..... If they don't compete why have they made it so difficult to install Microsoft Windows on their hardware?......
Apple has always been different than the rest. ("Think different") There is not much, if anything that MS's new upcoming VISTA will bring to users, which the current OSX does not. Why should Apple make it easy or even possible to run OSX on unspecified, miscellaneous hardware and then get blamed if things DON"T "just work" such as their own products do. Nobody seems to advocate that BMW should allow for and make it easy to put Honda motors into their cars or that there should be a standard drive-train that fits all cars. Why then for computers? The software that runs a computer is what makes it distinctive. Without software, the most beautiful hardware is only a very expensive door-stop.
Apple hardware is high quality, but so is hardware from certain other computer makers and that costs about the same, or in some cases more, than what Apple charges. If you install Windows on an Intel Apple, there is no way to tell at first, that it is NOT just another generic Windows computer. Apple competes with hardware makers. The fact that other hardware makers all use MS software is irrelevant. Apple makes hardware. That is NOT what makes their systems so much better though, but it is the software. They would be extremely foolish to give or sell that to their competitors. They don't need to worry about whether their software will run properly on a zillion different hardware configurations, but can test it all together ONLY on their own machines. It is this integration which makes their system very much superior to the PC/Windows approach. MS has realized this integrated approach with their Zune and Xbox, two "closed" systems, that also, mostly at least, "just work".
....more akin to the hardware world, where price competition is strong.....
Comparing hardware and software is like comparing apples and oranges. Unlike software, hardware is difficult to simply copy for almost free. Apple doesn't need to put DRM or other restrictions on their OS because their hardware and software are made only for each other. If all other computer makers made their own OS software, then DRM would not be needed. There would be competition, but ALL software would cost considerably more. In any market, where there is little competition, prices are higher. However there are other, sometimes more important bases for prices besides competition. Economy of scale is particularly important for IP. It costs a lot to make the first copy and then it is trivial to make more copies after that.
......My roommate can buy windows XP and Photoshop cheap, but it is illegal for me to own a copy of that very same software......
Since when does somebody's (even MS) EULA have the force of law? The LAW says that you friend can buy anything (not otherwise illegal in itself) he wishes and sell that to anyone else for any price he wants. That includes software. The "A" in EULA stands for "Agreement". It takes at least two entities to make such. Clicking a mouse or ripping a package does NOT mean anyone is agreeing to something. An agreement also must have a witness attesting to the identity of the persons agreeing and to the agreement they are making. In our culture they call such witnesses a notary public.
.....Imagine if said Rolex decided to stop working because for reasons unknown to you it no longer saw you as its rightful owner........
If a physical item, such s a Rolex were as easy and effortless to duplicate as IP, then the makers of Rolex might well incorporate such a "feature". If you hire someone to do some work, mental or physical, would you not pay them the agreed amount? If you do not pay the price for someone's effort and use the fruit of their labor for free, are you not stealing? If your company fails to pay you at the end of the week, have they not stolen from you?
If someone finds a wallet with all ID and money therein, and keeps it for themselves, is that not also theft? If you are the one who lost it, would you not be grateful to the honest person who returned it to you?
Because digital IP is effortlessly copied, the ones who make the effort to produce such, have to take steps to prevent people from stealing it in the same way that merchants make efforts to prevent shoplifting. These efforts cost money and this is reflected in the prices. If there were no stealing, then things like surveillance cameras and DRM would not exist. In the case of DRM, these measures against theft also make for inconvenience and aggravation for the vast majority of honest paying customers.
Apple is NOT competing with MS, at least not in computers. Apple is the only hardware maker who happens to also make their own software. MS is a software maker for others who make hardware. To use a (maybe lame) car analogy: Apple is like a car maker that builds their own engines and transmissions. They are the only ones doing this. The others buy these from a huge drive-train factory. The drive-train factory has never built a car and cannot be compared to an automaker.
