"Markup" (and its relative "gross margin") are defined in terms of selling price versus the cost of sale.
For a producer, the selling price is the wholesale price, for a retailer, it is the retail price. Despite Apple's own retail presence, the vast majority of iPhone sales is through carrier and other retailers, not through Apple Stores.
The cost of sale includes not just the production cost (materials, labor) but also supply chain, unit tariffs and royalties, shipping in, etc.
Anyways, Apple's gross margin over all products has ranged between ~40% to ~47% percent since the rise of the iPhone. This works out to a markup of 66% to 88% across all sales. Now if we assume that iPhones are particularly profitable, with estimated margins of up to 55%, that works out to a markup of ~120%. While not bad, it isn't 200%.
And, it doesn't include R&D, administration, marketing, legal, rent, taxes, etc., which also go against profit.
Don't have your 32 years, but going on 19, and post-40 here in Silicon Valley. And I haven't seen any shortage of opportunities myself, when I have been in the market, and the 97% of months when I haven't. But I have a track record, and I'm demonstrably good at cutting through crap, whether technical or political.
A 40-year trying to compete on the same terms as a 20-year old is playing a losing game. You're not going to have the stamina (as a rule, and I know exceptions), and life responsibilities generally restrict your capacity for risk. (Much harder to pick everything up and move across the country or world, for example.)
But there's a dirty little secret here. You don't have to play on the same terms. You simply have to be able to show, and explain, your own effectiveness. And even better if you can help that 20 year old enhance theirs. If you can do that, the world's your oyster.
So, learn to communicate, learn to discern, learn to make better mistakes, take more intelligent risks (and mitigate against the dumber ones), and you won't be hurting for opportunities here in Silicon Valley.
As far as I understand, that was fixing a different issue. Signal strength varies continuously, and the question is: Do you reflect the momentary signal strength in the UI and for purposes of connectivity, or some moving average as I understand cell phones generally do?
Pre-OS 2.1, the iPhone would reflect the momentary strength, and with that update, they moved to a moving average over 10 seconds, IIRC. So the issue was not changing the reported bars for a certain signal level, but how quickly and whether the reported bars would drop if you got momentary interference that sank your signal. This was misleading since the phone would re-establish the signal automatically anyway without a connectivity loss in the upper layers.
(Note that I'm not an expert on this field, and this is based on discussion with an engineer who works on a different aspect of the iPhone/iOS.)
Have you actually used Mac OS X? The reason so many developers use it (even at Apple competitors) is because it is a full-blown UNIX with user-friendly apps and a pretty shell.
It's unfortunate that the finder was not near any of the 12 or so Apple Stores in the bay area to return it to, and instead was only near enough to the Gizmodo editor to turn it over to him for $5K.
(Yeah, I don't buy the story about the call to tech support. Doesn't pass the smell test. I mean, tech support? To return a lost item?)
I'd make a guess and say the author was actually talking about built in CRTs which were a dumb idea...
Except the first iMacs (the jellybeans) also built in CRTs. Of course, of these iMacs, the other writer in the story says of them:
Shaun Nichols: The release of the original iMac was in many ways revolutionary. The case design, system specifications and marketing were all hugely successful. Not as popular, however, was the iMac's mouse.
Indeed, the entire story is a fluff piece, with no data but perhaps a cursory look at specs and a vague memory of what things might have been like 10 to 25 years ago.
[This is not to say that some of these weren't indeed spectacularly bad products, but, stupid pricing decisions and initial bad runs do not intrinsically make for bad products as was the case with several of their choices.]
Actually it just looks like someone confused a revision of the SC Code with a passage of a new law. (The Code appears to undergo complete revision every once in a while. In the case of this 1951 law, the previous codification was the 1976 Code as the Volokh link points out.)
I wonder if there will be a retraction, or is this one of those "too good to check" stories? Ah well.
...And now we can make them pay for the same game three times! (Evil Laugh Here)
If they're all iPhones/iPod Touches, you only need to buy the game once. I don't even know if there's a restriction on the number of mobile devices you can put the games on. (You are, however, restricted to 5 computers to sync to them on the same iTunes account.) We have 3 such mobile devices in our family that we do this with.
Paper ballots, but prefabricated results. (With many jurisdictions turning out many more votes than voters, and in many cases preliminary reports coming out almost the opposite of the final reports.)
