You are not actually disagreeing, but just looking at different issue altogether. You're talking about Apple spending more on average for their materials than Dell/HP, which is true, but irrelevant when you're comparing hypothetical identical products to determine markup and profit.
Essentially what you have to do is look at how much it would cost Dell to make the MacBook instead and see how much less they would charge. That markup the exact amount of the so-called "Apple Tax". What you're talking about is the combination of markup AND higher materials spending, which is not the current subject. Markup is the price difference of identical products, which necessarily requires materials of the same quality.
Let's start with definitions as we use them. 1. Retail price is [Cost of Goods (COG) + Gross Margin] 2. COG traditionally is [BOM + manufacturing] 3. BOM is [component cost + vendor markup]. Apple saves here through lower vendor markups by shifting the R&D costs in-house, resulting in a lower BOM for identical hardware than a firm who outsourced development of the same hardware. 4. Gross margin is [profit + business operations + product development]
5. "Costs" are [materials + manufacturing + R&D] 6. "Overhead" is business operations (capital, HR, marketing, transactions, legal, client support, logistics, regulatory compliance, etc.)--all things to run the business independent of what is sold) 7. Of course net profit is what's left over at the end.
So now for a detailed breakdown of the original example: A. Shelf price: $125 B. BOM: $90. C. Manufacturing: $5 D. R&D: $6.25 E. Overhead: $13
F. COG: [B+C]=90+3.75 = $93.75 G. Gross margin [A-F]=125-93.75 = $31.25 H. Gross margin as percentage: 31.25/125 = 25% I. Costs: [B+C+D]=90+3.75+6.25 = $100 J. Net profit: [A-(I+E)]=125-(100+13) = $12
Sales price of $125 ($31.25[gross margin of 25%] + 93.75[COG]) Gross margin is 25%; net profit is 9.6% or $12.
-------------------- Now Apple: A. Shelf price: $137 ($12 [9%] increase) B. BOM: $80 ($10 decrease by eliminating middleman profits at ODM stage) C. Manufacturing: $3.75 [Same. Manufacturing outsourced] D. R&D: $14.25 ($8 increase due to shifting work in-house) E. Overhead: $10 ($3 decrease by business efficiency gains)
F. COG: 80+3.75= $83.75 [$10 decrease due to lower BOM] G. Gross margin: 137-83.75= $53.25 [$22 increase] H. Gross margin as percentage: 53.25/137 = ~39% I. Costs: 80+3.75+14.25 = $98 ($2 decrease due to in-house savings) J. Net profit: 137-(98+10) = $29
Net profit is $29 or 21%, an increase of $17 compared to Dell.
I would think that in terms of pure manufacturing, Apple would spend more but saves money elsewhere
Why would Apple spend more on identical-spec parts, being an ODM instead of an ODM customer? It doesn't make sense.
In terms of total cost, Apple spends more on average for higher-quality materials and lot ratings. But in terms of relative margins, Apple spends less, because the direct comparison of margins requires that you control for costs, which means that you have to compare two hypothetical products with identical specifications and materials costs and look at what the pricing differential would be.
Yes, 2-3x is an exaggeration in computers, but not in portable media players.
It's still an outrageous exaggeration. Apple's cost/revenue breakdown for the iPhone/iPod lines shows a gross margin of not more than 50%. In order for them to be priced at "double" the competition, the average gross margin on those products would have to be less than 1%. That is not the case.
No. The average I took of 20% is for the personal computer hardware industry, taken directly from Yahoo Finance. Dell's 17%, which I quoted, is only slightly below industry average, while HPQ's 23% is slightly above industry average.
Those are corporate financials, not hardware sales. Yahoo Finance figures aren't what's important--you have to compare the SEC filings. Apple's reported margins are about 40% for Mac, 30% for media, and 50% for iPod/iPhone--for an average of 41% corporate (but software sales and xServes and iPads and accessories all stand at different levels). HP's margin includes all the businesses they participate in, not just consumer PC hardware. Dell's margins include all of their businesses. Your scope of comparison is invalid.
And again, even the wrong numbers and a made-up average, the difference between 20% and 25% is 5%, which helps your argument none whatsoever.
No, I'm saying that Dell doesn't sell any consumer PC's that cost over $1000.
You are out of your flippin' mind.
Starting price: $1099: Studio 17 i5. Starting price $1299: Studio 16. Starting price $1349: Studio 17 i7. Starting price $1099: Studio XPS 9000.
Just three examples taking literally 5 seconds to find, and that's even accounting for their current sale price, as opposed to their list prices, which range from $1400-1600.
I agree with most of your points, however, I would argue that Apple probably spends more on production costs per computer than other computer makers. Apple probably uses higher quality components on average than say Dell
A 1:1 comparison requires that they be at the same grade. If you're using a grade AA panel and your competitor has order grade A, you can't draw any conclusions from it. The conceit of the simplified example is identical hardware at identical costs, because that's the only way you can compare margins.
The example at the end of my first post is perhaps complex and underexplained (in an attempt to simplify), so although it paints the general picture, it doesn't quite add up. Here's a very simple example that should more clearly illustrate the bottom line of the complexities involved:
Dell widget. Costs $75/unit, overhead of $15/unit. $100 sales price. Net profits: $10/unit (10%).
Apple. Costs $70/unit (in-house savings), overhead of $10/unit (efficiency savings). $110 sales price (modest price premium). Net profits: $30/unit (27%).
That's how Apple pulls in piles of cash. But note you have to control for costs or you can't do any sort of math, so your point, while worth noting generally, doesn't affect the outcome here.
Definitely one noticeable difference is that every one of their computers except for the cheapest MacBook uses an aluminum body which will certainly be more expensive.
There are many such touches throughout the line, but you are comparing computers with unlike supply-side costs, which you simply cannot do. Forgive the car analogy, but it's like comparing margins of an Audi and a Chevy while pretending they have equivalent materials and engineering costs.
Apple's cost savings for equivalent hardware are a result of eliminating the middleman. One of the biggest savings for them is not having to pay Microsoft (with a Windows license running 5-10% of the overall price, highly regressive on the low end, and with a large part of that price profit for Microsoft, the fact that Apple doesn't have to pay a markup to itself is a huge savings by itself, to say nothing of in-house hardware engineering and cutting out the middlemen there in many parts of that process).
Apple outsources manufacturing, but does most of its own engineering and all of its design. People talk about the big items--chipsets, CPUs, GPUs, RAM, drives, displays--coming from the same places, but forget that most of the work and cost for a computer vendor is in everything else. Where Dell's power adapters, frame and casing, trackpads, keyboards, mainboards, batteries and lots of ICs are off the shelf or reference designs, Apple does all the legwork itself and sources the actual manufacturing only. Dell has a lot of places where they're paying a supplier's margins as part of their costs). A lot of Apple's "supplier margins" go back to themselves. If you were to add in reasonable third-party margins, Apple's overall percentages would start to look a lot more like HP's.
Apple's mainboards, lots of ICs, trackpads, keyboards, batteries, power adapters, cooling systems are their own engineering and design. Most competitors have a supplier design, engineer, and produce those pieces to specified parameters, which comes with a markup Apple doesn't have to pay.
Wow. No, you're completely wrong about the difference in margins between Apple and it's competitors in terms of gross margins.
That's comical from the guy who said Apple products cost double to triple identical competing products.
I said Apple's gross hardware margin is about 40%. You say their corporate margin is 41%. How is that wrong? You claim the industry average gross margin is 20%. The documents I see show that hardware margins in financial reports is 25%--you're claiming 20%, which I suspect is a mistake on your part, confusing the electronics industry average with computing devices. Even if we were to grant your number as correct, that's only a differential of 20%. You even quoted me as saying, "Even if it were double the gross margin of their large competitors (and the difference isn't that large), it would amount to a price difference of ~25%, about one-quarter to one-eighth your claim." And that's before factoring in their lower overhead and in-house engineering at all.
How does that help you, even a little? You're still off by a factor of 4 to 8.
And your $100 analogy serves only to obfuscate and confuse.
How? Add a zero if it makes you feel better. The numbers were small for illustration. You're the one who wanted to talk in percentages of shelf price. Accommodating Apple's larger margins means an effective cap of 15% on the price premium, as illustrated. Not double. Not triple. You're deluded for defending such a claim. I thought you were just being hyperbolic, but it seems you actually believe your absurd claim.
