"The 3GS is available today for $50 with a new contract"
You seem to imagine the price of that two year contract doesn't
matter in your calculus of how much it costs to upgrade to a
newer device.
But for the person who understands that a an unlocked iPhone 3G
can be used for significantly less money on T-Mobile's network,
the difference in real cost is significant.
I heard the Internet is real fast when you do that.
Wait, you think the "constant updates" to iOS have been for the benefit of the users?
Let's see:
iPhone 1.0 -> 2.0:
ActiveSync Support
Third Party Apps
VPN Support
New Language Support
Parental Controls
iPhone 2.0 -> 3.0:
Push Notifications
Copy and Paste
MMS
Third Party Hardware Accessories via Dock Port
Spotlight
A2DP
Comprehensive GPS Support
iPhone 3.0 -> 4.0
Background Processes for third party apps
Fast app switching via state saving
Local app notifications
Folders
Unified Inbox
Even 4.2/4.3 had huge features... AirPlay, Printing, etc. AirPlay was so good I bought an AppleTV 2 just to use it, once it started working with video and third party apps.
You don't find those features... just a little bit... beneficial to users?
Most people don't intend to post pics with geo-information tagged in it. Cameras starting adding the data as the "default" option a couple years ago, and no one (except nerds) took notice. So now we have millions of pictures floating around with lat/long data encoded in them. I couldn't believe cameras chose to embed the data automatically -- that's where the real disbelief is. Humans probably would turn it off if they knew it was on.
Oh please. People check into FourSquare or Facebook religiously, and tweet that they are leaving for vacation, and then come home and post pictures for the world to see. The problem isn't that they are unaware their location can be tracked. It's that they are proud to broadcast it. Actually problem is the wrong word for me to use... they don't see it as a problem.
The Infoworld article seems biased to me - I own one and it works brilliantly with my Blackberry phone, does what I need it to and will only get better over time. The phones DO suck but the tablet is based on a new OS that is leaps and bounds better than the phones. Word is the phones are supposed to start rolling out based on the new OS in the future.
That's kind of the best summary of the problem I've seen, even though you intended to compliment the device. So it would work better for me if I got a blackberry so I could tether and get the contacts, calendars, emails displayed (unless the phone battery went, in which case the content would disappear based on the reviews I've read, only to come back later). So I can have that today... but I have to swap out for a phone that "sucks".
This is a lie. People were all over the first iPad despite all the deficiencies, claiming they were not needed (Some of those being implemented in the second iPad). I haven't touched this RIM tablet (and I won't, I think tablets are pointless for me), but the reviewers' bias for Apple is obvious no matter the state of the market.
Perhaps it did enough. It had apps, a calendar, email, contacts, a great web browser, great battery life, a great screen, weighed half of the lightest notebooks, and felt pretty darn fast even without a dual core processor. Built in apps did multitask, third party ones didn't, and push notifications filled party of the gap. But probably the most important thing in all of that is that it had a calendar. And email. And contacts. And you didn't need a tethered iPhone to pull that off. Yes, clearly a year ago, you could ship a product without multitasking and a camera. But today you cannot ship a product without email.
Classic case of hubris and " love to hate " syndrome . It has got a good CPU , Support Flash , QNX run on Dalvik VM so there is always a plan B of supporting . Android Apps . I think for version 1 this is a decent device and i have used the pre released unit . Multitasking is good enough and by any count it is better than Xoom.
So it has a good CPU, reasonable support of Flash in the browser... and a future plan to support some Android apps that are pre-screened by RIM, if the developer recompiles them and submits them. And I can't imagine that will be pleasant. The hardware sounds good, the development process sounds atrocious, and there is a decided lack of support for email, calendars and contacts. I'm not claiming my iPad is the best device that will ever exist OMG Apple rules... I'm just saying I want my contacts, calendars and email on my tablet, the same way they are on my phone and the same way they are on my laptop. Expecting people to have that... but only if they have a Blackberry turned on and tethered not only cuts them off from a huge percentage of the market (you know, those guys who don't have Blackberry's), it also probably isn't exactly what some Blackberry phone users wanted. And webmail is nice, but I use my tablet in places where I don't always have Internet access. Plus, already stored contacts come up quicker than logging into a web page and waiting for the screen to refresh.
in a world filled with Android and Apple Fan boys its hard to measure anything on a standalone basis.