As with any item of commerce, don't buy it if you cannot or will not afford it. Until someone invents an atomic duplicator, it will always cost considerably more to make a copy of some tangible hardware. Software is a product of mind. All such pure mind products, especially digital ones, are intrinsically easily and inexpensively copied, without any great additional expenditure of money or effort. Acquiring the fruit of someone else's effort, whether that effort is physical or mental, without paying the one putting forth such effort is called stealing. If someone has a kid mow their lawn for an agreed price, and then doesn't pay, that person has stolen from that kid. If a particular kid wants more than you are willing to pay, you can find another one who will do it for a lower price or mow the lawn yourself.
Writing software requires effort and expense. The people who wrote that software deserve to be paid for that effort. Copying software without paying for the mental effort it took to write, IS *STEALING*, morally speaking, and also illegal as in copyright law violation.
What if a person freely admits that there is incriminating evidence on their very own laptop? Does the 5th amendment still hold against self incrimination? Being forced to give the encryption key would be the same as being forced to testify against self. I suppose in the end though, any court can do pretty much what they please, no matter what the constitution says.
....501c3's around cancer research should fund this......
Not likely to happen. If this were truly a "cure" then any need for further cancer research would no longer be needed and so these institutes would have to find a new business. People seldom try deliberately to work themselves out of a job.
.....No company is going to pass up a 'cure' for cancer......
I would not be so sure of that. If the money they make for cancer "treatment" exceeds what they might make from a "cure", they'll opt for the treatment cash every time. Pharmaceutical companies know that a cure of a given disease means that the potential for profit is gone after the cure eliminates that disease. Therefore they concentrate on ongoing, long term treatments for medical problems. If this drug were truly a "cure" for cancer, it would never see the light of day, even if it were patentable. Treatments are far more profitable than cures.
.......Market forces are not a good way to allocate the resource of life, as life is neither a resource nor should financial capacity have any bearing on who should be allocated how much of it........
That is a noble sentiment. Unfortunately, medicine, like food, clothing, shelter and other survival needs of life IS a resource, purchasable, like any other. Should governments get into providing these also from the public trough? Where is there *any* government that has ever GIVEN anything to anybody, where they have not taken it away from someone else? Rich folks in Canada come to the US because they do not want to get in line seemingly forever, so they can pay for and get fast medical treatment for conditions that are not immediate life threatening emergencies.
......There will be a doctor that will prescribe it, they're used to being bribed.........
The article stated that this stuff is available in chemical stores. This would mean that a doctor is not needed. Someone with terminal cancer would likely not care what rules any government might invent. After all what does such a person have to lose?
......You just administer it "off label", if you dare......
I would suspect that anyone who has terminal cancer and knows about this would dare. If the substance is available in chemical stores, then anyone could get it without a doctors approval. Of course if this became widely known, the Government would probably make it prescription only at best or totally illegal at worst. After all, a really effective cure for cancer would be devastating financially to the medical and pharmaceutical industries and would NEVER be allowed to come to market unless these established greedy operators could make a huge pile of money.
.....Which is about the time when Apple will have finally released a debugged version of the OS.......
Apple is a hardware company and historically has been pretty good at switching their software to newer and better devices. Therefore, there should not be many show stopper type bugs in this first phone version of their OSX. They have a huge advantage over MS and the other hardware makers in the fact that they can test and modify both hardware and software together until the whole device "just works".
Not for the first generation anyway. They spent two and a half years getting this first one ready. In time, as better better chips get developed, this will become a full fledged pocket computer that also makes phone calls. Apple knows that their ipod connector has enabled others to make accessories such as car interfaces transmitters, microphones etc. The combined money for ipod attachments, cases and other ipod stuff is actually more money than the ipods themselves. Apple will continue to foster this, because they will sell more iphones this way. Anyone who already owns a few ipod specialized accessories is somewhat locked in as well, and will not likely buy a Zune or other gadget similar to the ipod. If Apple did it right, many of the existing ipod gadgets will also work with the iphone.
...... In this case Apple must rely on Cingular.......