None of their major competitors produce a consumer PC that costs over $1000. None.
Say what? You're really claiming that Dell doesn't sell anything over $1000? Get real. Dell's problem is that they subsidize their bargain-basement models with all the profits from their mid- and high-end products. If they dropped their cheapest configuration across the board, they'd close the gap between their margin and industry average (but they want the mindshare and hate not being number 1 in market share, so they're aggressively trying to get it back, at the expense of profitability).
There's no question that Apple products carry a higher average price than similar products at other companies, but it's absurd hyperbole to claim 2-3x higher, especially based on gross margin. The logic fails entirely since all of this data is part of their corporate financial reports:
Probably because Apple products are 2-3x more expensive than those of their competitors.
That would imply that, given other manufacturers having a profit margin of 1%, that Apple would have a gross profit margin of 51 to 68%. Given another manufacturer's more realistic gross margin of 25%, that would mean that Apple's profit margin would be 63%-75%. That is of course not the case.
Apple's gross margin is closer to 40% (which is indeed higher than most competitors), which means that assuming identical production costs and business costs, Apple's prices are about 15% higher as an absolute cap.
But gross margin isn't net profit, and it's net profits that are the subject of so much jealousy--gross profit less overhead, in other words. Apple does a lot of its engineering work in house (hiring an OEM to make something you designed is much cheaper than buying something someone else designed from that OEM), and a simple walk through their SEC-reported financials reveals that they also have lower per capita business costs than Dell or Acer, which amounts to a price savings--we'll say it's in the 5% ballpark (though in reality, it's probably a bit more).
That makes for an 'Apple tax' of at most 10% in shelf price--hardly "2-3x" and similar to the higher-margin premium lines at HP and Dell that subsidize their unnaturally discounted rock-bottom lines.
It's well-known that Apple's profit margins are extremely high compared to their competitors,
Even if it were double the gross margin of their large competitors (and the difference isn't that large), it would amount to a price difference of ~25%, about one-quarter to one-eighth your claim.
In other words, if a product costs Dell $100 to make and grosses 25%, with $13 overhead, net profit is $12 of the $125 sales price. The same product costs Apple $98 to make and grosses 40%, with $10 overhead, making net profits $29 of the $137 sales price. The consumer pays just about 9% more at the store (nowhere near double), but Apple ends up with more than double the profit in dollars.
The premise of your "point", such as it is, is that copyright law is insane because with a single sleight of hand you can turn something that is not copyrightable into something that is.
The premise is invalid. The volume of postings of deluded armchair lawyering, meaningless FUD, and references to a perceived "insanity" (inevitably citing examples that do not support said point) accomplish exactly one thing: distracting from the actual problem areas and totally undermining the credibility of those who advance agendas from ignorance.
"Copyright is insane because you can't copyright a gown, but if you call it art, you can" isn't even close to correct, nor is it close to a valid point. It's not pedantic, it's just calling out the obvious.
If you design an evening gown it isn't copyrightable, but if you take that same evening gown, put it on a mannequin and place it in an art gallery, it's sculpture and CAN be copyrighted.
No, it cannot.
The evening gown remains uncopyrighted. You can obtain a copyright on the selection and arrangement of mannequins and gowns, as in an exhibition, but that copyright extends only to others taking the same gowns and the same mannequins, and pairing them in the same or similar combinations and the same or similar positioning.
Anyone can continue to use the gown. You didn't discover some glaring loophole or amazing inconsistency. The designs for the dresses, and the patterns for the fabrics, can be copyrighted. The dresses cannot be. Likewise, the code for software can be copyrighted as any other text, but the functionality cannot be.
That's a perfect illustration as to why our copyright laws are retarded.
It's a perfect illustration as to why Slashdot's understanding is either hopelessly ignorant or maliciously dishonest, and why the opinions popular here amount to little in the real world.
If it is not aesthetically unique enough to be covered under copyright
There you go again. At this point, your ignorance is obviously malicious. It is unique enough for copyright protection. It's not eligible for copyright protection for a completely different reason: because it's a useful article.
and isn't functional and inventive enough to qualify for a true patent then it shouldn't be protected at all.
A nonsensical statement. A design patent isn't a utility patent. It's not patentable for novel utility because it's not a novel function, but an existing function in a novel design. A particular object may simultaneously have patent, copyright, trademark, and industrial design protection, but the rights afforded cover different aspects and apply in different scenarios.
You are quibbling over a name, not its procedure, in a poorly disguised attempt to cover your plain display of ignorance. You can think of it as a copyright for useful articles if you prefer, but it's no more a copyright than a utility patent. Because industrial design has formalities and procedures requiring prosecution (like patents and trademarks and unlike copyrights), it was placed under the charge of the office with the resources and infrastructure to do so, the US Patent and Trademark Office. If you take issue with the name, you should consider that copyright started out as royal letters patent (same as with patents), and that lexical treatment could easily have developed where the modern copyright might be known as a copy patent.
The area between copyright and patent you are referring to doesn't need to be fixed with additional IP. That gap is a feature, not a bug.
Nonsense. Bold though you may be with your ignorance, sheer will won't make it into reasoning.
Industrial design has been protected internationally longer than trademarks have and predates the Berne Convention. In other words, it's been part of the equation from the beginning of the modern age. The constraints in each area are intentionally designed, but not to foreclose protection into your fictionalized binary state. Art is copyrightable to the exclusion of physical utility, machines are patentable to the exclusion of aesthetics. Industrial design protects functional art--a separate discipline altogether.
Closing that gap with a 'design patent' only serves to hinder progress.
All you're doing is bone-headedly arguing that design patents should be converted into copyrights, thus expanding their scope and duration.
You're internally inconsistent and contrarian. Further grasping at straws won't help your position.
A car is copyrightable in the same manner in which a sculpture is.
It isn't. It is prohibited expressly in Section 101 of the Copyright Act. A car is a useful article, which is ineligible from copyright protection except to the extent the form can be separated from its medium. The body of a car has no value as an independent work of art except as a derivative one meant to invoke the car itself. This recursive nature bars copyright protection.
Salient quotes: "Copyright protection is generally not available to articles which have a utilitarian function. Examples of these types of "useful articles" would include lamps, bathroom sinks, clothing, and computer monitors. Under the Copyright Act, the only copyright protection available to these items is for "features that can be identified separately from, and are capable of existing independently of, the utilitarian aspects of the article.""
"Designs for useful articles such as vehicular bodies, wearing apparel, household appliances, and the like are not protected by copyright."
Design is not functional, it is aesthetic and aesthetics belong to copyright.
Design is often functional. The body panels of a car are industrial design--the integration of aesthetics and engineering. They are protected by industrial design registration and NOT by copyright.
If an artist would not create the work as an independent expression of creativity, but instead is applying his craft to a functional need of a useful article, then it is not a copyrightable work. Specific exceptions have been made by statute, but they are limited to isolated cases and are not generally applicable.
Your comment is an textbook case of the IP problem--ignorance of the issues that is popularly, and blindly, reinforced as a worthwhile statement.
A copyright cannot be used to protect a useful article. A patent cannot be used to protect nonfunctional aspects of an object. A trademark has limited application and cannot protect objects clearly marked as unrelated. Thus, a design patent (which is usually known as an "industrial design" in most countries and is not a patent in the ordinary sense, having different application procedures, a shorter term, and a narrower scope of protection) bridges any gap that might arise, providing protection for the nonfunctional, distinctive design of a useful object, as well as provides an alternative to seeking independent protection of individual aspects of a creation.
There is certainly some overlap with copyright, but industrial design is not copyrightable unless its form can be separated from its medium--you can't copyright a car. You can copyright photographs, drawings, paintings, sculptures, songs, and stories of the car, but the car itself needs an industrial design registration to protect. In the US, that's called a design patent.
An industrial design registration simultaneously protects creative enterprise, promotes distinctiveness of competing products, and rewards successful integration of art and science. There is little legitimate reason to be upset about having to come up with an original design, given that it is difficult to infringe accidentally.
(And FYI, it's 'something that clearly', not 'something which'.)
IANAL either, but have you ever heard of abandonment doctrine?
No, actually it is true. Abandonment requires both placement and intent to abandon. Your trash cans aren't abandoned because you leave them in the street because you have no intent to rid yourself of them. Your trash is, because protocol dictates that you place trash to be collected in appropriate containers and leave them in the street near collection day.