If you read the article, this was one of the author's points: He had gone into this thinking like a consumer, and realized that thinking like a consumer isn't enough when you're talking about high availability/high throughput systems.
The article may be worthless to you because you may have an admin background, but I know of a lot of so called "admins" who don't understand some of these basics, as well as a lot of developer types.
They're not going after Podcast Ready, as long as the mark relates to podcasting, and is not intended as something broader. They are going after myPodder because of the mark's similarity to iPod, targeting iPod-related markets, and related dilution issues.
I imagine they'd go after Snapple as well if Snapple got into computing devices. Seems reasonable.
First, she (?) assumes no economies of scale for Sony in manufacturing the console, and no ability for Sony to squeeze its own supply chain. Perhaps there is or isn't, but I remember when the iPod first came out, there was a lot of discussion about Apple's margins on the device were marginal at best, and perhaps even negative, given the known component costs. But that fact was not in evidence in Apple's financial reports for that quarter or since.
I'm not arguing that the PS3 will be profitable initially or any particular year of its life, but Evermore's analysis (a $300 or $400 loss per unit over 6 million units ?!?) has a weakness that a lot of economic projections seem to share: assume perfect knowledge not only about current price structures and individual and corporate economic behavior, but also assume you know exactly how it's going to turn out in the future.
Second, her comparison of the DaimlerChrysler merger to a putative Sony-Microsoft merger does not make sense from a anti-trust perspective. Daimler and Chrysler largely had a complementary market presence in that Daimler-Benz's strengths were in markets Chrysler was weak in or did not serve, and vice-versa. In fact, I'm not aware of any market or market segment where both could be regarded in the top two, like Sony and Microsoft, or even the top five. (If anyone knows different for any of the national markets, please apprise us. I'm honestly curious.) There may have been other reasons to question the merger, but anti-trust issues were not one of them.
In other words, Daimler/Chrysler didn't trigger heightened anti-trust scrutiny. Microsoft/Sony most certainly would, and not only in the United States.
Evidently you slept though Economics 101. If say China stops buying government debt, guess what happens. Interest rates go through the roof, bond rates go up, stock market goes down, the economy enters recession, and people stop buying. And guess what they stop buying. Chinese goods.
And something else happens. China buys government debt to maintain its peg to the dollar. If it doesn't, black market trade in Yuans through the roof as the official rate comes completely unhinged from what the market would provide. Good thing? Maybe in some ways, if you don't like China.
And since US consumers are no longer buying Chinese goods, since the economy is in a recession, guess what this means for China. (Hint: If you shut down US-China trade, this causes inflation in the US, but takes China into a depression as trade with the U.S. is China's single biggest trade engine.)
China enters depression. And while the rest of the world may not suffer quite as badly since they have economies less tied to trade, the rest of the world enters depression as well.
Chinese don't buy US treasury bonds because they want to help the US. They buy them because it is in their best interest to do so.
The reason is that an opportunity to correct a judicial mistake is limited, particularly at the level of the Supreme Court. Your only recourse in constitional interpretation decisions is an amendment to the constitution. Or try to change the makeup of the court and hope for the best. In any case, the work of generations.
If the legislative or executive branch makes a mistake, you vote the legislator or executive out. Short of impeachment, the standard for which is set rather high, there is no recourse for judicial mistakes.
I'm all for judicial review, because legislators and executives are human and make human mistakes, but as the branch of government that is least accountable by custom to either the other branches or the governed, judges need to take special care with their powers.
Because, guess what, judges are also human and make human mistakes.
At the end of the day it'll end up being harder to eminent domain someones property than before the ruling.
No. In order for it to be harder, there would have to be a constitutional amendment to the effect. (And this constitional amendment would have to be more bulletproof than the current 5th amendment.)
In the meantime, the ruling ensures that this type of eminent domain can only be prevented by laws at the federal and state levels (for every state). The federal government can only affect policy to the extent that moneys from the federal government is used to effect it, and the current bills before Congress reflects this.
It's useful to keep in mind that the SC, or any court, can only rule on the dispute before it. Thus, they don't rule on the legality or illegality of the proliferation of cabinet departments because those matters are not under dispute in the cases before it.
