maestro64

Wow, this one brought out everyone, have not seen a thread this long in long time.

BTW, I was at the Apple store yesterday 1/1 getting my battery replace on my 6S (work Phone) 18 months old, for the last month the battery was dead by noon each day with light usage and supposed 89% life on the battery. Went to schedule an appointment last week and all the store with in 50 miles were booked through the 1st for in store support. When I call apple support they confirm as long as I book the appointment for the repair before 12/31 the store would still honor the discounted replacement. 

Get to the store the story there was completely different, they refuse to honor the discount replacement, did not even want to talk about, refuse to call Apple online support to see what they were telling people, there were two other people at my table who were told the exact same thing. They made us all pay the full price. But they were more than happy to talk to us about trading in our old phone for a brand new one. Not sure how many time they reference trading in the phone. 

After that experience I believe all the employees at the store were told no not talk about the battery replacement and push people to trade in their old phones.

I have to say this was the worse Apple experience I had. If this is the game they are going to play this is not going to go well for Apple.

it is now coming down to software optimization. pure processor power is not enough, unless the underlining code is optimize around the processor users will never see the performance. Even though the benchmarks try to work directly with the processor they can not they still have to interface with the operating system to execute code on the processor. The only way to eliminate the operating systems is to remove and replace it with the benchmark software which we know is not happening.

This is why Apple has the advantage and will always have the advantage. Google can not optimize their software to work with all the versions of processors.

I am no Goldman Sachs fan by any measure, but I am far less a fan of Citibank. This company looks for any way to extract interest out of you. This is old, but relevant. 

Back in the day before you could make electronic payments, we use to have Citibank for our American Airline CC. My wife used it all the time for work travel so we always paid it off. All of a sudden we started get hit with interest even though we paid in full. Call them up ask why, they said the payment was late, like by a day and some times longer depending which day in the week the due date fell. Even though we always paid the bill ~3 days before it was due, i.e. dropped it in the mail at the post office, just like all our other CC and bills. For some reason Citibank was the only one arriving late. 

What I eventually figure out, Citibank did not consider it paid until they deposited your check, so if the due date was Saturday and they did not deposit it Friday when the payment arrived and deposited it Monday you got nails for 2 days of interest, plus of the entire next billing cycle you were charge interest for the average daily balance. So we backup the payment day to 5 days or made sure if would arrive 2 days prior to a weekend due date. But the problem persisted, I complained to them and informed them US law considers a bill paid based on the post mark on the envelop not when it arrives at their processing facility (since US mail at the time could be delayed for lots of reason consumers were not to be penalize for late payment if it was post marked prior to the payment due date). When I ask them to what the post mark was on the envelop they claim they did not have it as far as they were concern it was late. At this point I dumped them as CC company and never looked back. 

I had second run in with them which I had not choice in. I had Employee Stock Purchase Plan with a company I worked at and Smith Barney was the holding company for the stock and Citibank bought them a few years into the plan. Once Citibank took over, it took forever to get my money when I sold stock. Smith Barney use to allow electronic deposit of funds at no cost, when Citibank took over, they would charge you $50 to do deposit wire transfer. When you are only making sometimes a few hundred on a ESPP transaction it was not worth giving Citibank $50, so they would mail you a check. Those check would take 2 to 3 weeks to get, even though it only takes 3 days to clear the stock transaction. I caught them sitting on the check, they used a stamping machine and it dates the envelop when they put on the stamp. Many times the envelops were stamped 3 to 4 days after the sale as you would expect, but the check would not arrive for a week or two later. When called on this they blamed the post office. 

Citibank most likely passed on the deal because Apple would have held them to a higher standard, and Apple would encourage people to pay off the card.  

First this is nothing new this kind of scams with moving has been going for a very long time. 

The first problem the military does not give people a whole lot of money to move so they look for the lowest cost company to move their stuff. Right there you know you are going to have problems. Most of these no name moving companies are shady at best. I have moved many times in my career and twice across the entire country and never had a single issue and had no damage. But I used United Van Lines every single time. They were not cheap but most times it was covered in a relocation package I negotiated, even if it wasn't I found ways to cut the costs such as packing most of our stuff and just have them load the truck.

I had person who work for me and we relocated them and gave nice relocation package. The person decided to go the cheap route and pocket some of the relocation money since we pay it in a lump sum. Well it ended up costing more than what was given to them. The moving company showed up right on time picking everything up, and it was on the delivery end where they pull all the scams. The move company first say the truck broke down, then had to move everything off that truck onto another truck at their warehouse, then could not find a crew to deliver it and it could be weeks before they could arrange delivery and the excuses stacked up. They final got the person to pay more to have the truck come to new house. When the truck showed up they refused to unload it unless the person paid more. The person who worked for me even had the police there when moving company arrived since they were afraid something like this would happen. Turns out the police said there was nothing they could do since no laws were broken all they could do was once the moving company was paid Cash they made sure the truck was unloaded. 