If you leave property in a public place, it's not assumed to be abandoned by that fact alone. It's the first fact you can use to build such a presumption, but far from the last required.
Similarly this could apply to things you leave about, however, ethics dictate that a person reasonably try to contact the original owner of such property (I would and have) to return said item.
Not just ethics, but the law of every state and nation of Western legal traditions (as well as most others). You can contact them directly if you have means to do so, or you can do it constructively by turning over the item to the police or designated state agency.
If owner not found nor seeking their property to be returned, enjoy the item.
No. If the owner is not found, after the police assume control of the item, and after the necessary period of time elapses, and if your state or country allows it, you can ask for it to be tendered to you.
I'm aware of nowhere in the world where you can just sit on an item and have it become yours, except for general exemptions in some places for found property where the owner is not known, cannot be found, AND the value is less than a minimal threshold of $20-50. This is because items of little-to-no value are more easily replaced than found by their owners, the state has little use expending more resources than it's worth to return, and agencies and prosecutors have better things to do than handle civil or criminal cases against people who pick spare change up off the sidewalk. But you better be damn sure what you pick up is close to worthless.
In US$, those prices would be $610, $738, $859 and $738, $859, $993
No, in the US, those prices would be $527, $637, $747, etc.
You can't compare a tax-inclusive price with a tax-exclusive price. You just can't. Taxes aren't set by manufacturers or vendors, and that portion of the revenue isn't kept by them. In fact, one of the many additional expenses of selling internationally is tax collection and recordkeeping for that international government--which is left for the company to pay. The government certainly doesn't include an allowance for the administrative and transactional costs of tax collection.
In other words, the tax-exclusive price in Euros just about the same as the UK markup (well under 10% for international expenses). That's far from unreasonable.
They should also look into why Apple refuses to allow people to isntall OSX on their "non Apple PCs"
They already did. It was decided in court. Did you miss the whole Psystar battle? All the armchair lawyers predicted vindication of their half-assed theories and claims...while everyone else waited with a bemused expression for the inevitable: Apple's sales model and license being upheld in court.
Both an antitrust inquiry and a lawsuit end up in the same place if they're not dismissed: federal court. But as has been said (and largely ignored) an inquiry doesn't mean that there has been an antitrust/competition law violation or even that one is suspected. It means that someone has complained and made allegations that could, if true, potentially be found to be anticompetitive.
Right now, it hasn't even been decided to open a formal inquiry. If an inquiry does happen, it doesn't mean it will be prosecuted in court. If it is prosecuted in court, it doesn't mean a violation occurred. We're about nine steps away from anyone actually demonstrating improper behavior.
A lot of fallacies are commonly used. They don't stop being fallacies, though.
In order to establish this situation as a fallacy of false choice, there needs to be a viable option outside those discussed, and the discussion must be presented as being collectively exhaustive.
Simplification for convenience doesn't always rise to the level of fallacy--propositions that have technically possible, but practically impossible, additional options aren't false choice unless the proposition forecloses other options. In other words, discussions about whether the Democrat or the Republican will win the presidency does not present a false choice unless there is a condition that there are no other candidates in existence, and not mentioning them is not the same as denying their existence.
For example, consider the response to your asking your boss for a day off: "would you prefer Friday or Monday off?" That's not a false choice fallacy. It's just a choice. Despite there being additional options in existence, and despite the fact that you might truly want Wednesday off, you have two viable options. A false choice requires that you be able to choose the unlisted alternative.
That doesn't really exist here. There is zero chance of Theora being adopted as the sole codec of HTML5. There is simultaneously a low chance that H.264 will be the sole codec, but a virtually guaranteed probability that it will be the most popular codec.
As for the matter of it being an impractical choice, there are a lot of smart coders working on making a free codec into something practical.
And those codecs might conceivably achieve hardware support in time to make them viable options for HTML6. But no achievement will make them viable for HTML5 to the exclusion of H.264 and/or Flash-native codecs.
The H.264 patents aren't software patents, so that whole argument goes out the window. They're method patents, which are valid everywhere there are patents, which is just about everywhere.
(in most of the world copyright lasts for 50 years
Where is this fantasy land? US copyright terms were expanded as a result of international treaty obligations. The Sonny Bono thing was largely superfluous, but the Berne Union, which covers most of the world (160-something out of 191 countries, in fact) requires all members to have a term of life plus 50.
before its US life+90 copyright expiration date
It's life plus 70 in the US. The life plus 50 required by international law plus the 20 year extension.
Many countries around the world also have life+70 terms (in France, it's possible to have life+100).
I get that you wanted to rant about copyright, but you display shocking ignorance of the subject worthy of being an American. Perhaps you should be locked out of the entire Internet.
The "power-efficient" Atom has a TDP of 2.5W (i.e., the same as the entire consumption of the iPad). That CPU alone, in other words, has about five times the power consumption of the entire ARM A8 SOC.
As the AC wrote, the Atom improvements are in the chipset. The old "low-power" 945-based chipsets were systems with an 11.9W TDP, while the new ones cut that way down to 5W. That is indeed a big improvement. But it's still ten times the ARM competitor. The N400 series switches to a SOC design too, but power consumption increased to 5.5W, so Intel still has a ton of work to do.
Sharing a car is still traveling by car, and teleconferencing isn't going anywhere.
But yes, there are plenty of other options, like riding a horse or building a personal hovercraft. The point remains that any of these options is an impractical mandate that 99% of people aren't going to use. For the 1% that will, more power to them.
A false choice traditionally means the preclusion of a viable option from the list, and the FSF's position is not a viable model for all applications on the web any more than their position is viable for all software development. There is certainly room for it among the other choices, but not discussing it when talking about prevailing parties isn't denying its existence. It's simply recognizing the reality that the third choices aren't viable candidates for dominance.
It's called "false choice" because the limit on the number of choices is artificial
Yeah, but in this case, it's the same "false choice" as asking someone whether they are traveling by car or taking public transit to a destination 25 miles away.
It's technically true that someone could bike or run, and some people might even advocate that biking is the "right" approach, but it's thoroughly impractical expectation that cars and public transit should shut down, and everyone should just bike.
I don't see anything in Jobs' letter that would preclude the use of free and unpatented standards in addition to, or in place of as a personal choice, but the FSF's notion that something like Theora is a practical option to the exclusion of H.264 is completely unrealistic, bordering on deluded.
I merely said that this letter from Steve was less than up front about the reasons why nobody had hardware accelerated video before April of this year. While Adobe may be "lazy" in their own rights, Apple is "lazy" too. If Apple is getting blamed for Flash's crashes, then Adobe is getting blamed for Apple's lack of hardware acceleration.
You present self-defeating arguments in this comment. The Jobs letter doesn't have anything to do with the API just released--because Flash uses a legacy codebase, it was ineligible to use modern APIs that would have provided hardware acceleration, including but not limited to the one announced a week ago. Adobe's failure to offer hardware accelerated h.264 video playback was not a criticism leveled against it. Adobe's failure to write a plugin with acceptable overall performance was, and that's got nothing to do with Apple.
H.264 video playback is hardware accelerated by all kinds of third party software products, none of which had to wait until the past two weeks to take advantage of those features, because of the OS-level Quicktime frameworks. Flash performance was equally terrible before any platform had h.264 hardware acceleration. Again I ask rhetorically, what was the hold up before? Hardware accelerated Flash is relatively new, period, and doesn't explain Flash's terrible performance relative to other platforms, all of which had the same tools available. As the blog post concludes,
"Compared to QuickTime based video playback support in Safari 4.0.x on Mac OS X 10.6.3 (or your standalone VLC/QuickTime player that is) there is still room for improvement in Flash Player."
Both the issue and the resolution are recent and merely collateral issues that have little to do with the Flash performance/hardware leveraging/battery life issue you purport to respond to.
Apple has been dragging their feet on this for much of the last decade
How so?
Citations please -- I'm not finding these benchmarks
Open Activity Monitor and see for yourself. Alternatively:
Besides, Silverlight 4 does use hardware acceleration, and does use this new API, so I'm not sure where you're getting your (mis)information. You're obviously out of date, and I'm starting to distrust the authority of your words.
Silverlight 4 was finalized in early March (before the new API was publicized) and released a week after the Apple API was announced. Unless you're suggesting that it has time-traveling capabilities, it does not use the just-publicized method. It uses the same hardware acceleration that has been available to developers for months to years--APIs that Flash could have used but for their own inaction. The real question is your apparent confusion over what's happening here, while you speak of setting the record straight.