Secondly, the SC will only take cases where there is a dispute that the court with its current makeup can resolve. If there is no chance that currently contructed court will change settled law or constitutional interpretation, it will simply refuse to take the case. Thus, you'll be hard put to bring up a case challenging the consitutionality of the IRS for example, because the court will consider it a waste of time. Why? Not because there may not be members of the court who would like to overrule settled law on the matter, because there may well be. But because they would have to decide there was actually a chance they might overrule it.
(Generally at least 4 justices have to decide to take a case for the case, but this is SC tradition, not a matter of law.)
Although I concede that the statement about the "mother of all engineering problems" is also not a denial but it is closer.
I'm not sure what you mean by a closer, unless you mean that it is an "end of discussion". It seems to me, however, that Apple is just creating an opportunity to come back and say: "Look what we did!"
It also seem like something they're actively working on. (At least enough to call it the MOAEP.) To call it a closer also suggests an ignorance of Apple's traditional media strategy: misdirect (taken as denial), misdirect, misdirect, then "ooooh! look!"
Re:The Peoples' Hate Affair with Apple
on
Apple Quashes pBop
·
· Score: 1
Midnight Thunder opines:
I always like to give the following answer to the people who argue there is less software on the Mac: there probably is, though if there is so much choice on the PC, why is everyone still using MS-Office?
The answer is that people appreciate quality.
I read this and was about to laugh my ass off. Then I noticed that this had been moderated Insightful, and not Funny, and now I don't know what to think.
Steve was asked by Fred Anderson what would it take to have you come back as CEO, because Gil is ignoring your advice and we are afraid with only 3 months of money left the company will fold? [tyrione]
3 months of money left? I wasn't aware that Apple was burning cash at over 12-16 billion dollars a year at the time, the rate they would have to be going to burn through the at least 3-4 billion dollars they had in cash and short term investments. (They may have had even more than that, but it was at least that.) In fact, there were jokes at the time about how someone should buy Apple just for its cash because it's market cap had dropped to about two and a half billion.
This was the time when Michael Dell commented that Apple should liquidate and return the cash to its shareholders, and Larry Ellison threatened to put together a hostile takeover.
While some of the other stuff you say makes sense, this one is pretty silly.
Technically, the distinction is between a head of state and head of government. In the United states, and in strong presidential systems, both offices are vested in the President. In parliamentary systems, the offices are generally separated, with the office of head of state vested in a President selected by the parliament as in India and Israel, or in a monarch as in Japan and England, and the head of government vested in the prime minister. Of course, there are also systems like the Russian and the Pakistani that are technically parliamentary but with strong presidents. But then, neither can be said to be truly democratic.
A note on democracy. Various people have noted that in a democracy, citizens directly vote on laws and take responsibilities for taking care of communal and social needs. This is true in a direct or "pure" democracy, and is only completely practicable on a small scale in times of relative normalcy. Thus, I think it's a little silly to argue that representative forms of democracy are somehow less democratic. I'm not, for example, aware of any pure democratic systems that did not vest authority in an elected representative or tyrant at least during times of emergency.
The current U.S. system is arguably set toward "easier" application and "harder" enforcement - with the idea being that a court room has more flexibility and resources to tackle difficult intellectual property rights issues than the patent office. Moreover, this type of system avoids a bias against inventors: a more "front-loaded" system that applies burden at the application process would delay the patent and perhaps even shorten the patent life significantly (similar to the argument pharmaceuticals make regarding how rigorous FDA testing effectively halves the patent life of new drugs) [--gradji]
The issue is not with how long the application process takes, but how long it takes to bring the invention to market. Inventors lose no rights by bringing the invention to market as soon as or even up to a year before the patent is actually filed. Thus, what you point out is an issue only for inventions that take many years to bring to market, for regulatory or other reasons. While this may be true of drugs, this is much less true with most other classes of inventions and almost completely untrue in cases of software, business methods, and many processes.
Yes, there may be some need to balance inventor rights, but I think to a large extent, for many classes of inventions, the balance has swung too far to inventors in a way that hampers further invention and limits progress.
Perhaps it's time to begin distinguising patents by classes, and for example limit software patents to five years, while retaining the current limits for drugs and such.
Very cool! Looks like the C/C++ compiler also has support for Objective-C now. Even if it's in the form of a "technology preview" and probably preliminary.
This means that this could well be usable as a replacement for GCC in developing Cocoa-based apps. It's good to finally have some options. Can't wait to see how well it works!
I'm pretty sure Apple announced a while back that Pepsi will be paying retail, i.e. 99 cents a song. But they'll only be paying for songs actually redeemed.
