Then add in your labor cost, the cost of the time you spent researching components, software costs, and technical support costs for when it breaks. Presumably if you were going to do these things for somebody else, your time wouldn't be free, right?
The difference, if there is any leftover, would be your profit. Apple (and every other PC manufacturer) makes a bit more than that on profit because they buy parts in bulk, pay cheaper laborers, and certain fixed costs like R&D are spread out over the entire run.
Comparing prebuilt to self-built is stupid, because you're not including all the costs of manufacture. A more useful comparison is between one company's prebuilt to another company's prebuilt, though it can be hard to find direct competition where the specs are identical between two companies' products.
You know, back when that was big news, somebody took two minutes and actually found out that suicide rates at Foxconn were actually lower than China as a whole. The reason is because those people have a job. As unfortunate as it is, having a job at Foxconn is pretty good compared to a lot of alternatives in that country.
Back when Tim Cook was COO, he actually streamlined Apple's supply chains quite a bit, to eliminate warehouses. Apple used to have obsolete products sitting in boxes somewhere, but no longer. It's why there's a wait time when you order a product from Apple, they have to make the thing first! So, I would not say warehouses are costing Apple dearly. I'm sure shipping is costly, but the labor is just so cheap over there.
Manufacturing workers here in the US expect huge salaries, huge benefits, and huge pensions. Unions and collective bargaining, while great things back in the days of child labor, dangerous factory conditions, and minuscule wages, have now crippled manufacturing here. The government has long since taken over the business of keeping workers safe and well-fed, and unions serve only to cater to the greed of the labor pool at the expensive of their own jobs.
Let's face it, if your job can be done by a robot, or a child in some third world country, you shouldn't expect to make loads and loads of money doing it, then be set up for life when you retire. It's unskilled labor, and it's worth exactly pennies an hour. That's why Chinese workers are eager to do the job for you for pennies an hour.
As lovely as the idea of good old American factories are, it's never going to happen unless American workers are willing to live a lower quality of life than they've become accustomed to. If it's any consolation, pretty soon China will be shipping a lot of their jobs overseas too, once their standards of living have increased as well. Apple is making a big push into selling their products in China now, which means it's probably not far off. If you can afford to buy an iPhone, you probably aren't working in an iPhone factory.
When we get cheap enough robots, we'll probably do as you say, build factories as close to customers or resources as possible, a mini automatic factory on every street corner where you can pick up anything, made the minute you swipe your credit card.
If you look at just laptop sales (where Apple has seen the most growth), Apple's numbers are even better compared to the competition.
The Mac is definitely seeing a halo effect from the various iPods and iPhones and iPads they make, and their Apple Retail Stores have certainly left a lot of positive impressions on the brand. Of course, it doesn't hurt either that just about every PC maker is seeing a drop in growth or negative growth in the last few years. It's partly Apple's growth, and partly everyone else doing poorly, but Apple's marketshare is increasing quite a bit. I'd say, regardless of market share, the fact they've seen such big growth during economic downturns, really says a lot about the strength of their product line. Even when you'd expect people to buy the cheapest they can get away with, they still find room in the budget for a new Mac.
I haven't really gone looking, but I'd actually be interested to see where Apple is doing compared to individual PC manufacturers, rather than grouping all Windows machines together. Anyone have that data close at hand?
You raise an interesting point. How exactly do we detect the absence of spacetime? Presumably if it's ripped apart, either there will be gaps, or somehow we'll make more of it.
If the game were just an endless flat space and you could build on top of it, you might have a point, but the worlds it randomly generates are truly beautiful in their own right. I've spent hours just running around looking at the terrain.
Fork-scraping never bothered me. Maybe it depends on the fork and plate, but as I recall, it's usually lower frequency. Styrofoam is annoying, but not shiver-inducing like the fingernails on chalkboard thing. Again, I think the frequency is lower most of the time I've encountered the stuff rubbing against itself.
I've lost loved ones to cancer as well, but if early detection doesn't help you, and false positives can really hurt you, then cancer screenings are doing more harm than good and costing society dearly.
I've been growing more wary of early detection, and not just cancer, but all sorts of things. False positives are everywhere in medicine, more commonplace than we'd like to think. It's better to educate people on symptoms, screen only for things that don't have any symptoms (until it's too late), and generally people should live their lives normally and only see a doctor when they actually get sick. Annual check-ups are good for people who are uninformed about their health, or have questions they need answered, but what do they actually do for healthy people? Nothing. What do they do for sick people? Well, those sick people should've made a special appointment when they realized they were sick, not based on an arbitrary annual check-up schedule.