Since Cingular/AT&T have millions of subscribers, they must be doing something right. Anyone stuck with another network will just have to eat the cost or wait for iPhone version 2 or 3. Unless there is a serious glitch in execution, Apple will easily sell 10 million of these neat devices. The price may seem high, but if you wanted to get the three basic functions in three separate gadgets, you would cost even more.
.....This is why Apple will never be really big......
How big is big? Like MS? No, probably not. Selling 10 million of something for $500 or $600 each is not exactly chump change. It will certainly keep Steve in new turtle neck shirts. They will sell at least that many if the touch screen truly works well. Nobody has yet made a tiny touchscreen that works properly with only human fingers. Not having buttons that get jammed and can only have one easily applied function is the best feature of the iPhone.
They did. Buttons are used because nobody else has figured out how to make a touch-screen work reliably with human fingers. If Apple did this right and has an airtight patent, they'll be the only one that makes a working button free phone or other hand held electronic device for a while. It also should be relatively cheaper to make than molding all those tiny little buttons and contacts.
The screen must also be scuff and scratch resistant and easy to clean. From the demo, it appears that the virtual button idea will be a huge success. Apple may come out with a non-phone ipod with a big screen and 30-80G storage also.
..... by producing a toy for the wealthy person........
Apparently there are quite a few wealthy people who have purchased ipods. Nobody really NEEDS any iPod, yet they are selling like hot-cakes. With iphone a customer gets three devices in one. Three separate devices with the capabilities of this breakthrough device would cost a good bit more. Initially, Apple is only shooting for a measly 1% of the total global cell phone market which comes to about 10 million phones. They will easily sell one of these toys to one out of a hundred people who want/need a new cell phone. Apple, like any business wants to make money. You cannot do that, trying to sell to the poverty stricken, but sell it to the wealthy. Apple will find plenty of people wealthy enough to buy one, even if you can't afford one right now. In a few years you might be able to buy a used one on ebay for cheap. Meanwhile you can buy a $29 Tracfone.
....Locking it into Cingular is effectively neutering the iPhone's entrance into the smartphone market....
According to Steve, Apple is only looking to take about 1% of the total phone market which is about 10 million units a year. They should have no trouble achieving this. A slightly larger HD based version may be in the wings. Such a device might replace the iPod and they may have one without the phone capability also.
.....you're still going to be polluting a lot. It's just moved further from the consumer.......
There are still advantages to this. First, powerplants can be located where fewer poeple have to breathe the pollutants. Second cleaning up one powerplant is a lot easier, more effective and more efficient than millions of cars. Third, we have lots of coal. That means not sending our money overseas, where a significant fraction is used to finance terrorists. If the industrialized world switched from oil to other energy sources, solar, nuclear, and coal, the terrorists would be starved for money. Bush could have used the huge amounts of money which war costs for sponsoring alternative energy research. Depriving terrorists of money would be avery effective way to limit their ability to do their thing.
....Sure, but the Tesla is also a real sports car that goes 0 - 60 in four seconds........
So will my Honda Accord Hybrid. The v6 engine together with the electric motor can really make that car zip away from a standstill. However I can almost buy three of them for the price one of the above. I get 30-33 mpg and it is a comfortable car that seats four or if need be five.
...If your taxes did not pay for roads, but this was paid for by the drivers (perhaps by a gas use fee), then you probably pay something comparable to $10/gallon......
Simply not true for most US states. In the US, gas and vehicle taxes are reserved for vehicle and transportation related uses, mostly roads. Virtually no general tax money is used for highways. In Europe, the motorists are one of their governments main cash cows and the taxes collected from gasoline and vehicle taxes get used for all government related expenses, including roads. That is why fuel costs almost double of what it costs in the US. After all much of the fuel used on both sides of the Atlantic comes from the same Arab holes in the ground.
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..... If they don't compete why have they made it so difficult to install Microsoft Windows on their hardware?......