Slashdot Mirror
"Markup" (and its relative "gross margin") are defined in terms of selling price versus the cost of sale.
For a producer, the selling price is the wholesale price, for a retailer, it is the retail price. Despite Apple's own retail presence, the vast majority of iPhone sales is through carrier and other retailers, not through Apple Stores.
The cost of sale includes not just the production cost (materials, labor) but also supply chain, unit tariffs and royalties, shipping in, etc.
Anyways, Apple's gross margin over all products has ranged between ~40% to ~47% percent since the rise of the iPhone. This works out to a markup of 66% to 88% across all sales. Now if we assume that iPhones are particularly profitable, with estimated margins of up to 55%, that works out to a markup of ~120%. While not bad, it isn't 200%.
And, it doesn't include R&D, administration, marketing, legal, rent, taxes, etc., which also go against profit.
Don't have your 32 years, but going on 19, and post-40 here in Silicon Valley. And I haven't seen any shortage of opportunities myself, when I have been in the market, and the 97% of months when I haven't. But I have a track record, and I'm demonstrably good at cutting through crap, whether technical or political.
A 40-year trying to compete on the same terms as a 20-year old is playing a losing game. You're not going to have the stamina (as a rule, and I know exceptions), and life responsibilities generally restrict your capacity for risk. (Much harder to pick everything up and move across the country or world, for example.)
But there's a dirty little secret here. You don't have to play on the same terms. You simply have to be able to show, and explain, your own effectiveness. And even better if you can help that 20 year old enhance theirs. If you can do that, the world's your oyster.
So, learn to communicate, learn to discern, learn to make better mistakes, take more intelligent risks (and mitigate against the dumber ones), and you won't be hurting for opportunities here in Silicon Valley.
As far as I understand, that was fixing a different issue. Signal strength varies continuously, and the question is: Do you reflect the momentary signal strength in the UI and for purposes of connectivity, or some moving average as I understand cell phones generally do?
Pre-OS 2.1, the iPhone would reflect the momentary strength, and with that update, they moved to a moving average over 10 seconds, IIRC. So the issue was not changing the reported bars for a certain signal level, but how quickly and whether the reported bars would drop if you got momentary interference that sank your signal. This was misleading since the phone would re-establish the signal automatically anyway without a connectivity loss in the upper layers.
(Note that I'm not an expert on this field, and this is based on discussion with an engineer who works on a different aspect of the iPhone/iOS.)
Have you actually used Mac OS X? The reason so many developers use it (even at Apple competitors) is because it is a full-blown UNIX with user-friendly apps and a pretty shell.
Anyway, as of Snow Leopard, Mac OS X is fully UNIX 03 compliant.
It's unfortunate that the finder was not near any of the 12 or so Apple Stores in the bay area to return it to, and instead was only near enough to the Gizmodo editor to turn it over to him for $5K.
(Yeah, I don't buy the story about the call to tech support. Doesn't pass the smell test. I mean, tech support? To return a lost item?)
I'd make a guess and say the author was actually talking about built in CRTs which were a dumb idea...
Except the first iMacs (the jellybeans) also built in CRTs. Of course, of these iMacs, the other writer in the story says of them:
Indeed, the entire story is a fluff piece, with no data but perhaps a cursory look at specs and a vague memory of what things might have been like 10 to 25 years ago.
[This is not to say that some of these weren't indeed spectacularly bad products, but, stupid pricing decisions and initial bad runs do not intrinsically make for bad products as was the case with several of their choices.]
Actually it just looks like someone confused a revision of the SC Code with a passage of a new law. (The Code appears to undergo complete revision every once in a while. In the case of this 1951 law, the previous codification was the 1976 Code as the Volokh link points out.)
I wonder if there will be a retraction, or is this one of those "too good to check" stories? Ah well.
...And now we can make them pay for the same game three times! (Evil Laugh Here)
If they're all iPhones/iPod Touches, you only need to buy the game once. I don't even know if there's a restriction on the number of mobile devices you can put the games on. (You are, however, restricted to 5 computers to sync to them on the same iTunes account.) We have 3 such mobile devices in our family that we do this with.
Paper ballots, but prefabricated results. (With many jurisdictions turning out many more votes than voters, and in many cases preliminary reports coming out almost the opposite of the final reports.)
