Every phone is super expensive over any period of time.
Service fees cost far more than mobile hardware. It's just that no corporations benefitted from pointing this out before Apple turned the industry upside down, eviscerating other hardware makers while totally skewering the service providers by forcing them to allow a WiFi mobile without a fake subsidy shell game advertisement.
Suddenly, the idea that mobile phones cost over $1000 a year to use became a factoid attached to Apple, as if everyone doesn't already pay $50-100 or more for their mobile plan (most US plans start around $80/month with taxes).
So thanks for your astroturfing efforts. The iPhone must be the same as a Shuffle and a POS Nokia, because you put in a graphic next to your crack pipe.
"it's also prohibitively expensive and probably illegal to smoke out the entire Internet every time Windows Enthusiasts print one of their articles. So as a public service announcement, I'm going to simply ask Zoon Awardees Mary Jo Foley, Mike Elgan, Dan Lyons, Joe Wilcox, and Paul Thurrott, along with all the other members of the Zoon Awards Hall of Shame, to please stop spreading false information."
It's funny you'd credit the N95 for having "expandable memory" as a feature. Why not point out that it only offers 0.125 GB RAM, compared to 8 GB of RAM in the iPhone (64 x as much memory). The iPhone doesn't desperately need an SD card slot because it already has as much RAM as you can possibly fit into the N95, without buying an extra $250 8 GB SD card. Of course, if the iPhone had an SD Card slot, the pundits would be attacking it as a "Security flaw!!"
From that perspective, the "potential for buying a handful of memory cards" so you can listen to music or take photos is the opposite of a "feature."
A main reason why the iPhone has so much more RAM than any other phone is that it is designed to actually do useful things, not just offer a long bullet point list of features. The popularity of the iPod suggests people like to listen to music and watch movies and podcasts. The N95 not only has an inferior display, but also offers no multitouch interface for browsing photos from your real camera synced in from iTunes, flipping through music, or watching movies. But the N95 also doesn't have enough memory to play back a movie (and still do anything else).
It's fine for you to act out devotion to Nokia, and the company has lots of fans, but the iPhone is designed for a different market: people who are more likely to listen to music, share photo albums, and browse the web, rather than enjoy the hoarding of SD cards and extra batteries, engage in mobile phone play-photography, or get lost in the woods in circumstances where 30 minutes of GPS would prove to be helpful.
Incidentally, that's also why the N95 can be cheaper if you line up the right subsidy (batteries & SD cards not included). Fortunately, we both have a choice to get whatever we want. It's not like Apple or Nokia are going to run each other out of business in a Microsoft-like fashion, so all the high pitched advocacy really isn't necessary.
Apple is making money on the iPhone, but it's still cheaper for Americans than crappier phones, which appear cheaper with upfront subsidy shell game tricks, but which really cost more.
Steve Ballmer make a big deal about "how expensive" the $500 iPhone was compared to the Windows Mobile Motorola Q, which is sometimes advertised for $99. But that wasn't a true comparison, because the iPhone does a lot more (which is why people want it and are not buying the Q), has a lot more RAM (8 GB vs 0.125 GB of every other mobile on the market) and is a lot easier to sync. The biggest problem with comparing subsidy prices is that Apple contracted to get a cheaper contract from AT&T, so while Apple might be making more than Motorola, consumers are also paying less. When including two years of service, the iPhone is a couple hundred less vs the Q from Verizon.
And then Apple lowered the iPhone's price and gave users a $100 rebate, making the iPhone now $300-400 less to own and use than the dumpy Q over 2 years. The Q doesn't even offer a touch screen and can't browse the web worth crap, and has no RAM capacity to listen to a few songs, let alone watch a movie on a larger screen.
You don't have to prefer the iPhone to get why people are paying any upfront premium for it, and saving money over the long run. Trying to suggest it's overpriced and ripping off Americans just makes you look like a fraud. You might be able to line up a cheaper deal on phones in the UK or elsewhere, but the iPhone is still a pioneering mobile that does a lot no other phone can. It's not just a gimmick like the LG Prada (which is EDGE only, no WiFi, but is sold in Europe), or a the Nokia N95, which has a lot of bullet point features, but is pretty rough around the edges and certainly not nearly as slick as the iPhone. Nokia expects you to carry around a handful of SD cards to do anything useful on the N95, in addition to a handful of batteries if you want to use its toy GPS.
You actually got that backwards. There's nothing "unethical about using marketshare [sic] power" if you have a natural monopoly, because governments (supposedly) regulate them (nationalized gas/phone utilities or local cable monopolies, for example). Any company that uses its market share power to prevent competition is running afoul of antitrust laws.
It's not about competing, it's about preventing competition. Microsoft has never competed well in a level playing field. It has only ever won markets through stealing IP, setting up contracts to prevent competition, and then using its sales to pay off lawsuits later. Microsoft has swept $25,000,000,000 of "corporate level losses" under the table in the last half decade, much of which went to anti-trust lawsuits and settlements. Microsoft spends far more propping up its criminal activities than any drug dealer. Shilling for this company only makes you look equally disingenuous.
For Microsoft Apologists, anything is fair up until a company outside of Microsoft does it. It's fine for Microsoft to bundle apps with its monopoly operating system in violation of its consent decree, but if Apple ships iTunes for iPods, that's suddenly a "monopoly" that needs to be stopped.
It's an "outrageous scandal" when Sony installs a root kit to enforce DRM, but when Microsoft builds even more limiting DRM into the OS and bars the user from working around it, it's "a vibrant opportunity to to experience rich media."
Seriously, it's impossible to take your religion seriously. Microsoft is a criminal organization that has to bribe the world to continue in servitude to its third rate products. What motivates you to make excuses for such greedy, arrogant, and technologically backward jokers?
Neither Blu-Ray nor HD-DVD "tapes" are cheaper--they are both prohibitive expensive in -R/-RW versions, and movies on both are quite expensive. If you were really paying attention during the VHS/Betamax wars, the real issues were:
- availability of rental movies (because there was no retail market for movies at reasonable prices until DVD) - length of recording time (Beta couldn't originally do an hour and a half on a single tape) - other features (VHS integrated a clock for time shifting).
None of those issues really apply to BR or HD-DVD. You also gloss over the fact that Sony helped to develop both CD and DVD, in your attempts to suggest that Sony has only ever failed with Betamax and MiniDisc. That sounds like "concern FUD."
The real failures that are relevant today are SA-CD and DVD-Audio, both of which tried to sneak in new DRM under the premise of delivering HD audio content. Sound familiar? Here's a hint: BR and HD-DVD are doing the same thing for video.
What's really shocking is how badly both are selling. Both sides are chatting up how they're in the lead, but combined together, both couldn't manage to sell more than a million players by this summer. That's ZUNE-like! Each have sold about 300,000 stand alone players up to this summer.
The only clear winner is Sony's bundled PS3, which purposely tagged along a BR drive to create an installed base for BR and drop the price of manufacturing. That means there are lots more BR players, but only because of the PS3:
Blu-Ray: 7.3 million 300,000 standalone 7,000,000 PS3 bundled
HD-DVD: 0.3 million 150,000 standalone 150,000 Xbox 360 optional disc player units
That isn't good on either side. Neither format delivers anything that couldn't be done with DVDs using H.264. Who needs PC-style navigation or 20 hours of "extra features" when you can easily put an HD movie on DVD? The only reason for either format to exist is to sell stronger DRM under the guise of HD, and to resell everyone the movies they already own.
As for all the astroturfing about the "Sony root kit," remember that Microsoft's Windows Media is the same thing, you just voluntarily install it. Running from Sony into the arms of Microsoft, which facilitated the Sony root kit in Windows after launching Bill Gate's DRM wet dream of Palladium--well, its obvious that you're all frauds. Come on, Microsoft has never supported anything open or consumer-friendly.
