Little lesson in Canadian retail... MAP (Minimum Advertised Price) is illegal in Canada. I find it rather ironic that the USA, home of the ultimate free market, allows manufacturers to dictate pricing across the market while us left leaning Canadians have a true free market economy.
When I see discounts at a Canadian retailer, I don't think transition, I think "sale".
When I see a discount on an Apple product I think transition. Apple Canada uses something far more effective than MAP to enforce pricing at retailers. They make the wholesale cost just 4-8% below the retail price direct from Apple. Anyone selling Apple product at a discount is accepting zero profit on the transaction.
In the past year there have been some discounts available through Best Buy. The discounts were generally confined to models where the price difference between Canada and the US was too big to be explained by the exchange rate. I see two possible reasons for this:
1. they're so big they've managed to get some additional discount from Apple
2. they buy from Apple USA and, against Apple's rules, transport the machines across the border enabling them to sell at US retail prices.
Is the current iMac GPU upgradable? Or is that only in MacPros? That is the only thing that is bothering me about my 4GB RAM MacBook. Can't even use the higher performance iTunes visualizers without getting FPS drops. If I could upgrade my GPU and then buy a 1TB TimeMachine drive I'd be set.
No, it's soldered on. Even if Apple used a notebook upgrade card system like AXIOM (ATI) or MXM (NVIDIA), you wouldn't be able to upgrade to a chip from a different vendor, and notebook upgrade cards are so scarce as to effectively be non-existent.
That said, you're on a MacBook. Even the base iMac decimates the GMA X3100 video of the MacBook, so you'd be less apt to complain if you had a fast enough system.
But the phone is a fairly simple device. At some point there won't be any usable holes left. that still makes my argument about jailbreaking staying viable, true.
Considering that people have found holes right down to the hardware level, it won't be until Apple redesigns the iPhone hardware that things could possibly change.
It's funny, I've watched this cat and mouse game with computer hardware and software since the dawn of the personal computer. Given what I've seen, I personally think it's a waste of money and engineering resources to try and stop people. But I guess they have to keep trying in the hope that, if they make it annoying enough for the average user to maintain a jailbroken state, then their control over the device will be "good enough".
Considering that people have found holes right down to the hardware level, it won't be until Apple redesigns the iPhone hardware that things could possibly change.
It's funny, I've watched this cat and mouse game with computer hardware and software since the dawn of the personal computer. Given what I've seen, I personally think it's a waste of money and engineering resources to try and stop people. But I guess they have to keep trying in the hope that, if they make it annoying enough for the average user to maintain a jailbroken state, then their control over the device will be "good enough".
After a while, any holes left become much more difficult to exploit. The main way holes are exploited are those buffer overruns. It's been estimated that if there were no buffer overruns in software (including the OS), 95% of all malicious software would never work (not including phishing, of course. That exploits the mental holes which will always exist). The same thing is true for the phone.
Comments
Little lesson in Canadian retail... MAP (Minimum Advertised Price) is illegal in Canada. I find it rather ironic that the USA, home of the ultimate free market, allows manufacturers to dictate pricing across the market while us left leaning Canadians have a true free market economy.
When I see discounts at a Canadian retailer, I don't think transition, I think "sale".
When I see a discount on an Apple product I think transition. Apple Canada uses something far more effective than MAP to enforce pricing at retailers. They make the wholesale cost just 4-8% below the retail price direct from Apple. Anyone selling Apple product at a discount is accepting zero profit on the transaction.
In the past year there have been some discounts available through Best Buy. The discounts were generally confined to models where the price difference between Canada and the US was too big to be explained by the exchange rate. I see two possible reasons for this:
1. they're so big they've managed to get some additional discount from Apple
2. they buy from Apple USA and, against Apple's rules, transport the machines across the border enabling them to sell at US retail prices.
Is the current iMac GPU upgradable? Or is that only in MacPros? That is the only thing that is bothering me about my 4GB RAM MacBook. Can't even use the higher performance iTunes visualizers without getting FPS drops. If I could upgrade my GPU and then buy a 1TB TimeMachine drive I'd be set.
No, it's soldered on. Even if Apple used a notebook upgrade card system like AXIOM (ATI) or MXM (NVIDIA), you wouldn't be able to upgrade to a chip from a different vendor, and notebook upgrade cards are so scarce as to effectively be non-existent.
That said, you're on a MacBook. Even the base iMac decimates the GMA X3100 video of the MacBook, so you'd be less apt to complain if you had a fast enough system.
But the phone is a fairly simple device. At some point there won't be any usable holes left. that still makes my argument about jailbreaking staying viable, true.
Considering that people have found holes right down to the hardware level, it won't be until Apple redesigns the iPhone hardware that things could possibly change.
It's funny, I've watched this cat and mouse game with computer hardware and software since the dawn of the personal computer. Given what I've seen, I personally think it's a waste of money and engineering resources to try and stop people. But I guess they have to keep trying in the hope that, if they make it annoying enough for the average user to maintain a jailbroken state, then their control over the device will be "good enough".
Considering that people have found holes right down to the hardware level, it won't be until Apple redesigns the iPhone hardware that things could possibly change.
It's funny, I've watched this cat and mouse game with computer hardware and software since the dawn of the personal computer. Given what I've seen, I personally think it's a waste of money and engineering resources to try and stop people. But I guess they have to keep trying in the hope that, if they make it annoying enough for the average user to maintain a jailbroken state, then their control over the device will be "good enough".
After a while, any holes left become much more difficult to exploit. The main way holes are exploited are those buffer overruns. It's been estimated that if there were no buffer overruns in software (including the OS), 95% of all malicious software would never work (not including phishing, of course. That exploits the mental holes which will always exist). The same thing is true for the phone.