I wonder if this is becoming an industry.
If you read the article, this was one of the author's points: He had gone into this thinking like a consumer, and realized that thinking like a consumer isn't enough when you're talking about high availability/high throughput systems.
The article may be worthless to you because you may have an admin background, but I know of a lot of so called "admins" who don't understand some of these basics, as well as a lot of developer types.
I'll buy apple... ...when leopard freezes over!
SNOW Leopard comes out next year. Start saving your pennies. :-)
http://www.apple.com/macosx/snowleopard/
Are you trying to explain the joke? Or announcing you didn't get it? ;)
They're not going after Podcast Ready, as long as the mark relates to podcasting, and is not intended as something broader. They are going after myPodder because of the mark's similarity to iPod, targeting iPod-related markets, and related dilution issues.
I imagine they'd go after Snapple as well if Snapple got into computing devices. Seems reasonable.
Two basic criticisms with Evermore's analysis.
First, she (?) assumes no economies of scale for Sony in manufacturing the console, and no ability for Sony to squeeze its own supply chain. Perhaps there is or isn't, but I remember when the iPod first came out, there was a lot of discussion about Apple's margins on the device were marginal at best, and perhaps even negative, given the known component costs. But that fact was not in evidence in Apple's financial reports for that quarter or since.
I'm not arguing that the PS3 will be profitable initially or any particular year of its life, but Evermore's analysis (a $300 or $400 loss per unit over 6 million units ?!?) has a weakness that a lot of economic projections seem to share: assume perfect knowledge not only about current price structures and individual and corporate economic behavior, but also assume you know exactly how it's going to turn out in the future.
Second, her comparison of the DaimlerChrysler merger to a putative Sony-Microsoft merger does not make sense from a anti-trust perspective. Daimler and Chrysler largely had a complementary market presence in that Daimler-Benz's strengths were in markets Chrysler was weak in or did not serve, and vice-versa. In fact, I'm not aware of any market or market segment where both could be regarded in the top two, like Sony and Microsoft, or even the top five. (If anyone knows different for any of the national markets, please apprise us. I'm honestly curious.) There may have been other reasons to question the merger, but anti-trust issues were not one of them.
In other words, Daimler/Chrysler didn't trigger heightened anti-trust scrutiny. Microsoft/Sony most certainly would, and not only in the United States.
Evidently you slept though Economics 101. If say China stops buying government debt, guess what happens. Interest rates go through the roof, bond rates go up, stock market goes down, the economy enters recession, and people stop buying. And guess what they stop buying. Chinese goods.
And something else happens. China buys government debt to maintain its peg to the dollar. If it doesn't, black market trade in Yuans through the roof as the official rate comes completely unhinged from what the market would provide. Good thing? Maybe in some ways, if you don't like China.
And since US consumers are no longer buying Chinese goods, since the economy is in a recession, guess what this means for China. (Hint: If you shut down US-China trade, this causes inflation in the US, but takes China into a depression as trade with the U.S. is China's single biggest trade engine.)
China enters depression. And while the rest of the world may not suffer quite as badly since they have economies less tied to trade, the rest of the world enters depression as well.
Chinese don't buy US treasury bonds because they want to help the US. They buy them because it is in their best interest to do so.
If MS doesn't support it natively, it is not mainstream.
So I wonder when PDF is going mainstream.
Why is an expansionist view of judical power bad?
The reason is that an opportunity to correct a judicial mistake is limited, particularly at the level of the Supreme Court. Your only recourse in constitional interpretation decisions is an amendment to the constitution. Or try to change the makeup of the court and hope for the best. In any case, the work of generations.
If the legislative or executive branch makes a mistake, you vote the legislator or executive out. Short of impeachment, the standard for which is set rather high, there is no recourse for judicial mistakes.
I'm all for judicial review, because legislators and executives are human and make human mistakes, but as the branch of government that is least accountable by custom to either the other branches or the governed, judges need to take special care with their powers.
Because, guess what, judges are also human and make human mistakes.
At the end of the day it'll end up being harder to eminent domain someones property than before the ruling.
No. In order for it to be harder, there would have to be a constitutional amendment to the effect. (And this constitional amendment would have to be more bulletproof than the current 5th amendment.)
In the meantime, the ruling ensures that this type of eminent domain can only be prevented by laws at the federal and state levels (for every state). The federal government can only affect policy to the extent that moneys from the federal government is used to effect it, and the current bills before Congress reflects this.
