melgross

I really think we need to take a step back on this price thing. We know this is a first gen oroduct. We know Apple expects it to be bought by developers and these with the finances. There’s nothing unexpected about that.

but if Apple came out with a more limited headset, more like the Quest Pro, at about the same price, the criticisms would be dramatic. Apple has been expected to come out with something category leading, and that’s exactly what they’ve done. So it’s expensive. Fine. It doesn’t natter. We see here what Apple can do owning the entire stack, which is far more than anyone else can do.

no Apple is going to drop the price in another model at some point. Will it have all of the features of this one? Well, likely pretty close, but more affordable to the average person. Apple as we see with their other products sets a minimum performance/feature floor, and every product has to sit on, or above it, until they set it higher some years later. It’s why we don’t see a $300 iPhone, for example.

so everything for Apple’s AR/VR future has to meet a minimum standard, and this headset is making that minimum clear to everyone. In the long run, where consumers, business and likely the government will all be customers, that makes sense. And many of their customers aren’t price sensitive. There are far more expensive headset solutions for the latter two customer categories than this one, available now.

spheric said:

melgross said:

Spotify continues to generate losses. I’ve been saying for several years that the only companies that will be able to offer music streaming on a large scale will be companies that offer it as a service, as additive to their other, much larger businesses.

This would be the final nail in the commoditisation of music. 

In which bizarre universe is the logical business choice simply accepting that there is no way to make any money off streaming business model, and in consequence reducing it to a loss-leading add-on? I mean, rather than figuring that THE FUCKING BUSINESS MODEL DOESN'T WORK? 

I'm slightly irate over this because at NO POINT in this (mis)judgement of business viability do the interests of those supplying the actual content ever enter into the equation. 

Oh, so you've built a "business" around ripping us off and giving everything we make away, conditioned customers to expect access to everything for free or ad-free for price of three Starbucks coffees a month, and haven't figured out how to make a profit? 

Well, now. I have this D-sub tie-line cable that would like a word with you. 

The problem is that except for a very tiny number of subscribers of Tidal and QoBuz, and by tiny, I mean just a few hundred thousand between them, the market has shown that people don’t want to spend more than about $10 per month for streaming. Several companies have tried to charge $15, but dropped it and went out of business.

seriously, it’s the potential customers. When ‘tidal first appeared here I had a fairly long discussion with the then CEO. I asked him what he was trying to do here. He said that young people, including college students would race to pay $20 a month got CD quality music. I told him he was nuts. I asked why he was demo’ing at a high end audio show if he believed what he said, rather than at some gathering for young people, such as a ComicCon. His answer was garbled. He really had no idea. We see what happened. When it was bought, they immediately released a compressed version for $9.95.

remember that what every streaming company is paying was negotiated. It wasn’t simply a; “This is what we’re going to pay you.” So there’s a connection between what can be paid for a company to stay in business, and what recording companies and artists want to get paid. Unfortunately, it come back to what consumers are willing to pay. Somewhere in there is where the payment per stream lies.

I bought that book on my iPad when it came out. It’s a great book, with interviews from the CEOs of RIM as well as from other companies, such as Verizon, which was the principle sales terminal for the Blackberry. Once Blackberry made an irretrievable error with their response to the iPhone, with the Storm, Verizon removed their advertising of Blackberry from their network and moved to the otherwise not yet successful Android (remember that campaign? It was towards young men, with aliens, meteoroids, etc). That destroyed Blackberry. They never came back from that.

9secondkox2 said:

StrangeDays said:

9secondkox2 said:

Should just be in a genre tab on Apple Music. 

a lot of music catalogs on Apple Music. Just because this is a giant catalog doesn’t mean it needs its own app. 

Biography info, etc would fit nearly as a link or accordion element. 

More steps to do the same thing. Not good. 

It’s not the number of tracks, it’s that the UX is different owing to some unique things about classical music. 

It’s music. No need for separate UX. It’s just a way to justify a dedicated app. 

But let’s say that you have a point - for sake of argument. Apple could easily implement a class where the classical tab of Apple Music gets its own look and behavior. 

And yet none of that is necessary. 

A music app is a music app. 

If there is a better way to do it, then they should apply it to the app as a whole to benefit the entire thing. 

Searching for, curating, creating playlists, and playing classical music is fundamentally no different than doing so for any other genre. 

Your last bit there is just wrong. Classical music is very different from pop, and generally, even jazz. Unfortunately, it’s much more complicated.

sloaah said:

williamh said:

I don’t understand the role of these companies.  I thought Apple designed the stuff and these other companies assembled them.  It sounds like the Pegatrons and Luxshares are designing or helping to design?

Designing a product and preparing a commercial manufacturing line for them are two very different things. There are lots of technical hurdles and bespoke machinery required to build Apple's products, because they're constantly pushing boundaries.

While true, Apple usually provides any custom designed machinery as well as training people to use them, so that’s no good reason to back away. I wonder if he’s really understanding what’s happening here. He usually gets most things right, as far as product details go, but often gets production dates wrong. This could just be another time when he doesn’t get the production concept correct.