stevewhitemd

This is what happens when people want more government -- they get more government...

Daniel correctly points out that Samsung has borrowed a lot (by which we mean, nearly all) of its inspiration for its products from Apple. We have a fair idea what Samsung phones would be if the iPhone had not come along, for example. The idea could be extended back forty years as a way of demonstrating how Apple, many times small in the market, sometimes "beleaguered" and troubled, has influenced what computers, printers, phones, and music players should be. What if there had been no Apple ][? No Macintosh? No Laserwriter? No Mac OS? No ImageWriter? More recently, what if there had been no iPod, no Mac OS X? Care to venture what a Microsoft operating system would look like if Mac OS, and then OS X, hadn't come along? Anyone think that Microsoft would have gotten the idea of a GUI? Would Microsoft, or Texas Instruments, or other giants of the day have figured out how to put a computer into a laser printer (a computer more powerful than what anyone had on their desktop at that time), integrate into a distant computer's operating system, and sell it? Who would have pushed object-oriented programming to the front of the industry and given that industry a market for such wares? We all know what the music players of 1999 looked like with their idiot Timex-watch style key buttons, design and market limitations, and unreliable playing of music. Who other than Apple would have figured out the click-wheel, popularized it, dropped onto a little box with a frigging MINI HARD DRIVE inside to store thousands of songs, and gotten the music industry (that band of robber-baron scum) to go along? Name a company, I'll wait. Take Apple out of the history from 1976 on. What does the world look like today?

Apple favors their own applications? Whoa, careful Mr. Volach, you almost knocked me over with that feather!

I'm a long-time Canon shooter and advanced amateur. The R and RP are superb bodies for the advanced amateur and for a pro who needs a 2nd (or 4th) camera body while maintaining Canon EF compatibility. If you are a Nikon or Sony FF mirrorless shooter, good for you; the Canon R/RP will not entice you. If you are a Fuji shooter, ditto. But if you are already a Canon shooter, the R/RP show you the future. The R has superb color rendition and fast autofocus. The EVF is sharp. It's sensor is between the 5D and 6D (the RP sensor is straight from the 6D) and it works well. The controls are very logical (for a Canon shooter), the menus well organized, and only that idiot touch bar gets in the way. You can read reviews; suffice to say that Canon users will use an R or RP and say "why yes, of course". The new RF lenses show exactly where Canon is going, all but one on the market today and one planned RF are "L" glass; that is, the best Canon can do. These are pro lenses, and what Canon is doing comes from the old photo adage, "you date your camera bodies but you marry your lenses". This is in contrast to Nikon where the ZF lenses (so far, they'll fix this eventually) are underwhelming. Canon is signaling that they're in the RF lens mount for the next three decades. The ability to mount EF lenses with a simple adapter makes clear that a Canon shooter can move up today to FF mirrorless and complete their transition at their own speed. One true weakness in the R/RP: video. If you absolutely need great 4K video, these aren't the cameras for you. Go Sony or Fuji. A true pro level R body (e.g., at or above the 5D, and perhaps at the 1DXm2 level) supposedly is coming by the end of this year, so a professional who shoots Canon and needs to make money is justified waiting. But the R and RP will meet the needs of many photographers. As long as you're in the Canon ecosystem. Sound familiar, Mac-users?

For all the sniping and complaining, lost is one simple fact -- it's a market economy.

"Value" is something I define differently than (say) lewchenko. He might not see the value of an iPhone X or XS or XR, but I do. Which of us is right? We both are -- for ourselves. In a market economy, I'm free to spend a princely sum for something I value, and lewchenko is free to walk away from the same deal. We both think of ourselves as being the savvy one. We're both right.

I think this is Mr. Dilger's main point. In a market economy, Apple bet heavily that many people would see the value of the X -- what it was, what it could do, how long it would be current, and what the value was to THEM. They indeed bought and Apple has been handsomely rewarded. Lewchenko doesn't have to buy, and Apple doesn't miss the loss of a sale to him; it's sold a couple hundred million iPhones last year, the majority of which were the X. That's a couple hundred million people who could have bought a cheaper iPhone 8, or a much cheaper iPhone 7, or a really cheap SE, or a similarly priced Samsung, or some flavor of cheap, cheap, cheap Android phone, or a throw-away feature phone, or NO PHONE AT ALL. But they bought an X. Who was right? They all were -- for them.

Can Apple continue to do this? Beats me. But the success to date suggests that I won't be betting against them for a few years.

Staying within the boundaries that the moderator (fairly) has set, I'll just note that I appreciate Apple's position more and more. Whatever one thinks of Mr. Comey, it's clear that our government and our politics have reached the point where the legal process and investigative agencies have been weaponized (and try putting THAT genie back into the bottle!). In such settings, ordinary people need more protection from government, not less, and having their personal phone less susceptible to both hacking and inappropriate intrusion is much appreciated. I can criticize Apple like anyone else, but on this one they're right.

Mr. Dilger's article almost makes me feel sorry for Intel. Almost. What's interesting about Intel isn't that they failed to recognize the corner they'd painted themselves into with the x86 architecture -- it's that they DID recognize, and tried to solve it, and failed. They tried to get into other chip fabrications like broadband, and failed. They tried IA-64, and failed. They tried the Atom, and failed. For broadband and Atom it became clear to the industry that Intel's solution wasn't good enough, but for IA-64 and Itanium Intel fell into the classic trap of having a superior product that others wouldn't invest in to use. Microsoft wasn't going for it and neither were the other industry leaders. You'd think that someone at Intel would learn from all this failure -- Apple (well, really, Jobs, and to a fair extent Cook and Ive) certainly learned from failure, which is why we got the iMac, iPod, iPhone, Mac OS X, etc. Failure, if you survive it, is a good teacher. What has Intel learned? Darned if I know.

From the article: "Next to the Nikkei, only Bloomberg, the New York Times, Reuters, Yahoo, CNBC, the Wall Street Journal and perhaps a few other major financial news sources have similarly generated consistently false reports about the future prospects of Apple's next iPhone." Yes, this. Which is why I don't trust these news agencies and newspapers about virtually anything else they say and write. If they can't get relatively straight-forward news about Apple right, why should I trust them about COVID-19, the Middle East, or political shenanigans in Washington?