If something hurts, is bleeding, or isn't working right, by all means, go see a doctor, ideally a specialist who knows all about it. If there's nothing wrong, though, you're more likely to become sick going to a doctor's office or hospital than if you just stayed home. Either you'll catch something from another patient who's there legitimately, or you'll become a victim of malpractice or treatment for false positives.
While emergency medicine is based on worst case scenario, the rest of our medical system is all based on probabilities. The same three symptoms could mean you have x, y, or z, but you're treated for y because it's most likely. Only if treatment fails do we consider x or z. It's not a perfect system, but it's the best system for the most number of people, until we devise better tests to differentiate x and z from y. By all means, we should use cold hard statistics to weigh the pros and cons of screening. If the probability of harm is greater than the probability of benefit, regardless of the dangers of untreated cancer, we must advocate less screening.
There's certainly a psychological component. Just thinking about that noise and making the clawing/scraping motion with my hand, right now, made me react as I would hearing it for real.
Yeah, I don't understand speed limits on highways, at all. These are roads designed for maximal straightness, and generally your safety is determined solely on how many people are trying to swerve around slow drivers in the wrong lane. If there were no speed limits at all, but strictly enforced passing rules, people would feel more responsible for their safety and drive at the speeds they're most comfortable with, and in lanes where they are not a danger to others.
On residential and busy commercial areas, where it's much more likely there are pedestrians about to hit, speed limits make a lot of sense. In these areas, I tend to drive a bit slower than the speed limits because there's usually plenty of reasons to brake. Either the roads are more curvy, there are cars ahead of me that want to turn off or turn on, or there are pedestrians I don't want to kill.
You can tell it's about revenue, not safety, because they enforce speed limits most stringently on highways, and I never see any speed traps in suburban or urban streets where pedestrians get hit and killed all the time (or drivers go too fast and hit a tree). They just put up those honor system "you're going this fast" radar signs that do nothing.
This does explain why when I visited CA several years ago, I saw tons and tons of vehicles without plates. It really stood out. At the time, I thought it was truly bizarre, and wondered if cops just didn't care, but I guess that's CA for you.
Well, the solution to overpopulation is to colonize other planets. It just won't happen as soon as we'd like. But that's fine, we'll devise new methods of supporting an ever accelerating population growth for quite a while before we truly need to move people off-world to survive. If we never make another advance in technology, we can probably get into the low tens of billions of humans before the planet just can't support any more, but obviously our understanding of genetics and development of new agricultural techniques will push things even further. Sooner or later though, we run out of space, materials, and energy, but the universe has those in vast supply and it's only rational we'll exploit those resources eventually. It's basic economics. It may be costly and difficult to get those resources now, but as demand increases continually, off-Earth alternatives get cheaper and cheaper relative to Earth sources, and economies of scale will make it cheaper than it would be today, anyway.
People certainly won't stop reproducing. Since we're the only species we've met that can continually figure out new ways to eliminate scarcity, it's inevitable that we'll look to other worlds, or Lagrange points, as a way of getting more real estate. Some will be in other solar systems, whether we have FTL (we'll see, I guess), near-c (doable, given enough time), or generation ships (likely) to get us there.
Furthermore, space colonization is the only way to ensure the continued survival of the species for the foreseeable future. Right now we have all our eggs in one basket, and it will only take one mass extinction event, which happen with relative frequency, to finish us off. While I don't expect us to behave rationally as a species to prioritize long-term survival, colonizing other parts of Sol, other parts of the Milky Way, and eventually other parts of the Local Group (and beyond) as quickly as we're able to, need will push us forward.
If you're going to use straw man arguments against so-called "Space Nutters", you might want to pick your arguments more carefully. Space colonization is currently quite expensive, but doable with existing technologies. We have the money too, we simply lack the will to spend it.
Oh, and one thing you might be overlooking, with those computers getting faster and faster, is that pretty soon they'll be smarter than us, and can help us solve problems we're unable to ourselves. Those turbine-powered metal aircraft you mention have already benefited from newer and better simulations and genetic algorithms helping with design efficiency, so again, I think you should pick your arguments more carefully.
A free market is not anarchy, a government is required to enforce contracts and provide for tort suits under a court system.