Apple has always been different than the rest. ("Think different") There is not much, if anything that MS's new upcoming VISTA will bring to users, which the current OSX does not. Why should Apple make it easy or even possible to run OSX on unspecified, miscellaneous hardware and then get blamed if things DON"T "just work" such as their own products do. Nobody seems to advocate that BMW should allow for and make it easy to put Honda motors into their cars or that there should be a standard drive-train that fits all cars. Why then for computers? The software that runs a computer is what makes it distinctive. Without software, the most beautiful hardware is only a very expensive door-stop.
Apple hardware is high quality, but so is hardware from certain other computer makers and that costs about the same, or in some cases more, than what Apple charges. If you install Windows on an Intel Apple, there is no way to tell at first, that it is NOT just another generic Windows computer. Apple competes with hardware makers. The fact that other hardware makers all use MS software is irrelevant. Apple makes hardware. That is NOT what makes their systems so much better though, but it is the software. They would be extremely foolish to give or sell that to their competitors. They don't need to worry about whether their software will run properly on a zillion different hardware configurations, but can test it all together ONLY on their own machines. It is this integration which makes their system very much superior to the PC/Windows approach. MS has realized this integrated approach with their Zune and Xbox, two "closed" systems, that also, mostly at least, "just work".
....more akin to the hardware world, where price competition is strong.....
Comparing hardware and software is like comparing apples and oranges. Unlike software, hardware is difficult to simply copy for almost free. Apple doesn't need to put DRM or other restrictions on their OS because their hardware and software are made only for each other. If all other computer makers made their own OS software, then DRM would not be needed. There would be competition, but ALL software would cost considerably more. In any market, where there is little competition, prices are higher. However there are other, sometimes more important bases for prices besides competition. Economy of scale is particularly important for IP. It costs a lot to make the first copy and then it is trivial to make more copies after that.
......My roommate can buy windows XP and Photoshop cheap, but it is illegal for me to own a copy of that very same software......
Since when does somebody's (even MS) EULA have the force of law? The LAW says that you friend can buy anything (not otherwise illegal in itself) he wishes and sell that to anyone else for any price he wants. That includes software. The "A" in EULA stands for "Agreement". It takes at least two entities to make such. Clicking a mouse or ripping a package does NOT mean anyone is agreeing to something. An agreement also must have a witness attesting to the identity of the persons agreeing and to the agreement they are making. In our culture they call such witnesses a notary public.
.....Imagine if said Rolex decided to stop working because for reasons unknown to you it no longer saw you as its rightful owner........
If a physical item, such s a Rolex were as easy and effortless to duplicate as IP, then the makers of Rolex might well incorporate such a "feature". If you hire someone to do some work, mental or physical, would you not pay them the agreed amount? If you do not pay the price for someone's effort and use the fruit of their labor for free, are you not stealing? If your company fails to pay you at the end of the week, have they not stolen from you?
If someone finds a wallet with all ID and money therein, and keeps it for themselves, is that not also theft? If you are the one who lost it, would you not be grateful to the honest person who returned it to you?
Because digital IP is effortlessly copied, the ones who make the effort to produce such, have to take steps to prevent people from stealing it in the same way that merchants make efforts to prevent shoplifting. These efforts cost money and this is reflected in the prices. If there were no stealing, then things like surveillance cameras and DRM would not exist. In the case of DRM, these measures against theft also make for inconvenience and aggravation for the vast majority of honest paying customers.
......(which leaves Apple out)......
Apple is NOT competing with MS, at least not in computers. Apple is the only hardware maker who happens to also make their own software. MS is a software maker for others who make hardware. To use a (maybe lame) car analogy: Apple is like a car maker that builds their own engines and transmissions. They are the only ones doing this. The others buy these from a huge drive-train factory. The drive-train factory has never built a car and cannot be compared to an automaker.
....Software is simply overpriced......
As with any item of commerce, don't buy it if you cannot or will not afford it. Until someone invents an atomic duplicator, it will always cost considerably more to make a copy of some tangible hardware. Software is a product of mind. All such pure mind products, especially digital ones, are intrinsically easily and inexpensively copied, without any great additional expenditure of money or effort. Acquiring the fruit of someone else's effort, whether that effort is physical or mental, without paying the one putting forth such effort is called stealing. If someone has a kid mow their lawn for an agreed price, and then doesn't pay, that person has stolen from that kid. If a particular kid wants more than you are willing to pay, you can find another one who will do it for a lower price or mow the lawn yourself.