There are three types of hardware acceleration: (1) hardware rendering (i.e. Quartz, CoreImage, CoreAnimation), (2) GPGPU acceleration of Flash functions, and (3) hardware decoder access for video playback (specifically, h.264). Adobe doesn't currently support any of them fully on the Mac.
(2) is relatively new, so no fault there. (1) has been available to developers for years in Windows, OS X, and more recently, even Linux. Adobe implemented hardware vector rendering 10.1 for Windows and finally rewrote some of the Mac v
Adobe needed API support from Apple before they could add hardware video decoding to their Flash Player.
Hardware-accelerate h.264 wasn't and isn't the reason Flash sucks.
Silverlight plays h.264 video without this magical cure-all API at a fraction of the CPU usage of Flash player. In fact, Silverlight still bests the 10.1 beta (Flash uses the newly publicized API; Silverlight does not).
you can rest assured, that now that Apple has finally provided an API for developers to use, Adobe has jumped on it,
Two things. First, that blog entry doesn't have anything to do with the new h.264 API access.
Second, notice what's buried in that blog? That it took until 10.1 to rewrite Flash in Cocoa (thus opening up to them a whole world of APIs that Flash could have been using)--and it still falls back to Carbon in most usage scenarios. Carbon was deprecated in 2004 after two years of Apple urging Adobe (and other vendors) to move to Cocoa because Carbon was a legacy platform. It's 2010 and they finally got the memo.
Until 10.1, Adobe couldn't physically use the API that you claim has been holding back Flash performance. They only wrote 10.1 because Flash's terrible performance couldn't be ignored any longer.
You say h.264 acceleration was to blame. Setting aside that your link doesn't speak to that at all, it concludes, "This is by no means panacea for all performance issues in the Flash Player. Far from it. But it is a small step to a larger goal which is to improve the experience in the browser with the ever more complex web content out there."
What was holding them up from rewriting Flash in Cocoa so it could access non-deprecated APIs the past six years? How was Microsoft able to deliver a better product without whining? Why is Silverlight's performance, lacking any hardware acceleration, still better than the hardware-accelerated Flash beta?
If Japan *were* to somehow amalgamate with the US, the 47 prefectures, each of which has a population of roughly one-third to one-half of the typical US state, would become the 51st to 97th states.
No. Japan would become the 51st state. It would be the most populous state by far, but it would remain exactly one state. Japan is a unitary government--its prefectures would not be granted independent statehood because the prefectures lack any form of sovereignty. The prefectures are wholly subordinate subdivisions and analogous to US counties.
Why is it that when people want to point out that Country X is an independent nation and not part of the USA, they always make an entire country equal to one single US state?
Because legally, it is. The US is a federal republic. The word 'state' implies sovereignty. A governmental entity lacking any sovereignty is ineligible to become a US state. A sovereign entity seeking membership would join as a single entity, regardless of its internal structure.
Likewise, if Japan were to join the EU, it would join as a single state, not as 47 prefectures.
Even if Japan were a federal system, it would still join as a single state if Japan entered the union. If, say, Wakayama seceded from Japan and asked to join the US, it would do so as a single state. Germany, itself a federal republic, exists as a single state within the EU; it divides its own national sovereignty internally, but it's Germany that joined the EU, not its 16 states individually.
Yes he did, and he's absolutely right. In print media (color or black&white) 300dpi is considered a bare minimum, yet on computer displays we get a measly 96dpi? Yuck!
Not even close to comparable.
On a four-color process, 300 dpi is about 150 ppi equivalent, which is not far from most smartphones (~160ppi) expected out of a monitor. Paper also does not have pixel bloom or pitch gaps, which even on LCDs provides natural AA, and exaggerates aliasing, respectively. Paper does have natural blending on account of its absorption and the natural adhesive/expansive properties of inks and toner.
600dpi prints are considered fairly standard, because they achieve about 300 ppi, which is smooth and crisp, and approaches the limits of what people with normal vision can resolve without putting the page up to their noses. 2400dpi prints and other extremely high-process prints exist only for the purposes of art, to ensure that you can put the print up to your nose or under a magnifying glass and still show crisp details. That's something that simply is not necessary in a display.
Higher ppi is important, and it'll happen eventually, but constructing 150 ppi and higher density displays at sizes usable on anything larger than a smartphone is currently priced out the market. Constructing 300 ppi displays is uneconomical at just about any size for consumer display devices. Camera viewfinders boasting multi-MP viewfinders in "dots" are just counting the paper way--by number of subpixels. Still, the pixel count they achieve at 1" diagonal isn't feasible at even 4".
The fact of the matter is that until consumer displays can be built at a mass market price (even for the high end niche) at 200 ppi or above, resolution-independence won't become a reality in software and content production. From there, advancing to 300 ppi (the last stop on any existing display technology) will have only technical and economic hurdles to jump. The article writer's 600 ppi pipe dream shows an extreme ignorance of physics and technology. There's no appreciable benefit to 600 ppi over 300 ppi for a display, which he might have understood better had he recognized the distinction between dpi on paper and ppi on screen.
"iPhone" is the stylised trademark representation.
No, it's just the name. If someone's last name is van Sant, and they spell it van Sant, then it's incorrect to do it any other way. Saying, "I see that your name is 'van Sant', but I'm going to call you 'Van Sant' because it makes sense in the rules of proper nouns from the perspective of a four year old" is just wrong.
E.g., "Adidas" rather than "adidas"; "Time" rather than "TIME".
Neither example fits your criterion. The formal name of the shoe company is Adidas AG (capitalized just like everyone else does); the magazine, officially Time Magazine or Time Europe, is the eponymous product of Time, Inc., a unit of Time-Warner, Inc.
I also note for other trademarks that have odd capitalisation, such as all lowercase or all uppercase, people tend to ignore these.
Since you're talking about prose and formal style, you're incorrect.
There's a difference between stylized typefaces (backwards letters, use of all caps or all lowercase, letters substituted with shapes or images, etc.) and the exact naming of a product, company, or service as specified by their press release.
You're free to ignore the oddities of logos and stylization, but it is improper to use an incorrect name when it is specified in standard text in official government registries, press releases, and other formal first- and third-party documents.
I'm not sure why an exception should be made for Apple.
None is. Professional prose writers conform to the actual name of products. It's not ignored. Intel i5 is written "i5", not 'I5' or 'I-5' or any other variation. Intel is written 'Intel' because that is the company's formal name, even though its trademark is written in an all lowercase typeface.
Then they loose: "Double crap - all our best selling authors are now publishing their own book directly on the Kindle and taking 85% of the revenue rather than the 10% we used to give them. Ingrates!"
The only "they" who stands to lose is the author. Self-publishing on Amazon gives authors 35% of net proceeds.
If Apple adopts the iTunes music and app model for eBooks, authors will keep 70% of net revenue--double what Amazon currently gives them.
Though 35% is more than the typical author's share from Amazon sales when you have a publisher, a publisher also does a lot more in terms of editing, marketing, handling all the transactional details, paying advances, arranging for distribution, securing cost discounts, and the like. An author has to compare the advance+royalties from a publisher with the prospect of earning 35% royalties and having to do essentially all the promotional work.
Amazon for its 65% cut handles the actual transactions and distribution and delivers the eyeballs. If a publisher offers 10% royalties and does all that other work, it might be a better deal, especially since only about 1/5 of titles ever even earn back their advance. You've got free money and zero costs until that point, which means that if you're offered a $5000 advance and 10% royalties on a $10 eBook from a publisher, and you don't have a pretty strong belief that you can sell at least 5000 copies while spending less than $2.50 per unit on all the things the publisher would provide for free, you'd be dumb not to take that deal.
If self-publishing meant that you could keep anywhere near 90% of the net revenue, it might be more of a threat, but at 35%, not so much. It's basically a "it's better than trying to sell this from my own website where no one will ever find it" setup--but even there, in order for Amazon to make any sense, you'd have to believe that the mere presence in Amazon's market would almost triple your sales in order to make the Amazon self-publishing a viable deal.
Slashdot Mirror
You are not actually disagreeing, but just looking at different issue altogether. You're talking about Apple spending more on average for their materials than Dell/HP, which is true, but irrelevant when you're comparing hypothetical identical products to determine markup and profit.