If a company causes environmental damage, they can be sued the crap out of by those it effects. A jury can force the company to pay a lot more than some regulatory fines written by lobbyists that right now get taken into account as the cost of business by the people making the decisions. This actually provides a greater incentive not to cause problems, since companies right now can use regulatory loopholes and be immune in court, whereas a court system can find them liable for all sorts of things when statutes are taken out of the picture.
Ideally, the free press will tell us the truth. We shouldn't trust our governments or the big companies. Unfortunately, they've become the big companies they ought to be reporting on.
It will continue to surprise Apple's competitors, as well. Whenever they see Apple have success, they think it is just the polish, try to copy that polish, and their products just aren't that successful. Steve Jobs was fond of pointing out in interviews that his competitors just didn't get it.
One thing Steve Jobs said to Tim Cook while he was in his final week, was that he didn't want Apple to keep asking itself what Steve Jobs would do, and just figure things out for themselves.
Tim Cook is going to get 10 million shares of AAPL if he sticks around another 10 years, so they pretty much have him locked down. Tim Cook is a practical man, but he's a true believer.
Jeff Williams is a Tim Cook operations kind of guy, and without a doubt much of Apple's success was because of operations under Tim Cook. Operations will continue moving along quite well for the foreseeable future.
Jonathan Ive is absolutely a true believer, and Jobs set up Apple to give the man free reign of the company. I don't doubt Jonathan Ive is living his dream job, and he'll stick around as long as they let him and he'll keep the Jobs way going. Realistically, much of Apple's success has been a collaboration between Jobs and Ive, not Jobs alone.
Scott Forstall is probably also living his dream job, I doubt he'd jump ship either, and he's certainly a true believer as well. He's also got a reputation as being rather Jobs-like in his aggression, so he'll be a watchdog as well for Apple culture.
I'm sure Eddy Cue, Bob Mansfield, and Phil Schiller will stick around too, and that pretty much rounds out the executive team.
The Apple board let Steve Jobs pretty much do whatever he wanted during his tenure as CEO when he came back, and he used that power to set up a group of managers and culture under him to carry Apple forward as an innovative company. For all the talk of Jobs being a brutal, nasty boss who bludgeoned people into doing things his way, what that really means is he forced people out that weren't, in his mind, Apple material. The only people left are the true believers.
The spreadsheet monkeys won't have an easy time worming their way back in.
Considering how much profit Apple makes by staying customer-focused, one could argue they're both the same thing. It's just that some companies don't realize that the best way to get profit is focus on the customer experience. In other words, they focus on making profits but don't have a clue how to get them.
And we've seen this time and time again from the shoe bomber to the underpants bomber, people reacted quickly to neutralize the threat.
As far as I'm concerned, the government does more harm than good by telling people that only the government can protect people. The government has been for the most part reacting to things that have already failed. Why have these plots failed? Largely because people saw something weird happening, and took matters into their own hands to stop it.
What we need is people to be more self-reliant for their own safety, not be cowed into obedience of increasingly bizarre and unnecessary TSA policies. I'm sure the government has done some good intelligence work behind the scenes to prevent plots from getting very far, but if a plot does make its way to the airport, chances are excellent the terrorists have figured out how to get through security and it's up to ordinary people to defend themselves from the unexpected.
If I was working for DHS/TSA, I'd be doing PSAs all the time telling people to be alert and react to situations as they arise, rather than assuring everyone they're perfectly safe if they carefully measure their liquids and take off their shoes. Everyone should learn how bombs work, the signs of a chemical or biological attack, and how to protect themselves and others around them should we get attacked. I'm glad at least in my EMT course, we were taught about terrorism as part of hazmat training. The best defense against terrorism is alertness and knowledge, not the government.
Oh, and we'll never have another 9/11 because they locked and reinforced all the cockpit doors. That was a pretty obvious and easy fix. Everything else is just politics and theater.
Steve Jobs before his passing referred to AppleTV as a hobby, not a business for them. Until they start selling like crazy, Apple won't waste much energy showing it off.
That said, they usually have one set up somewhere in the store.
Yeah but what's really the difference between Shell gas and Mobile gas, or CVS vs. Rite Aid? They're identical and commoditized, and they survive because there's enough market for both of them, though first mover advantage means one of the two is likely on the best side of the street for visibility and getting traffic.