Is a Root Kit only evil if its installed by an evil third party, but "A-OK" if its shoehorned in by Microsoft? Because WGA and WMA are both exactly the same thing as Sony's third party root kit, it's just that Microsoft additionally uses its access to send home data on top. Spyware + Root Kit DRM. The Windows Enthusiasts don't seem to mind getting bent over by Microsoft, but sure have a lot to say about DRM from anyone else.
Apple included SMS texting on the iPhone, but delivered an email client that can attach photos, completely obsolescing MMS "picture messaging," as emails are free with unlimited data/WiFi. The result was an outraged complaint that the iPhone doesn't support MMS for 10 cent/message charges.
It similarly defaults to sending your Notes to Mail, not SMS, encouraging users to use free email rather than pay-per-text SMS. More complaints.
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As for Dvorak and "nobody cares about smartphones," the growth in smartphones was far higher than basic phones even before the iPhone:
And no, Dvorak has never been right. When he and other flacks talked about Macs moving to Intel, it was first impossible because of the non-portability of Mac software (Star Trek project of the late 80s could run the Mac OS on PCs, but all software would have to be recompiled and redesigned for flipped endian processors, the same problem that nailed any hope for a cross platform NT), and then because Apple had to support the classic Mac OS software (NeXT/Rhapsody worked fine on PCs, but it couldn't run Office and Photoshop, which is why people used Macs and not NeXT in the first place).
Dvorak et all then changed their tune to Itanium, thinking the industry would move to IA64, when nobody did. Ironically, Apple delivers the EFI PC hardware that PC makers never got around to delivering, using AMD's 64-bit architecture instead.
It's easy to wish for the obvious (if impossible) and then give yourself credit for "predicting" that somebody else would actually engineer a similar solution. Is there anyone who was alive between 1984 and 2006 to whom "the thought of PCs and Macs running the same processor" did not occur?
Dvoark seemingly never been right, apart from the time he explained how he baits readers with sensationalism to get people upset so they "write his followup article for him."
Hypocrisy is pretending to be something you are not. "Hypocracy" might be a government run by large mammals, but I don't think it's an actual word.
In any event, AT&T and Verizon are afraid of open standards and Google in particular, and are crapping their pants over Google's bid to enter the mobile service business in the TV spectrum auction and suddenly make their existing 2.5/3G mobile networks obsolete.
Apple's iPhone is tied to AT&T, and offers it absolutely no threat. It is not designed to work on future networks. Verizon doesn't have much good to say about it, but why would you think AT&T would view the iPhone similar to Google? Is it because you are unable to view the world from perspectives you don't hold yourself?
And to everyone who gave me a hard time for pointing out the obvious related to the "gPhone" rumors... thanks!
You are right that Microsoft makes all of its money elsewhere. However, its profits are all related to selling an OS and applications for PCs, and that market is mature. PC sales are not going to explode again, they're going to migrate into more mobile devices and other form factors.
Microsoft sits in an enormously powerful position, but its platform needs to grow and diversify. That's why it's been spending billions for over ten years now to develop WinCE, first to create a Newton-like small PC, then to copy the Palm Pilot hand held, and finally to get into mobile phones. It hasn't captured more than a tiny fraction of the smartphone business in the last half decade.
In Q2 2007, Microsoft software only shipped on 6.1% of the 26 smartphones sold (1.6 million). Apple sold 270,000 iPhones in a day and a half, netting 1.3% share of the entire world's smartphone business for the entire quarter. It then sold 1.1 million phones the next quarter. That's bad news, because Microsoft only makes a bit of OS licensing revenue; Apple earns hardware profits, retail profits, and service shares on every phone sold.
Microsoft's inability to create a workable mobile strategy isn't an isolated problem. It also couldn't develop a workable strategy behind PlaysForSure/Zune, WebTV/Ultimate TV, Xbox gaming, and other initiatives that attempt to clone the Windows PC monopoly licensing business in other arenas.
Add all those efforts together, and Microsoft managed to burn through $6 billion in consumer product revenues and then destroy another $2 billion in net loss (pulled from its other businesses). That's the real problem: the company has proven it has nowhere to go. It continues to try to leverage the only products it can sell Windows PC/Server/Office as tools to push sales of its products rejected in the open market.
If Google were to offer a free or very low cost alternative to run on WinCE platform devices, it would not only scuttle Microsoft's revenues from mobiles and kill its ability to sell them at all, but would also expand Google's search business into mobiles. Google could even pay phone makers to ship its product, funded by ads.
After proving how easy it is to yank away Windows Mobile from Microsoft, Google could then launch its own linux distro and do the same thing on low end PCs, and serve as the desktop for web/email users with Firefox + OpenOffice. Microsoft would subsequently collapse, unable to maintain its monopoly position and unable to adapt.
Magic Cap offered some interesting ideas but didn't offer a mobile phone--it produced a PDA OS. The General Magic company (mostly Apple employees spun off in an internal battle between Magic Cap and Newton) ended up licensing its technologies to Microsoft in 1998, which turned Windows CE from a laugh-out-loud joke into a mild embarrassment.
Microsoft didn't start shipping a phone product until 2002, the same year the Handspring Treo arrived (which combined the older Visor+phone back pack.) There were no real PDA phones in the 90s.
Google is very unlikely to produce its own phone, and if it did, it would be nothing like Apple's iPhone, because Google is good at very different things. It has no experience in consumer hardware, retail, and couldn't even beat YouTube at serving videos.
Microsoft's "Patch Tuesdays" solve immediate, exploitable flaws with hotfixes. They do not address significant architectural or stability problems, which is why Microsoft doesn't count them as minor (5.x) updates. Apple also releases frequent security fixes. Those aren't counted among the +35 minor updates (10.n.x) to Mac OS X in between the five major updates (10.x) since 2000.
In contrast, Microsoft has released only two major updates, and only 2 minor updates for its consumer systems since then. (On the server side, the situation is similar).
In the past year, Apple stock has been +115%, vs Microsoft +7%.
But over the last five years, Apple stock has been +2270%, vs Microsoft +21%.
An in the last ten years, Apple stock has been +4314%, vs Microsoft +89%.
What "long term investors" would prefer to have been sitting on MSFT?
Microsoft has 80,000 employees, +95% market share, and competes in businesses outside of Apple, which only has 18,000 employees and ~3% worldwide market share. However, Apple is bringing in more than a third of Microsoft's revenues and making more than a quarter of Microsoft's profits, and is selling new Macs--which eat up direct sales of Windows PCs--four times faster than the industry.
So Apple is doing good.
Microsoft exploded in the 90s, reached supernova in 2000, and has been flat as a pancake ever since. Apple exploded in the early 80s and ran into problems in the mid 90s, but recovered during the dotcom years and has been among few tech companies to wildly outperform its 2000-era peak. Microsoft certainly hasn't.
Apple doesn't have any catching up to do; it was already a high flying major company when Microsoft went public in 1986. Seriously, what "long term investors" have been holding Microsoft stock since 1986 apart from Bill Gates?
Check your facts: US antitrust laws apply to using market force to enter into other markets with an unfair advantage. Name me *one* popular OS that doesn't include the ability to watch vids and listen to music, much less browse the net and *gasp* Search.
These are defacto "parts" of the OS now, and have been for quite some time.
Curb your Windows Enthusiasm. It doesn't matter how "defacto" a practice is when a company holds monopoly control over what should be an open market. For a number of reasons, all significant PC makers HAVE to license Windows from Microsoft in order to sell PCs. There are major barriers to Linux on the desktop for consumers (despite it's being free), and developing a business model like Apple requires the ability to coast along under constant attack from Microsoft for a decade or so while developing your own OS. IBM, the Amiga, NeXT, and Be couldn't, and it appears clear nobody else ever could in the future.
The PC is not an open market, but only because of artificial barriers created by Microsoft to prevent competition. Unlike utility monopolies, it does not serve the public. We don't benefit from having to pay the Microsoft tax for every PC sold, and Microsoft has proven that without competition, it refuses to innovate (which is why development of IE suddenly stopped in 2001 and didn't resume until the threat posted by Firefox and Safari motivated it to poop out IE 7 five years later.)