Perhaps you meant to say "in a world filled with iPads and Android tablets, it's hard to measure a tablet without considering what's already available, in some cases for less money:"
Sorry, but multitasking and dual core processors aren't enough anymore. The iPad 2 has extremely polished software, a HUGE marketplace of third party apps, more built in functionality for managing your PIM, and while it doesn't come with an office suite, $30 fixes that pretty quickly. But it doesn't play Flash. So if that was your only motivation (accessible Flash), then you can buy a PlayBook.... or a Xoom with seemingly more functionality out of the box.
You're right... it's going to be hard for Playbook to compete in an established market. That's what happens when you ship later than your competition and don't visibly offer more functionality or a drastically reduced price. It can be done (B&N NookColor, Motorola Xoom), but you can't just ship a tablet and expect ten million in sales (countless Chinese tablets with Android 1.6 and a cheap price tag).
Android? Why, are people who own Android phones buying a lot of music in Ogg format? I realize you like Ogg, but that doesn't make it relevant to consumer music listeners.
"Apple has location services as something that can be turned off completely"
It's closed source, so how do you know it's not continuing to collect data, even if that collection isn't made visible to the user? How do you know that the file in question is a result of the location services which can be turned off?
Btw, your missing the point. iPods and other mp3 players are doomed.
Future is phones. Show me the native support on the phone side, maybe Andorids have it. Symbian is suporter of MPEG4, Apple is supporter of Mpeg4. MS claims to be a supporter of Mpeg4 (i doubt that will happen).
Google maybe support non standard formats.
I'm not quite sure that's true. Apparently there are more than 60 million iPod Touches in the market. The Nano seems to sell well. But putting all that side, if MP3 players go away, and phones take over, the future is still in MP3 and AAC. After Apple and Amazon's music stores, what's left? There's just no question that if you take tens of millions of "portable devices that play audio", that the HUGE majority of them play MP3 and AAC, and the HUGE majority of the content loaded onto them is MP3 and AAC. Phone, iPod, whatever. That's what's on there. The HUGE majority of sales are AAC (Apple) and MP3 (Amazon), or physical (Amazon, retail). Heck, the place where music might most likely be in your format of choice would be something underground, where more geeks tend to be then on iTunes. But yet, it seems to me most of the stuff on Usenet (The first rule of Usenet is, you don't talk about Usenet) is in MP3 format. Well, at least that's what a friend told me, I don't frequent such establishments.
Some brands that include the OGG playback feature in their products: SanDisk, Cowon, Trekstor, HTC, Archos, Grundig, iRiver, Philips, Samsung... Pretty neat for a "zero penetration" format;) BTW, many of them also support FLAC.
Would "near zero penetration" work better for you? Seriously, what percentage of the market for portable audio is that?
Stop trying to make yourself look foolish. It's not clear if you are trolling, stupid, simply can't read, or some combination of the three. As the article says, it appears to use cell towers to determine location, by which rough location can be determined quite easily. So, no "magical GPS" necessary. Now, do you want to claim that iPhone users commonly travel with their phone service disabled?
Yes, it can do so. But again, Apple has location services as something that can be turned off completely, which would mean it does not track this information, even if the cell phone was on. Also, location services are specific to apps, so some apps can track, others can't. As to this file, well, luckily, you can't access my PC, so I guess it's safe. But I just turned on encrypted backups. Voila! Problem solved! PS: There are lots of other things in the backups, that if not encrypted, are readable.
And while you try to twist it into "it's all about economics" the truth is that morality is also a part of this, if I feel a movie isn't worth my money but I have a choice between pirating that movie and watching paint dry I may still choose to pirate and watch the movie. You may consider this inherently wrong but I just don't see it.
It IS about economics, also though. You might look at *1* individual movie, and say "I would never pay for that, I'll just watch it. I'm not HURTING anyone, because I wasn't going to pay anyway." That's possibly true, but if you took EVERY movie into the equation, the situation changes quite a bit. If you stopped pirating, and did not pay for movies... you would NEVER see those movies again. And most people who enjoy movies, would rather see them sometimes, then NEVER. So in that scenario (absent of piracy), most of these people WOULD spend some money on movies. Piracy removes that from the equation, allowing some people to never spend a dollar on a movie, that they darn well would have otherwise.
The only reason the movies you watch are still available, are because not EVERY person who watches them are stealing them, and breaking copyright law in the process. Some people still pay to watch in a theater, or buy on DVD or BluRay, or subscribe to a premium movie channel, or get from NetFlix that they've paid a fee for, or whatever. If everyone stopped doing those things, and we all just starting torrenting our movies, eventually... there wouldn't really be a lot of movies, would there?
