Actually, Apple's cost per unit on iOS may be less than Motorola's for Android. The software on iPad is the same as on iPhone and iPod, and the core of iOS is OS X from the Mac. And iPad is the same A4 chip and other guts from iPhone also. There are such massive economies of scale there, Apple pays very little for each iPad's software. Plus, they made it all themselves, there is no 3rd party profit to pay. Motorola may get some parts of Android for free, but other parts they pay for, like Google apps, and they have to do all the drivers to fit it to their hardware, it is a custom job.
It's so easy to say "well, Android is free," but that is just a kernel in a code repository. It's a recipe, not ready to serve muffins. Apple also uses BSD and LLVM and Clang and WebKit and Bonjour, but that didn't make iOS free.
No, they just can't make them any cheaper in such low volumes. XOOM is the same economics as Zune in media players. They are niche devices with similar hardware to Apple but about 1% of the software and functionality and 1% of the sales. So the cost per unit is dramatically higher.
You are way off. You're not even making sense. Cameras won't be enough for iPad to do what? To match XOOM's higher price, lower quality, and complete lack of apps?
The apps on Apple's mobiles are more powerful than on other mobiles, not less. They are native C apps, not baby Java applets. They are desktop class code with a desktop class framework running on a desktop class OS (the core of iOS is OS X.) The interfaces are drawn 100% in the GPU, and the GPU also assists in general purpose computation, so Apple gets more out of each ARM generation than other manufacturers. Android v3 is the first version to even use the GPU. iOS apps are commonly ported from the Mac or PlayStation or another C platform, while Android apps have to be written from the ground up in Java. They are less sophisticated, less powerful, less media rich, less numerous, and less diverse than iOS apps. Tablets are all about apps. The hardware is generic. The inside of an iPad is remarkably like the inside of an Apple Newton from 1993: ARM SoC, RAM, flash storage, modem, touchscreen, batteries. The key innovation is desktop class apps. Not baby apps. Full desktop class native C apps and full desktop class HTML5 Web apps. An iPad can be made to do anything. Not mobile things or baby things, but anything.
The Mac is not some niche system. What decade are you living in? The Mac is 90% of high-end PC sales. Everyone who is serious about computing uses a Mac, except for a few neck beards on another Unix. The average selling price of a Windows PC is $425 or similar, they are relegated to being cheap low-end Mac clones only. If you are using Windows in 2011, you do not matter. You're not in the game. You're not innovating, and you're not creating the future. You are barely even in this century.
There is almost no money in either Android or Windows hardware. All of the Android makers together account for less than 5% of hardware profits, while RIM by itself is 15%, Nokia is 25%, and Apple is just over 50%. HP has to ship something like 10 PC's to make the money Apple makes on one Mac. Apple could likely kill HP with a $699 MacBook. There is nothing new or interesting coming out of Motorola or Samsung or HP. They are cloning Apple and that is it. And not even well. But their generic mobile hardware can't compete with Apple, because Apple is also making generic mobile hardware, but in much, much greater quantity and with native C apps! It's iPods all over again, with App Store instead of Music Store. There is nothing competitive on the horizon for iPad, same as iPod.
That is where Android belongs. Java applets and adware and poor hardware integration and a murky software update track is not a high-end experience. $799 is almost twice the average selling price of a Windows PC. Apple is at $500 for tablets and $1000 for PC's, so clones have to be half of those prices.
People didn't balk at the iPad price at all. The device was constantly sold out for 6 months, they could not make enough, they had a 2 per person limit, they delayed the international launch, even now it is only in half the iPhone countries. And even with all that, they still sold 15 million in the first 7-8 months. All for a device you had to try before you understood what it was for.
The reason 3G is good in iPad is it is instant-on and has a 10-12 hour battery and the plans are cheap and a la carte with no contract. Mi-Fi devices typically have 4-5 hour battery, don't turn on instantly, have contracts, and cost 2x per month what iPad's data costs. So for me, I pay a dollar a day and the entire issue of the network goes away.