The PC market was also not a product of choice. People didn't decide to use Windows over other alternatives; Microsoft simple ensured there were no other alternatives. While Windows Enthusiasts like to complain that Apple has "monopolized" music with iTunes and the iPod, the situation isn't even similar: no other manufacturers have to license Apple's tech (or even can) in order to sell their products. In reality, Microsoft monopolized music, because its pretty much impossible to get any kind of DRM music or player without it being involved. Apple just beat Microsoft in the marketplace by offering a better product before Microsoft could lock it all up. Without iTunes, we'd have the "choice" of various Windows Media stores and various Windows Media players, just as PC buyers only have the "choice" of buying Windows PCs from various makers.
In a similarly monopolized business, say the old phone market, or in the case of newspaper/broadcasting markets, there are laws that prevent companies with a certain position from acquiring other companies to extend their control over the market or leverage their control over one market to obliterate another. The fact that other smaller companies are not similarly restricted is not a defense against antitrust laws, and it makes no sense to bring up as if it were.
Saying that Apple bundles Safari or that Nokia bundles its own browser on its phones or that Nintendo offers Opera for the Wii is completely immaterial to the fact that Microsoft used its PC monopoly position to destroy Netscape, Sun, and every other rival in the desktop/web/API space to entrench Windows and tie all web development to its own proprietary browser. It just makes you look really stupid to repeat such absurd comments. What has Microsoft done for you lately?
Uh, they do work together on security. Seriously, google around for security conferences.
AppleInsider has an interesting series of articles looking at the technology behind features in Mac OS X Leopard and ancestor systems that came before it, including the classic Mac OS , NeXT, Be, Amiga, DOS/Windows, and the development of Unix. Great for nostalgic nerds, and puts the new stuff into perspective against how tech has developed. Road to Mac OS X Leopard Server: Collaborative Info Sharing Services.
I agree, Microsoft's early lead with the 360 isn't going to hold up in the face of $8 billion in annual losses, much of which drained from from the bottom of its Xbox division. How long can it afford to pay people to buy Xbox consoles?
BetaMax was "ahead early on" because it was the original video tape. JVC ripped it off a year later with VHS as a cheaper to license standard with longer recording times.
As for piracy, HD-DVD has just as outrageous of DRM as Blu-Ray. Both also have excessive titling features that demand significant processor power. And neither delivers something DVD's really can't.
H.264 can put an HD movie on a standard DVD today. The market for HD is also not that impressive in scope. Half a million standalone HD players for the entire industry is nothing to write home about. HD-DVD has other problems outside of market penetration.
The problem with releasing new generations of a gaming platform is that it spits your existing installed base. It forces users to decide whether to upgrade (and many won't if the price is significant, as it is with high end graphics/processor upgrades) and it forces developers to decide whether they want to target their games to actually benefit from the advances of the new generation, or to aim for the lowest common denominator.
Incidentally, that was the same problem for the Amiga, NeXT, and other advanced platforms: why would the mass market upgrade? The catch-22 for users and developers meant the market instead gravitated toward the basic PC, which slowly evolved in a lowest common denominator way and finally caught up to advances released a decade or so prior.
Now look at the PS3: Sony's biggest competition isn't the Xbox 360, it's the PS2. Microsoft's console is big in the US, but has very limited sales outside. The 360 has sold more units so far, but that's because has been on sale twice as long as the PS3. Since the PS3's release, Sony has shipped around 7 million units, while Microsoft has only shipped an additional 2 million. In contrast, Nintendo has sold 12 million Wii units. Xbox sales look good only if you can't do math or don't understand how time relates to the graph of a sales chart.
Sony is worried about two things. First, there's already 115 million PS2s in the world; the PS3 has to be desirable enough to convince those users to upgrade. $500 for fancier versions of the same games is a difficult upgrade to force. Until it can sell 10-20 million PS3s, developers will make more money delivering new titles for the PS2, because there are more users buying games for it. Sony is still selling cheap PS2 units, so it's competing against itself on price.
The second problem for Sony (and the reason it competes with itself) is that it's trying to push sales of Blu-Ray players and drive down the manufacturing costs of blue lasers. That means Sony is willing to lose money selling the PS3 at an initial loss, just to get Blu-Ray widely installed. Microsoft has taken sides with Toshiba in selling the rival HD-DVD format. If Sony weren't pushing Blu-Ray in the PS3, HD-DVD would be ahead in installed base.
At last count:
HD-DVD standalone players sold around 150k units Blu-Ray standalone players sold around 100k units
However:
HD-DVD options Xbox 360 players sold around 150k units Blu-Ray players bundled with the PS3 have sold 7 million units
So Sony's PS3 game isn't just about replacing the PS2, it's also about pushing the Blu-Ray disc format. It has single-handedly turned the HD wars around and put HD-DVD in a distant second place to Blu-Ray: 7,100,000 to 300,000.
Without Blu-Ray, it wouldn't make much sense for Sony to be trying to sell an expensive games console to replace the PS2. The games war is being won by the Wii, which costs much less and has no installed base to compete against, thanks to the poor sales of the GameCube. Nintendo can't make enough to meet demand. Nintendo also doesn't care about selling an HD platform.
Microsoft is being left in the middle, selling a console that's losing on the game popularity end to the Wii, and losing on the HD end to Sony. It's also competing against itself with in the area of PC gaming; the Xbox 360 overlaps with PC gaming, eating up the cheap end of a finite market in the US. At least it's trying to make it easier for developers to redeploy PC games in console versions.
When you title your article "Leopard's Release Date a Serious Mistake" it's a bit weak to say in the last paragraph of the article:
"With all things considered, did Apple make a serious mistake by delaying Leopard's release until October? I don't think so."
This isn't even an opinion, it's just a sensationalist, uninformed headline we've already read, with nothing backing it up, not even the author. What a waste of time.
- The Great Google gPhone Myth - Pundits have seized upon rumors of a new mobile phone product from Google as their golden ticket for bashing the iPhone. The "gPhone" is the perfect foil for fear-based rumormongers because it's a secret Google han't said much about publicly. That lets the wags blow it out of proportion and stretch it into an iPhone Killer. They're wrong, here's why.
"Fascism is an authoritarian political ideology (generally tied to a mass movement) that considers individual and other societal interests subordinate to the interests of the state"
Perhaps you are unfamiliar with extreme right wing fundamentalist talking points:
- Don't criticize the administration or you are "supporting terrorism." - Broad wiretap spying programs on citizens is important for nationalist security. - Torture and indefinite imprisonment of the accused, with suspended Habeas Corpus, is critical to nationalist security. - Limiting the right to travel around and to/from the country and imposing a Nationalist biometric ID program.
Centrist Americans in both the Democratic and Republican parties have historically found all those ideas repugnant. You are right to say those ideas have historically been associated with extremist socialist states such as Stalin's Russia, but they are also associated with with the Axis fascist countries and fundamentalist religious states. Authoritarian political ideology is not unique to a particular extreme end of political spectrum.
The US isn't in danger of falling to a communist revolution. It is, however, already knee deep in a cesspool of a fascist torture/spy/police state that considers individual rights and societal interests (freedom of expression, access to health care and education) subordinate to the needs of corrupt corporations that largely run the country. Corporate welfare, a government run media (Fox), and wartime profiteering are not American ideals.
The American right and conservatives in general are not represented by the NeoCon minority. Small and effective government and free markets have little to do with the torture/spy/police state fascism being advanced by NeoCons in their efforts to set up a fundamentalist religious state and declare war on other fundamentalist religious states throughout the world, partnered with welfare-state corporations like Haliburton and Blackwater.
Commonwealth has nothing to do with communism or communal wealth distribution.
