Business license fees are just a naked cash grab, and you have to pay them whether you make a dime of income or not on your "business".
All licensing fees like this do is help the big guy and punish the little guy. Erecting barriers to entry makes it so the little guy can't get into the market and compete with the established players.
So two things struck me here. The first, is that $300 is not necessarily a HUGE barrier to prevent the "little guy" from entering into the market. Although, it's certainly a lot more than I paid in my jurisdiction, but if you are going to launch a serious business and $300 makes or breaks you, perhaps there were other things to keep you from competing with the established players, like a like of working capital.
The second thing is, business licenses can get revoked, as well. This can protect the REAL little guy, the guy whose not even in business, but an abused customer of a business. Is someone making $10 a month in Google Ad revenue writing a blog for fun really the same as a site the size of Slashdot, no, probably not - but this blogger doesn't have to operate as a business. Drop the ads, write for fun. Doesn't have to cost you a dime. I ran a blog for six months. Ramped up to an almost meaningless level of traffic, but still some 1000 people a day. Hosted it for free at Blogger. Cost me nothing except time to run. I actually did display ads, never really gave it much thought. Never collected a penny, either, but I think my Adwords balance is $10 or $15 now, I just never bothered giving them banking information to get paid. If I had kept it running, and been informed it was a business, I would have turned off the ads.
Considering you work in a profession which relies heavily on perfect grammar and sentence structure, I feel obliged to tell you that the phrase you're looking for is "I couldn't care less."
I'm not sure I work in an industry that relies on PERFECT grammar. I am sure I spend a little less time proofreading a comment on a web site then... say... a business document. But yeah, if this were an english class and you were my teacher, I suppose you'd have a good point. PS: I believe they could care less. It's possible they care a little about the welfare of upstart businesses in their state, just not enough to waive registration fees.
I just hope Philadelphia gets their $300 filing fee, then sees an overall loss when next year she writes off her hosting, internet connection, computer, and portions of rent, utilities, lunch meetings, travel etc.
Not sure about the portion of rent bit, since it's very difficult to write off a home office, but sure - if it's fair to have to pay a licensing fee, then it's fair to write off legitimate business expenses. If her overall due state taxes go down, who would cry about that? If she plays by the rules, she gets to use all the rules, not just the one that nets the city some cash. Does Philadelphia have a city tax, by the way? Doesn't really matter, since her deductions can count against state and federal taxes too.
Yes, but in return you got an LLC, which can have certain tax and liability advantages. She's getting nothing in return. Hobby that makes money != business.
Of course a money making venture is a business. Here's a Slashdot friendly car reference. If your hobby is restoring old cars, great. If you restore them so well that people want them, and you're suddenly selling them for more than you paid to acquire and fix them, whether or not you still consider it your hobby, that's a business.
True, but not relevant. When I formed an LLC for my consulting side practice, nobody asked me if I had clients. Presumably, they could care less. Either way, I had to pay the cost of filing.
Some still believe that it's unadulterated truth even though it's obvious that the bible is a book written by "man" for "man" to control "man"..... The whole purpose of the Catholic church is about control of the unwashed masses.
That's probably not the "whole purpose" of the Catholic church. I wouldn't know, I'm not Catholic. Southern Baptists, for example believe that The Holy Bible was written by men divinely inspired and is God's revelation of Himself to man.. Gerald Schroeder has some very interesting books attempting to bridge Science and Genesis together. Schroeder is both a Jewish theologist and teacher and physicist, although his background is a bit more weighted towards science.
Some how, I have a bad feeling I'm about to get both down modded and a bunch of flame responses. But that said, there really are a few educated spiritual people out there, you don't have to be 100% pro-science or 100% pro-religion.
To be honest, pretty much only an idiot develops for them. Especially given Apple's tendency to steal ideas out of the App store rendering the payware obsolete.
You have to admit, though, Apple's model at the very least has created some fairly successful idiots. Open and poor, closed and rich. I'd kinda lean towards the closed ecosystem right now if I had a great idea, and time/budget to create only one app for one platform. At the very least, I'd release it first on Apple, before investing energy in any of the other app stores.
How so? in order to dev for the ipad in any convincing way, i have to spend well over a thousand bucks (need something that runs OS-X). Then i have to hope that whatever i write in terms of apps catches on (and only a small percentage do), if i want to recoup my costs to some degree.