Essentially what you have to do is look at how much it would cost Dell to make the MacBook instead and see how much less they would charge. That markup the exact amount of the so-called "Apple Tax". What you're talking about is the combination of markup AND higher materials spending, which is not the current subject. Markup is the price difference of identical products, which necessarily requires materials of the same quality.
Let's start with definitions as we use them.
1. Retail price is [Cost of Goods (COG) + Gross Margin]
2. COG traditionally is [BOM + manufacturing]
3. BOM is [component cost + vendor markup]. Apple saves here through lower vendor markups by shifting the R&D costs in-house, resulting in a lower BOM for identical hardware than a firm who outsourced development of the same hardware.
4. Gross margin is [profit + business operations + product development]
5. "Costs" are [materials + manufacturing + R&D]
6. "Overhead" is business operations (capital, HR, marketing, transactions, legal, client support, logistics, regulatory compliance, etc.)--all things to run the business independent of what is sold)
7. Of course net profit is what's left over at the end.
So now for a detailed breakdown of the original example:
A. Shelf price: $125
B. BOM: $90.
C. Manufacturing: $5
D. R&D: $6.25
E. Overhead: $13
F. COG: [B+C]=90+3.75 = $93.75
G. Gross margin [A-F]=125-93.75 = $31.25
H. Gross margin as percentage: 31.25/125 = 25%
I. Costs: [B+C+D]=90+3.75+6.25 = $100
J. Net profit: [A-(I+E)]=125-(100+13) = $12
Sales price of $125 ($31.25[gross margin of 25%] + 93.75[COG])
Gross margin is 25%; net profit is 9.6% or $12.
--------------------
Now Apple:
A. Shelf price: $137 ($12 [9%] increase)
B. BOM: $80 ($10 decrease by eliminating middleman profits at ODM stage)
C. Manufacturing: $3.75 [Same. Manufacturing outsourced]
D. R&D: $14.25 ($8 increase due to shifting work in-house)
E. Overhead: $10 ($3 decrease by business efficiency gains)
F. COG: 80+3.75= $83.75 [$10 decrease due to lower BOM]
G. Gross margin: 137-83.75= $53.25 [$22 increase]
H. Gross margin as percentage: 53.25/137 = ~39%
I. Costs: 80+3.75+14.25 = $98 ($2 decrease due to in-house savings)
J. Net profit: 137-(98+10) = $29
Net profit is $29 or 21%, an increase of $17 compared to Dell.
I would think that in terms of pure manufacturing, Apple would spend more but saves money elsewhere
Why would Apple spend more on identical-spec parts, being an ODM instead of an ODM customer? It doesn't make sense.
In terms of total cost, Apple spends more on average for higher-quality materials and lot ratings. But in terms of relative margins, Apple spends less, because the direct comparison of margins requires that you control for costs, which means that you have to compare two hypothetical products with identical specifications and materials costs and look at what the pricing differential would be.
Yes, 2-3x is an exaggeration in computers, but not in portable media players.
It's still an outrageous exaggeration. Apple's cost/revenue breakdown for the iPhone/iPod lines shows a gross margin of not more than 50%. In order for them to be priced at "double" the competition, the average gross margin on those products would have to be less than 1%. That is not the case.
No. The average I took of 20% is for the personal computer hardware industry, taken directly from Yahoo Finance. Dell's 17%, which I quoted, is only slightly below industry average, while HPQ's 23% is slightly above industry average.
Those are corporate financials, not hardware sales. Yahoo Finance figures aren't what's important--you have to compare the SEC filings. Apple's reported margins are about 40% for Mac, 30% for media, and 50% for iPod/iPhone--for an average of 41% corporate (but software sales and xServes and iPads and accessories all stand at different levels). HP's margin includes all the businesses they participate in, not just consumer PC hardware. Dell's margins include all of their businesses. Your scope of comparison is invalid.
And again, even the wrong numbers and a made-up average, the difference between 20% and 25% is 5%, which helps your argument none whatsoever.
No, I'm saying that Dell doesn't sell any consumer PC's that cost over $1000.
You are out of your flippin' mind.
Starting price: $1099: Studio 17 i5. Starting price $1299: Studio 16. Starting price $1349: Studio 17 i7. Starting price $1099: Studio XPS 9000.
Just three examples taking literally 5 seconds to find, and that's even accounting for their current sale price, as opposed to their list prices, which range from $1400-1600.
I agree with most of your points, however, I would argue that Apple probably spends more on production costs per computer than other computer makers. Apple probably uses higher quality components on average than say Dell
A 1:1 comparison requires that they be at the same grade. If you're using a grade AA panel and your competitor has order grade A, you can't draw any conclusions from it. The conceit of the simplified example is identical hardware at identical costs, because that's the only way you can compare margins.
The example at the end of my first post is perhaps complex and underexplained (in an attempt to simplify), so although it paints the general picture, it doesn't quite add up. Here's a very simple example that should more clearly illustrate the bottom line of the complexities involved:
Dell widget. Costs $75/unit, overhead of $15/unit. $100 sales price. Net profits: $10/unit (10%).
Apple. Costs $70/unit (in-house savings), overhead of $10/unit (efficiency savings). $110 sales price (modest price premium). Net profits: $30/unit (27%).
That's how Apple pulls in piles of cash. But note you have to control for costs or you can't do any sort of math, so your point, while worth noting generally, doesn't affect the outcome here.
Definitely one noticeable difference is that every one of their computers except for the cheapest MacBook uses an aluminum body which will certainly be more expensive.
There are many such touches throughout the line, but you are comparing computers with unlike supply-side costs, which you simply cannot do. Forgive the car analogy, but it's like comparing margins of an Audi and a Chevy while pretending they have equivalent materials and engineering costs.
Apple's cost savings for equivalent hardware are a result of eliminating the middleman. One of the biggest savings for them is not having to pay Microsoft (with a Windows license running 5-10% of the overall price, highly regressive on the low end, and with a large part of that price profit for Microsoft, the fact that Apple doesn't have to pay a markup to itself is a huge savings by itself, to say nothing of in-house hardware engineering and cutting out the middlemen there in many parts of that process).
Apple outsources manufacturing, but does most of its own engineering and all of its design. People talk about the big items--chipsets, CPUs, GPUs, RAM, drives, displays--coming from the same places, but forget that most of the work and cost for a computer vendor is in everything else. Where Dell's power adapters, frame and casing, trackpads, keyboards, mainboards, batteries and lots of ICs are off the shelf or reference designs, Apple does all the legwork itself and sources the actual manufacturing only. Dell has a lot of places where they're paying a supplier's margins as part of their costs). A lot of Apple's "supplier margins" go back to themselves. If you were to add in reasonable third-party margins, Apple's overall percentages would start to look a lot more like HP's.
Apple's mainboards, lots of ICs, trackpads, keyboards, batteries, power adapters, cooling systems are their own engineering and design. Most competitors have a supplier design, engineer, and produce those pieces to specified parameters, which comes with a markup Apple doesn't have to pay.
Wow. No, you're completely wrong about the difference in margins between Apple
and it's competitors in terms of gross margins.
That's comical from the guy who said Apple products cost double to triple identical competing products.
I said Apple's gross hardware margin is about 40%. You say their corporate margin is 41%. How is that wrong? You claim the industry average gross margin is 20%. The documents I see show that hardware margins in financial reports is 25%--you're claiming 20%, which I suspect is a mistake on your part, confusing the electronics industry average with computing devices. Even if we were to grant your number as correct, that's only a differential of 20%. You even quoted me as saying, "Even if it were double the gross margin of their large competitors (and the difference isn't that large), it would amount to a price difference of ~25%, about one-quarter to one-eighth your claim." And that's before factoring in their lower overhead and in-house engineering at all.
How does that help you, even a little? You're still off by a factor of 4 to 8.
And your $100 analogy serves only to obfuscate and confuse.
How? Add a zero if it makes you feel better. The numbers were small for illustration. You're the one who wanted to talk in percentages of shelf price. Accommodating Apple's larger margins means an effective cap of 15% on the price premium, as illustrated. Not double. Not triple. You're deluded for defending such a claim. I thought you were just being hyperbolic, but it seems you actually believe your absurd claim.
None of their major competitors produce a consumer PC that costs over $1000. None.