According to Wikipedia:
==The original phrase "common wealth" or "the common weal" comes from the old meaning of "wealth" which is "well-being". The term literally meant "common well-being". Thus commonwealth originally meant a state or nation-state governed for the common good as opposed to an authoritarian state governed for the benefit of a given class of owners.==
Kentucky, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts are all officially designated as a commonwealth, and Puerto Rico is also described as a commonwealth of the US.
Trying to jingoize words to fit a fascist/fundamentalist right wing political simplification based on what you think they might mean just makes the world a stupider place. Please stop, our country is already stupid enough without your contributions.
The law you asked for is the Audio Home Recording Act, which mandated the use of copy protection on digital music players and destroyed the US market for DAT and MiniDisc.
It wasn't until the RIAA sued Diamond over the Rio--insisting that it put Serial Copy Management System on its MP3 player--and lost (the court ruled MP3 players weren't recording devices because they didn't copy from stereos, but rather just traded digital files with PCs) that the market for MP3 players had anywhere to go. Apple came in with the iPod and cleaned up.
Despite winning the case, Diamond tried to push the Rio toward DRM with music subscriptions. Sony tried to push ATRAC, and Microsoft tried to push WMA, but Apple got behind MP3, and later AAC, both of which are open formats; DRM has only ever been optional on the iPod. That gave Apple the music player market, and labels have been scrambling to figure out how to force music back under control with WMA music subscriptions ever since.
"While the philosophical debate over whether Apple should open the iPhone to third party development is interesting, the underlying technical grounds for disabling third party software can not be argued around. All of the unauthorized third party software developed for the iPhone relied upon exploiting buffer overruns. These were significant security flaws that could just as easily allow attack vectors to malicious coders. Apple had an obligation to its users to patch these cracks.
"However, Apple left the iPhone update an optional install. It did not roll out an automatic update that users could not shut off, as Microsoft does with its Windows XP and Vista software update. Apple also did not ban any equipment it found violating its terms of service, as Microsoft does when it permanently bans Xbox 360 users suspected of installing hacks to their console firmware from accessing its online Xbox Live services, or as it unintentionally did when its WGA system went down and legitimate XP and Vista users were locked down with a reduced feature set on suspicion of software piracy."
[...]
"Perhaps he doesn't understand that the iPhone isn't a small PC, but rather a series of at least three independent embedded processors, including a baseband cellular radio subsystem and the ARM processors running the OS X operating system.
"Each of these systems has its own firmware, and that firmware has to be in a known state in order to load software properly. When hackers dig through the system, they can overrun memory buffers until part of the system resets, then feed it replacement code to allow themselves further access into the system. This works very much like a biological virus, which inserts its own DNA code into cells to force them to perform other tasks. Like viruses, these break ins complicate how the host system works in complex ways.
"No computer or device makers can offer to support a PC or mobile device running with tampered firmware. For example, Microsoft doesn't guarantee that Windows will load properly on a system that does not work as originally designed after unsupported hacks are made to its BIOS. For Elgan to perform his theatrics about how Apple is abusing its customers with a "cold slap in the face" is simply a matter of intellectual dishonesty, hypocrisy, and grosteque ignorance."
This is kind of stupid. Even if all the major US carriers were prevented from locking phones to their network, it would only open the market between T-Mobile and AT&T, and separately between Sprint and Verizon Wireless. Both use totally different networks (GSM vs CDMA2000), so nothing would be open.
Further, as 3G rolls out, T-Mobile and AT&T's versions of UTMS totally incompatible, meaning that their next generation of phone will be naturally locked to a single provider. They didn't do that on purpose, there just isn't available bandwidth in the US to share the same band.
The real solution--rather than enriching attorneys to raise frivolous lawsuits that won't accomplish anything--is to open up the TV spectrum and insist that it actually be open, as Google has been pushing for. That would rapidly obsolesce the existing mobile networks however, leaving them open for replacement as well. Verizon/Sprint/AT&T have spent billions building out old fashioned 2.5/3G mobile service, and aren't excited about the prospect of having it all thrown in the trash can.
One of the most wryly ironic personal funny moments I ever had (well at least in the top 1,000) was being put in an elevator with a guy at SF General Hospital, who looked like the "stereotypical nerd" (I look like a non-stereotypical nerd, for the record) with a stack of books on cashless society. I struck up a conversation about his reading material and he notified me that he was translating it into Esperanto. I couldn't laugh, I couldn't speak. I felt like an actor on the scene of some nerdy inside joke miniseries.
My knowledge about Esperanto would barely fill a leaflet the size of "Jewish Sports Legends," but I recognized immediately that Esperanto was the perfect language for educating oneself on the benefits of a cashless society. And perhaps fondue parties.
Nokia and SonyEricsson phones have a public API. None of their third party developers are using a buffer overrun to exploit a way to reprogram portions of the firmware in various different ways. Sony Ericsson and Nokia do not support phones with tampered firmware.
Because Apple's update included a security patch that removed the exploits those unlock hacks used, they no longer work. Because the software updated the system, it did not make any provision to instantiate a makeshift public API based on what a few apps had done. In testing, Apple found that phones that had modified firmware may not update properly and warned users. Creating your own firmware patches is dangerous business. Apple didn't "brick" any devices, it only warned that tampered firmware would interfere with the update process.
Apple is under no legal obligation to support whatever firmware hacks users might try, just as PC makers and other mobile makers don't warrant that their systems will work perfectly after you break in an tamper with their firmware. Apple didn't stop anyone from doing that, it just noted that those hacks wouldn't be compatible with future releases. Apple left the iPhone update an optional install. It did not roll out an automatic update that users could not shut off, as Microsoft does with its Windows XP and Vista software update.
Interestingly, the same Windows Enthusiast who are trying to grandstand with a feigned outrage over Apple's update make excuses for Microsoft. Apple did not simply ban any equipment it found violating its terms of service, as Microsoft does when it permanently bans Xbox 360 users suspected of installing hacks to their console firmware from accessing its online Xbox Live services, or as it unintentionally did when its WGA system went down and legitimate XP and Vista users were locked down with a reduced feature set on suspicion of software piracy.
Sony Ericsson and Nokia do not support phones with tampered firmware either.
Arrogance Unleashed: The Foul Stench of Computerworld's Mike Elgan Mike Elgan, a former editor of Windows Magazine, has recently gone on an anti-Apple rampage, posting countless articles on why users should torment themselves with fear, doubt, and uncertainty about Apple. Elgan's desperation is so overreaching that it is, like Rob Enderle, an embarrassment even to Windows Enthusiasts.
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Every phone is super expensive over any period of time.
Service fees cost far more than mobile hardware. It's just that no corporations benefitted from pointing this out before Apple turned the industry upside down, eviscerating other hardware makers while totally skewering the service providers by forcing them to allow a WiFi mobile without a fake subsidy shell game advertisement.
Suddenly, the idea that mobile phones cost over $1000 a year to use became a factoid attached to Apple, as if everyone doesn't already pay $50-100 or more for their mobile plan (most US plans start around $80/month with taxes).
So thanks for your astroturfing efforts. The iPhone must be the same as a Shuffle and a POS Nokia, because you put in a graphic next to your crack pipe.
"it's also prohibitively expensive and probably illegal to smoke out the entire Internet every time Windows Enthusiasts print one of their articles. So as a public service announcement, I'm going to simply ask Zoon Awardees Mary Jo Foley, Mike Elgan, Dan Lyons, Joe Wilcox, and Paul Thurrott, along with all the other members of the Zoon Awards Hall of Shame, to please stop spreading false information."
Ten Myths of Leopard: 10 Leopard is a Vista Knockoff!
It's funny you'd credit the N95 for having "expandable memory" as a feature. Why not point out that it only offers 0.125 GB RAM, compared to 8 GB of RAM in the iPhone (64 x as much memory). The iPhone doesn't desperately need an SD card slot because it already has as much RAM as you can possibly fit into the N95, without buying an extra $250 8 GB SD card. Of course, if the iPhone had an SD Card slot, the pundits would be attacking it as a "Security flaw!!"
