Apple's warranty service left me with a broken $2000 PowerBook within 3 weeks of purchase because they refused to believe that the crack in the LCD was not user-inflicted. (For the record, it wasn't. I used to repair Toshiba and Compaq laptops for a living; I know how to handle notebooks.) They wanted $700 for the repair. It was suggested to me by the "Genius" at the local Apple Store that if I had bought AppleCare, they would send the machine for repair but they still might bill me afterward because it "appeared" to be user-inflicted damage. Amazing. I no longer own any Apple products. The PowerBook and every other Apple piece of equipment was sold on eBay during the following month. I actually got $1200 for the PowerBook. But even having sold it for that much, I was out $800, $100 more than it would have cost to have it repaired. I can't imagine any other manufacturer being that hostile towards their customers after making a $2000 purchase. Hell, most retailers take exchanges of defective items within 30 days. If I had only bought an HP laptop from Staples...
[just waiting for the Apple fanbois to mod this -1000 Troll]
This seems like just another way for Cablevision to try to force its worthless iO digital service down subscribers' throats. I would be shocked if they don't somehow tie this in to iO. It cost them so much money to implement and nobody wants it. They market it VERY aggressively. I've actually had Cablevision telephone reps outright lie to me and tell me that iO was required even for basic cable. They charge you $9.95 a month, PLUS equipment rental fees for the digital box AND the remote control. And all you get is 20 extra channels that are among the least wanted cable channels available anywhere, of course, in sterling digital quality, while your remaining channels (that you actually watch) are still in crackly, fuzzy analog. Of course, everyone I know that had iO ditched it after the first month, except for my folks who need it in order to get HD. Maybe if they didn't overcharge us for analog ($9.95 for broadcast channels plus $40 for basic cable) we might be more receptive. If you want TV out here, you either need cable or satellite. We have 3 broadcast channels in range, one of which is exclusively ATSC now, two others are Spanish-only, and the other one is home shopping. And if you rent, then Cablevision is really your only option unless you can convince your landlord to install a satellite dish on the property. Cablevision has been milking its monopoly for every last penny, and we're sick of it!
Media extenders are here and now. I would consider my Roku SoundBridge to be one, but that doesn't mean there aren't times when I wish I had a media center PC! This is just Intel marketing bull. Sad that News.com is buying into the hype. VIIV will no more kill the media center than the iPod killed radio. People have different needs and different devices meet those needs.
I was actually wondering whose idea it was, NeXT's or Sun's. Anyone happen to know which came first--NeXT.app packages or Java.jar packages? Either way, it really is handy.
Because administratively, these matters do not rise above the diocesan level. It comes down to either bad bishops or otherwise good bishops making bad decisions. There has been a lot of hysteria about this. The real facts are that there are only a handful of cases, it's not rampant as the media would have you believe. And secondly, almost all of the cases involved teenage boys, which seems to point not to pedophilia, but to homosexual attraction. Proactively preventing homosexuals from entering the seminaries will go a long way towards abating this. I personally know a priest who was defrocked and served jail time for a relationship he had with a 14-year old boy. In his case, he was involved in a relationship with the principal of his Catholic high school. He was going to be a priest, and he was told by this other priest that this is what priests do and that it was alright. When he went through seminary, there were many homosexuals, who kept things on the DL, so to speak, but it was known what was happening, and simply ignored. He understands that this was poor judgment to get involved with this boy, and he knew it was wrong, but he was conditioned to such an environment that encouraged these kinds of things.
The anti-Catholics want to have it both ways. They either label it pedophilia, when it clearly is not. These priests have been targeting teenagers, not little boys, and almost never girls. Or they do acknowledge that homosexuality is to blame, but they attribute it to celibacy and the Church's dogma against homosexual behavior and denounce the Church for not allowing priests to marry or live a homosexual lifestyle.
The enemies of the Church will spin this a million ways to try to attack it or make it conform to what they envision. The reality is, that far more children are at risk by their own families and teachers than by their parish priest. The hysteria concerning the supposed "pedophilia epidemic" is just an orchestrated attack on the Church and its steadfastness in holding to 2000+ years of Gospel teaching without flinching in the face of a sinful and disgusting world.