Now you're comment about the low income person... does that even apply to you? PS: I've been that person, and I saw less movies. There's nothing moral and ethical about stealing movies. Do I sympathize with someone stealing groceries who can't get them any other way? Sure! But either go pay for Tron, or do something else.
Why would Amazon want to lower the price of a $1 app to 20 cents when 100% of the revenue goes to the developer?
First of all, you illustrate the problem. You just gave the developer 20 cents, when he priced the app hoping for 70 cents. On Android Marketplace, he would get 70 cents. On App Store he would get 70 cents.
Second of all, why? I don't know... maybe SOLELY to undercut Google, since it's THEIR app store, and they are trying to establish marketshare, and combat the (temporary) problem of how hard it is to install the app on most phones, when long term they hope to convince carriers to add their store from day 1, built into the phone, maybe even offering them 5% of sales as an incentive to do so.
Does no one remember how Amazon starting out with Kindle by insisting on $9.99 for a price point for new releases, even if they sold them at a slight loss? They did that to establish THEIR store as the predominate way to get eBooks.
Instead of wading through the Dev License you could always RTFA. Amazon can charge whatever they want, but they have to pay the dev the greater of 20% of the list price or 70% of the purchase price. So if you list your game at $5 and Amazon gives it away for free, you get 20% of list or $1. If they sell it for $5, then you get 70% of purchase or $3.50. It's not wholly unreasonable,
So if I have an app that sells for $10 on iOS, and $10 on Android Marketplace, and it becomes the BIGGEST THING OF THE YEAR (or month or minute, whatever), I'm making $7 from Apple and $7 from Google on every sale. But Amazon sees all the activity and says "well, can't get the iPhone people, but we'll show those Google folks, this is our free app for the month." Now I get $2 from Amazon, instead of $7. Yeah, sounds great.
and nothing is forcing you to sell through them.
Who said people were FORCING anybody to do anything? It was an article. It's almost like the people behind the article wanted to make sure game developers were aware of that potential situation.
PS, it's a $5 per copy difference. If you are selling 100,000 copies of a title... that's fairly MASSIVE a loss of revenue.
Chrome already has "incognito mode," so I'm not sure what more you could want from a browser if there is any concern about privacy.
Plenty! And Safari already had it's Private Browsing feature (where that idea in Chrome came from). In those modes, cookies are not saved past the current session, browser history isn't saved, your downloads history isn't preserved, etc. For me, I like those things, but my need for cookies is limited to things like Slashdot recognizing me so I am logged in all the time. I don't need ad tracking.
Why now? Because Apple just showed it works. Look, the App Store on iPhone showed that you can make people LOVE your phone MORE, while collecting 30 cents on the dollar for everything they buy, without having to make the software yourself. So now all smartphones are coming with app stores. Then Apple did the same on Mac OS X desktops and laptops. Boom, a sizable shift in app purchases, causing 30 cents on the dollar going to Apple. Same thing over at Amazon, with indie publishers getting 70 cents on the dollar when publishing through Kindle. Same thing at Android. Same thing everywhere - make it easy for people to find apps, companies will share profits with you. I hope when MS rolls out a tablet, and then has a subscription service for periodicals we don't all ask "why now?"
Nice Examples! Besides Thunderbolt, they also popularized USB, and to a certain extent Firewire (didn't take off as much, but for years it was THE way to connect a digital camcorder, on any platform). Also they changed the way people bought music (iTunes), both taking over retail sales, and getting some people BACK from piracy. They MADE MP3 players popular, and introduced the concept of apps on the same platform (iPod Touch). It's a bit less popular now, but they also introduced the concept of the 17" notebook that DIDN'T weigh and arm and a leg. There were video chat services before iChat and FaceTime, but they made it popular, well known, and in the case of built in cameras to your portable equipment mandatory. Before you tell me about some Android app, that was out before FaceTime, please ask a non-geek... they only know FaceTime.