From that perspective, the "potential for buying a handful of memory cards" so you can listen to music or take photos is the opposite of a "feature."
A main reason why the iPhone has so much more RAM than any other phone is that it is designed to actually do useful things, not just offer a long bullet point list of features. The popularity of the iPod suggests people like to listen to music and watch movies and podcasts. The N95 not only has an inferior display, but also offers no multitouch interface for browsing photos from your real camera synced in from iTunes, flipping through music, or watching movies. But the N95 also doesn't have enough memory to play back a movie (and still do anything else).
It's fine for you to act out devotion to Nokia, and the company has lots of fans, but the iPhone is designed for a different market: people who are more likely to listen to music, share photo albums, and browse the web, rather than enjoy the hoarding of SD cards and extra batteries, engage in mobile phone play-photography, or get lost in the woods in circumstances where 30 minutes of GPS would prove to be helpful.
Incidentally, that's also why the N95 can be cheaper if you line up the right subsidy (batteries & SD cards not included). Fortunately, we both have a choice to get whatever we want. It's not like Apple or Nokia are going to run each other out of business in a Microsoft-like fashion, so all the high pitched advocacy really isn't necessary.
iPhone OS X Architecture: the Mach Kernel and RAM
The ironically named HTC "Advantage" is a book-shaped small PC with a chicklet keyboard, not a music/movie/web handheld mobile like the iPhone.
It also runs WinCE, which is an absolute joke and you know it. What comparison are you making?
The Spectacular Failure of WinCE and Windows Mobile
Apple is making money on the iPhone, but it's still cheaper for Americans than crappier phones, which appear cheaper with upfront subsidy shell game tricks, but which really cost more.
Steve Ballmer make a big deal about "how expensive" the $500 iPhone was compared to the Windows Mobile Motorola Q, which is sometimes advertised for $99. But that wasn't a true comparison, because the iPhone does a lot more (which is why people want it and are not buying the Q), has a lot more RAM (8 GB vs 0.125 GB of every other mobile on the market) and is a lot easier to sync. The biggest problem with comparing subsidy prices is that Apple contracted to get a cheaper contract from AT&T, so while Apple might be making more than Motorola, consumers are also paying less. When including two years of service, the iPhone is a couple hundred less vs the Q from Verizon.
And then Apple lowered the iPhone's price and gave users a $100 rebate, making the iPhone now $300-400 less to own and use than the dumpy Q over 2 years. The Q doesn't even offer a touch screen and can't browse the web worth crap, and has no RAM capacity to listen to a few songs, let alone watch a movie on a larger screen.
You don't have to prefer the iPhone to get why people are paying any upfront premium for it, and saving money over the long run. Trying to suggest it's overpriced and ripping off Americans just makes you look like a fraud. You might be able to line up a cheaper deal on phones in the UK or elsewhere, but the iPhone is still a pioneering mobile that does a lot no other phone can. It's not just a gimmick like the LG Prada (which is EDGE only, no WiFi, but is sold in Europe), or a the Nokia N95, which has a lot of bullet point features, but is pretty rough around the edges and certainly not nearly as slick as the iPhone. Nokia expects you to carry around a handful of SD cards to do anything useful on the N95, in addition to a handful of batteries if you want to use its toy GPS.
Ten Fake Apple Scandals: 1 - Phony Rage About iPhone Price and Profits
Ten Myths of Leopard: 10 Leopard is a Vista Knockoff!
You actually got that backwards. There's nothing "unethical about using marketshare [sic] power" if you have a natural monopoly, because governments (supposedly) regulate them (nationalized gas/phone utilities or local cable monopolies, for example). Any company that uses its market share power to prevent competition is running afoul of antitrust laws.
It's not about competing, it's about preventing competition. Microsoft has never competed well in a level playing field. It has only ever won markets through stealing IP, setting up contracts to prevent competition, and then using its sales to pay off lawsuits later. Microsoft has swept $25,000,000,000 of "corporate level losses" under the table in the last half decade, much of which went to anti-trust lawsuits and settlements. Microsoft spends far more propping up its criminal activities than any drug dealer. Shilling for this company only makes you look equally disingenuous.
Microsoft's Outrageous Office Profits
For Microsoft Apologists, anything is fair up until a company outside of Microsoft does it. It's fine for Microsoft to bundle apps with its monopoly operating system in violation of its consent decree, but if Apple ships iTunes for iPods, that's suddenly a "monopoly" that needs to be stopped.
It's an "outrageous scandal" when Sony installs a root kit to enforce DRM, but when Microsoft builds even more limiting DRM into the OS and bars the user from working around it, it's "a vibrant opportunity to to experience rich media."
Seriously, it's impossible to take your religion seriously. Microsoft is a criminal organization that has to bribe the world to continue in servitude to its third rate products. What motivates you to make excuses for such greedy, arrogant, and technologically backward jokers?
RDM
Neither Blu-Ray nor HD-DVD "tapes" are cheaper--they are both prohibitive expensive in -R/-RW versions, and movies on both are quite expensive. If you were really paying attention during the VHS/Betamax wars, the real issues were:
- availability of rental movies (because there was no retail market for movies at reasonable prices until DVD)
- length of recording time (Beta couldn't originally do an hour and a half on a single tape)
- other features (VHS integrated a clock for time shifting).
Format Wars in Home Theater
None of those issues really apply to BR or HD-DVD. You also gloss over the fact that Sony helped to develop both CD and DVD, in your attempts to suggest that Sony has only ever failed with Betamax and MiniDisc. That sounds like "concern FUD."
The real failures that are relevant today are SA-CD and DVD-Audio, both of which tried to sneak in new DRM under the premise of delivering HD audio content. Sound familiar? Here's a hint: BR and HD-DVD are doing the same thing for video.
What's really shocking is how badly both are selling. Both sides are chatting up how they're in the lead, but combined together, both couldn't manage to sell more than a million players by this summer. That's ZUNE-like! Each have sold about 300,000 stand alone players up to this summer.
The only clear winner is Sony's bundled PS3, which purposely tagged along a BR drive to create an installed base for BR and drop the price of manufacturing. That means there are lots more BR players, but only because of the PS3:
Blu-Ray: 7.3 million
300,000 standalone
7,000,000 PS3 bundled
HD-DVD: 0.3 million
150,000 standalone
150,000 Xbox 360 optional disc player units
That isn't good on either side. Neither format delivers anything that couldn't be done with DVDs using H.264. Who needs PC-style navigation or 20 hours of "extra features" when you can easily put an HD movie on DVD? The only reason for either format to exist is to sell stronger DRM under the guise of HD, and to resell everyone the movies they already own.
As for all the astroturfing about the "Sony root kit," remember that Microsoft's Windows Media is the same thing, you just voluntarily install it. Running from Sony into the arms of Microsoft, which facilitated the Sony root kit in Windows after launching Bill Gate's DRM wet dream of Palladium--well, its obvious that you're all frauds. Come on, Microsoft has never supported anything open or consumer-friendly.
Origins of the Blu-ray vs HD-DVD War
Blu-ray vs HD-DVD in Next Generation Game Consoles
Is a Root Kit only evil if its installed by an evil third party, but "A-OK" if its shoehorned in by Microsoft? Because WGA and WMA are both exactly the same thing as Sony's third party root kit, it's just that Microsoft additionally uses its access to send home data on top. Spyware + Root Kit DRM. The Windows Enthusiasts don't seem to mind getting bent over by Microsoft, but sure have a lot to say about DRM from anyone else.
Ten Myths of Mac OS X Leopard: 9 Apple Is Spying on Users!
Apple included SMS texting on the iPhone, but delivered an email client that can attach photos, completely obsolescing MMS "picture messaging," as emails are free with unlimited data/WiFi. The result was an outraged complaint that the iPhone doesn't support MMS for 10 cent/message charges.
It similarly defaults to sending your Notes to Mail, not SMS, encouraging users to use free email rather than pay-per-text SMS. More complaints.