Galaxy Tab literally has less than half the screen of iPad, less than half the battery, less than half the system software, less than half the apps. That is completely indisputable.
People don't see iOS as limited since it does more things than any other mobile OS, and with less training and computer knowledge required. Other mobile systems do not even have native C apps, let alone the sheer number that Apple has. Not sure if you are including the Mac in your judgement, but since it has a full Unix and by far the best creative platform I don't see how it could be called limited in any way.
Apple is known for charging premium prices in the PC market, where they only make high-end PC's and have 90% of the high-end market, which means everyone else only makes cheap, low-end PC's.
In iPods, iPhones, and iPads, Apple is the price leader as well as design and technology and manufacturing leader. That is why they are so unstoppable there. You can get an iPod for $59, you can get an iPhone for $49, you can get an iPad for $499. All 3 of those devices are better than competing products at higher price points, and they all have Genius Bar support and free training at Apple Store. The iPod has iTunes and iTunes Music Store; the iPhone a full video iPod in it plus it has 300,000 native C apps, almost half of which are free; the iPad has a 10 inch screen, PC class OS, PC class native C apps, and 10-12 hour battery life. These devices are CHEAP. You can use an iPad all day every day to do thousands of things, it pays for itself very quickly.
Average iPad sales price is US$625, less than the average iPhone price of $640.
The dual core processor, extra RAM, and cameras are coming in the 2011 iPad. XOOM has to have more advantages than that. It has no native apps, just Java applets, and none are full-size. It has no Netflix. Who is going to pay $71 more for a generic clone of an iPad with about 10% of the functionality?
That is the 2010 iPad you are comparing to, which was introduced January 27, 2010. The 2011 iPad likely also has a 2011 ARM chip and FaceTime camera and will be out any moment now. Where is Motorola going to get native C apps? How long until they have 75,000 full-size apps, including a PC-class office suite for $30?
Those aren't better features, those are niche features.
Tablets are wireless devices, your ports and SD cards are not wanted by most, and are a $29 add-on to iPad for those that do. Phones with keyboards niche. And iPhone works with hundreds of accessory keyboards in every form factor. Music players with manual music management. Ugh.
Apple makes very few devices, shares parts among them, reuses the OS X core, and ships in such massive quantities, they are the cheap manufacturer. In PC's they only have high end models, but in every other case they are the cheapest. Even in software iMovie costs $15 for Mac and $5 for iPhone, Keynote is $20 for Mac and $10 for iPad. Logic Pro is cheaper than competitors.
Apple are not going to get undercut on iPad. They will likely have a new model at current price points and sell the current model at reduced price points. Within a month or two we may see 2 iPads for the price of one XOOM.
MobileMe calls these aliases. They are very useful for protecting your main address. You can add the year to your regular address and use that all year for one-offs and then you only hear from the last year's worth of one-off contacts.
They GPL'd and got cloned, but the best bit is the poster thinking it is somehow Apple's responsibility to fix baby's diapers. Managing your intellectual property is up to you, crafty open source software developers.
The issue was not paying more for getting more. The issue was cable companies taxing online video by dramatically lowering bandwidth caps and dramatically increasing overage charges. Essentially saying the Internet is not for video, that is what cable TV is for.
So, no, you don't have a problem with a 250GB cap and 10 cents per GB over that cap. But what if Comcast dropped you to a 60GB cap and $2 per GB overage because you subscribed to Netflix? That is what happened in Canada.
The Mac lost to Windows while Steve Jobs was on a 10 year break from Apple. He has been back for 14 years. How suspicious is it to talk about Apple's failures when he was gone and ignore their many successes since he has been back? To blame those failures on him is even worse.
The iPod, people! Come into this century.
An iPhone has an average selling price of $625, while a Windows PC has an average selling price of $475. The Mac sells for $1350. Apple has 90% share of PC's over $1000. They just launched their first $500 PC and had 241% year over year growth in their PC sales. They take over 50% of all mobile phone profits (not just smartphones). Jobs/Apple WON. Get over it.