Say what? You're really claiming that Dell doesn't sell anything over $1000? Get real. Dell's problem is that they subsidize their bargain-basement models with all the profits from their mid- and high-end products. If they dropped their cheapest configuration across the board, they'd close the gap between their margin and industry average (but they want the mindshare and hate not being number 1 in market share, so they're aggressively trying to get it back, at the expense of profitability).
There's no question that Apple products carry a higher average price than similar products at other companies, but it's absurd hyperbole to claim 2-3x higher, especially based on gross margin. The logic fails entirely since all of this data is part of their corporate financial reports:
Probably because Apple products are 2-3x more expensive than those of their competitors.
That would imply that, given other manufacturers having a profit margin of 1%, that Apple would have a gross profit margin of 51 to 68%. Given another manufacturer's more realistic gross margin of 25%, that would mean that Apple's profit margin would be 63%-75%. That is of course not the case.
Apple's gross margin is closer to 40% (which is indeed higher than most competitors), which means that assuming identical production costs and business costs, Apple's prices are about 15% higher as an absolute cap.
But gross margin isn't net profit, and it's net profits that are the subject of so much jealousy--gross profit less overhead, in other words. Apple does a lot of its engineering work in house (hiring an OEM to make something you designed is much cheaper than buying something someone else designed from that OEM), and a simple walk through their SEC-reported financials reveals that they also have lower per capita business costs than Dell or Acer, which amounts to a price savings--we'll say it's in the 5% ballpark (though in reality, it's probably a bit more).
That makes for an 'Apple tax' of at most 10% in shelf price--hardly "2-3x" and similar to the higher-margin premium lines at HP and Dell that subsidize their unnaturally discounted rock-bottom lines.
It's well-known that Apple's profit margins are extremely high compared to their competitors,
Even if it were double the gross margin of their large competitors (and the difference isn't that large), it would amount to a price difference of ~25%, about one-quarter to one-eighth your claim.
In other words, if a product costs Dell $100 to make and grosses 25%, with $13 overhead, net profit is $12 of the $125 sales price. The same product costs Apple $98 to make and grosses 40%, with $10 overhead, making net profits $29 of the $137 sales price. The consumer pays just about 9% more at the store (nowhere near double), but Apple ends up with more than double the profit in dollars.
The premise of your "point", such as it is, is that copyright law is insane because with a single sleight of hand you can turn something that is not copyrightable into something that is.
The premise is invalid. The volume of postings of deluded armchair lawyering, meaningless FUD, and references to a perceived "insanity" (inevitably citing examples that do not support said point) accomplish exactly one thing: distracting from the actual problem areas and totally undermining the credibility of those who advance agendas from ignorance.
"Copyright is insane because you can't copyright a gown, but if you call it art, you can" isn't even close to correct, nor is it close to a valid point. It's not pedantic, it's just calling out the obvious.
If you design an evening gown it isn't copyrightable, but if you take that same evening gown, put it on a mannequin and place it in an art gallery, it's sculpture and CAN be copyrighted.
No, it cannot.
The evening gown remains uncopyrighted. You can obtain a copyright on the selection and arrangement of mannequins and gowns, as in an exhibition, but that copyright extends only to others taking the same gowns and the same mannequins, and pairing them in the same or similar combinations and the same or similar positioning.
Anyone can continue to use the gown. You didn't discover some glaring loophole or amazing inconsistency. The designs for the dresses, and the patterns for the fabrics, can be copyrighted. The dresses cannot be. Likewise, the code for software can be copyrighted as any other text, but the functionality cannot be.
That's a perfect illustration as to why our copyright laws are retarded.
It's a perfect illustration as to why Slashdot's understanding is either hopelessly ignorant or maliciously dishonest, and why the opinions popular here amount to little in the real world.
If it is not aesthetically unique enough to be covered under copyright
There you go again. At this point, your ignorance is obviously malicious. It is unique enough for copyright protection. It's not eligible for copyright protection for a completely different reason: because it's a useful article.
and isn't functional and inventive enough to qualify for a true patent then it shouldn't be protected at all.
A nonsensical statement. A design patent isn't a utility patent. It's not patentable for novel utility because it's not a novel function, but an existing function in a novel design. A particular object may simultaneously have patent, copyright, trademark, and industrial design protection, but the rights afforded cover different aspects and apply in different scenarios.
You are quibbling over a name, not its procedure, in a poorly disguised attempt to cover your plain display of ignorance. You can think of it as a copyright for useful articles if you prefer, but it's no more a copyright than a utility patent. Because industrial design has formalities and procedures requiring prosecution (like patents and trademarks and unlike copyrights), it was placed under the charge of the office with the resources and infrastructure to do so, the US Patent and Trademark Office. If you take issue with the name, you should consider that copyright started out as royal letters patent (same as with patents), and that lexical treatment could easily have developed where the modern copyright might be known as a copy patent.
The area between copyright and patent you are referring to doesn't need to be fixed with additional IP. That gap is a feature, not a bug.
Nonsense. Bold though you may be with your ignorance, sheer will won't make it into reasoning.
Industrial design has been protected internationally longer than trademarks have and predates the Berne Convention. In other words, it's been part of the equation from the beginning of the modern age. The constraints in each area are intentionally designed, but not to foreclose protection into your fictionalized binary state. Art is copyrightable to the exclusion of physical utility, machines are patentable to the exclusion of aesthetics. Industrial design protects functional art--a separate discipline altogether.
Closing that gap with a 'design patent' only serves to hinder progress.
All you're doing is bone-headedly arguing that design patents should be converted into copyrights, thus expanding their scope and duration.
You're internally inconsistent and contrarian. Further grasping at straws won't help your position.
A car is copyrightable in the same manner in which a sculpture is.
It isn't. It is prohibited expressly in Section 101 of the Copyright Act. A car is a useful article, which is ineligible from copyright protection except to the extent the form can be separated from its medium. The body of a car has no value as an independent work of art except as a derivative one meant to invoke the car itself. This recursive nature bars copyright protection.
For starters, see:
http://www.bitlaw.com/copyright/unprotected.html#useful
http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl103.html
Salient quotes:
"Copyright protection is generally not available to articles which have a utilitarian function. Examples of these types of "useful articles" would include lamps, bathroom sinks, clothing, and computer monitors. Under the Copyright Act, the only copyright protection available to these items is for "features that can be identified separately from, and are capable of existing independently of, the utilitarian aspects of the article.""
"Designs for useful articles such as vehicular bodies, wearing apparel, household appliances, and the like are not protected by copyright."
Design is not functional, it is aesthetic and aesthetics belong to copyright.
Design is often functional. The body panels of a car are industrial design--the integration of aesthetics and engineering. They are protected by industrial design registration and NOT by copyright.
If an artist would not create the work as an independent expression of creativity, but instead is applying his craft to a functional need of a useful article, then it is not a copyrightable work. Specific exceptions have been made by statute, but they are limited to isolated cases and are not generally applicable.
Your comment is an textbook case of the IP problem--ignorance of the issues that is popularly, and blindly, reinforced as a worthwhile statement.
A copyright cannot be used to protect a useful article. A patent cannot be used to protect nonfunctional aspects of an object. A trademark has limited application and cannot protect objects clearly marked as unrelated. Thus, a design patent (which is usually known as an "industrial design" in most countries and is not a patent in the ordinary sense, having different application procedures, a shorter term, and a narrower scope of protection) bridges any gap that might arise, providing protection for the nonfunctional, distinctive design of a useful object, as well as provides an alternative to seeking independent protection of individual aspects of a creation.
There is certainly some overlap with copyright, but industrial design is not copyrightable unless its form can be separated from its medium--you can't copyright a car. You can copyright photographs, drawings, paintings, sculptures, songs, and stories of the car, but the car itself needs an industrial design registration to protect. In the US, that's called a design patent.
An industrial design registration simultaneously protects creative enterprise, promotes distinctiveness of competing products, and rewards successful integration of art and science. There is little legitimate reason to be upset about having to come up with an original design, given that it is difficult to infringe accidentally.
(And FYI, it's 'something that clearly', not 'something which'.)
Actually, not true.
IANAL either, but have you ever heard of abandonment doctrine?
No, actually it is true. Abandonment requires both placement and intent to abandon. Your trash cans aren't abandoned because you leave them in the street because you have no intent to rid yourself of them. Your trash is, because protocol dictates that you place trash to be collected in appropriate containers and leave them in the street near collection day.