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As for Dvorak and "nobody cares about smartphones," the growth in smartphones was far higher than basic phones even before the iPhone:
"IDC says smartphones are growing at a rate of more than 46% each year, compared to standard mobile growth of 21%. "
And no, Dvorak has never been right. When he and other flacks talked about Macs moving to Intel, it was first impossible because of the non-portability of Mac software (Star Trek project of the late 80s could run the Mac OS on PCs, but all software would have to be recompiled and redesigned for flipped endian processors, the same problem that nailed any hope for a cross platform NT), and then because Apple had to support the classic Mac OS software (NeXT/Rhapsody worked fine on PCs, but it couldn't run Office and Photoshop, which is why people used Macs and not NeXT in the first place).
Dvorak et all then changed their tune to Itanium, thinking the industry would move to IA64, when nobody did. Ironically, Apple delivers the EFI PC hardware that PC makers never got around to delivering, using AMD's 64-bit architecture instead.
It's easy to wish for the obvious (if impossible) and then give yourself credit for "predicting" that somebody else would actually engineer a similar solution. Is there anyone who was alive between 1984 and 2006 to whom "the thought of PCs and Macs running the same processor" did not occur?
Why Apple hasn't used Intel processors before.
Dvoark seemingly never been right, apart from the time he explained how he baits readers with sensationalism to get people upset so they "write his followup article for him."
Apple's Hardware and Dvorak's Microsoft Branded PC
WYE, WYG: Taking Out the Trash Talkers
Hypocrisy is pretending to be something you are not. "Hypocracy" might be a government run by large mammals, but I don't think it's an actual word.
In any event, AT&T and Verizon are afraid of open standards and Google in particular, and are crapping their pants over Google's bid to enter the mobile service business in the TV spectrum auction and suddenly make their existing 2.5/3G mobile networks obsolete.
Apple's iPhone is tied to AT&T, and offers it absolutely no threat. It is not designed to work on future networks. Verizon doesn't have much good to say about it, but why would you think AT&T would view the iPhone similar to Google? Is it because you are unable to view the world from perspectives you don't hold yourself?
And to everyone who gave me a hard time for pointing out the obvious related to the "gPhone" rumors... thanks!
The Great Google gPhone Myth
You are right that Microsoft makes all of its money elsewhere. However, its profits are all related to selling an OS and applications for PCs, and that market is mature. PC sales are not going to explode again, they're going to migrate into more mobile devices and other form factors.
Microsoft sits in an enormously powerful position, but its platform needs to grow and diversify. That's why it's been spending billions for over ten years now to develop WinCE, first to create a Newton-like small PC, then to copy the Palm Pilot hand held, and finally to get into mobile phones. It hasn't captured more than a tiny fraction of the smartphone business in the last half decade.
In Q2 2007, Microsoft software only shipped on 6.1% of the 26 smartphones sold (1.6 million). Apple sold 270,000 iPhones in a day and a half, netting 1.3% share of the entire world's smartphone business for the entire quarter. It then sold 1.1 million phones the next quarter. That's bad news, because Microsoft only makes a bit of OS licensing revenue; Apple earns hardware profits, retail profits, and service shares on every phone sold.
Microsoft's inability to create a workable mobile strategy isn't an isolated problem. It also couldn't develop a workable strategy behind PlaysForSure/Zune, WebTV/Ultimate TV, Xbox gaming, and other initiatives that attempt to clone the Windows PC monopoly licensing business in other arenas.
Add all those efforts together, and Microsoft managed to burn through $6 billion in consumer product revenues and then destroy another $2 billion in net loss (pulled from its other businesses). That's the real problem: the company has proven it has nowhere to go. It continues to try to leverage the only products it can sell Windows PC/Server/Office as tools to push sales of its products rejected in the open market.
If Google were to offer a free or very low cost alternative to run on WinCE platform devices, it would not only scuttle Microsoft's revenues from mobiles and kill its ability to sell them at all, but would also expand Google's search business into mobiles. Google could even pay phone makers to ship its product, funded by ads.
After proving how easy it is to yank away Windows Mobile from Microsoft, Google could then launch its own linux distro and do the same thing on low end PCs, and serve as the desktop for web/email users with Firefox + OpenOffice. Microsoft would subsequently collapse, unable to maintain its monopoly position and unable to adapt.
You know, like a dinosaur.
Microsoft's Outrageous Office Profits
Yeah it's more effective to actually point out what I get wrong than to just stomp your foot O'Reilly style.
What You Expected, What You Got: Taking Out the Trash Talkers
Magic Cap offered some interesting ideas but didn't offer a mobile phone--it produced a PDA OS. The General Magic company (mostly Apple employees spun off in an internal battle between Magic Cap and Newton) ended up licensing its technologies to Microsoft in 1998, which turned Windows CE from a laugh-out-loud joke into a mild embarrassment.
Microsoft didn't start shipping a phone product until 2002, the same year the Handspring Treo arrived (which combined the older Visor+phone back pack.) There were no real PDA phones in the 90s.
The Egregious Incompetence of Palm
The Spectacular Failure of WinCE and Windows Mobile
Google is very unlikely to produce its own phone, and if it did, it would be nothing like Apple's iPhone, because Google is good at very different things. It has no experience in consumer hardware, retail, and couldn't even beat YouTube at serving videos.
The Great Google gPhone Myth
Microsoft's "Patch Tuesdays" solve immediate, exploitable flaws with hotfixes. They do not address significant architectural or stability problems, which is why Microsoft doesn't count them as minor (5.x) updates. Apple also releases frequent security fixes. Those aren't counted among the +35 minor updates (10.n.x) to Mac OS X in between the five major updates (10.x) since 2000.
In contrast, Microsoft has released only two major updates, and only 2 minor updates for its consumer systems since then. (On the server side, the situation is similar).
Ten Myths of Leopard: 2 - It's Only a Service Pack!
In the past year, Apple stock has been +115%, vs Microsoft +7%.
But over the last five years, Apple stock has been +2270%, vs Microsoft +21%.
An in the last ten years, Apple stock has been +4314%, vs Microsoft +89%.
What "long term investors" would prefer to have been sitting on MSFT?
Microsoft has 80,000 employees, +95% market share, and competes in businesses outside of Apple, which only has 18,000 employees and ~3% worldwide market share. However, Apple is bringing in more than a third of Microsoft's revenues and making more than a quarter of Microsoft's profits, and is selling new Macs--which eat up direct sales of Windows PCs--four times faster than the industry.
So Apple is doing good.
Microsoft exploded in the 90s, reached supernova in 2000, and has been flat as a pancake ever since. Apple exploded in the early 80s and ran into problems in the mid 90s, but recovered during the dotcom years and has been among few tech companies to wildly outperform its 2000-era peak. Microsoft certainly hasn't.
Apple doesn't have any catching up to do; it was already a high flying major company when Microsoft went public in 1986. Seriously, what "long term investors" have been holding Microsoft stock since 1986 apart from Bill Gates?
What has Microsoft done for you lately?
How Microsoft Got Its Office Monopoly
What You Expected, What You Got: Windows Vista Vs Mac OS X Leopard
Check your facts: US antitrust laws apply to using market force to enter into other markets with an unfair advantage. Name me *one* popular OS that doesn't include the ability to watch vids and listen to music, much less browse the net and *gasp* Search.
These are defacto "parts" of the OS now, and have been for quite some time.
Curb your Windows Enthusiasm. It doesn't matter how "defacto" a practice is when a company holds monopoly control over what should be an open market. For a number of reasons, all significant PC makers HAVE to license Windows from Microsoft in order to sell PCs. There are major barriers to Linux on the desktop for consumers (despite it's being free), and developing a business model like Apple requires the ability to coast along under constant attack from Microsoft for a decade or so while developing your own OS. IBM, the Amiga, NeXT, and Be couldn't, and it appears clear nobody else ever could in the future.