BASHING LINUX = always gets your modded down and you will go right to hell if you are Catholic!
actually, Linux isn't as untouchable as it used to be on./ These days, you're more likely to get modded to minus 3e45 if you dare speak something unfavorable about Apple. I watched my karma go straight from Excellent to the shitter in one week that happened to have more Apple stories than usual. The RDF is taking on a life of its own. Be careful!
IANAL, but the last time I checked, the First Amendment guaranteed freedom OF religion, not FROM. The First Amendment was not passed to guarantee atheists freedom from religion entering the public sphere, but rather in the milieu of Revolutionary America, where Baptists, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Catholics, etc., each had a large degree to do with the founding of many of the 13 Colonies (Rhode Island, for instance, being founded to escape persecution of Baptists in the Congregationalist Massachusetts colony, which itself was founded by those fleeing persecution in England), that one's religious affiliation could not be used to deny one's civil rights. Furthermore, since each state had a state church, it would guarantee that Congress would not favor one over the other, which would give certain states undue influence over others. It had nothing to do with suppressing religious speech or public display or exercise of religion. The intent was quite the opposite. In fact, before the Civil War, the Supreme Court did not get involved in religious exercise matters and let state laws prevail. It wasn't until after the War, when the judiciary took on a more activist and legislative role for itself, that this started to change. The Constitution is meaningless today thanks to the Supreme Court justices who over the last century have reinterpreted every single word to the point where it just does not have the same meaning as it did in the late 18th century.
"When you combine people and technology, you have a very powerful combination."
Dubya is amazing. Not only can he run America, export democracy to the whole world, and win elections, but he even finds time to moonlight as a Microsoft marketing writer. Wow!
Why do you people continue to misunderestimate the man! He's phenomenal!
Umm... Pornographers know they're pornographers. They're not shy about it. Have you ever stumbled across a porn site that wasn't incredibly obvious it was porn?
Failing that, you can use the erection test. If you get aroused by the content on the site, well, it's porn!
The difference is not that we Americans are anti-sex and that mainland Europeans are pro-sex. It's really more to do with the fact that most Americans are Christians who believe that sex has a purpose, whereas most continental Europeans are godless humanists who see sex as no more than a mere biological function, like peeing. You have the German and Dutch humanists and the French revolutionaries to thank for it. Unfortunately, this error has spread even to places like Italy, which used to be solidly Catholic, and nowadays, most Italians are clearly out of sync with the Vatican. I guess there's always hope with Britain and Ireland! Keep the faith, lads and lasses!
But that's okay because in 50 years it won't matter with the European birthrate being something like 0.2 children per couple because after all, sex is just exercise. They don't actually expect to have families or anything. God forbid! Europe will be an extension of the Middle East by then, given birthrates and immigration patterns. Then with Islam being the dominant cultural force, maybe we'll see a restoration of the importance of family and the proper role of sex in Europe. Maybe.
It's Apple's fault because while Microsoft will license their DRM to anybody, Apple refuses to license FairPlay and insists that their device will only work with FairPlay. They even took steps to prevent Real's Harmony from working with newer iPod firmware. Apple wants to maintain their total control over the iPod and what it can play. It's as simple as that. Do you think that Real wouldn't have licensed FairPlay if they could? Apple won't license it. Roku got Apple to certify their SoundBridge as being DAAP compatible, but they still wouldn't license FairPlay.
Face it, Apple is just as greedy, monopolistic, and evil as Microsoft, if not moreso. Hell, you can't even run Mac OS X on anything other than Mac hardware, not because it's technically impossible, but because their EULA specifically forbids it!
I have the hardest time reading Slashdot at work because the layout gets all screwed up and I often get text overwriting itself near the bottom of the page. Doesn't happen with Firefox at home, but with IE at work, it's a huge problem. Given that IE has higher market penetration and the site is supported by advertising, you would think that they'd pay more attention to making it work with IE! I mean, it's not like I even have the option of using Firefox. I don't control what goes on my company laptop!
I loved the quote from G.W. Bush: "People in India are eating McCurry sandwiches from McDonalds and buying Whirlpool appliances".
My rebuttal: "Yes, and we're buying Big Macs from Indian-owned McDonald franchises and coffee from Indian-owned 7-11 and Dunkin Donuts franchises and when we have trouble with our Whirlpool appliance, we can talk to someone in India who will repeatedly tell us to unplug it and see if it works when we plug it in again."
