mjtomlin

Rayz2016 said:

Soli said:

How can anyone not love Tim Cook?

Many people suffer from a debilitating condition known as CCH which many believed struck its victims randomly. Research secretly funded by Apple has shown that Cyclical Cook Hatred is not random, but seems tied to the stock price. Symptoms include night sweats, foaming at the mouth, and non-sensical ramblings concerning the purchase of abandoned nuclear missile silos in a bid to move the share price.

Most people just call it homophobia. This means there's absolutely nothing Tim Cook can possibly ever do right, regardless of how well Apple is doing.

Regarding AAPL, it goes "up" because of Trump, and anytime it goes down is naturally because of Cook.

Rayz2016 said:

Right, a "no license, no chips" strategy. That sound familiar. 

One of the practises Microsoft was eventually convicted of was its habit of charging PC vendors for a Windows license whether they installed Windows on a machine or not. This was one of the reasons that Linux was unable to get a foothold in the desktop market. 

Actually Microsoft charged all licensing fees based on the number of "seats" in a corporation, even if some of those "seats" sat a non-Windows computer. For this reason, not only could Linux not get in, but since the company was already paying Windows, Office and Windows Server fees, it only made sense to just get a PC, thus, making sure that it was extremely costly and difficult to get any other platform in the door.

asdasd said:

Apple can easily benefit from this. At the moment they get exactly nothing from my Amazon prime membership, or my fairly frequent amazon orders. As I now go to the website. 

Instead of taking 30% of the retail price  -- which eliminates most profit - they need to use Apple Pay and charge a reasonable usage fee, similar to the credit card fee. 

Umm, Apple does not get a cut of retail goods sold through apps, they only take a cut of digital content and subscriptions purchased via their platform.

You have to remember, and so does everyone else, iOS is not an open platform and never has been. Apple didn't all of sudden make these changes when the platform became popular. Apple shells out a lot of money to keep their platform viable and if others want access to it, they should have to help cover some of those costs.

Soli said:

shrave10 said:

Isn't Spotify always gloating how many more millions of subscribers they have over AM? Seems like their numbers don't walk the their talk. Not going to look good in court.

If they can show that they've dropped or that their growth rate for iOS-baed devices has dropped since Apple Music started, I could see the EU saying that Apple had an unfair advantage. Look what they did to Microsoft long after Internet Explorer was the dominate browser engine being used.

Of course Apple has an "unfair" advantage... they make the hardware and the software that these services run on. People like to compare Android and Windows with Apple's products, but they are not the same. First of all, Apple's platforms are a fraction of the others. Second, Apple makes the entire product. Google and Microsoft take unfair advantage of the fact that a majority of OEMs chose to use their OS/platform, making them market "leaders". That's a huge difference from what Apple does.

Also, it's only natural that growth rate will drop when a competing service enters the market.

Personally, I think it has more to do with the fact that these phones have become quite powerful and people are upgrading less. Now that the carriers have changed course with regards to contracts, it doesn't make much sense to auto-upgrade when your "contract" ends; once the phone is paid off, that amount is removed from your monthly payment. Previously, of course I upgraded as soon as my 2-year contract ended, why continue to pay that "free phone tax"?