Writing software requires effort and expense. The people who wrote that software deserve to be paid for that effort. Copying software without paying for the mental effort it took to write, IS *STEALING*, morally speaking, and also illegal as in copyright law violation.
.....surrender the key or go to jail.......
What if a person freely admits that there is incriminating evidence on their very own laptop? Does the 5th amendment still hold against self incrimination? Being forced to give the encryption key would be the same as being forced to testify against self. I suppose in the end though, any court can do pretty much what they please, no matter what the constitution says.
....501c3's around cancer research should fund this......
Not likely to happen. If this were truly a "cure" then any need for further cancer research would no longer be needed and so these institutes would have to find a new business. People seldom try deliberately to work themselves out of a job.
.....No company is going to pass up a 'cure' for cancer......
I would not be so sure of that. If the money they make for cancer "treatment" exceeds what they might make from a "cure", they'll opt for the treatment cash every time. Pharmaceutical companies know that a cure of a given disease means that the potential for profit is gone after the cure eliminates that disease. Therefore they concentrate on ongoing, long term treatments for medical problems. If this drug were truly a "cure" for cancer, it would never see the light of day, even if it were patentable. Treatments are far more profitable than cures.
...... Likewise, if someone invented a cure for any of the diseases you listed, they could get rich selling it, and would......
Only if that someone was an already established rich drug company that is able to pay off the FDA, patent and other lawyers and pay for advertising.
.......Market forces are not a good way to allocate the resource of life, as life is neither a resource nor should financial capacity have any bearing on who should be allocated how much of it........
That is a noble sentiment. Unfortunately, medicine, like food, clothing, shelter and other survival needs of life IS a resource, purchasable, like any other. Should governments get into providing these also from the public trough? Where is there *any* government that has ever GIVEN anything to anybody, where they have not taken it away from someone else? Rich folks in Canada come to the US because they do not want to get in line seemingly forever, so they can pay for and get fast medical treatment for conditions that are not immediate life threatening emergencies.
......There will be a doctor that will prescribe it, they're used to being bribed.........
The article stated that this stuff is available in chemical stores. This would mean that a doctor is not needed. Someone with terminal cancer would likely not care what rules any government might invent. After all what does such a person have to lose?
......You just administer it "off label", if you dare......
I would suspect that anyone who has terminal cancer and knows about this would dare. If the substance is available in chemical stores, then anyone could get it without a doctors approval. Of course if this became widely known, the Government would probably make it prescription only at best or totally illegal at worst. After all, a really effective cure for cancer would be devastating financially to the medical and pharmaceutical industries and would NEVER be allowed to come to market unless these established greedy operators could make a huge pile of money.
.....Which is about the time when Apple will have finally released a debugged version of the OS.......
Apple is a hardware company and historically has been pretty good at switching their software to newer and better devices. Therefore, there should not be many show stopper type bugs in this first phone version of their OSX. They have a huge advantage over MS and the other hardware makers in the fact that they can test and modify both hardware and software together until the whole device "just works".
.....Someone let me know when there's an unlocked model for $250......
After the first two year contracts expire, you'll probably be able to buy one on ebay for half that or less.
....The OS isn't going to be "OS X for real......
Not for the first generation anyway. They spent two and a half years getting this first one ready. In time, as better better chips get developed, this will become a full fledged pocket computer that also makes phone calls. Apple knows that their ipod connector has enabled others to make accessories such as car interfaces transmitters, microphones etc. The combined money for ipod attachments, cases and other ipod stuff is actually more money than the ipods themselves. Apple will continue to foster this, because they will sell more iphones this way. Anyone who already owns a few ipod specialized accessories is somewhat locked in as well, and will not likely buy a Zune or other gadget similar to the ipod. If Apple did it right, many of the existing ipod gadgets will also work with the iphone.
...... In this case Apple must rely on Cingular.......