As if set-top boxes that receive a digital HD signal and output analog component video won't start showing up in Hong Kong. I wouldn't be surprised if Lik Sang already had some for sale!
China has no respect for copyright and is probably responsible for 99% of the piracy in the world. That's where the industry needs to direct its concern to, not your average joe consumer. Kick China out of the WTO and boycott their products until they decide they want to behave like a good world citizen!
You're right. I could have explained it a bit clearer. I was trying to make a joke, but felt a need to explain it because I thought a lot of folks wouldn't catch on. Probably the best analogy I can come up with is Mac OS X vs. Mac OS Classic. It's the successor product, and retains compatibility with its predecessor, but is based on a new kernel and primarily uses a fundamentally different API.
So, as Mac OS X suceeded Mac OS 9, so did Microsoft Windows NT 3.0 succeed Microsoft OS/2 1.3. But at its inception, Windows NT was very much Microsoft's continuation of their OS/2 development, intended to be the 3.0 release. It just took a radically different turn from IBM which was independently developing the 2.0 release, and so it became essentially a new product in its own right. It's also one of the reasons that Windows NT version numbers began with 3. It was already intended to be version 3 of OS/2, and it fit neatly with the 16-bit Windows version that was current at the time of its release, so it worked well from a marketing perspective too.
It's now called "Windows XP". You may have heard of it.
(I know, the article is about IBM OS/2, not Microsoft's. Microsoft and IBM parted ways after version 1.3, with IBM working on version 2, while Microsoft focused on building a more ambitious version 3, which eventually became Windows NT version 3. The rest is history. But yes, Windows NT in its embryonic stages was originally supposed to be Microsoft OS/2 version 3. Windows NT could still use HPFS file systems and run OS/2 binaries until, I believe, Windows 2000. Not that there were a lot of killer apps out that used the OS/2 v1.x API, but you could actually still run them on NT 3 and NT 4)..
You're simply lying. I work in a shop with dozens of these, and have never heard of this happening. Assuming you're not making the whole thing up, there are two options: 1, the unit was dropped or concussed and it was a matter of time before the crack actualized, or 2, it was a defective unit. I would bet the farm that (1) is the case, because unless there were obvious damage the store would've replaced the unit for you.
To summarize: You're a fscking liar. How pathetic.
And this is exactly the same attitude, almost word for word, actually, of what I got from the AppleStore employee. It's nice to know Apple cares so much about good customer service!
Wife has PowerBook for exactly 5 weeks, I carry it under my arm from the end table to a folding tray, maybe a 2 foot distance, holding it for all of 30 seconds, and open it, and lo and behold.. the LCD has a crack in it. Mind you, I was a laptop repair technician for many years, and I've even worked on PowerBooks. I know how to handle them. But there is apparently just a thin layer of ALUMINUM protecting the screen. It is apparently super sensitive to even the tiniest amount of pressure. I brought it to the Apple Store, and they refused to do anything to help, insisting that the damage was not covered under warranty and it would cost at least $700 to repair. This was clearly a defect unless Apple supposes that we aren't actually supposed to USE the laptop! But the MacIdiot^H^H^H^H^HGenius seemed to imply that if I had spent the extra $300+ on AppleCare, they might have been able to help me.
That day, I listed all three of our Macs and all of our accessories, including an AirPort BaseStation and two AirPort Expresses on eBay, and haven't bought any Apple product since!
And I wrote about this on some Apple message boards, and of course all of the Apple fanbois say "well, they're delicate, you have to handle them properly".. delicate isn't the word.. flimsy is better, but I say they sacrifice function for the sake of form.. Aluminum sure does look nice, but I didn't pay over $2000 for a laptop that breaks within a month from probably an ounce of pressure applied to the back of the LCD.
As opposed to overpriced hardware with overpriced software. I mean, really, who on earth charges $149 a copy for a point-release upgrade?!..besides Apple, of course!
Windows XP Service Pack 2 doesn't cost me a dime to upgrade from SP1. Mac OS X 10.4 is $149 to upgrade from 10.3. And they come out almost every single year, and they introduce incompatibilities with previous versions, forcing you to upgrade. I'm sure I'm not the only one who was forced to pay $149 to upgrade to 10.3 just to get working printer drivers because they switched printing infrastructures after 10.2!
