late 90s; pushing downloads via iTMS versus CDs and DVDs; never even putting a BluRay player in any device, and designing a line of MacBooks without RM (the Air). This just follows the same line.
Want extra storage? Get a bigger device or use a cloud-based synching system like DropBox, EverNote or the rumored upcoming version of MobileMe. Want to get pictures from your camera? If it doesn't exist soon, I'd be surprised if the folks at EyeFi will build an app to allow you to do it wirelessly. Want it for some other reason? Great; buy a different device. However, you might not have a lot of luck with other tablets either; SD card support is often limited, and it's varied. Some devices will only let you use it for a single purpose like transferring files. Other devices will only let you use it for core memory expansion, so you can't remove it without causing you to lose files or functionality.
But you're free to dislike the fact that they haven't chosen to add the feature; just don't mistake your simple disdain for a more insightful stance. I've seen the term 'strategy tax' bandied about with regards to Apple products several times in the last week, and each time, it's just a highfallutin' way of saying, "I disagree." Strategy tax, schmategy tax.
You forgot: "Walled Garden", "Cult Members" and "Only for Status". Can you please respond to these anti-Apple talking points as well? Oh, and don't forget, "Thirty Fucking Percent!"
1- Comcast could decide, "Well, if we can't do selective throttling, nobody else should be able to either!" and throw their considerable resources behind getting broad laws put in place and enforced against their rivals whom they feel aren't following the rules that they themselves are subject to.
2- Comcast could spin off an independent company whose sole purpose in existing would be to provide Internet connectivity to Comcast. That new third party vendor could charge Comcast for connectivity on an at-cost basis, and they could instead do all of the selective throttling, protecting Comcast from having to do so.
Either way, I'm sure Comcast will make sure that either they don't need to really pay attention to the rules, or that everyone else feels the "pain".
Did you ever see Repo Man? Every product in the movie except for the cars was generic. There's a great scene where Otto is eating "Food" right out of the can.
Sometimes it's worse than others. In the TV show Heroes, it was pretty obvious that Nissan had paid big to be in there. And in the Charlie's Angels movie (I only saw the first one), there were a lot of scenes where the focus was clearly the cell phone, and all of them were Nokias. And some car chase movie, The Italian Job, I think, featured three Mini Coopers that were so clean, so polished, and so perfect that nobody would ever use them for a getaway car. It was just stupid.
The Apple placements are pretty blatant just because it's almost always a MacBook, shown from the rear, with that logo blazing. If they were just showing Cinema Displays, it wouldn't make much of an impact. On placement that I like that counters the Apple MacBook placements is on the TV show Psych--it's a stupid show, so if you've never seen it, you're not missing much, although it's occasionally chuckle-worthy--where they show the main characters in their offices working on Windows notebooks. That's right, glossy black notebook screen-backs with the Windows logo in the center where you'd normally see Dell or Apple. Brightly lit, even garish. I'd love to get that as a skin for my MacBook; nobody'd ever want to steal it.
I'm pretty sure that the GP's point was the opposite: that Blizzard releases a lot of stuff that's "good enough" and irons out the wrinkles as they go.
It's a sad state of affairs, isn't it? When trolls are so stupid that there's even a possibility that a statement like that would have been made in any sort of seriousness...
They don't make anything that hundreds of companies can't imitate. You call that innovation? How is it innovation if everyone else is doing it, in most cases cheaper, within a year or two after they release it?
Too true, but even then, I don't think I'd want to use it to code. Maybe writing that novel, where I don't want to have other windows up distracting me (theoretically; I've never written a novel). But for coding, I like having a couple of monitors, lots of screen space, etc.
The other reason I didn't mention the bt kb option is that I think using it would be an edge case scenario. I'm not going to bring an ipad and a bt kb to a cafe or try to set up the pair on an airplane. I even have a bt kb already, and I know that if I brought home an iPad, the kb would sit downstairs unused 99.9% of the time.
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I don't know; I think it's fine if people believe this. It'll mean that a whole gaggle of competitors will try to make money the same way and there'll be hundreds of crappy tablets to buy on Woot.com by this time next year.