Since Cingular/AT&T have millions of subscribers, they must be doing something right. Anyone stuck with another network will just have to eat the cost or wait for iPhone version 2 or 3. Unless there is a serious glitch in execution, Apple will easily sell 10 million of these neat devices. The price may seem high, but if you wanted to get the three basic functions in three separate gadgets, you would cost even more.
.....This is why Apple will never be really big......
How big is big? Like MS? No, probably not. Selling 10 million of something for $500 or $600 each is not exactly chump change. It will certainly keep Steve in new turtle neck shirts. They will sell at least that many if the touch screen truly works well. Nobody has yet made a tiny touchscreen that works properly with only human fingers. Not having buttons that get jammed and can only have one easily applied function is the best feature of the iPhone.
... Apple should have taken a lesson.....
They did. Buttons are used because nobody else has figured out how to make a touch-screen work reliably with human fingers. If Apple did this right and has an airtight patent, they'll be the only one that makes a working button free phone or other hand held electronic device for a while. It also should be relatively cheaper to make than molding all those tiny little buttons and contacts.
The screen must also be scuff and scratch resistant and easy to clean. From the demo, it appears that the virtual button idea will be a huge success. Apple may come out with a non-phone ipod with a big screen and 30-80G storage also.
..... by producing a toy for the wealthy person ........
Apparently there are quite a few wealthy people who have purchased ipods. Nobody really NEEDS any iPod, yet they are selling like hot-cakes. With iphone a customer gets three devices in one. Three separate devices with the capabilities of this breakthrough device would cost a good bit more. Initially, Apple is only shooting for a measly 1% of the total global cell phone market which comes to about 10 million phones. They will easily sell one of these toys to one out of a hundred people who want/need a new cell phone. Apple, like any business wants to make money. You cannot do that, trying to sell to the poverty stricken, but sell it to the wealthy. Apple will find plenty of people wealthy enough to buy one, even if you can't afford one right now. In a few years you might be able to buy a used one on ebay for cheap. Meanwhile you can buy a $29 Tracfone.
....Locking it into Cingular is effectively neutering the iPhone's entrance into the smartphone market....
According to Steve, Apple is only looking to take about 1% of the total phone market which is about 10 million units a year. They should have no trouble achieving this. A slightly larger HD based version may be in the wings. Such a device might replace the iPod and they may have one without the phone capability also.
....Therefore taxing according to the weight .......
In the US cars are usually taxed by value. Since the expensive cars and SUVs are also generally heavier, the tax is also by weight, though indirectly.
.....you're still going to be polluting a lot. It's just moved further from the consumer .......
There are still advantages to this. First, powerplants can be located where fewer poeple have to breathe the pollutants. Second cleaning up one powerplant is a lot easier, more effective and more efficient than millions of cars. Third, we have lots of coal. That means not sending our money overseas, where a significant fraction is used to finance terrorists. If the industrialized world switched from oil to other energy sources, solar, nuclear, and coal, the terrorists would be starved for money. Bush could have used the huge amounts of money which war costs for sponsoring alternative energy research. Depriving terrorists of money would be avery effective way to limit their ability to do their thing.
....Sure, but the Tesla is also a real sports car that goes 0 - 60 in four seconds........
So will my Honda Accord Hybrid. The v6 engine together with the electric motor can really make that car zip away from a standstill. However I can almost buy three of them for the price one of the above. I get 30-33 mpg and it is a comfortable car that seats four or if need be five.
...If your taxes did not pay for roads, but this was paid for by the drivers (perhaps by a gas use fee), then you probably pay something comparable to $10/gallon......
Simply not true for most US states. In the US, gas and vehicle taxes are reserved for vehicle and transportation related uses, mostly roads. Virtually no general tax money is used for highways. In Europe, the motorists are one of their governments main cash cows and the taxes collected from gasoline and vehicle taxes get used for all government related expenses, including roads. That is why fuel costs almost double of what it costs in the US. After all much of the fuel used on both sides of the Atlantic comes from the same Arab holes in the ground.