Nice to see some cable companies waking up. It would be nice to see the TV channels wake up as well. Here's a hint: If your cable company has an app that lets you watch live TV in your house only, on an iPad or iPhone, you are PRESERVING your status quo. It's an INCENTIVE to me to NOT ditch cable. To KEEP my satellite. To CONTINUE paying $100 a month. Thanks to AirPlay, I can beam it right back onto my TV, and not worry about that one room that doesn't have wiring for satellite or a receiver sitting inside already. It's a reason to keep them, so when my wife watches those garbage reality shows, I can still be in the room watching the game, courtesy of a pair of headphones and an app that hooks into my service. Let it be like that crappy DirecTV Windows only app, too, and let me tap into my already recorded DVR programs. It's one less reason to think about trying to switch to Hulu Plus & Netflix for 1/5th the monthly cost.
The problem is the packaging for a bag of chips is bad enough without switching it into six plastic bags just so we can illustrate the point that the little bag of chips has 25 grams of fat, not 5 grams each serving. We already know most people eat the whole bag. Change the nutritional labels. Have a per-serving and per-bag column, problem solved.
Are you saying that with an Apple product, you can go find an app and install it to get functionality to work where the competition "Just Works"? That doesn't bode well for Apple.
DrXym is complaining that iTunes can't do it when it trivially could, not that it isn't possible. To which danaris claims that there is no reason to want to do that anyway. Well, there is. Which is why those apps exist.
I guess... but that's only half true. If you have any of the apps that exist to share/store files, they can expose themselves through iTunes to allow you to move files in and out from a PC. GoodReader, for example, is a great app that does just this. So iTunes CAN do this, but Apple provides no default app to do this on the iPad itself.
2) Seriously? A $500 to $900 iPad is the portable device that's really screaming to be used to transport files from one physical place to another? Maybe a $20 USB stick or a 50 cent DVD or a $1 BluRay or a free DropBox accounts might be an efficient way to go on this one.
Yes, obviously no one will buy an iPad when all they need is a flash drive. But if you already have an iPad, it would be nice if it could obviate the need for also having a flash drive.
I just can't imagine not carrying my flash drive because I have a 10" tablet. I wouldn't loan an iPad, but would leave a flash drive in someone's computer. Also, now I need a cable. I just don't see how an iPad replaces a flash drive in any way what-so-ever, and I don't think software was the limiting factor.
Slashdot Mirror
"The 3GS is available today for $50 with a new contract"
You seem to imagine the price of that two year contract doesn't matter in your calculus of how much it costs to upgrade to a newer device.
But for the person who understands that a an unlocked iPhone 3G can be used for significantly less money on T-Mobile's network, the difference in real cost is significant.
I heard the Internet is real fast when you do that.
Wait, you think the "constant updates" to iOS have been for the benefit of the users?
Let's see:
iPhone 1.0 -> 2.0:
iPhone 2.0 -> 3.0:
iPhone 3.0 -> 4.0
Even 4.2/4.3 had huge features... AirPlay, Printing, etc. AirPlay was so good I bought an AppleTV 2 just to use it, once it started working with video and third party apps.
You don't find those features... just a little bit... beneficial to users?
I wasn't concerned with one poster. I was replying to a post that mentioned "most people", not "me specifically".
Most people don't intend to post pics with geo-information tagged in it. Cameras starting adding the data as the "default" option a couple years ago, and no one (except nerds) took notice. So now we have millions of pictures floating around with lat/long data encoded in them. I couldn't believe cameras chose to embed the data automatically -- that's where the real disbelief is. Humans probably would turn it off if they knew it was on.
Oh please. People check into FourSquare or Facebook religiously, and tweet that they are leaving for vacation, and then come home and post pictures for the world to see. The problem isn't that they are unaware their location can be tracked. It's that they are proud to broadcast it. Actually problem is the wrong word for me to use... they don't see it as a problem.
The Infoworld article seems biased to me - I own one and it works brilliantly with my Blackberry phone, does what I need it to and will only get better over time. The phones DO suck but the tablet is based on a new OS that is leaps and bounds better than the phones. Word is the phones are supposed to start rolling out based on the new OS in the future.
That's kind of the best summary of the problem I've seen, even though you intended to compliment the device. So it would work better for me if I got a blackberry so I could tether and get the contacts, calendars, emails displayed (unless the phone battery went, in which case the content would disappear based on the reviews I've read, only to come back later). So I can have that today... but I have to swap out for a phone that "sucks".
This is a lie. People were all over the first iPad despite all the deficiencies, claiming they were not needed (Some of those being implemented in the second iPad). I haven't touched this RIM tablet (and I won't, I think tablets are pointless for me), but the reviewers' bias for Apple is obvious no matter the state of the market.