This. It's pretty simple, and Apple's been quite transparent about it. When they see a promising technology, they make a huge pre-purchase investment which allows the vendor to tool up quickly and supply in the quantities that Apple needs, gives Apple a great price and ensures some level of exclusivity. At a minimum, that exclusivity is for pricing, but it seems like they like to buy up the first 6-18 months worth of production on some items to make sure that the copycats are a little ways behind.
I'm sure their vendors are doing pretty well for the time being, but the tactic is somewhat reminiscent of what Walmart does; if Apple isn't careful to treat their vendors well, they could leave a similar trail of destroyed companies who bet everything on a big deal with the 800lb gorilla in the room.
I second the comment on VueScan. I have it for Mac OS X and it resurrected what would otherwise have been a perfectly-good-but-dead-due-to-lack-of-drivers Canon Lide 20 for me. $20 to VueScan saved me from wasting $40 additional dollars on another scanner, the effort associated with choosing that scanner, and equally important, it kept just a little bit of electronics waste out of some landfill in India (or whatever they do with "recycling" these days).
Yeah, that made me laugh.
I can't tell if you're serious and crazy, or joking and just not very funny.
You know what would totally have been cool? If they had a Mac running VMWare running a Win7 installation running VMWare running a Vista installation running VMWare running an XP Installation running VMWare running Windows2000... does VMWare run on Win2k?
Kudos to Microsoft. And even greater kudos to VMWare.
OMG LOL Glitter Text! This deserves a +10, not a +5.
No, I understand completely what it means. But you're using the term in two different ways yourself. Their strategies are preventing them from producing the best possible product? What's the best possible product? For whom? Apple has an smash-hit product which they are clearly working on improving, and which has already outsold all of the tablet PCs that ever came before it. Many of those had USB ports, SD card ports, accessible file systems and so on. If they had done all that (and added a stylus on top), they would have had a me-too product copying a whole line of failed products.
I'm not saying that the iPad is perfect, nor that it will ever be all things to all people. But Apple these days seems like a fairly dynamic company which invests a lot in user experience. As with copy/paste, they didn't add it in until they were sure it could be done right, and they successfully shipped the first iPhones and iPod touches without it. People complained, and people maligned them for any number of reasons. But it wasn't a conspiracy or a strategy; it was simply an issue of releasing a good-enough product and then hitting some of the features that didn't make the version one list.
SD cards may indeed be on somebody's list somewhere, but it's just been deemed to not be a priority.
I'm with you on wireless iTunes synching. That would be awesome. The only way I've justified that being left out for the time being is that (a) if you're on the same wifi network with your iTunes-hosting computer, you're probably close enough to physically connect them anyway and (b) you probably want to be charging while you're doing an operation that has a high volume of data transfer as well as lots of read/write/erase operations on the device's long-term storage.
Oh, and one other thing. I've got an old Apple TV, and I'll tell you, when I fire up iTunes and it starts synching over the air, it's kind of a chore. I almost always cancel unless there's a good reason to synch at that time. Maybe they're not happy with their overall synching strategies, and they're going to introduce iPad/Phone/Pod synching over the air at some other time. We'll see.
But honestly, I see the Microsoft examples--don't let product A do this or it'll kill product B!--but I just don't think that's what's happening here with the iPad. I think it's a new product category that doesn't have all the features you want. Some it'll get, some it won't. Competitors may have a product that better fits your needs, and you'll buy it. Chances are Apple will see that coming and decide if there are enough of "you" to implement your desired features before the competition does. If they don't see that coming, then it'll be 1995 all over again.
I love that everyone is now bandying about this term, "strategy tax." It's not a tax, it's a business decision. When you call it a "strategy tax", you're implying that your desire for a feature actually represents a better product decision than they've made. I'm not saying that Apple is infallible, nor even that you're wrong to want this feature, but to just label it as a strategy tax because saying you disagree with their decision is, well, silly.
In case you haven't noticed, Apple's been working towards getting rid of removable media for a long time. Killing the floppy back in the late 90s; pushing downloads via iTMS versus CDs and DVDs; never even putting a BluRay player in any device, and designing a line of MacBooks without RM (the Air). This just follows the same line.