True... if you don't count the Mac Mini, the $999 MacBook, any number of refurbs, and the MacBook Pro or iMac (the latter two are over $1000, but not WELL over a thousand). But otherwise, yes, you can't buy a Mac for a grand.
Instead, yesterday i bought a pre-paid android phone for 100 euros (running android 2.1 no less). Now for just that cost, i can go and dev and play around with a nifty little android device, which in a few hours already has me convinced that apple is way behind the curve in phone-land.
So you bought a phone running an almost latest release of the OS. PS: Can it video chat with a front facing camera? Is it's screen resolution iPhone busting? Does it come with 16 or 32 gb of memory standard, and a way to use all of that memory for app storage? I have a Droid for work. It hasn't convinced me that Apple is "way behind the curve".
At 500, the ipad is overpriced, as nearly all apple stuff is (the only thing i dont find completely ridiculous in terms of price is the ipod touch, its more expensive then other 8gb mp3 players, but offers loads more functionality)
The iPod Touch costs more than other 8gb mp3 players? Sure it does. Perhaps you meant to buy a Nano for $50 less, or a Shuffle. Or did you also want apps, videos, games, movies, photos, multitasking? How can you compare an iPod Touch to any random MP3 player? Yeah, there are 8gb players for under a hundred bucks. They really are a different type of product.
How many techies actually make purchasing decisions at their workplaces? Not many. Most are made by high-up managers, under advice from sales reps.
Where on earth do you work, and can you find better? I'm not currently in a decision making role, although I have been, but I am in a role where I help gather requirements, evaluation specifications, invite vendors for product demos, work on getting evals / visiting labs / visiting and talking with other customers, review quotes, beat up reps on pricing, make a formal recommendation, and wait for my boss to get it done. We have a purchasing department... but they just purchase things they are told to. We also have a CFO, but if we're doing our diligence, and meeting our budget, he's not often overruling us.
Out of curiosity what do you find so difficult about working with NetApp hardware?
SnapMirror leaves some things to be desired, monitoring is a PITA, their web interface is CRAP, I even prefer Navisphere for friendliness. Primary deduplication is a joke, despite how many times their engineers told us "that shouldn't be possible" as we demonstrated bringing a test filer to it's knees / crashing it outright as we dealt with 1tb volumes that stored a bunch of SQL dumps that were a joke to dedupe being so similar. iSCSI performance is a joke (WAFL is great if you run a NAS, but they play in the SAN space, and WAFL really isn't helping NetApp pretend to be a block level storage provider.
Except that in the US at least, the only one of those things that use it is BluRay. Broadcast, Cable, and Satellite still use mpeg2. Even many Blu-Ray's use mpeg2.
Huh? I believe ALL of the HD offerings on DIsh and Directv are now h.264 only. For awhile, after the near completion of the migration, the NYC and LA locals remained MPEG-2, but I think even that's done. Also, uVerse is h.264. Also OTA high def. supports h.264 Wikipedia link. Don't know much about cable, to be honest, but h.264 is pretty common... everywhere. Flash videos use it, most HTML 5 videos use it, your satellite receivers use it, your MKVs use it, your BluRay's use it...
Why not? The desktop/laptop is stagnant and flat to little growth, you can see this in the way they gloss over it in their quarterly reports. The iOS is freeking rocking in money. So yeah they may have a hammer and try it out. At the very least a skin that makes the macosx look like the ios with a translation layer.
What? Stagnant and flat? Maybe overall, in the industry, but there are a couple of segments growing at the expense of the regular players, namely netbooks and... APPLE.
Q2 2010 - Apple sold 2.94 million Macintosh® computers during the quarter, representing a 33 percent unit increase over the year-ago quarter. Q1 2010 - Apple sold 3.36 million Macintosh® computers during the quarter, representing a 33 percent unit increase over the year-ago quarter. Q4 2009 - Apple sold 3.05 million Macintosh® computers during the quarter, representing a 17 percent unit increase over the year-ago quarter. Q3 2009 - Apple sold 2.6 million Macintosh® computers during the quarter, representing a four percent unit increase over the year-ago quarter. Q2 2009 - Apple sold 2.22 million Macintosh® computers during the quarter, representing a three percent unit decline from the year-ago quarter. Q1 2009 - Apple sold 2,524,000 Macintosh® computers during the quarter, representing nine percent unit growth over the year-ago quarter.