Perhaps it did enough. It had apps, a calendar, email, contacts, a great web browser, great battery life, a great screen, weighed half of the lightest notebooks, and felt pretty darn fast even without a dual core processor. Built in apps did multitask, third party ones didn't, and push notifications filled party of the gap. But probably the most important thing in all of that is that it had a calendar. And email. And contacts. And you didn't need a tethered iPhone to pull that off. Yes, clearly a year ago, you could ship a product without multitasking and a camera. But today you cannot ship a product without email.
Classic case of hubris and " love to hate " syndrome . It has got a good CPU , Support Flash , QNX run on Dalvik VM so there is always a plan B of supporting . Android Apps . I think for version 1 this is a decent device and i have used the pre released unit . Multitasking is good enough and by any count it is better than Xoom .
So it has a good CPU, reasonable support of Flash in the browser... and a future plan to support some Android apps that are pre-screened by RIM, if the developer recompiles them and submits them. And I can't imagine that will be pleasant. The hardware sounds good, the development process sounds atrocious, and there is a decided lack of support for email, calendars and contacts. I'm not claiming my iPad is the best device that will ever exist OMG Apple rules... I'm just saying I want my contacts, calendars and email on my tablet, the same way they are on my phone and the same way they are on my laptop. Expecting people to have that... but only if they have a Blackberry turned on and tethered not only cuts them off from a huge percentage of the market (you know, those guys who don't have Blackberry's), it also probably isn't exactly what some Blackberry phone users wanted. And webmail is nice, but I use my tablet in places where I don't always have Internet access. Plus, already stored contacts come up quicker than logging into a web page and waiting for the screen to refresh.
in a world filled with Android and Apple Fan boys its hard to measure anything on a standalone basis .
Perhaps you meant to say "in a world filled with iPads and Android tablets, it's hard to measure a tablet without considering what's already available, in some cases for less money:"
Sorry, but multitasking and dual core processors aren't enough anymore. The iPad 2 has extremely polished software, a HUGE marketplace of third party apps, more built in functionality for managing your PIM, and while it doesn't come with an office suite, $30 fixes that pretty quickly. But it doesn't play Flash. So if that was your only motivation (accessible Flash), then you can buy a PlayBook.... or a Xoom with seemingly more functionality out of the box.
You're right... it's going to be hard for Playbook to compete in an established market. That's what happens when you ship later than your competition and don't visibly offer more functionality or a drastically reduced price. It can be done (B&N NookColor, Motorola Xoom), but you can't just ship a tablet and expect ten million in sales (countless Chinese tablets with Android 1.6 and a cheap price tag).
Android? Why, are people who own Android phones buying a lot of music in Ogg format? I realize you like Ogg, but that doesn't make it relevant to consumer music listeners.
And you were hoping for what? Apple open sourcing everything? I try to stay within the bounds of something that might actually happen.
"Apple has location services as something that can be turned off completely" It's closed source, so how do you know it's not continuing to collect data, even if that collection isn't made visible to the user? How do you know that the file in question is a result of the location services which can be turned off?
Apple's Guy Tribble, VP of Software Technology gave senate testimony on the very subject.
Btw, your missing the point. iPods and other mp3 players are doomed.
Future is phones. Show me the native support on the phone side, maybe Andorids have it. Symbian is suporter of MPEG4, Apple is supporter of Mpeg4. MS claims to be a supporter of Mpeg4 (i doubt that will happen).
Google maybe support non standard formats.
I'm not quite sure that's true. Apparently there are more than 60 million iPod Touches in the market. The Nano seems to sell well. But putting all that side, if MP3 players go away, and phones take over, the future is still in MP3 and AAC. After Apple and Amazon's music stores, what's left? There's just no question that if you take tens of millions of "portable devices that play audio", that the HUGE majority of them play MP3 and AAC, and the HUGE majority of the content loaded onto them is MP3 and AAC. Phone, iPod, whatever. That's what's on there. The HUGE majority of sales are AAC (Apple) and MP3 (Amazon), or physical (Amazon, retail). Heck, the place where music might most likely be in your format of choice would be something underground, where more geeks tend to be then on iTunes. But yet, it seems to me most of the stuff on Usenet (The first rule of Usenet is, you don't talk about Usenet) is in MP3 format. Well, at least that's what a friend told me, I don't frequent such establishments.