The PC is not an open market, but only because of artificial barriers created by Microsoft to prevent competition. Unlike utility monopolies, it does not serve the public. We don't benefit from having to pay the Microsoft tax for every PC sold, and Microsoft has proven that without competition, it refuses to innovate (which is why development of IE suddenly stopped in 2001 and didn't resume until the threat posted by Firefox and Safari motivated it to poop out IE 7 five years later.)
The PC market was also not a product of choice. People didn't decide to use Windows over other alternatives; Microsoft simple ensured there were no other alternatives. While Windows Enthusiasts like to complain that Apple has "monopolized" music with iTunes and the iPod, the situation isn't even similar: no other manufacturers have to license Apple's tech (or even can) in order to sell their products. In reality, Microsoft monopolized music, because its pretty much impossible to get any kind of DRM music or player without it being involved. Apple just beat Microsoft in the marketplace by offering a better product before Microsoft could lock it all up. Without iTunes, we'd have the "choice" of various Windows Media stores and various Windows Media players, just as PC buyers only have the "choice" of buying Windows PCs from various makers.
In a similarly monopolized business, say the old phone market, or in the case of newspaper/broadcasting markets, there are laws that prevent companies with a certain position from acquiring other companies to extend their control over the market or leverage their control over one market to obliterate another. The fact that other smaller companies are not similarly restricted is not a defense against antitrust laws, and it makes no sense to bring up as if it were.
Saying that Apple bundles Safari or that Nokia bundles its own browser on its phones or that Nintendo offers Opera for the Wii is completely immaterial to the fact that Microsoft used its PC monopoly position to destroy Netscape, Sun, and every other rival in the desktop/web/API space to entrench Windows and tie all web development to its own proprietary browser. It just makes you look really stupid to repeat such absurd comments. What has Microsoft done for you lately?
How Microsoft Got Its Office Monopoly
Uh, they do work together on security. Seriously, google around for security conferences.
AppleInsider has an interesting series of articles looking at the technology behind features in Mac OS X Leopard and ancestor systems that came before it, including the classic Mac OS , NeXT, Be, Amiga, DOS/Windows, and the development of Unix. Great for nostalgic nerds, and puts the new stuff into perspective against how tech has developed. Road to Mac OS X Leopard Server: Collaborative Info Sharing Services.
I agree, Microsoft's early lead with the 360 isn't going to hold up in the face of $8 billion in annual losses, much of which drained from from the bottom of its Xbox division. How long can it afford to pay people to buy Xbox consoles?
"For additional perspective, the "spectacular failure" of Chrysler that caused Mercedes to dump the division like a hot potato this year amounted to losses of $1.5 billion annually, a slight fraction of Microsoft's $8 billion cash bonfire this year. Without the Office cash cow, Microsoft would be unable to dump unfathomable amounts of money into profitless exercises intended to hold back innovation and prevent competition in new markets to increasingly broaden its sphere of influence."
BetaMax was "ahead early on" because it was the original video tape. JVC ripped it off a year later with VHS as a cheaper to license standard with longer recording times.
Format Wars in Home Theater
As for piracy, HD-DVD has just as outrageous of DRM as Blu-Ray. Both also have excessive titling features that demand significant processor power. And neither delivers something DVD's really can't.
H.264 can put an HD movie on a standard DVD today. The market for HD is also not that impressive in scope. Half a million standalone HD players for the entire industry is nothing to write home about. HD-DVD has other problems outside of market penetration.
Origins of the Blu-ray vs HD-DVD War
The problem with releasing new generations of a gaming platform is that it spits your existing installed base. It forces users to decide whether to upgrade (and many won't if the price is significant, as it is with high end graphics/processor upgrades) and it forces developers to decide whether they want to target their games to actually benefit from the advances of the new generation, or to aim for the lowest common denominator.
Incidentally, that was the same problem for the Amiga, NeXT, and other advanced platforms: why would the mass market upgrade? The catch-22 for users and developers meant the market instead gravitated toward the basic PC, which slowly evolved in a lowest common denominator way and finally caught up to advances released a decade or so prior.
Now look at the PS3: Sony's biggest competition isn't the Xbox 360, it's the PS2. Microsoft's console is big in the US, but has very limited sales outside. The 360 has sold more units so far, but that's because has been on sale twice as long as the PS3. Since the PS3's release, Sony has shipped around 7 million units, while Microsoft has only shipped an additional 2 million. In contrast, Nintendo has sold 12 million Wii units. Xbox sales look good only if you can't do math or don't understand how time relates to the graph of a sales chart.
Nintendo Wii vs Sony PlayStation 3 vs Microsoft Xbox 360: Q2 2007
Sony is worried about two things. First, there's already 115 million PS2s in the world; the PS3 has to be desirable enough to convince those users to upgrade. $500 for fancier versions of the same games is a difficult upgrade to force. Until it can sell 10-20 million PS3s, developers will make more money delivering new titles for the PS2, because there are more users buying games for it. Sony is still selling cheap PS2 units, so it's competing against itself on price.
The second problem for Sony (and the reason it competes with itself) is that it's trying to push sales of Blu-Ray players and drive down the manufacturing costs of blue lasers. That means Sony is willing to lose money selling the PS3 at an initial loss, just to get Blu-Ray widely installed. Microsoft has taken sides with Toshiba in selling the rival HD-DVD format. If Sony weren't pushing Blu-Ray in the PS3, HD-DVD would be ahead in installed base.
At last count:
HD-DVD standalone players sold around 150k units
Blu-Ray standalone players sold around 100k units
However:
HD-DVD options Xbox 360 players sold around 150k units
Blu-Ray players bundled with the PS3 have sold 7 million units
So Sony's PS3 game isn't just about replacing the PS2, it's also about pushing the Blu-Ray disc format. It has single-handedly turned the HD wars around and put HD-DVD in a distant second place to Blu-Ray: 7,100,000 to 300,000.
Without Blu-Ray, it wouldn't make much sense for Sony to be trying to sell an expensive games console to replace the PS2. The games war is being won by the Wii, which costs much less and has no installed base to compete against, thanks to the poor sales of the GameCube. Nintendo can't make enough to meet demand. Nintendo also doesn't care about selling an HD platform.
Microsoft is being left in the middle, selling a console that's losing on the game popularity end to the Wii, and losing on the HD end to Sony. It's also competing against itself with in the area of PC gaming; the Xbox 360 overlaps with PC gaming, eating up the cheap end of a finite market in the US. At least it's trying to make it easier for developers to redeploy PC games in console versions.
Blu-ray vs HD-DVD in Next Generation Game Consoles
PlayStation 3 vs. Xbox 360 vs. Nintendo Wii
When you title your article "Leopard's Release Date a Serious Mistake" it's a bit weak to say in the last paragraph of the article:
"With all things considered, did Apple make a serious mistake by delaying Leopard's release until October? I don't think so."
This isn't even an opinion, it's just a sensationalist, uninformed headline we've already read, with nothing backing it up, not even the author. What a waste of time.
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The Great Google gPhone Myth - Pundits have seized upon rumors of a new mobile phone product from Google as their golden ticket for bashing the iPhone. The "gPhone" is the perfect foil for fear-based rumormongers because it's a secret Google han't said much about publicly. That lets the wags blow it out of proportion and stretch it into an iPhone Killer. They're wrong, here's why.
"Fascism is an authoritarian political ideology (generally tied to a mass movement) that considers individual and other societal interests subordinate to the interests of the state"
Perhaps you are unfamiliar with extreme right wing fundamentalist talking points:
- Don't criticize the administration or you are "supporting terrorism."
- Broad wiretap spying programs on citizens is important for nationalist security.
- Torture and indefinite imprisonment of the accused, with suspended Habeas Corpus, is critical to nationalist security.
- Limiting the right to travel around and to/from the country and imposing a Nationalist biometric ID program.