Apple is ten times worse a customer-abuser than Microsoft. If it weren't for their underdog elitist appeal, they'd have died out long ago. They chose their niche well and they cater to it. Their business practices, however, are just as loathsome as Microsoft's, if not worse!
I switched. So did my wife and kid. Then we all switched back to Windows. It had everything to do with subpar performance of the G4 vs. a modern Athlon processor as well as Apple's complete lack of customer support for anyone with even a month-old product that doesn't buy their $300+ AppleCare extortion^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hwarranty.
double discs typically cost $20-$25. I haven't really seen a single disc retail for more than $19, but I was including double-discs because there are a lot of re-issues now that I'd like to buy that come with an extra disc or fancy packaging, and of course, none of this is truly a "bonus" because they charge more for it.. I was appalled to find Iron Maiden's "Live After Death" for $24.98 the other day. This is an album from 1985, the second disc only has 5 tracks on it (the ones that are on the double LP and cassette that wouldn't fit on a single disc), and it has a multimedia section.. big whoop.. But my only alternative is to shop around used CD dealers and hope that someone still has the re-issues from 1998 that had both discs. Real PITA!
And, ironically enough, this is to replace my lost 1998 edition! If I only had a backup...
The price of a CD retail these days is $17-$25. Ten years ago it was $13-$16, at the same time that cassettes (which cost more to produce) cost $7-$12.
I understand inflation, but I also know that the cost of manufacturing CDs has dropped considerably in the last ten years, not to mention that record companies for the most part no longer produce anything other than CDs since cassettes and vinyl have (except in some niche areas) gone by the wayside. So CD sales have increased exponentially in the last decade as CD players have become ubiquitous.
This is no more than collusive price gouging by the recording industry. This is what Congress really should be investigating. Break up the cartel!! This has to violate some kind of antitrust or RICO laws. I can't believe that an industry can collude to set artificially high prices like this and get away with it!
That's what happens when you have a product that is high on fashion and low on functionality. It's all hype. iPod sucks. I'm just waiting for the battery on my 4G to go belly-up so I can buy something else.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple's warranty service left me with a broken $2000 PowerBook within 3 weeks of purchase because they refused to believe that the crack in the LCD was not user-inflicted. (For the record, it wasn't. I used to repair Toshiba and Compaq laptops for a living; I know how to handle notebooks.) They wanted $700 for the repair. It was suggested to me by the "Genius" at the local Apple Store that if I had bought AppleCare, they would send the machine for repair but they still might bill me afterward because it "appeared" to be user-inflicted damage. Amazing. I no longer own any Apple products. The PowerBook and every other Apple piece of equipment was sold on eBay during the following month. I actually got $1200 for the PowerBook. But even having sold it for that much, I was out $800, $100 more than it would have cost to have it repaired. I can't imagine any other manufacturer being that hostile towards their customers after making a $2000 purchase. Hell, most retailers take exchanges of defective items within 30 days. If I had only bought an HP laptop from Staples...
[just waiting for the Apple fanbois to mod this -1000 Troll]
This seems like just another way for Cablevision to try to force its worthless iO digital service down subscribers' throats. I would be shocked if they don't somehow tie this in to iO. It cost them so much money to implement and nobody wants it. They market it VERY aggressively. I've actually had Cablevision telephone reps outright lie to me and tell me that iO was required even for basic cable. They charge you $9.95 a month, PLUS equipment rental fees for the digital box AND the remote control. And all you get is 20 extra channels that are among the least wanted cable channels available anywhere, of course, in sterling digital quality, while your remaining channels (that you actually watch) are still in crackly, fuzzy analog. Of course, everyone I know that had iO ditched it after the first month, except for my folks who need it in order to get HD. Maybe if they didn't overcharge us for analog ($9.95 for broadcast channels plus $40 for basic cable) we might be more receptive. If you want TV out here, you either need cable or satellite. We have 3 broadcast channels in range, one of which is exclusively ATSC now, two others are Spanish-only, and the other one is home shopping. And if you rent, then Cablevision is really your only option unless you can convince your landlord to install a satellite dish on the property. Cablevision has been milking its monopoly for every last penny, and we're sick of it!
Media extenders are here and now. I would consider my Roku SoundBridge to be one, but that doesn't mean there aren't times when I wish I had a media center PC! This is just Intel marketing bull. Sad that News.com is buying into the hype. VIIV will no more kill the media center than the iPod killed radio. People have different needs and different devices meet those needs.