There's a lot of differentiation between Microsoft and Apple, and despite all of Microsoft's efforts to copy Apple Stores, their stores as well. It's because the products are different. If the products were the same, Microsoft would win easily, because they're the known brand. Since they're not, their store positioning merely encourages comparison. I don't think the comparison will be favorable for that average tech consumer.
Soooo offtopic, and a bit misinformed. The widely-cited ending of Apple's charity program when Steve Jobs returned as CEO was because the company was going under and couldn't afford it anymore. Since they've become profitable, they've done a lot more. Apple's participated in Product Red quite heavily with their iPod lines. Steve Jobs is widely believed to have given a lot of money to cancer research before he died, but simply chose to do so anonymously so we can't be entirely sure. There may have been quite a bit of other philanthropic efforts done that we won't know about because Steve Jobs was a very private person, and nobody cares enough about the other executives there to actually find out about their charitable donations but that's not proof they haven't given anything either.
I actually find it a lot more obnoxious when these rich guys give their money away so publicly. I was raised to give to charity and not make such a big deal out of it, because then you're doing it for the right reasons, and not praise. When you are a billionaire, giving away money is literally the easiest thing you can do. You won't miss it. Let me know when Bill Gates gives up his entire net worth, leaves nothing for his family, and lives as a pauper. Then I'll consider him a saint. Until then, I'm a lot more impressed by the person making minimum wage dropping some dollar bills in the charity bucket and not telling all their friends and the media about it.
I'm not arguing with you. I myself do far, far more gaming on my 360 than my iPhone, and there's no serious games on the iPhone (that I can think of). But you make it sound like Apple and Microsoft are going head to head in gaming, and they are not at all. Each has their preferred market, and are doing okay in their niches. The casual market seems to be a bigger one, though, which is why the Wii kicked the 360's ass and the PS3 is limping in third.
The gggp was talking about Microsoft being behind Apple in a lot of ways, but you can't compare the two companies between markets that the other one is not trying to compete it at all. That's comparing Apples and, uh, Microsofts. His statement refers to markets where Microsoft is following Apple (which is sort of the point of TFA), not markets in which they are no competing with each other.
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Then add in your labor cost, the cost of the time you spent researching components, software costs, and technical support costs for when it breaks. Presumably if you were going to do these things for somebody else, your time wouldn't be free, right?
The difference, if there is any leftover, would be your profit. Apple (and every other PC manufacturer) makes a bit more than that on profit because they buy parts in bulk, pay cheaper laborers, and certain fixed costs like R&D are spread out over the entire run.
Comparing prebuilt to self-built is stupid, because you're not including all the costs of manufacture. A more useful comparison is between one company's prebuilt to another company's prebuilt, though it can be hard to find direct competition where the specs are identical between two companies' products.
You know, back when that was big news, somebody took two minutes and actually found out that suicide rates at Foxconn were actually lower than China as a whole. The reason is because those people have a job. As unfortunate as it is, having a job at Foxconn is pretty good compared to a lot of alternatives in that country.
Back when Tim Cook was COO, he actually streamlined Apple's supply chains quite a bit, to eliminate warehouses. Apple used to have obsolete products sitting in boxes somewhere, but no longer. It's why there's a wait time when you order a product from Apple, they have to make the thing first! So, I would not say warehouses are costing Apple dearly. I'm sure shipping is costly, but the labor is just so cheap over there.
Manufacturing workers here in the US expect huge salaries, huge benefits, and huge pensions. Unions and collective bargaining, while great things back in the days of child labor, dangerous factory conditions, and minuscule wages, have now crippled manufacturing here. The government has long since taken over the business of keeping workers safe and well-fed, and unions serve only to cater to the greed of the labor pool at the expensive of their own jobs.
Let's face it, if your job can be done by a robot, or a child in some third world country, you shouldn't expect to make loads and loads of money doing it, then be set up for life when you retire. It's unskilled labor, and it's worth exactly pennies an hour. That's why Chinese workers are eager to do the job for you for pennies an hour.
As lovely as the idea of good old American factories are, it's never going to happen unless American workers are willing to live a lower quality of life than they've become accustomed to. If it's any consolation, pretty soon China will be shipping a lot of their jobs overseas too, once their standards of living have increased as well. Apple is making a big push into selling their products in China now, which means it's probably not far off. If you can afford to buy an iPhone, you probably aren't working in an iPhone factory.