If anything, I'd say sales have picked up steam. What isn't exaggerated is the death of the desktop... people are buying netbooks, notebooks and now iPads, and eschewing the traditional computer in an office that can't move. But Apple's decline in desktop sales has been more than outweighed by sales of notebooks, iPads, iPods and iPhones. If the PC market truly begins to shrink, at the expense of a mobile device landscape whose mindshare and possibly marketshare is dominated by Apple, then I think they're happy with that. For one, it would mean they still make a hefty profit. For two, they do so WITH impressive marketshare, but just hovering at the 8-10% of the PC market. Third, if EVERYBODY continues to buy iOS devices, even as the desktop market shrinks, it stands to reason Apple's marketshare and overall volume will increase. I suspect with their margins on iMacs, MacBook Pros, iPads, iPods and iPhones, they don't really care which 3 or 4 products the consumer ends up buying.
No different than the food supplements in America. They make all these claims and then some.
Yeah, supplements that make carefully worded claims followed by disclaimers that the FDA hasn't evaluated any of those claims is TOTALLY like the North Korean government making outlandish claims.
I think his point was that competition has forced Apple to step up as opposed to merely recycling previous models (i.e. 3G, 3GS).
Yeah the 3GS and the 3.0 upgrade sucked. I mean, where's the voice control, MMS support, cut and paste, bluetooth stereo, speed increase, video recording, opengl 2, compass, I mean they just sit back and never improve the thing.
I'm not saying Android didn't force Apple to rethink a thing or two (background processes for third party devs), but it's not like the iPhone resembles the v1.0 to this day. I have a Droid through work, I'm always confused if I should open Email or Gmail, or Calendar or Corporate Calendar, and the app reviews are great since they tell me to go to droidfilez.com usually (most recent review of almost anything). Also, I enjoyed paying $20 for a third party activesync program so I could have a SIGNATURE attached to my email, and the double tap in the browser that doesn't perfectly zoom text all the time was a nice touch. Oh, and that $20 third party program - it was nice, I lost multiple Exchange account support which the built in client had, unless I switch profiles every time I want to check a new account. Oh and that Droid keyboard sucks, and the batter isn't impressive, but I can shut down the phone, put a new battery in, and then reboot if I need to. And who misses the dock connector, not like I need TV out or anything.
Android is many things, including more open for app developers, but I'll reserve final judgement until Verizon and Motorola "allow" Froyo to be released for me. At least when iOS 4 ships, my iPhone and iTouch will get it immediately. Well, I guess it will take an hour to download first.
I have an Acer Aspire Revo that is about $199 at Newegg, Bestbuy or Amazon, single core Atom, nVidia chipset. Came with XP Home, I think - never booted the hard drive. HDMI out w/ audio, I have an 8gb USB stick I boot Linux/XBMC off of, and 1080p is no problem. Haven't bothered reformatting the 160gb hard drive yet - I stream (mostly 720p) video over 802.11n with no stutter. Wired would be better for 1080p, I get some stutters sometimes with anything 9gb or higher...
All signs point to h.264 as the HTML5 video codec of choice. There's nothing non-proprietary about it. It just so happens that Apple is part-owner.
Furthermore, one of the reasons so many notable websites were able to adopt HTML5 so quickly as an option, is because most Flash video players were streaming... h.264 encoded video! Rerendering not needed. There are a few Javascripts floating around that will play your h.264 video, using HTML5 if available, Flash if not, and I saw one that would fall over backwards and try Silverlight failing the first two. I'm not sure who that ONE guy was who had no HTML5, no Flash, but a working Silverlight plugin, but I'm guessing he's not Mac fanboy.
Of course, this isn't true with iAds. How convenient...
I think it's very convienent for end users and developers, and not so much for AdMob and Google. Apple's charging a premium, a rather large one if you believe the Wall Street Journal. It would seem that if Apple takes 30% of ad revenue but charges twice as much or more, the developers still get MORE in their pocket. And from a typical end user perspective, I'd rather NO personal information get transferred. But at least by keeping only Apple and very large, pre-screened advertisers involved, I'm slightly less worried about a) my email address getting transmitted and b) that address getting sold to Joe Spammer.
PS, for me, it's all academic. If the apps good, I'll pay $1 to $10 to get an ad-free version.