Some brands that include the OGG playback feature in their products: SanDisk, Cowon, Trekstor, HTC, Archos, Grundig, iRiver, Philips, Samsung... Pretty neat for a "zero penetration" format ;) BTW, many of them also support FLAC.
Would "near zero penetration" work better for you? Seriously, what percentage of the market for portable audio is that?
Stop trying to make yourself look foolish. It's not clear if you are trolling, stupid, simply can't read, or some combination of the three. As the article says, it appears to use cell towers to determine location, by which rough location can be determined quite easily. So, no "magical GPS" necessary. Now, do you want to claim that iPhone users commonly travel with their phone service disabled?
Yes, it can do so. But again, Apple has location services as something that can be turned off completely, which would mean it does not track this information, even if the cell phone was on. Also, location services are specific to apps, so some apps can track, others can't. As to this file, well, luckily, you can't access my PC, so I guess it's safe. But I just turned on encrypted backups. Voila! Problem solved! PS: There are lots of other things in the backups, that if not encrypted, are readable.
IF ableToCompete==False THEN sue=nearestCompetitor This little nugget's been part of Apple's MO since the 80's.
Yeah, good thing to, I mean, that iPad is really not doing well in the marketplace.
See, this is exactly what Apple was talking about. This is why Apple had to sue Samsung... these things are copying Apple!
And while you try to twist it into "it's all about economics" the truth is that morality is also a part of this, if I feel a movie isn't worth my money but I have a choice between pirating that movie and watching paint dry I may still choose to pirate and watch the movie. You may consider this inherently wrong but I just don't see it.
It IS about economics, also though. You might look at *1* individual movie, and say "I would never pay for that, I'll just watch it. I'm not HURTING anyone, because I wasn't going to pay anyway." That's possibly true, but if you took EVERY movie into the equation, the situation changes quite a bit. If you stopped pirating, and did not pay for movies... you would NEVER see those movies again. And most people who enjoy movies, would rather see them sometimes, then NEVER. So in that scenario (absent of piracy), most of these people WOULD spend some money on movies. Piracy removes that from the equation, allowing some people to never spend a dollar on a movie, that they darn well would have otherwise.
... there wouldn't really be a lot of movies, would there?
The only reason the movies you watch are still available, are because not EVERY person who watches them are stealing them, and breaking copyright law in the process. Some people still pay to watch in a theater, or buy on DVD or BluRay, or subscribe to a premium movie channel, or get from NetFlix that they've paid a fee for, or whatever. If everyone stopped doing those things, and we all just starting torrenting our movies, eventually
Now you're comment about the low income person... does that even apply to you? PS: I've been that person, and I saw less movies. There's nothing moral and ethical about stealing movies. Do I sympathize with someone stealing groceries who can't get them any other way? Sure! But either go pay for Tron, or do something else.
Why would Amazon want to lower the price of a $1 app to 20 cents when 100% of the revenue goes to the developer?
First of all, you illustrate the problem. You just gave the developer 20 cents, when he priced the app hoping for 70 cents. On Android Marketplace, he would get 70 cents. On App Store he would get 70 cents.
Second of all, why? I don't know... maybe SOLELY to undercut Google, since it's THEIR app store, and they are trying to establish marketshare, and combat the (temporary) problem of how hard it is to install the app on most phones, when long term they hope to convince carriers to add their store from day 1, built into the phone, maybe even offering them 5% of sales as an incentive to do so.
Does no one remember how Amazon starting out with Kindle by insisting on $9.99 for a price point for new releases, even if they sold them at a slight loss? They did that to establish THEIR store as the predominate way to get eBooks.
Instead of wading through the Dev License you could always RTFA. Amazon can charge whatever they want, but they have to pay the dev the greater of 20% of the list price or 70% of the purchase price. So if you list your game at $5 and Amazon gives it away for free, you get 20% of list or $1. If they sell it for $5, then you get 70% of purchase or $3.50. It's not wholly unreasonable,
So if I have an app that sells for $10 on iOS, and $10 on Android Marketplace, and it becomes the BIGGEST THING OF THE YEAR (or month or minute, whatever), I'm making $7 from Apple and $7 from Google on every sale. But Amazon sees all the activity and says "well, can't get the iPhone people, but we'll show those Google folks, this is our free app for the month." Now I get $2 from Amazon, instead of $7. Yeah, sounds great.
and nothing is forcing you to sell through them.
Who said people were FORCING anybody to do anything? It was an article. It's almost like the people behind the article wanted to make sure game developers were aware of that potential situation.