When we get cheap enough robots, we'll probably do as you say, build factories as close to customers or resources as possible, a mini automatic factory on every street corner where you can pick up anything, made the minute you swipe your credit card.
If you look at just laptop sales (where Apple has seen the most growth), Apple's numbers are even better compared to the competition.
The Mac is definitely seeing a halo effect from the various iPods and iPhones and iPads they make, and their Apple Retail Stores have certainly left a lot of positive impressions on the brand. Of course, it doesn't hurt either that just about every PC maker is seeing a drop in growth or negative growth in the last few years. It's partly Apple's growth, and partly everyone else doing poorly, but Apple's marketshare is increasing quite a bit. I'd say, regardless of market share, the fact they've seen such big growth during economic downturns, really says a lot about the strength of their product line. Even when you'd expect people to buy the cheapest they can get away with, they still find room in the budget for a new Mac.
I haven't really gone looking, but I'd actually be interested to see where Apple is doing compared to individual PC manufacturers, rather than grouping all Windows machines together. Anyone have that data close at hand?
You raise an interesting point. How exactly do we detect the absence of spacetime? Presumably if it's ripped apart, either there will be gaps, or somehow we'll make more of it.
If the game were just an endless flat space and you could build on top of it, you might have a point, but the worlds it randomly generates are truly beautiful in their own right. I've spent hours just running around looking at the terrain.
Fork-scraping never bothered me. Maybe it depends on the fork and plate, but as I recall, it's usually lower frequency. Styrofoam is annoying, but not shiver-inducing like the fingernails on chalkboard thing. Again, I think the frequency is lower most of the time I've encountered the stuff rubbing against itself.
I've lost loved ones to cancer as well, but if early detection doesn't help you, and false positives can really hurt you, then cancer screenings are doing more harm than good and costing society dearly.
I've been growing more wary of early detection, and not just cancer, but all sorts of things. False positives are everywhere in medicine, more commonplace than we'd like to think. It's better to educate people on symptoms, screen only for things that don't have any symptoms (until it's too late), and generally people should live their lives normally and only see a doctor when they actually get sick. Annual check-ups are good for people who are uninformed about their health, or have questions they need answered, but what do they actually do for healthy people? Nothing. What do they do for sick people? Well, those sick people should've made a special appointment when they realized they were sick, not based on an arbitrary annual check-up schedule.
If something hurts, is bleeding, or isn't working right, by all means, go see a doctor, ideally a specialist who knows all about it. If there's nothing wrong, though, you're more likely to become sick going to a doctor's office or hospital than if you just stayed home. Either you'll catch something from another patient who's there legitimately, or you'll become a victim of malpractice or treatment for false positives.
While emergency medicine is based on worst case scenario, the rest of our medical system is all based on probabilities. The same three symptoms could mean you have x, y, or z, but you're treated for y because it's most likely. Only if treatment fails do we consider x or z. It's not a perfect system, but it's the best system for the most number of people, until we devise better tests to differentiate x and z from y. By all means, we should use cold hard statistics to weigh the pros and cons of screening. If the probability of harm is greater than the probability of benefit, regardless of the dangers of untreated cancer, we must advocate less screening.
There's certainly a psychological component. Just thinking about that noise and making the clawing/scraping motion with my hand, right now, made me react as I would hearing it for real.
Yeah, I don't understand speed limits on highways, at all. These are roads designed for maximal straightness, and generally your safety is determined solely on how many people are trying to swerve around slow drivers in the wrong lane. If there were no speed limits at all, but strictly enforced passing rules, people would feel more responsible for their safety and drive at the speeds they're most comfortable with, and in lanes where they are not a danger to others.
On residential and busy commercial areas, where it's much more likely there are pedestrians about to hit, speed limits make a lot of sense. In these areas, I tend to drive a bit slower than the speed limits because there's usually plenty of reasons to brake. Either the roads are more curvy, there are cars ahead of me that want to turn off or turn on, or there are pedestrians I don't want to kill.
You can tell it's about revenue, not safety, because they enforce speed limits most stringently on highways, and I never see any speed traps in suburban or urban streets where pedestrians get hit and killed all the time (or drivers go too fast and hit a tree). They just put up those honor system "you're going this fast" radar signs that do nothing.
This does explain why when I visited CA several years ago, I saw tons and tons of vehicles without plates. It really stood out. At the time, I thought it was truly bizarre, and wondered if cops just didn't care, but I guess that's CA for you.