No, the real reason is to control ad and app revenue. Apple now owns the ad revenue stream into their devices with iAd in 4.0 and later.
This doesn't REQUIRE developers to use it. It just provides it as an easy thing to implement. AdMob apps won't disappear overnight... except for where they find Apple pays them more and they switch out of sheer excitement.
Hmm, the Dutch had windmills for much more than a couple of years...
Yes, but if you bothered to follow the link, you'd realize we're talking about OFFSHORE wind farms, of which the Dutch have had one for less than a decade. Here's another link, for one of their sites.
Hell, in Winston-Salem, they just built a minor league baseball stadium, using mostly tax money, for a mere 30 million or so.
While I'm FAR from supporting tax-payer funded stadiums in most cases, there's a huge difference between a five hundred million park for a professional team threatening half-heartedly to move and an affordable stadium meant to lure or keep a low revenue minor league park.
Minor league teams are great for families (bring a family of four for the price of one ticket in a major league park), and it's very feasible that the tax collected over the life of that stadium will absolutely exceed 30 million. So it may very well fund a road or two. Beats another toll road every day...
After all, if that's Apple's big fear, then why do they do such a good, and constantly improving, job of supporting the very standards that "allow third parties to develop apps... and deploy them on the web..., thus bypassing the App Store and Apple's cut of the money"??? Hmm. Two ways to allow third parties to develop apps and run them on iPhones without going through the app store, one way via standards and under Apple's control, one way via a proprietary system not under Apple's control and which on the Mac for many years was a steaming pile of constantly-crashing junk. Maybe their goal is to keep crashing junk off the iPhone. Maybe their goal is to limit iPhone apps to ones that support multi-touch and do not depend on mouse-overs.
Apple doesn't care how much money they make on music|movies|tv shows|apps. If they turn a profit on it, great, but more importantly if the bulk of music|movies|tv shows|apps are purchased through iTunes for use on Apple hardware, then it helps them sell said hardware. Hey, I want to buy and watch TV on a portable media player, and sync my music, and occasionally buy an album and rent a movie... sounds like I need an iPod, iPad or iPhone. That's what they care about.
Apple wants to have a dominant market share of mobile devices. Heck, they make great money on their 10% desktop/laptop marketshare, but I'm sure they'd rather have 40% of the market and preserve their margins. On mobile, this is a strong possibility. If the primary source of third party software and services are either HTML5 based (including the local HTML apps that include sqlite DB access, etc), or the App Store, they are either in control (development kit) or capable of staying compatible (HTML5 is open, everyone can implement it).
With Flash, you could end up with apps that run better on other platforms, have features better supported on other platforms, see Flash be discontinued by Adobe, see Adobe introduce a mobile phone and kill off iPhone software, see versions come out first for Android and second on iPhone - there's a part of the control you give up. With HTML5, it's an open spec and Apple gets to implement it - if they fall behind, it's on them, not because of some third party that updates for the iPhone a bit slow/buggy/never. With the App Store and the native SDK, there's even less fear - they only have to offer compelling features that keep the users wanting more, and the developers will fall in line because that's where the HUGE majority of the money in phone apps lies right now. People bitch left and right about the policies, but at the end of the day, if you want to make a few hundred thousand dollars selling Apps, chances are your best bet is iPhone development.
Imagine if the Flash to iPhone App shipped, and then six months from now there were a dozen really popular apps - but on the iPhone a few features were missing because not every feature was supported in the CS5 Flash compiler, but if you play it on the web or through your Android you had full functionality. That's one big reason Apple is against it.
One can play 720@24p videos on an old AMD XP series chip with ffmpeg and it's not even really the fastest H.264 decoder around.
I have a $199 Acer Revo running a 1.6GHz single core Atom hooked up via HDMI to my TV. It streams 1080p over 802.11n from a server upstairs, h.264 encoded via XBMC on Linux booted off a USB flash drive. So, I have far from the fastest machine, far from the fastest networking and far from having paid $1 for any h.264 decoding and it works just fine. Slow, unwieldy and CPU intensive it is not.
Slashdot Mirror
Business license fees are just a naked cash grab, and you have to pay them whether you make a dime of income or not on your "business". All licensing fees like this do is help the big guy and punish the little guy. Erecting barriers to entry makes it so the little guy can't get into the market and compete with the established players.