Centrist Americans in both the Democratic and Republican parties have historically found all those ideas repugnant. You are right to say those ideas have historically been associated with extremist socialist states such as Stalin's Russia, but they are also associated with with the Axis fascist countries and fundamentalist religious states. Authoritarian political ideology is not unique to a particular extreme end of political spectrum.
The US isn't in danger of falling to a communist revolution. It is, however, already knee deep in a cesspool of a fascist torture/spy/police state that considers individual rights and societal interests (freedom of expression, access to health care and education) subordinate to the needs of corrupt corporations that largely run the country. Corporate welfare, a government run media (Fox), and wartime profiteering are not American ideals.
The American right and conservatives in general are not represented by the NeoCon minority. Small and effective government and free markets have little to do with the torture/spy/police state fascism being advanced by NeoCons in their efforts to set up a fundamentalist religious state and declare war on other fundamentalist religious states throughout the world, partnered with welfare-state corporations like Haliburton and Blackwater.
What You Expected, What You Got
Dear anonymous coward NeoCon:
Commonwealth has nothing to do with communism or communal wealth distribution.
According to Wikipedia:
==The original phrase "common wealth" or "the common weal" comes from the old meaning of "wealth" which is "well-being". The term literally meant "common well-being". Thus commonwealth originally meant a state or nation-state governed for the common good as opposed to an authoritarian state governed for the benefit of a given class of owners.==
Kentucky, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts are all officially designated as a commonwealth, and Puerto Rico is also described as a commonwealth of the US.
Trying to jingoize words to fit a fascist/fundamentalist right wing political simplification based on what you think they might mean just makes the world a stupider place. Please stop, our country is already stupid enough without your contributions.
What You Expected, What You Got.
The law you asked for is the Audio Home Recording Act, which mandated the use of copy protection on digital music players and destroyed the US market for DAT and MiniDisc.
It wasn't until the RIAA sued Diamond over the Rio--insisting that it put Serial Copy Management System on its MP3 player--and lost (the court ruled MP3 players weren't recording devices because they didn't copy from stereos, but rather just traded digital files with PCs) that the market for MP3 players had anywhere to go. Apple came in with the iPod and cleaned up.
Despite winning the case, Diamond tried to push the Rio toward DRM with music subscriptions. Sony tried to push ATRAC, and Microsoft tried to push WMA, but Apple got behind MP3, and later AAC, both of which are open formats; DRM has only ever been optional on the iPod. That gave Apple the music player market, and labels have been scrambling to figure out how to force music back under control with WMA music subscriptions ever since.
Rise of the iTunes Killers Myth
Then you'll enjoy my disassembly of Microsoft Shill Mike Elgan:
Arrogance Unleashed: The Foul Stench of Computerworld's Mike Elgan, where I point out not only the buffoonery of Elgan, but also the simpleton arguments that claim Apple has "bricked" phones and persecuted iPhone users by offering a security and feature update.
"While the philosophical debate over whether Apple should open the iPhone to third party development is interesting, the underlying technical grounds for disabling third party software can not be argued around. All of the unauthorized third party software developed for the iPhone relied upon exploiting buffer overruns. These were significant security flaws that could just as easily allow attack vectors to malicious coders. Apple had an obligation to its users to patch these cracks.
"However, Apple left the iPhone update an optional install. It did not roll out an automatic update that users could not shut off, as Microsoft does with its Windows XP and Vista software update. Apple also did not ban any equipment it found violating its terms of service, as Microsoft does when it permanently bans Xbox 360 users suspected of installing hacks to their console firmware from accessing its online Xbox Live services, or as it unintentionally did when its WGA system went down and legitimate XP and Vista users were locked down with a reduced feature set on suspicion of software piracy."
[...]
"Perhaps he doesn't understand that the iPhone isn't a small PC, but rather a series of at least three independent embedded processors, including a baseband cellular radio subsystem and the ARM processors running the OS X operating system.
"Each of these systems has its own firmware, and that firmware has to be in a known state in order to load software properly. When hackers dig through the system, they can overrun memory buffers until part of the system resets, then feed it replacement code to allow themselves further access into the system. This works very much like a biological virus, which inserts its own DNA code into cells to force them to perform other tasks. Like viruses, these break ins complicate how the host system works in complex ways.
"No computer or device makers can offer to support a PC or mobile device running with tampered firmware. For example, Microsoft doesn't guarantee that Windows will load properly on a system that does not work as originally designed after unsupported hacks are made to its BIOS. For Elgan to perform his theatrics about how Apple is abusing its customers with a "cold slap in the face" is simply a matter of intellectual dishonesty, hypocrisy, and grosteque ignorance."
This is kind of stupid. Even if all the major US carriers were prevented from locking phones to their network, it would only open the market between T-Mobile and AT&T, and separately between Sprint and Verizon Wireless. Both use totally different networks (GSM vs CDMA2000), so nothing would be open.
Further, as 3G rolls out, T-Mobile and AT&T's versions of UTMS totally incompatible, meaning that their next generation of phone will be naturally locked to a single provider. They didn't do that on purpose, there just isn't available bandwidth in the US to share the same band.
The real solution--rather than enriching attorneys to raise frivolous lawsuits that won't accomplish anything--is to open up the TV spectrum and insist that it actually be open, as Google has been pushing for. That would rapidly obsolesce the existing mobile networks however, leaving them open for replacement as well. Verizon/Sprint/AT&T have spent billions building out old fashioned 2.5/3G mobile service, and aren't excited about the prospect of having it all thrown in the trash can.
How AT&T Picked Up the iPhone: A Brief History of Mobiles
One of the most wryly ironic personal funny moments I ever had (well at least in the top 1,000) was being put in an elevator with a guy at SF General Hospital, who looked like the "stereotypical nerd" (I look like a non-stereotypical nerd, for the record) with a stack of books on cashless society. I struck up a conversation about his reading material and he notified me that he was translating it into Esperanto. I couldn't laugh, I couldn't speak. I felt like an actor on the scene of some nerdy inside joke miniseries.
My knowledge about Esperanto would barely fill a leaflet the size of "Jewish Sports Legends," but I recognized immediately that Esperanto was the perfect language for educating oneself on the benefits of a cashless society. And perhaps fondue parties.
Nokia and SonyEricsson phones have a public API. None of their third party developers are using a buffer overrun to exploit a way to reprogram portions of the firmware in various different ways. Sony Ericsson and Nokia do not support phones with tampered firmware.
Because Apple's update included a security patch that removed the exploits those unlock hacks used, they no longer work. Because the software updated the system, it did not make any provision to instantiate a makeshift public API based on what a few apps had done. In testing, Apple found that phones that had modified firmware may not update properly and warned users. Creating your own firmware patches is dangerous business. Apple didn't "brick" any devices, it only warned that tampered firmware would interfere with the update process.
Apple is under no legal obligation to support whatever firmware hacks users might try, just as PC makers and other mobile makers don't warrant that their systems will work perfectly after you break in an tamper with their firmware. Apple didn't stop anyone from doing that, it just noted that those hacks wouldn't be compatible with future releases. Apple left the iPhone update an optional install. It did not roll out an automatic update that users could not shut off, as Microsoft does with its Windows XP and Vista software update.
Interestingly, the same Windows Enthusiast who are trying to grandstand with a feigned outrage over Apple's update make excuses for Microsoft. Apple did not simply ban any equipment it found violating its terms of service, as Microsoft does when it permanently bans Xbox 360 users suspected of installing hacks to their console firmware from accessing its online Xbox Live services, or as it unintentionally did when its WGA system went down and legitimate XP and Vista users were locked down with a reduced feature set on suspicion of software piracy.
Sony Ericsson and Nokia do not support phones with tampered firmware either.
Arrogance Unleashed: The Foul Stench of Computerworld's Mike Elgan Mike Elgan, a former editor of Windows Magazine, has recently gone on an anti-Apple rampage, posting countless articles on why users should torment themselves with fear, doubt, and uncertainty about Apple. Elgan's desperation is so overreaching that it is, like Rob Enderle, an embarrassment even to Windows Enthusiasts.