If you leave property in a public place, it's not assumed to be abandoned by that fact alone. It's the first fact you can use to build such a presumption, but far from the last required.
Similarly this could apply to things you leave about, however, ethics dictate that a person reasonably try to contact the original owner of such property (I would and have) to return said item.
Not just ethics, but the law of every state and nation of Western legal traditions (as well as most others). You can contact them directly if you have means to do so, or you can do it constructively by turning over the item to the police or designated state agency.
If owner not found nor seeking their property to be returned, enjoy the item.
No. If the owner is not found, after the police assume control of the item, and after the necessary period of time elapses, and if your state or country allows it, you can ask for it to be tendered to you.
I'm aware of nowhere in the world where you can just sit on an item and have it become yours, except for general exemptions in some places for found property where the owner is not known, cannot be found, AND the value is less than a minimal threshold of $20-50. This is because items of little-to-no value are more easily replaced than found by their owners, the state has little use expending more resources than it's worth to return, and agencies and prosecutors have better things to do than handle civil or criminal cases against people who pick spare change up off the sidewalk. But you better be damn sure what you pick up is close to worthless.
In US$, those prices would be $610, $738, $859 and $738, $859, $993
No, in the US, those prices would be $527, $637, $747, etc.
You can't compare a tax-inclusive price with a tax-exclusive price. You just can't. Taxes aren't set by manufacturers or vendors, and that portion of the revenue isn't kept by them. In fact, one of the many additional expenses of selling internationally is tax collection and recordkeeping for that international government--which is left for the company to pay. The government certainly doesn't include an allowance for the administrative and transactional costs of tax collection.
In other words, the tax-exclusive price in Euros just about the same as the UK markup (well under 10% for international expenses). That's far from unreasonable.
They should also look into why Apple refuses to allow people to isntall OSX on their "non Apple PCs"
They already did. It was decided in court. Did you miss the whole Psystar battle? All the armchair lawyers predicted vindication of their half-assed theories and claims...while everyone else waited with a bemused expression for the inevitable: Apple's sales model and license being upheld in court.
Both an antitrust inquiry and a lawsuit end up in the same place if they're not dismissed: federal court. But as has been said (and largely ignored) an inquiry doesn't mean that there has been an antitrust/competition law violation or even that one is suspected. It means that someone has complained and made allegations that could, if true, potentially be found to be anticompetitive.
Right now, it hasn't even been decided to open a formal inquiry. If an inquiry does happen, it doesn't mean it will be prosecuted in court. If it is prosecuted in court, it doesn't mean a violation occurred. We're about nine steps away from anyone actually demonstrating improper behavior.
A lot of fallacies are commonly used. They don't stop being fallacies, though.
In order to establish this situation as a fallacy of false choice, there needs to be a viable option outside those discussed, and the discussion must be presented as being collectively exhaustive.
Simplification for convenience doesn't always rise to the level of fallacy--propositions that have technically possible, but practically impossible, additional options aren't false choice unless the proposition forecloses other options. In other words, discussions about whether the Democrat or the Republican will win the presidency does not present a false choice unless there is a condition that there are no other candidates in existence, and not mentioning them is not the same as denying their existence.
For example, consider the response to your asking your boss for a day off: "would you prefer Friday or Monday off?" That's not a false choice fallacy. It's just a choice. Despite there being additional options in existence, and despite the fact that you might truly want Wednesday off, you have two viable options. A false choice requires that you be able to choose the unlisted alternative.
That doesn't really exist here. There is zero chance of Theora being adopted as the sole codec of HTML5. There is simultaneously a low chance that H.264 will be the sole codec, but a virtually guaranteed probability that it will be the most popular codec.
As for the matter of it being an impractical choice, there are a lot of smart coders working on making a free codec into something practical.
And those codecs might conceivably achieve hardware support in time to make them viable options for HTML6. But no achievement will make them viable for HTML5 to the exclusion of H.264 and/or Flash-native codecs.
The H.264 patents aren't software patents, so that whole argument goes out the window. They're method patents, which are valid everywhere there are patents, which is just about everywhere.
(in most of the world copyright lasts for 50 years
Where is this fantasy land? US copyright terms were expanded as a result of international treaty obligations. The Sonny Bono thing was largely superfluous, but the Berne Union, which covers most of the world (160-something out of 191 countries, in fact) requires all members to have a term of life plus 50.
before its US life+90 copyright expiration date
It's life plus 70 in the US. The life plus 50 required by international law plus the 20 year extension.
Many countries around the world also have life+70 terms (in France, it's possible to have life+100).
I get that you wanted to rant about copyright, but you display shocking ignorance of the subject worthy of being an American. Perhaps you should be locked out of the entire Internet.
The "power-efficient" Atom has a TDP of 2.5W (i.e., the same as the entire consumption of the iPad). That CPU alone, in other words, has about five times the power consumption of the entire ARM A8 SOC.
As the AC wrote, the Atom improvements are in the chipset. The old "low-power" 945-based chipsets were systems with an 11.9W TDP, while the new ones cut that way down to 5W. That is indeed a big improvement. But it's still ten times the ARM competitor. The N400 series switches to a SOC design too, but power consumption increased to 5.5W, so Intel still has a ton of work to do.
Sharing a car is still traveling by car, and teleconferencing isn't going anywhere.
But yes, there are plenty of other options, like riding a horse or building a personal hovercraft. The point remains that any of these options is an impractical mandate that 99% of people aren't going to use. For the 1% that will, more power to them.
A false choice traditionally means the preclusion of a viable option from the list, and the FSF's position is not a viable model for all applications on the web any more than their position is viable for all software development. There is certainly room for it among the other choices, but not discussing it when talking about prevailing parties isn't denying its existence. It's simply recognizing the reality that the third choices aren't viable candidates for dominance.
It's called "false choice" because the limit on the number of choices is artificial
Yeah, but in this case, it's the same "false choice" as asking someone whether they are traveling by car or taking public transit to a destination 25 miles away.
It's technically true that someone could bike or run, and some people might even advocate that biking is the "right" approach, but it's thoroughly impractical expectation that cars and public transit should shut down, and everyone should just bike.
I don't see anything in Jobs' letter that would preclude the use of free and unpatented standards in addition to, or in place of as a personal choice, but the FSF's notion that something like Theora is a practical option to the exclusion of H.264 is completely unrealistic, bordering on deluded.
I merely said that this letter from Steve was less than up front about the reasons why nobody had hardware accelerated video before April of this year. While Adobe may be "lazy" in their own rights, Apple is "lazy" too. If Apple is getting blamed for Flash's crashes, then Adobe is getting blamed for Apple's lack of hardware acceleration.
You present self-defeating arguments in this comment. The Jobs letter doesn't have anything to do with the API just released--because Flash uses a legacy codebase, it was ineligible to use modern APIs that would have provided hardware acceleration, including but not limited to the one announced a week ago. Adobe's failure to offer hardware accelerated h.264 video playback was not a criticism leveled against it. Adobe's failure to write a plugin with acceptable overall performance was, and that's got nothing to do with Apple.
H.264 video playback is hardware accelerated by all kinds of third party software products, none of which had to wait until the past two weeks to take advantage of those features, because of the OS-level Quicktime frameworks. Flash performance was equally terrible before any platform had h.264 hardware acceleration. Again I ask rhetorically, what was the hold up before? Hardware accelerated Flash is relatively new, period, and doesn't explain Flash's terrible performance relative to other platforms, all of which had the same tools available. As the blog post concludes,
"Compared to QuickTime based video playback support in Safari 4.0.x on Mac OS X 10.6.3 (or your standalone VLC/QuickTime player that is) there is still room for improvement in Flash Player."
Both the issue and the resolution are recent and merely collateral issues that have little to do with the Flash performance/hardware leveraging/battery life issue you purport to respond to.
Apple has been dragging their feet on this for much of the last decade
How so?
Citations please -- I'm not finding these benchmarks
Open Activity Monitor and see for yourself. Alternatively:
http://forums.silverlight.net/forums/p/3015/10847.aspx
http://www.tobinharris.com/past/2008/8/30/performance-of-silverlight-vs-flash-vs-javascript-vs-tracemonkey/ (even using Silverlight 1.0, it was still almost 3 times faster than Flash)
http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=35496
Besides, Silverlight 4 does use hardware acceleration, and does use this new API, so I'm not sure where you're getting your (mis)information. You're obviously out of date, and I'm starting to distrust the authority of your words.