PS, it's a $5 per copy difference. If you are selling 100,000 copies of a title... that's fairly MASSIVE a loss of revenue.
Chrome already has "incognito mode," so I'm not sure what more you could want from a browser if there is any concern about privacy.
Plenty! And Safari already had it's Private Browsing feature (where that idea in Chrome came from). In those modes, cookies are not saved past the current session, browser history isn't saved, your downloads history isn't preserved, etc. For me, I like those things, but my need for cookies is limited to things like Slashdot recognizing me so I am logged in all the time. I don't need ad tracking.
Why now? Because Apple just showed it works. Look, the App Store on iPhone showed that you can make people LOVE your phone MORE, while collecting 30 cents on the dollar for everything they buy, without having to make the software yourself. So now all smartphones are coming with app stores. Then Apple did the same on Mac OS X desktops and laptops. Boom, a sizable shift in app purchases, causing 30 cents on the dollar going to Apple. Same thing over at Amazon, with indie publishers getting 70 cents on the dollar when publishing through Kindle. Same thing at Android. Same thing everywhere - make it easy for people to find apps, companies will share profits with you. I hope when MS rolls out a tablet, and then has a subscription service for periodicals we don't all ask "why now?"
Nice Examples! Besides Thunderbolt, they also popularized USB, and to a certain extent Firewire (didn't take off as much, but for years it was THE way to connect a digital camcorder, on any platform). Also they changed the way people bought music (iTunes), both taking over retail sales, and getting some people BACK from piracy. They MADE MP3 players popular, and introduced the concept of apps on the same platform (iPod Touch). It's a bit less popular now, but they also introduced the concept of the 17" notebook that DIDN'T weigh and arm and a leg. There were video chat services before iChat and FaceTime, but they made it popular, well known, and in the case of built in cameras to your portable equipment mandatory. Before you tell me about some Android app, that was out before FaceTime, please ask a non-geek... they only know FaceTime.
Nice to see some cable companies waking up. It would be nice to see the TV channels wake up as well. Here's a hint: If your cable company has an app that lets you watch live TV in your house only, on an iPad or iPhone, you are PRESERVING your status quo. It's an INCENTIVE to me to NOT ditch cable. To KEEP my satellite. To CONTINUE paying $100 a month. Thanks to AirPlay, I can beam it right back onto my TV, and not worry about that one room that doesn't have wiring for satellite or a receiver sitting inside already. It's a reason to keep them, so when my wife watches those garbage reality shows, I can still be in the room watching the game, courtesy of a pair of headphones and an app that hooks into my service. Let it be like that crappy DirecTV Windows only app, too, and let me tap into my already recorded DVR programs. It's one less reason to think about trying to switch to Hulu Plus & Netflix for 1/5th the monthly cost.
The problem is the packaging for a bag of chips is bad enough without switching it into six plastic bags just so we can illustrate the point that the little bag of chips has 25 grams of fat, not 5 grams each serving. We already know most people eat the whole bag. Change the nutritional labels. Have a per-serving and per-bag column, problem solved.
Are you saying that with an Apple product, you can go find an app and install it to get functionality to work where the competition "Just Works"? That doesn't bode well for Apple.
No I'm not, sorry!.
You should try a tablet, you might be surprised how most of them work.
DrXym is complaining that iTunes can't do it when it trivially could, not that it isn't possible. To which danaris claims that there is no reason to want to do that anyway. Well, there is. Which is why those apps exist.
I guess... but that's only half true. If you have any of the apps that exist to share/store files, they can expose themselves through iTunes to allow you to move files in and out from a PC. GoodReader, for example, is a great app that does just this. So iTunes CAN do this, but Apple provides no default app to do this on the iPad itself.
2) Seriously? A $500 to $900 iPad is the portable device that's really screaming to be used to transport files from one physical place to another? Maybe a $20 USB stick or a 50 cent DVD or a $1 BluRay or a free DropBox accounts might be an efficient way to go on this one.
Yes, obviously no one will buy an iPad when all they need is a flash drive. But if you already have an iPad, it would be nice if it could obviate the need for also having a flash drive.
I just can't imagine not carrying my flash drive because I have a 10" tablet. I wouldn't loan an iPad, but would leave a flash drive in someone's computer. Also, now I need a cable. I just don't see how an iPad replaces a flash drive in any way what-so-ever, and I don't think software was the limiting factor.