So two things struck me here. The first, is that $300 is not necessarily a HUGE barrier to prevent the "little guy" from entering into the market. Although, it's certainly a lot more than I paid in my jurisdiction, but if you are going to launch a serious business and $300 makes or breaks you, perhaps there were other things to keep you from competing with the established players, like a like of working capital.
The second thing is, business licenses can get revoked, as well. This can protect the REAL little guy, the guy whose not even in business, but an abused customer of a business. Is someone making $10 a month in Google Ad revenue writing a blog for fun really the same as a site the size of Slashdot, no, probably not - but this blogger doesn't have to operate as a business. Drop the ads, write for fun. Doesn't have to cost you a dime. I ran a blog for six months. Ramped up to an almost meaningless level of traffic, but still some 1000 people a day. Hosted it for free at Blogger. Cost me nothing except time to run. I actually did display ads, never really gave it much thought. Never collected a penny, either, but I think my Adwords balance is $10 or $15 now, I just never bothered giving them banking information to get paid. If I had kept it running, and been informed it was a business, I would have turned off the ads.
Considering you work in a profession which relies heavily on perfect grammar and sentence structure, I feel obliged to tell you that the phrase you're looking for is "I couldn't care less."
I'm not sure I work in an industry that relies on PERFECT grammar. I am sure I spend a little less time proofreading a comment on a web site then... say... a business document. But yeah, if this were an english class and you were my teacher, I suppose you'd have a good point. PS: I believe they could care less. It's possible they care a little about the welfare of upstart businesses in their state, just not enough to waive registration fees.
I just hope Philadelphia gets their $300 filing fee, then sees an overall loss when next year she writes off her hosting, internet connection, computer, and portions of rent, utilities, lunch meetings, travel etc.
Not sure about the portion of rent bit, since it's very difficult to write off a home office, but sure - if it's fair to have to pay a licensing fee, then it's fair to write off legitimate business expenses. If her overall due state taxes go down, who would cry about that? If she plays by the rules, she gets to use all the rules, not just the one that nets the city some cash. Does Philadelphia have a city tax, by the way? Doesn't really matter, since her deductions can count against state and federal taxes too.
Yes, but in return you got an LLC, which can have certain tax and liability advantages. She's getting nothing in return. Hobby that makes money != business.
Of course a money making venture is a business. Here's a Slashdot friendly car reference. If your hobby is restoring old cars, great. If you restore them so well that people want them, and you're suddenly selling them for more than you paid to acquire and fix them, whether or not you still consider it your hobby, that's a business.
Net Income != Profits.
True, but not relevant. When I formed an LLC for my consulting side practice, nobody asked me if I had clients. Presumably, they could care less. Either way, I had to pay the cost of filing.
Some still believe that it's unadulterated truth even though it's obvious that the bible is a book written by "man" for "man" to control "man"..... The whole purpose of the Catholic church is about control of the unwashed masses.
That's probably not the "whole purpose" of the Catholic church. I wouldn't know, I'm not Catholic. Southern Baptists, for example believe that The Holy Bible was written by men divinely inspired and is God's revelation of Himself to man.. Gerald Schroeder has some very interesting books attempting to bridge Science and Genesis together. Schroeder is both a Jewish theologist and teacher and physicist, although his background is a bit more weighted towards science.
Some how, I have a bad feeling I'm about to get both down modded and a bunch of flame responses. But that said, there really are a few educated spiritual people out there, you don't have to be 100% pro-science or 100% pro-religion.
To be honest, pretty much only an idiot develops for them. Especially given Apple's tendency to steal ideas out of the App store rendering the payware obsolete.
You have to admit, though, Apple's model at the very least has created some fairly successful idiots. Open and poor, closed and rich. I'd kinda lean towards the closed ecosystem right now if I had a great idea, and time/budget to create only one app for one platform. At the very least, I'd release it first on Apple, before investing energy in any of the other app stores.
How so? in order to dev for the ipad in any convincing way, i have to spend well over a thousand bucks (need something that runs OS-X). Then i have to hope that whatever i write in terms of apps catches on (and only a small percentage do), if i want to recoup my costs to some degree.
True... if you don't count the Mac Mini, the $999 MacBook, any number of refurbs, and the MacBook Pro or iMac (the latter two are over $1000, but not WELL over a thousand). But otherwise, yes, you can't buy a Mac for a grand.