I was actually wondering whose idea it was, NeXT's or Sun's. Anyone happen to know which came first--NeXT .app packages or Java .jar packages? Either way, it really is handy.
The anti-Catholics want to have it both ways. They either label it pedophilia, when it clearly is not. These priests have been targeting teenagers, not little boys, and almost never girls. Or they do acknowledge that homosexuality is to blame, but they attribute it to celibacy and the Church's dogma against homosexual behavior and denounce the Church for not allowing priests to marry or live a homosexual lifestyle.
The enemies of the Church will spin this a million ways to try to attack it or make it conform to what they envision. The reality is, that far more children are at risk by their own families and teachers than by their parish priest. The hysteria concerning the supposed "pedophilia epidemic" is just an orchestrated attack on the Church and its steadfastness in holding to 2000+ years of Gospel teaching without flinching in the face of a sinful and disgusting world.
actually, Linux isn't as untouchable as it used to be on ./ These days, you're more likely to get modded to minus 3e45 if you dare speak something unfavorable about Apple. I watched my karma go straight from Excellent to the shitter in one week that happened to have more Apple stories than usual. The RDF is taking on a life of its own. Be careful!
IANAL, but the last time I checked, the First Amendment guaranteed freedom OF religion, not FROM. The First Amendment was not passed to guarantee atheists freedom from religion entering the public sphere, but rather in the milieu of Revolutionary America, where Baptists, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Catholics, etc., each had a large degree to do with the founding of many of the 13 Colonies (Rhode Island, for instance, being founded to escape persecution of Baptists in the Congregationalist Massachusetts colony, which itself was founded by those fleeing persecution in England), that one's religious affiliation could not be used to deny one's civil rights. Furthermore, since each state had a state church, it would guarantee that Congress would not favor one over the other, which would give certain states undue influence over others. It had nothing to do with suppressing religious speech or public display or exercise of religion. The intent was quite the opposite. In fact, before the Civil War, the Supreme Court did not get involved in religious exercise matters and let state laws prevail. It wasn't until after the War, when the judiciary took on a more activist and legislative role for itself, that this started to change. The Constitution is meaningless today thanks to the Supreme Court justices who over the last century have reinterpreted every single word to the point where it just does not have the same meaning as it did in the late 18th century.
Dubya is amazing. Not only can he run America, export democracy to the whole world, and win elections, but he even finds time to moonlight as a Microsoft marketing writer. Wow!
Why do you people continue to misunderestimate the man! He's phenomenal!
Actually, it's spelled futebol in Portuguese.
Failing that, you can use the erection test. If you get aroused by the content on the site, well, it's porn!
But that's okay because in 50 years it won't matter with the European birthrate being something like 0.2 children per couple because after all, sex is just exercise. They don't actually expect to have families or anything. God forbid! Europe will be an extension of the Middle East by then, given birthrates and immigration patterns. Then with Islam being the dominant cultural force, maybe we'll see a restoration of the importance of family and the proper role of sex in Europe. Maybe.
Face it, Apple is just as greedy, monopolistic, and evil as Microsoft, if not moreso. Hell, you can't even run Mac OS X on anything other than Mac hardware, not because it's technically impossible, but because their EULA specifically forbids it!
I thought this was going to be about OS/2's HPFS! You don't see too many technical articles on OS/2 anymore... bummer! :-(
I have the hardest time reading Slashdot at work because the layout gets all screwed up and I often get text overwriting itself near the bottom of the page. Doesn't happen with Firefox at home, but with IE at work, it's a huge problem. Given that IE has higher market penetration and the site is supported by advertising, you would think that they'd pay more attention to making it work with IE! I mean, it's not like I even have the option of using Firefox. I don't control what goes on my company laptop!
My rebuttal: "Yes, and we're buying Big Macs from Indian-owned McDonald franchises and coffee from Indian-owned 7-11 and Dunkin Donuts franchises and when we have trouble with our Whirlpool appliance, we can talk to someone in India who will repeatedly tell us to unplug it and see if it works when we plug it in again."
China has no respect for copyright and is probably responsible for 99% of the piracy in the world. That's where the industry needs to direct its concern to, not your average joe consumer. Kick China out of the WTO and boycott their products until they decide they want to behave like a good world citizen!