IBM never allowed liberal use of their PC format. And iPods are a better smartphone analogy, because they are almost exactly the same device, bought the same way, for the same price, during the same century. Whatever theory you have about smartphones today should also predict the demise of the iPod in 2003.
I don't know why this guy is even talking about Apple anymore. Surely iPhone was destroyed by Android in 2009 as originally scheduled, same as Linux destroyed the Mac during The Year Of Linux On The Desktop, which if I remember correctly was around the time the iPod came out, which of course itself was immediately made obsolete due to its lack of Ogg Vorbis support and the fact that it had no wireless.
The other day I mentioned iPhone to a friend and he was like, "that is so 2008!" Good times, good times.
1) in this context, Apple is the WebKit open source project
2) dozens of vendors use WebKit, including Google, and there are many contributors
3) Mozilla is a foundation
4) Microsoft and Adobe are also part of W3C, although they sometimes had to be dragged kicking and screaming, but that just shows that standardization works
Apple created canvas, submitted to W3C, Mozilla submitted changes, canvas was standardized, then Apple invested significant engineerig resources into changing their canvas implementation to match the standard.
If you want an academic standard with no real world use, XHTML 2 is available for your masturbatory needs. The Web needs a practical HTML standard that documents how you DO write HTML, not how you theoretically SHOULD write HTML.
The PC itself was called a toy when the Apple II shipped, the GUI was called a toy when the Mac shipped, multitouch was called a toy when iPhone shipped, and now you are calling the mobile PC a toy after iPad shipped. Good luck with that.
You are under informed. iPad has all that stuff. iPad replaces a Windows PC. TCO is dramatically reduced. Corporations deploy their own apps, wirelessly. They are easy to manage.
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Actually, Apple's cost per unit on iOS may be less than Motorola's for Android. The software on iPad is the same as on iPhone and iPod, and the core of iOS is OS X from the Mac. And iPad is the same A4 chip and other guts from iPhone also. There are such massive economies of scale there, Apple pays very little for each iPad's software. Plus, they made it all themselves, there is no 3rd party profit to pay. Motorola may get some parts of Android for free, but other parts they pay for, like Google apps, and they have to do all the drivers to fit it to their hardware, it is a custom job.
It's so easy to say "well, Android is free," but that is just a kernel in a code repository. It's a recipe, not ready to serve muffins. Apple also uses BSD and LLVM and Clang and WebKit and Bonjour, but that didn't make iOS free.
No, they just can't make them any cheaper in such low volumes. XOOM is the same economics as Zune in media players. They are niche devices with similar hardware to Apple but about 1% of the software and functionality and 1% of the sales. So the cost per unit is dramatically higher.
75% of XOOM devices will only be a few thousand units, so you may be right.
You are way off. You're not even making sense. Cameras won't be enough for iPad to do what? To match XOOM's higher price, lower quality, and complete lack of apps?
The apps on Apple's mobiles are more powerful than on other mobiles, not less. They are native C apps, not baby Java applets. They are desktop class code with a desktop class framework running on a desktop class OS (the core of iOS is OS X.) The interfaces are drawn 100% in the GPU, and the GPU also assists in general purpose computation, so Apple gets more out of each ARM generation than other manufacturers. Android v3 is the first version to even use the GPU. iOS apps are commonly ported from the Mac or PlayStation or another C platform, while Android apps have to be written from the ground up in Java. They are less sophisticated, less powerful, less media rich, less numerous, and less diverse than iOS apps. Tablets are all about apps. The hardware is generic. The inside of an iPad is remarkably like the inside of an Apple Newton from 1993: ARM SoC, RAM, flash storage, modem, touchscreen, batteries. The key innovation is desktop class apps. Not baby apps. Full desktop class native C apps and full desktop class HTML5 Web apps. An iPad can be made to do anything. Not mobile things or baby things, but anything.