Instead, yesterday i bought a pre-paid android phone for 100 euros (running android 2.1 no less). Now for just that cost, i can go and dev and play around with a nifty little android device, which in a few hours already has me convinced that apple is way behind the curve in phone-land.
So you bought a phone running an almost latest release of the OS. PS: Can it video chat with a front facing camera? Is it's screen resolution iPhone busting? Does it come with 16 or 32 gb of memory standard, and a way to use all of that memory for app storage? I have a Droid for work. It hasn't convinced me that Apple is "way behind the curve".
At 500, the ipad is overpriced, as nearly all apple stuff is (the only thing i dont find completely ridiculous in terms of price is the ipod touch, its more expensive then other 8gb mp3 players, but offers loads more functionality)
The iPod Touch costs more than other 8gb mp3 players? Sure it does. Perhaps you meant to buy a Nano for $50 less, or a Shuffle. Or did you also want apps, videos, games, movies, photos, multitasking? How can you compare an iPod Touch to any random MP3 player? Yeah, there are 8gb players for under a hundred bucks. They really are a different type of product.
Good thing it's an Outlook comment. If it were for Slashdot, we might never see any comments posted!
The least they should do is offer people a phone with the problem fixed or a full refund.
iPhone Return Policy. Yeah, if only they offered a refund. Oh... wait.
How many techies actually make purchasing decisions at their workplaces? Not many. Most are made by high-up managers, under advice from sales reps.
Where on earth do you work, and can you find better? I'm not currently in a decision making role, although I have been, but I am in a role where I help gather requirements, evaluation specifications, invite vendors for product demos, work on getting evals / visiting labs / visiting and talking with other customers, review quotes, beat up reps on pricing, make a formal recommendation, and wait for my boss to get it done. We have a purchasing department... but they just purchase things they are told to. We also have a CFO, but if we're doing our diligence, and meeting our budget, he's not often overruling us.
Out of curiosity what do you find so difficult about working with NetApp hardware?
SnapMirror leaves some things to be desired, monitoring is a PITA, their web interface is CRAP, I even prefer Navisphere for friendliness. Primary deduplication is a joke, despite how many times their engineers told us "that shouldn't be possible" as we demonstrated bringing a test filer to it's knees / crashing it outright as we dealt with 1tb volumes that stored a bunch of SQL dumps that were a joke to dedupe being so similar. iSCSI performance is a joke (WAFL is great if you run a NAS, but they play in the SAN space, and WAFL really isn't helping NetApp pretend to be a block level storage provider.
Except that in the US at least, the only one of those things that use it is BluRay. Broadcast, Cable, and Satellite still use mpeg2. Even many Blu-Ray's use mpeg2.
Huh? I believe ALL of the HD offerings on DIsh and Directv are now h.264 only. For awhile, after the near completion of the migration, the NYC and LA locals remained MPEG-2, but I think even that's done. Also, uVerse is h.264. Also OTA high def. supports h.264 Wikipedia link. Don't know much about cable, to be honest, but h.264 is pretty common... everywhere. Flash videos use it, most HTML 5 videos use it, your satellite receivers use it, your MKVs use it, your BluRay's use it...
Why not? The desktop/laptop is stagnant and flat to little growth, you can see this in the way they gloss over it in their quarterly reports. The iOS is freeking rocking in money. So yeah they may have a hammer and try it out. At the very least a skin that makes the macosx look like the ios with a translation layer.
What? Stagnant and flat? Maybe overall, in the industry, but there are a couple of segments growing at the expense of the regular players, namely netbooks and... APPLE.
Q2 2010 - Apple sold 2.94 million Macintosh® computers during the quarter, representing a 33 percent unit increase over the year-ago quarter.
Q1 2010 - Apple sold 3.36 million Macintosh® computers during the quarter, representing a 33 percent unit increase over the year-ago quarter.
Q4 2009 - Apple sold 3.05 million Macintosh® computers during the quarter, representing a 17 percent unit increase over the year-ago quarter.
Q3 2009 - Apple sold 2.6 million Macintosh® computers during the quarter, representing a four percent unit increase over the year-ago quarter.
Q2 2009 - Apple sold 2.22 million Macintosh® computers during the quarter, representing a three percent unit decline from the year-ago quarter.