I will tell you either move yourself or hire one of the major moving companies, anything in the middle is going to be problems. It could be as simple as broken furniture or a loss items, to the major horror stories of all your stuff being stolen or held for ransom.

The other part of the problem is the Military does not help their own people. I think if a Military Brass called up this company and had few choose words with them they would be more than happy to make sure Military personal stuff showed up where it is needed and when it was needed.

Just wait until these third party app stores realize the cost to run a store and charge developer same fee to cover those costs. No one is going do it for free.

eightzero said:

You can always go to a different lawyer that works for less. Just like you can go to the other App store to sell apps for the Apple products they are designed for. Right?

Actually, I do not believe they are allowed to accepted less. You can pay by the hour, and you get all the winnings, or if the lawyer is working on contingency meaning they assuming all the costs to fight the case you have to pay the 30%, this fee is set by the courts. The hourly rate is the only thing you can negotiate or is different from lawyer to lawyer. 

I work in corporate American and been involved in lawsuits between companies these are never contingency, companies never want to share the winnings so they are willing to pay actual costs. Small companies and private citizens usually do not have deep pockets to go the hourly rate path and its required you to stay on top of it or your billed things you probably did not want to pay for.

First, HTC is known in the industry as an ODM more than EMS or CM, ODM is original design manufacturer, verses a contract manufacturer. The primary difference is you can go to ODM and ask them to put your name on their product or  provide them a concept of a design with design specs and they have engineers on staff who can actually design the hardware then hand it over to the manufacturing arm to make. CM can not design anything they just put things together, you have to provide them all the design files and everything. Apple only uses CM, apple does all the hard work even down to designing some of the manufacturing technology to build the product.

My understanding of what Google did with Nexus and Pixel is the following: Nexus they went to HTC and others and said give them a phone they can put their name on. That obviously did not work well so they step up to the next level and put together a design spec for a phone and then went to HTC and ask them to design and build a phone to Google designs specs. Google does not have the thousands of hardware design engineers it take to design a phone from scratch and do all the necessary testing and such. "Their Design" was them taking reference designs from chip manufacturers and put them together with their design and performance spec and handed that over to HTC and had their thousands of engineers go to work can come up with an original design which Google approved then HTC made the product for them. 

The reason Google fails is because they see no value in the hardware, this company is run by a bunch of software types and they see hardware only a means to the end like using a pencil to write on paper. The words on the paper have more value to them and who made the paper and pencil. Forget the fact some pencils and paper are far better than other so if you want your written words to out last the writer then it requires better lead in the pencil and the paper has to be of a quality which will not deteriorate over time. Google may have great feature in software but if the hardware that runs it is subpar than know one will know how good it is. 

This is something Steve Jobs always understood, you can not change the world if your work can not our last its creator.

yisheng508 said:

lmac said:

Rather than getting more in bed with China, Apple should help Japan and S. Korea sort this out, and keep diversifying the supply chain.

Very biased opinion！！！You are brainwashed by CNN, China is not as bad as it is imagined.

I do not listen to CNN and my views are based on 20yrs of working with China and Chinese company first hand and prior to that I work with Japan and Japanese company. As difficult as it is dealing with Japanese companies it far better than what you have to deal with in China.  

From inside China they see nothing wrong with what they do. Using (stealing) other people's idea and solution is not seen the same way as the rest of the modern world see it. China see things as it is all for the common good no one gets to own anything and everyone is allow to benefit for what anyone is doing. Most Chinese do not really understand the concept of Copywrites, or Intellectual Property since these ideas do not really exist in a communist world.

You can not say Apple is throttling your phone performance at the same time as causing your battery life to be shorten. Throttling should increasing battery life.

 These people need decide whether their performance has gone in the hole or the battery life.

I personally think these people have older phones which were fast in their day and then they see their friends new phones running the latest iOS and they get phone envy then think the iOS caused the phone to slow down or they just noticed the 3 yr old battery is not what it use be. I seen old battery work okay one week then the next week they do not what you hold a charge.

rob53 said:

“For too long, dominant technology companies have made it difficult for other businesses to compete in the digital marketplace by abusing their gatekeeper status to give themselves and their partners preferential treatment and access on their platforms," Apple is not the leading manufacturer of mobile phones. Consumers choose things based on many factors but I feel most iPhone users buy them because they simply work, providing a safe environment. Why do competitors feel they are owed access to things another company makes? It’s obvious these people have nothing to compete with Apple on so they try and litigate instead of providing a better product. 

Apple argument is from the view point of the App Store, nothing more. I would agree Apple produces the better mouse trap and competitors are trying to find any way including regulation to break the tight relationship Apple has with their customers. I would argue Apple solution is mostly good not bad for the consumer. However, this is more broad reaching and it going after facebook, google and such which do not necessary have the better mouse trap but controls how you use the mouse trap.

Everyone is coming at this from different directions, the big guy do not want to be broken up since the want complete control over your information, they want the complete picture, Apple does to care about your information, they just do not want to share their technology with third parties which is what they will have to do it Apple is broken into hardware, software, and separate services business.