Well, the solution to overpopulation is to colonize other planets. It just won't happen as soon as we'd like. But that's fine, we'll devise new methods of supporting an ever accelerating population growth for quite a while before we truly need to move people off-world to survive. If we never make another advance in technology, we can probably get into the low tens of billions of humans before the planet just can't support any more, but obviously our understanding of genetics and development of new agricultural techniques will push things even further. Sooner or later though, we run out of space, materials, and energy, but the universe has those in vast supply and it's only rational we'll exploit those resources eventually. It's basic economics. It may be costly and difficult to get those resources now, but as demand increases continually, off-Earth alternatives get cheaper and cheaper relative to Earth sources, and economies of scale will make it cheaper than it would be today, anyway.
People certainly won't stop reproducing. Since we're the only species we've met that can continually figure out new ways to eliminate scarcity, it's inevitable that we'll look to other worlds, or Lagrange points, as a way of getting more real estate. Some will be in other solar systems, whether we have FTL (we'll see, I guess), near-c (doable, given enough time), or generation ships (likely) to get us there.
Furthermore, space colonization is the only way to ensure the continued survival of the species for the foreseeable future. Right now we have all our eggs in one basket, and it will only take one mass extinction event, which happen with relative frequency, to finish us off. While I don't expect us to behave rationally as a species to prioritize long-term survival, colonizing other parts of Sol, other parts of the Milky Way, and eventually other parts of the Local Group (and beyond) as quickly as we're able to, need will push us forward.
If you're going to use straw man arguments against so-called "Space Nutters", you might want to pick your arguments more carefully. Space colonization is currently quite expensive, but doable with existing technologies. We have the money too, we simply lack the will to spend it.
Oh, and one thing you might be overlooking, with those computers getting faster and faster, is that pretty soon they'll be smarter than us, and can help us solve problems we're unable to ourselves. Those turbine-powered metal aircraft you mention have already benefited from newer and better simulations and genetic algorithms helping with design efficiency, so again, I think you should pick your arguments more carefully.
A free market is not anarchy, a government is required to enforce contracts and provide for tort suits under a court system.
If a company causes environmental damage, they can be sued the crap out of by those it effects. A jury can force the company to pay a lot more than some regulatory fines written by lobbyists that right now get taken into account as the cost of business by the people making the decisions. This actually provides a greater incentive not to cause problems, since companies right now can use regulatory loopholes and be immune in court, whereas a court system can find them liable for all sorts of things when statutes are taken out of the picture.
Ideally, the free press will tell us the truth. We shouldn't trust our governments or the big companies. Unfortunately, they've become the big companies they ought to be reporting on.
It will continue to surprise Apple's competitors, as well. Whenever they see Apple have success, they think it is just the polish, try to copy that polish, and their products just aren't that successful. Steve Jobs was fond of pointing out in interviews that his competitors just didn't get it.
One thing Steve Jobs said to Tim Cook while he was in his final week, was that he didn't want Apple to keep asking itself what Steve Jobs would do, and just figure things out for themselves.
Tim Cook is going to get 10 million shares of AAPL if he sticks around another 10 years, so they pretty much have him locked down. Tim Cook is a practical man, but he's a true believer.
Jeff Williams is a Tim Cook operations kind of guy, and without a doubt much of Apple's success was because of operations under Tim Cook. Operations will continue moving along quite well for the foreseeable future.
Jonathan Ive is absolutely a true believer, and Jobs set up Apple to give the man free reign of the company. I don't doubt Jonathan Ive is living his dream job, and he'll stick around as long as they let him and he'll keep the Jobs way going. Realistically, much of Apple's success has been a collaboration between Jobs and Ive, not Jobs alone.
Scott Forstall is probably also living his dream job, I doubt he'd jump ship either, and he's certainly a true believer as well. He's also got a reputation as being rather Jobs-like in his aggression, so he'll be a watchdog as well for Apple culture.
I'm sure Eddy Cue, Bob Mansfield, and Phil Schiller will stick around too, and that pretty much rounds out the executive team.
The Apple board let Steve Jobs pretty much do whatever he wanted during his tenure as CEO when he came back, and he used that power to set up a group of managers and culture under him to carry Apple forward as an innovative company. For all the talk of Jobs being a brutal, nasty boss who bludgeoned people into doing things his way, what that really means is he forced people out that weren't, in his mind, Apple material. The only people left are the true believers.