Want extra storage? Get a bigger device or use a cloud-based synching system like DropBox, EverNote or the rumored upcoming version of MobileMe. Want to get pictures from your camera? If it doesn't exist soon, I'd be surprised if the folks at EyeFi will build an app to allow you to do it wirelessly. Want it for some other reason? Great; buy a different device. However, you might not have a lot of luck with other tablets either; SD card support is often limited, and it's varied. Some devices will only let you use it for a single purpose like transferring files. Other devices will only let you use it for core memory expansion, so you can't remove it without causing you to lose files or functionality.
But you're free to dislike the fact that they haven't chosen to add the feature; just don't mistake your simple disdain for a more insightful stance. I've seen the term 'strategy tax' bandied about with regards to Apple products several times in the last week, and each time, it's just a highfallutin' way of saying, "I disagree." Strategy tax, schmategy tax.
You forgot: "Walled Garden", "Cult Members" and "Only for Status". Can you please respond to these anti-Apple talking points as well? Oh, and don't forget, "Thirty Fucking Percent!"
Or when the GP goes to the gym to swim laps, does she end up in the hot tub? Or when looking for a pet cat, does he bring home a man eating lion?
You must have gotten the one some crack-head stole from me, because in 1984, they cost $599 (undercutting the Apple IIe by $67).
Well, it could go one of two ways...
1- Comcast could decide, "Well, if we can't do selective throttling, nobody else should be able to either!" and throw their considerable resources behind getting broad laws put in place and enforced against their rivals whom they feel aren't following the rules that they themselves are subject to.
2- Comcast could spin off an independent company whose sole purpose in existing would be to provide Internet connectivity to Comcast. That new third party vendor could charge Comcast for connectivity on an at-cost basis, and they could instead do all of the selective throttling, protecting Comcast from having to do so.
Either way, I'm sure Comcast will make sure that either they don't need to really pay attention to the rules, or that everyone else feels the "pain".
Well, to be fair, it was a Pixar movie; I'm sure they put that in just as a fun inside joke for old Steve.
Also, didn't they make his the old style of Mac chime, and hers the new (post Intel migration) chime?
All those Cisco placements ruined Lord of the Rings...
Did you ever see Repo Man? Every product in the movie except for the cars was generic. There's a great scene where Otto is eating "Food" right out of the can.
Sometimes it's worse than others. In the TV show Heroes, it was pretty obvious that Nissan had paid big to be in there. And in the Charlie's Angels movie (I only saw the first one), there were a lot of scenes where the focus was clearly the cell phone, and all of them were Nokias. And some car chase movie, The Italian Job, I think, featured three Mini Coopers that were so clean, so polished, and so perfect that nobody would ever use them for a getaway car. It was just stupid.
The Apple placements are pretty blatant just because it's almost always a MacBook, shown from the rear, with that logo blazing. If they were just showing Cinema Displays, it wouldn't make much of an impact. On placement that I like that counters the Apple MacBook placements is on the TV show Psych--it's a stupid show, so if you've never seen it, you're not missing much, although it's occasionally chuckle-worthy--where they show the main characters in their offices working on Windows notebooks. That's right, glossy black notebook screen-backs with the Windows logo in the center where you'd normally see Dell or Apple. Brightly lit, even garish. I'd love to get that as a skin for my MacBook; nobody'd ever want to steal it.
I'm pretty sure that the GP's point was the opposite: that Blizzard releases a lot of stuff that's "good enough" and irons out the wrinkles as they go.
Why is it that *almost* everyone who called me out on my pre-emptive troll posted as ACs?
It's a sad state of affairs, isn't it? When trolls are so stupid that there's even a possibility that a statement like that would have been made in any sort of seriousness...
I was just pre-empting the trolls. :)
:) Whoosh?
They don't make anything that hundreds of companies can't imitate. You call that innovation? How is it innovation if everyone else is doing it, in most cases cheaper, within a year or two after they release it?
Too true, but even then, I don't think I'd want to use it to code. Maybe writing that novel, where I don't want to have other windows up distracting me (theoretically; I've never written a novel). But for coding, I like having a couple of monitors, lots of screen space, etc.
The other reason I didn't mention the bt kb option is that I think using it would be an edge case scenario. I'm not going to bring an ipad and a bt kb to a cafe or try to set up the pair on an airplane. I even have a bt kb already, and I know that if I brought home an iPad, the kb would sit downstairs unused 99.9% of the time.