It's useful to keep in mind that the SC, or any court, can only rule on the dispute before it. Thus, they don't rule on the legality or illegality of the proliferation of cabinet departments because those matters are not under dispute in the cases before it.
Secondly, the SC will only take cases where there is a dispute that the court with its current makeup can resolve. If there is no chance that currently contructed court will change settled law or constitutional interpretation, it will simply refuse to take the case. Thus, you'll be hard put to bring up a case challenging the consitutionality of the IRS for example, because the court will consider it a waste of time. Why? Not because there may not be members of the court who would like to overrule settled law on the matter, because there may well be. But because they would have to decide there was actually a chance they might overrule it.
(Generally at least 4 justices have to decide to take a case for the case, but this is SC tradition, not a matter of law.)
I'm not sure what you mean by a closer, unless you mean that it is an "end of discussion". It seems to me, however, that Apple is just creating an opportunity to come back and say: "Look what we did!"
It also seem like something they're actively working on. (At least enough to call it the MOAEP.) To call it a closer also suggests an ignorance of Apple's traditional media strategy: misdirect (taken as denial), misdirect, misdirect, then "ooooh! look!"
Steve was asked by Fred Anderson what would it take to have you come back as CEO, because Gil is ignoring your advice and we are afraid with only 3 months of money left the company will fold? [tyrione]
3 months of money left? I wasn't aware that Apple was burning cash at over 12-16 billion dollars a year at the time, the rate they would have to be going to burn through the at least 3-4 billion dollars they had in cash and short term investments. (They may have had even more than that, but it was at least that.) In fact, there were jokes at the time about how someone should buy Apple just for its cash because it's market cap had dropped to about two and a half billion.
This was the time when Michael Dell commented that Apple should liquidate and return the cash to its shareholders, and Larry Ellison threatened to put together a hostile takeover.
While some of the other stuff you say makes sense, this one is pretty silly.
Technically, the distinction is between a head of state and head of government. In the United states, and in strong presidential systems, both offices are vested in the President. In parliamentary systems, the offices are generally separated, with the office of head of state vested in a President selected by the parliament as in India and Israel, or in a monarch as in Japan and England, and the head of government vested in the prime minister. Of course, there are also systems like the Russian and the Pakistani that are technically parliamentary but with strong presidents. But then, neither can be said to be truly democratic.
A note on democracy. Various people have noted that in a democracy, citizens directly vote on laws and take responsibilities for taking care of communal and social needs. This is true in a direct or "pure" democracy, and is only completely practicable on a small scale in times of relative normalcy. Thus, I think it's a little silly to argue that representative forms of democracy are somehow less democratic. I'm not, for example, aware of any pure democratic systems that did not vest authority in an elected representative or tyrant at least during times of emergency.
The current U.S. system is arguably set toward "easier" application and "harder" enforcement - with the idea being that a court room has more flexibility and resources to tackle difficult intellectual property rights issues than the patent office. Moreover, this type of system avoids a bias against inventors: a more "front-loaded" system that applies burden at the application process would delay the patent and perhaps even shorten the patent life significantly (similar to the argument pharmaceuticals make regarding how rigorous FDA testing effectively halves the patent life of new drugs) [--gradji]
The issue is not with how long the application process takes, but how long it takes to bring the invention to market. Inventors lose no rights by bringing the invention to market as soon as or even up to a year before the patent is actually filed. Thus, what you point out is an issue only for inventions that take many years to bring to market, for regulatory or other reasons. While this may be true of drugs, this is much less true with most other classes of inventions and almost completely untrue in cases of software, business methods, and many processes.
Yes, there may be some need to balance inventor rights, but I think to a large extent, for many classes of inventions, the balance has swung too far to inventors in a way that hampers further invention and limits progress.
Perhaps it's time to begin distinguising patents by classes, and for example limit software patents to five years, while retaining the current limits for drugs and such.
Very cool! Looks like the C/C++ compiler also has support for Objective-C now. Even if it's in the form of a "technology preview" and probably preliminary.
This means that this could well be usable as a replacement for GCC in developing Cocoa-based apps. It's good to finally have some options. Can't wait to see how well it works!
I'm pretty sure Apple announced a while back that Pepsi will be paying retail, i.e. 99 cents a song. But they'll only be paying for songs actually redeemed.