The spreadsheet monkeys won't have an easy time worming their way back in.
If it was only marketing, wouldn't everybody be doing it? Or are you just saying that only Apple has an advertising budget?
Considering how much profit Apple makes by staying customer-focused, one could argue they're both the same thing. It's just that some companies don't realize that the best way to get profit is focus on the customer experience. In other words, they focus on making profits but don't have a clue how to get them.
And we've seen this time and time again from the shoe bomber to the underpants bomber, people reacted quickly to neutralize the threat.
As far as I'm concerned, the government does more harm than good by telling people that only the government can protect people. The government has been for the most part reacting to things that have already failed. Why have these plots failed? Largely because people saw something weird happening, and took matters into their own hands to stop it.
What we need is people to be more self-reliant for their own safety, not be cowed into obedience of increasingly bizarre and unnecessary TSA policies. I'm sure the government has done some good intelligence work behind the scenes to prevent plots from getting very far, but if a plot does make its way to the airport, chances are excellent the terrorists have figured out how to get through security and it's up to ordinary people to defend themselves from the unexpected.
If I was working for DHS/TSA, I'd be doing PSAs all the time telling people to be alert and react to situations as they arise, rather than assuring everyone they're perfectly safe if they carefully measure their liquids and take off their shoes. Everyone should learn how bombs work, the signs of a chemical or biological attack, and how to protect themselves and others around them should we get attacked. I'm glad at least in my EMT course, we were taught about terrorism as part of hazmat training. The best defense against terrorism is alertness and knowledge, not the government.
Oh, and we'll never have another 9/11 because they locked and reinforced all the cockpit doors. That was a pretty obvious and easy fix. Everything else is just politics and theater.
Might bring back full service gas stations, in that case. Lugging those heavy batteries into the convenience shop would get old fast.
Steve Jobs before his passing referred to AppleTV as a hobby, not a business for them. Until they start selling like crazy, Apple won't waste much energy showing it off.
That said, they usually have one set up somewhere in the store.
Yeah but what's really the difference between Shell gas and Mobile gas, or CVS vs. Rite Aid? They're identical and commoditized, and they survive because there's enough market for both of them, though first mover advantage means one of the two is likely on the best side of the street for visibility and getting traffic.
There's a lot of differentiation between Microsoft and Apple, and despite all of Microsoft's efforts to copy Apple Stores, their stores as well. It's because the products are different. If the products were the same, Microsoft would win easily, because they're the known brand. Since they're not, their store positioning merely encourages comparison. I don't think the comparison will be favorable for that average tech consumer.
Soooo offtopic, and a bit misinformed. The widely-cited ending of Apple's charity program when Steve Jobs returned as CEO was because the company was going under and couldn't afford it anymore. Since they've become profitable, they've done a lot more. Apple's participated in Product Red quite heavily with their iPod lines. Steve Jobs is widely believed to have given a lot of money to cancer research before he died, but simply chose to do so anonymously so we can't be entirely sure. There may have been quite a bit of other philanthropic efforts done that we won't know about because Steve Jobs was a very private person, and nobody cares enough about the other executives there to actually find out about their charitable donations but that's not proof they haven't given anything either.
I actually find it a lot more obnoxious when these rich guys give their money away so publicly. I was raised to give to charity and not make such a big deal out of it, because then you're doing it for the right reasons, and not praise. When you are a billionaire, giving away money is literally the easiest thing you can do. You won't miss it. Let me know when Bill Gates gives up his entire net worth, leaves nothing for his family, and lives as a pauper. Then I'll consider him a saint. Until then, I'm a lot more impressed by the person making minimum wage dropping some dollar bills in the charity bucket and not telling all their friends and the media about it.
I'm not arguing with you. I myself do far, far more gaming on my 360 than my iPhone, and there's no serious games on the iPhone (that I can think of). But you make it sound like Apple and Microsoft are going head to head in gaming, and they are not at all. Each has their preferred market, and are doing okay in their niches. The casual market seems to be a bigger one, though, which is why the Wii kicked the 360's ass and the PS3 is limping in third.
The gggp was talking about Microsoft being behind Apple in a lot of ways, but you can't compare the two companies between markets that the other one is not trying to compete it at all. That's comparing Apples and, uh, Microsofts. His statement refers to markets where Microsoft is following Apple (which is sort of the point of TFA), not markets in which they are no competing with each other.