Q1 2009 - Apple sold 2,524,000 Macintosh® computers during the quarter, representing nine percent unit growth over the year-ago quarter.
If anything, I'd say sales have picked up steam. What isn't exaggerated is the death of the desktop... people are buying netbooks, notebooks and now iPads, and eschewing the traditional computer in an office that can't move. But Apple's decline in desktop sales has been more than outweighed by sales of notebooks, iPads, iPods and iPhones. If the PC market truly begins to shrink, at the expense of a mobile device landscape whose mindshare and possibly marketshare is dominated by Apple, then I think they're happy with that. For one, it would mean they still make a hefty profit. For two, they do so WITH impressive marketshare, but just hovering at the 8-10% of the PC market. Third, if EVERYBODY continues to buy iOS devices, even as the desktop market shrinks, it stands to reason Apple's marketshare and overall volume will increase. I suspect with their margins on iMacs, MacBook Pros, iPads, iPods and iPhones, they don't really care which 3 or 4 products the consumer ends up buying.
Wouldn't you love to have their problem?
Or have a good home theater that uses the sound to put you into the stadium =)
In Soviet Russia, stadium puts sound in you!
No different than the food supplements in America. They make all these claims and then some.
Yeah, supplements that make carefully worded claims followed by disclaimers that the FDA hasn't evaluated any of those claims is TOTALLY like the North Korean government making outlandish claims.
I think his point was that competition has forced Apple to step up as opposed to merely recycling previous models (i.e. 3G, 3GS).
Yeah the 3GS and the 3.0 upgrade sucked. I mean, where's the voice control, MMS support, cut and paste, bluetooth stereo, speed increase, video recording, opengl 2, compass, I mean they just sit back and never improve the thing.
I'm not saying Android didn't force Apple to rethink a thing or two (background processes for third party devs), but it's not like the iPhone resembles the v1.0 to this day. I have a Droid through work, I'm always confused if I should open Email or Gmail, or Calendar or Corporate Calendar, and the app reviews are great since they tell me to go to droidfilez.com usually (most recent review of almost anything). Also, I enjoyed paying $20 for a third party activesync program so I could have a SIGNATURE attached to my email, and the double tap in the browser that doesn't perfectly zoom text all the time was a nice touch. Oh, and that $20 third party program - it was nice, I lost multiple Exchange account support which the built in client had, unless I switch profiles every time I want to check a new account. Oh and that Droid keyboard sucks, and the batter isn't impressive, but I can shut down the phone, put a new battery in, and then reboot if I need to. And who misses the dock connector, not like I need TV out or anything.
Android is many things, including more open for app developers, but I'll reserve final judgement until Verizon and Motorola "allow" Froyo to be released for me. At least when iOS 4 ships, my iPhone and iTouch will get it immediately. Well, I guess it will take an hour to download first.
I have an Acer Aspire Revo that is about $199 at Newegg, Bestbuy or Amazon, single core Atom, nVidia chipset. Came with XP Home, I think - never booted the hard drive. HDMI out w/ audio, I have an 8gb USB stick I boot Linux/XBMC off of, and 1080p is no problem. Haven't bothered reformatting the 160gb hard drive yet - I stream (mostly 720p) video over 802.11n with no stutter. Wired would be better for 1080p, I get some stutters sometimes with anything 9gb or higher...
All signs point to h.264 as the HTML5 video codec of choice. There's nothing non-proprietary about it. It just so happens that Apple is part-owner.
Furthermore, one of the reasons so many notable websites were able to adopt HTML5 so quickly as an option, is because most Flash video players were streaming... h.264 encoded video! Rerendering not needed. There are a few Javascripts floating around that will play your h.264 video, using HTML5 if available, Flash if not, and I saw one that would fall over backwards and try Silverlight failing the first two. I'm not sure who that ONE guy was who had no HTML5, no Flash, but a working Silverlight plugin, but I'm guessing he's not Mac fanboy.
Of course, this isn't true with iAds. How convenient...
I think it's very convienent for end users and developers, and not so much for AdMob and Google. Apple's charging a premium, a rather large one if you believe the Wall Street Journal. It would seem that if Apple takes 30% of ad revenue but charges twice as much or more, the developers still get MORE in their pocket. And from a typical end user perspective, I'd rather NO personal information get transferred. But at least by keeping only Apple and very large, pre-screened advertisers involved, I'm slightly less worried about a) my email address getting transmitted and b) that address getting sold to Joe Spammer.