The Mac is not some niche system. What decade are you living in? The Mac is 90% of high-end PC sales. Everyone who is serious about computing uses a Mac, except for a few neck beards on another Unix. The average selling price of a Windows PC is $425 or similar, they are relegated to being cheap low-end Mac clones only. If you are using Windows in 2011, you do not matter. You're not in the game. You're not innovating, and you're not creating the future. You are barely even in this century.
There is almost no money in either Android or Windows hardware. All of the Android makers together account for less than 5% of hardware profits, while RIM by itself is 15%, Nokia is 25%, and Apple is just over 50%. HP has to ship something like 10 PC's to make the money Apple makes on one Mac. Apple could likely kill HP with a $699 MacBook. There is nothing new or interesting coming out of Motorola or Samsung or HP. They are cloning Apple and that is it. And not even well. But their generic mobile hardware can't compete with Apple, because Apple is also making generic mobile hardware, but in much, much greater quantity and with native C apps! It's iPods all over again, with App Store instead of Music Store. There is nothing competitive on the horizon for iPad, same as iPod.
That is where Android belongs. Java applets and adware and poor hardware integration and a murky software update track is not a high-end experience. $799 is almost twice the average selling price of a Windows PC. Apple is at $500 for tablets and $1000 for PC's, so clones have to be half of those prices.
People didn't balk at the iPad price at all. The device was constantly sold out for 6 months, they could not make enough, they had a 2 per person limit, they delayed the international launch, even now it is only in half the iPhone countries. And even with all that, they still sold 15 million in the first 7-8 months. All for a device you had to try before you understood what it was for.
The reason 3G is good in iPad is it is instant-on and has a 10-12 hour battery and the plans are cheap and a la carte with no contract. Mi-Fi devices typically have 4-5 hour battery, don't turn on instantly, have contracts, and cost 2x per month what iPad's data costs. So for me, I pay a dollar a day and the entire issue of the network goes away.
Many print ads for generic electronics have typos. They are made on Windows, which lacks decent text rendering and a system wide spell checker.
Galaxy Tab literally has less than half the screen of iPad, less than half the battery, less than half the system software, less than half the apps. That is completely indisputable.
People don't see iOS as limited since it does more things than any other mobile OS, and with less training and computer knowledge required. Other mobile systems do not even have native C apps, let alone the sheer number that Apple has. Not sure if you are including the Mac in your judgement, but since it has a full Unix and by far the best creative platform I don't see how it could be called limited in any way.
Apple is known for charging premium prices in the PC market, where they only make high-end PC's and have 90% of the high-end market, which means everyone else only makes cheap, low-end PC's.
In iPods, iPhones, and iPads, Apple is the price leader as well as design and technology and manufacturing leader. That is why they are so unstoppable there. You can get an iPod for $59, you can get an iPhone for $49, you can get an iPad for $499. All 3 of those devices are better than competing products at higher price points, and they all have Genius Bar support and free training at Apple Store. The iPod has iTunes and iTunes Music Store; the iPhone a full video iPod in it plus it has 300,000 native C apps, almost half of which are free; the iPad has a 10 inch screen, PC class OS, PC class native C apps, and 10-12 hour battery life. These devices are CHEAP. You can use an iPad all day every day to do thousands of things, it pays for itself very quickly.
Average iPad sales price is US$625, less than the average iPhone price of $640.
The dual core processor, extra RAM, and cameras are coming in the 2011 iPad. XOOM has to have more advantages than that. It has no native apps, just Java applets, and none are full-size. It has no Netflix. Who is going to pay $71 more for a generic clone of an iPad with about 10% of the functionality?
That is the 2010 iPad you are comparing to, which was introduced January 27, 2010. The 2011 iPad likely also has a 2011 ARM chip and FaceTime camera and will be out any moment now. Where is Motorola going to get native C apps? How long until they have 75,000 full-size apps, including a PC-class office suite for $30?
Those aren't better features, those are niche features.