So, as Mac OS X suceeded Mac OS 9, so did Microsoft Windows NT 3.0 succeed Microsoft OS/2 1.3. But at its inception, Windows NT was very much Microsoft's continuation of their OS/2 development, intended to be the 3.0 release. It just took a radically different turn from IBM which was independently developing the 2.0 release, and so it became essentially a new product in its own right. It's also one of the reasons that Windows NT version numbers began with 3. It was already intended to be version 3 of OS/2, and it fit neatly with the 16-bit Windows version that was current at the time of its release, so it worked well from a marketing perspective too.
(I know, the article is about IBM OS/2, not Microsoft's. Microsoft and IBM parted ways after version 1.3, with IBM working on version 2, while Microsoft focused on building a more ambitious version 3, which eventually became Windows NT version 3. The rest is history. But yes, Windows NT in its embryonic stages was originally supposed to be Microsoft OS/2 version 3. Windows NT could still use HPFS file systems and run OS/2 binaries until, I believe, Windows 2000. Not that there were a lot of killer apps out that used the OS/2 v1.x API, but you could actually still run them on NT 3 and NT 4)..
To summarize: You're a fscking liar. How pathetic.
And this is exactly the same attitude, almost word for word, actually, of what I got from the AppleStore employee. It's nice to know Apple cares so much about good customer service!
I'll add my own:
Wife has PowerBook for exactly 5 weeks, I carry it under my arm from the end table to a folding tray, maybe a 2 foot distance, holding it for all of 30 seconds, and open it, and lo and behold.. the LCD has a crack in it. Mind you, I was a laptop repair technician for many years, and I've even worked on PowerBooks. I know how to handle them. But there is apparently just a thin layer of ALUMINUM protecting the screen. It is apparently super sensitive to even the tiniest amount of pressure. I brought it to the Apple Store, and they refused to do anything to help, insisting that the damage was not covered under warranty and it would cost at least $700 to repair. This was clearly a defect unless Apple supposes that we aren't actually supposed to USE the laptop! But the MacIdiot^H^H^H^H^HGenius seemed to imply that if I had spent the extra $300+ on AppleCare, they might have been able to help me.
That day, I listed all three of our Macs and all of our accessories, including an AirPort BaseStation and two AirPort Expresses on eBay, and haven't bought any Apple product since!
And I wrote about this on some Apple message boards, and of course all of the Apple fanbois say "well, they're delicate, you have to handle them properly".. delicate isn't the word.. flimsy is better, but I say they sacrifice function for the sake of form.. Aluminum sure does look nice, but I didn't pay over $2000 for a laptop that breaks within a month from probably an ounce of pressure applied to the back of the LCD.
Windows XP Service Pack 2 doesn't cost me a dime to upgrade from SP1. Mac OS X 10.4 is $149 to upgrade from 10.3. And they come out almost every single year, and they introduce incompatibilities with previous versions, forcing you to upgrade. I'm sure I'm not the only one who was forced to pay $149 to upgrade to 10.3 just to get working printer drivers because they switched printing infrastructures after 10.2!
Apple is ten times worse a customer-abuser than Microsoft. If it weren't for their underdog elitist appeal, they'd have died out long ago. They chose their niche well and they cater to it. Their business practices, however, are just as loathsome as Microsoft's, if not worse!
I switched. So did my wife and kid. Then we all switched back to Windows. It had everything to do with subpar performance of the G4 vs. a modern Athlon processor as well as Apple's complete lack of customer support for anyone with even a month-old product that doesn't buy their $300+ AppleCare extortion^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hwarranty.
And, ironically enough, this is to replace my lost 1998 edition! If I only had a backup...
I understand inflation, but I also know that the cost of manufacturing CDs has dropped considerably in the last ten years, not to mention that record companies for the most part no longer produce anything other than CDs since cassettes and vinyl have (except in some niche areas) gone by the wayside. So CD sales have increased exponentially in the last decade as CD players have become ubiquitous.
This is no more than collusive price gouging by the recording industry. This is what Congress really should be investigating. Break up the cartel!! This has to violate some kind of antitrust or RICO laws. I can't believe that an industry can collude to set artificially high prices like this and get away with it!
That's what happens when you have a product that is high on fashion and low on functionality. It's all hype. iPod sucks. I'm just waiting for the battery on my 4G to go belly-up so I can buy something else.