Silverlight 4 was finalized in early March (before the new API was publicized) and released a week after the Apple API was announced. Unless you're suggesting that it has time-traveling capabilities, it does not use the just-publicized method. It uses the same hardware acceleration that has been available to developers for months to years--APIs that Flash could have used but for their own inaction. The real question is your apparent confusion over what's happening here, while you speak of setting the record straight.
There are three types of hardware acceleration: (1) hardware rendering (i.e. Quartz, CoreImage, CoreAnimation), (2) GPGPU acceleration of Flash functions, and (3) hardware decoder access for video playback (specifically, h.264). Adobe doesn't currently support any of them fully on the Mac.
(2) is relatively new, so no fault there. (1) has been available to developers for years in Windows, OS X, and more recently, even Linux. Adobe implemented hardware vector rendering 10.1 for Windows and finally rewrote some of the Mac v
Adobe needed API support from Apple before they could add hardware video decoding to their Flash Player.
Hardware-accelerate h.264 wasn't and isn't the reason Flash sucks.
Silverlight plays h.264 video without this magical cure-all API at a fraction of the CPU usage of Flash player. In fact, Silverlight still bests the 10.1 beta (Flash uses the newly publicized API; Silverlight does not).
you can rest assured, that now that Apple has finally provided an API for developers to use, Adobe has jumped on it,
Two things. First, that blog entry doesn't have anything to do with the new h.264 API access.
Second, notice what's buried in that blog? That it took until 10.1 to rewrite Flash in Cocoa (thus opening up to them a whole world of APIs that Flash could have been using)--and it still falls back to Carbon in most usage scenarios. Carbon was deprecated in 2004 after two years of Apple urging Adobe (and other vendors) to move to Cocoa because Carbon was a legacy platform. It's 2010 and they finally got the memo.
Until 10.1, Adobe couldn't physically use the API that you claim has been holding back Flash performance. They only wrote 10.1 because Flash's terrible performance couldn't be ignored any longer.
You say h.264 acceleration was to blame. Setting aside that your link doesn't speak to that at all, it concludes, "This is by no means panacea for all performance issues in the Flash Player. Far from it. But it is a small step to a larger goal which is to improve the experience in the browser with the ever more complex web content out there."
What was holding them up from rewriting Flash in Cocoa so it could access non-deprecated APIs the past six years? How was Microsoft able to deliver a better product without whining? Why is Silverlight's performance, lacking any hardware acceleration, still better than the hardware-accelerated Flash beta?
If Japan *were* to somehow amalgamate with the US, the 47 prefectures, each of which has a population of roughly one-third to one-half of the typical US state, would become the 51st to 97th states.
No. Japan would become the 51st state. It would be the most populous state by far, but it would remain exactly one state. Japan is a unitary government--its prefectures would not be granted independent statehood because the prefectures lack any form of sovereignty. The prefectures are wholly subordinate subdivisions and analogous to US counties.
Why is it that when people want to point out that Country X is an independent nation and not part of the USA, they always make an entire country equal to one single US state?
Because legally, it is. The US is a federal republic. The word 'state' implies sovereignty. A governmental entity lacking any sovereignty is ineligible to become a US state. A sovereign entity seeking membership would join as a single entity, regardless of its internal structure.
Likewise, if Japan were to join the EU, it would join as a single state, not as 47 prefectures.
Even if Japan were a federal system, it would still join as a single state if Japan entered the union. If, say, Wakayama seceded from Japan and asked to join the US, it would do so as a single state. Germany, itself a federal republic, exists as a single state within the EU; it divides its own national sovereignty internally, but it's Germany that joined the EU, not its 16 states individually.
Yes he did, and he's absolutely right. In print media (color or black&white) 300dpi is considered a bare minimum, yet on computer displays we get a measly 96dpi? Yuck!
Not even close to comparable.
On a four-color process, 300 dpi is about 150 ppi equivalent, which is not far from most smartphones (~160ppi) expected out of a monitor. Paper also does not have pixel bloom or pitch gaps, which even on LCDs provides natural AA, and exaggerates aliasing, respectively. Paper does have natural blending on account of its absorption and the natural adhesive/expansive properties of inks and toner.
600dpi prints are considered fairly standard, because they achieve about 300 ppi, which is smooth and crisp, and approaches the limits of what people with normal vision can resolve without putting the page up to their noses. 2400dpi prints and other extremely high-process prints exist only for the purposes of art, to ensure that you can put the print up to your nose or under a magnifying glass and still show crisp details. That's something that simply is not necessary in a display.
Higher ppi is important, and it'll happen eventually, but constructing 150 ppi and higher density displays at sizes usable on anything larger than a smartphone is currently priced out the market. Constructing 300 ppi displays is uneconomical at just about any size for consumer display devices. Camera viewfinders boasting multi-MP viewfinders in "dots" are just counting the paper way--by number of subpixels. Still, the pixel count they achieve at 1" diagonal isn't feasible at even 4".
The fact of the matter is that until consumer displays can be built at a mass market price (even for the high end niche) at 200 ppi or above, resolution-independence won't become a reality in software and content production. From there, advancing to 300 ppi (the last stop on any existing display technology) will have only technical and economic hurdles to jump. The article writer's 600 ppi pipe dream shows an extreme ignorance of physics and technology. There's no appreciable benefit to 600 ppi over 300 ppi for a display, which he might have understood better had he recognized the distinction between dpi on paper and ppi on screen.
"iPhone" is the stylised trademark representation.
No, it's just the name. If someone's last name is van Sant, and they spell it van Sant, then it's incorrect to do it any other way. Saying, "I see that your name is 'van Sant', but I'm going to call you 'Van Sant' because it makes sense in the rules of proper nouns from the perspective of a four year old" is just wrong.
E.g., "Adidas" rather than "adidas"; "Time" rather than "TIME".
Neither example fits your criterion. The formal name of the shoe company is Adidas AG (capitalized just like everyone else does); the magazine, officially Time Magazine or Time Europe, is the eponymous product of Time, Inc., a unit of Time-Warner, Inc.
I also note for other trademarks that have odd capitalisation, such as all lowercase or all uppercase, people tend to ignore these.
Since you're talking about prose and formal style, you're incorrect.
There's a difference between stylized typefaces (backwards letters, use of all caps or all lowercase, letters substituted with shapes or images, etc.) and the exact naming of a product, company, or service as specified by their press release.
You're free to ignore the oddities of logos and stylization, but it is improper to use an incorrect name when it is specified in standard text in official government registries, press releases, and other formal first- and third-party documents.
I'm not sure why an exception should be made for Apple.
None is. Professional prose writers conform to the actual name of products. It's not ignored. Intel i5 is written "i5", not 'I5' or 'I-5' or any other variation. Intel is written 'Intel' because that is the company's formal name, even though its trademark is written in an all lowercase typeface.
Then they loose: "Double crap - all our best selling authors are now publishing their own book directly on the Kindle and taking 85% of the revenue rather than the 10% we used to give them. Ingrates!"
The only "they" who stands to lose is the author. Self-publishing on Amazon gives authors 35% of net proceeds.
If Apple adopts the iTunes music and app model for eBooks, authors will keep 70% of net revenue--double what Amazon currently gives them.
Though 35% is more than the typical author's share from Amazon sales when you have a publisher, a publisher also does a lot more in terms of editing, marketing, handling all the transactional details, paying advances, arranging for distribution, securing cost discounts, and the like. An author has to compare the advance+royalties from a publisher with the prospect of earning 35% royalties and having to do essentially all the promotional work.
Amazon for its 65% cut handles the actual transactions and distribution and delivers the eyeballs. If a publisher offers 10% royalties and does all that other work, it might be a better deal, especially since only about 1/5 of titles ever even earn back their advance. You've got free money and zero costs until that point, which means that if you're offered a $5000 advance and 10% royalties on a $10 eBook from a publisher, and you don't have a pretty strong belief that you can sell at least 5000 copies while spending less than $2.50 per unit on all the things the publisher would provide for free, you'd be dumb not to take that deal.
If self-publishing meant that you could keep anywhere near 90% of the net revenue, it might be more of a threat, but at 35%, not so much. It's basically a "it's better than trying to sell this from my own website where no one will ever find it" setup--but even there, in order for Amazon to make any sense, you'd have to believe that the mere presence in Amazon's market would almost triple your sales in order to make the Amazon self-publishing a viable deal.