PS, for me, it's all academic. If the apps good, I'll pay $1 to $10 to get an ad-free version.
No, the real reason is to control ad and app revenue. Apple now owns the ad revenue stream into their devices with iAd in 4.0 and later.
This doesn't REQUIRE developers to use it. It just provides it as an easy thing to implement. AdMob apps won't disappear overnight... except for where they find Apple pays them more and they switch out of sheer excitement.
Hmm, the Dutch had windmills for much more than a couple of years...
Yes, but if you bothered to follow the link, you'd realize we're talking about OFFSHORE wind farms, of which the Dutch have had one for less than a decade. Here's another link, for one of their sites.
Hell, in Winston-Salem, they just built a minor league baseball stadium, using mostly tax money, for a mere 30 million or so.
While I'm FAR from supporting tax-payer funded stadiums in most cases, there's a huge difference between a five hundred million park for a professional team threatening half-heartedly to move and an affordable stadium meant to lure or keep a low revenue minor league park.
Minor league teams are great for families (bring a family of four for the price of one ticket in a major league park), and it's very feasible that the tax collected over the life of that stadium will absolutely exceed 30 million. So it may very well fund a road or two. Beats another toll road every day...
After all, if that's Apple's big fear, then why do they do such a good, and constantly improving, job of supporting the very standards that "allow third parties to develop apps ... and deploy them on the web..., thus bypassing the App Store and Apple's cut of the money"??? Hmm. Two ways to allow third parties to develop apps and run them on iPhones without going through the app store, one way via standards and under Apple's control, one way via a proprietary system not under Apple's control and which on the Mac for many years was a steaming pile of constantly-crashing junk. Maybe their goal is to keep crashing junk off the iPhone. Maybe their goal is to limit iPhone apps to ones that support multi-touch and do not depend on mouse-overs.
Apple doesn't care how much money they make on music|movies|tv shows|apps. If they turn a profit on it, great, but more importantly if the bulk of music|movies|tv shows|apps are purchased through iTunes for use on Apple hardware, then it helps them sell said hardware. Hey, I want to buy and watch TV on a portable media player, and sync my music, and occasionally buy an album and rent a movie... sounds like I need an iPod, iPad or iPhone. That's what they care about.
Apple wants to have a dominant market share of mobile devices. Heck, they make great money on their 10% desktop/laptop marketshare, but I'm sure they'd rather have 40% of the market and preserve their margins. On mobile, this is a strong possibility. If the primary source of third party software and services are either HTML5 based (including the local HTML apps that include sqlite DB access, etc), or the App Store, they are either in control (development kit) or capable of staying compatible (HTML5 is open, everyone can implement it).
With Flash, you could end up with apps that run better on other platforms, have features better supported on other platforms, see Flash be discontinued by Adobe, see Adobe introduce a mobile phone and kill off iPhone software, see versions come out first for Android and second on iPhone - there's a part of the control you give up. With HTML5, it's an open spec and Apple gets to implement it - if they fall behind, it's on them, not because of some third party that updates for the iPhone a bit slow/buggy/never. With the App Store and the native SDK, there's even less fear - they only have to offer compelling features that keep the users wanting more, and the developers will fall in line because that's where the HUGE majority of the money in phone apps lies right now. People bitch left and right about the policies, but at the end of the day, if you want to make a few hundred thousand dollars selling Apps, chances are your best bet is iPhone development.
Imagine if the Flash to iPhone App shipped, and then six months from now there were a dozen really popular apps - but on the iPhone a few features were missing because not every feature was supported in the CS5 Flash compiler, but if you play it on the web or through your Android you had full functionality. That's one big reason Apple is against it.
It's slow, unwieldy, CPU intensive
One can play 720@24p videos on an old AMD XP series chip with ffmpeg and it's not even really the fastest H.264 decoder around.
I have a $199 Acer Revo running a 1.6GHz single core Atom hooked up via HDMI to my TV. It streams 1080p over 802.11n from a server upstairs, h.264 encoded via XBMC on Linux booted off a USB flash drive. So, I have far from the fastest machine, far from the fastest networking and far from having paid $1 for any h.264 decoding and it works just fine. Slow, unwieldy and CPU intensive it is not.