Tablets are wireless devices, your ports and SD cards are not wanted by most, and are a $29 add-on to iPad for those that do. Phones with keyboards niche. And iPhone works with hundreds of accessory keyboards in every form factor. Music players with manual music management. Ugh.
Apple makes very few devices, shares parts among them, reuses the OS X core, and ships in such massive quantities, they are the cheap manufacturer. In PC's they only have high end models, but in every other case they are the cheapest. Even in software iMovie costs $15 for Mac and $5 for iPhone, Keynote is $20 for Mac and $10 for iPad. Logic Pro is cheaper than competitors.
Apple are not going to get undercut on iPad. They will likely have a new model at current price points and sell the current model at reduced price points. Within a month or two we may see 2 iPads for the price of one XOOM.
MobileMe calls these aliases. They are very useful for protecting your main address. You can add the year to your regular address and use that all year for one-offs and then you only hear from the last year's worth of one-off contacts.
They GPL'd and got cloned, but the best bit is the poster thinking it is somehow Apple's responsibility to fix baby's diapers. Managing your intellectual property is up to you, crafty open source software developers.
The issue was not paying more for getting more. The issue was cable companies taxing online video by dramatically lowering bandwidth caps and dramatically increasing overage charges. Essentially saying the Internet is not for video, that is what cable TV is for.
So, no, you don't have a problem with a 250GB cap and 10 cents per GB over that cap. But what if Comcast dropped you to a 60GB cap and $2 per GB overage because you subscribed to Netflix? That is what happened in Canada.
The Mac lost to Windows while Steve Jobs was on a 10 year break from Apple. He has been back for 14 years. How suspicious is it to talk about Apple's failures when he was gone and ignore their many successes since he has been back? To blame those failures on him is even worse.
The iPod, people! Come into this century.
An iPhone has an average selling price of $625, while a Windows PC has an average selling price of $475. The Mac sells for $1350. Apple has 90% share of PC's over $1000. They just launched their first $500 PC and had 241% year over year growth in their PC sales. They take over 50% of all mobile phone profits (not just smartphones). Jobs/Apple WON. Get over it.
IBM never allowed liberal use of their PC format. And iPods are a better smartphone analogy, because they are almost exactly the same device, bought the same way, for the same price, during the same century. Whatever theory you have about smartphones today should also predict the demise of the iPod in 2003.
I don't know why this guy is even talking about Apple anymore. Surely iPhone was destroyed by Android in 2009 as originally scheduled, same as Linux destroyed the Mac during The Year Of Linux On The Desktop, which if I remember correctly was around the time the iPod came out, which of course itself was immediately made obsolete due to its lack of Ogg Vorbis support and the fact that it had no wireless.
The other day I mentioned iPhone to a friend and he was like, "that is so 2008!" Good times, good times.
It's not 4 companies, that is BS:
1) in this context, Apple is the WebKit open source project
2) dozens of vendors use WebKit, including Google, and there are many contributors
3) Mozilla is a foundation
4) Microsoft and Adobe are also part of W3C, although they sometimes had to be dragged kicking and screaming, but that just shows that standardization works
It's nothing like Word get a grip.
Apple created canvas, submitted to W3C, Mozilla submitted changes, canvas was standardized, then Apple invested significant engineerig resources into changing their canvas implementation to match the standard.
If you want an academic standard with no real world use, XHTML 2 is available for your masturbatory needs. The Web needs a practical HTML standard that documents how you DO write HTML, not how you theoretically SHOULD write HTML.
America can, nay must, blow up the moon.
The replacement for Xserve is a bunch of Mac mini servers. The user base already moved to that.
The PC itself was called a toy when the Apple II shipped, the GUI was called a toy when the Mac shipped, multitouch was called a toy when iPhone shipped, and now you are calling the mobile PC a toy after iPad shipped. Good luck with that.
You are under informed. iPad has all that stuff. iPad replaces a Windows PC. TCO is dramatically reduced. Corporations deploy their own apps, wirelessly. They are easy to manage.