tmay

Expedia makes its money in a few different ways. The largest of those ways is through hotel bookings, which the company is mainly known for allowing users to do. A whopping 70% of Expedia’s revenue is generated from hoteliers (people who own or manage hotels). The way that Expedia get’s here in the first place is through a simple supply and demand strategy. Expedia buys up a large number of rooms at a discounted cost and then advertises the bookings through their website as the cheapest you’ll find in the market.

An example would be Expedia pushing for a 7-night all-inclusive trip to a remote island in the Caribbean. Expedia reaches out to a hotel on the island and buys up a block of, say, 100 rooms at a discounted price (because everything is cheaper in bulk). Expedia than buys a large number of plane tickets going to that island, usually at little to no discount. Then Expedia offers the deal to 2 people at a price like $1,700, which is most likely going to be at least marginally cheaper than it would through other sites. People get a good deal and Expedia is able to fill more plane seats and hotel rooms. And Expedia has only paid a part of what they charge the people for the service, meaning they profit from every transaction.

Another way that Expedia makes money is through commission fees. Because Expedia always offers the lowest price (or at least a lower price than the hotel will offer), people will be far more willing to actually take a trip in the first place. So hoteliers are far more inclined to sell rooms to Expedia because some money is better than no money. The commission fees are usually between 20% and 25%.

An example of the way that this works is that if a hotel sells a room (in this example we will use just one room, but in reality, it would be far more) to Expedia for $100 and Expedia gets the room booked, then Expedia will collect that $100 and pay the hotel $75 (if the fee is 25%). They will say that that $25 goes towards customer service, marketing, and various other business functions.

HIDDEN FEES?

Expedia makes a little on the side through fees. These fees aren’t hidden, but they’re also not in your face. They can get away with this because they don’t charge users a fee to actually book the hotel, or whatever it is that they are booking, in the first place. These fees include:

• Cancellation fees when canceling a booking more than 24 hours after booking
• Fees on some airlines for overweight baggage
• Wi-Fi fees in some hotels
• Off resort excursion fees
• Fees for parking at particular venues
• Meal fees at hotels
• Fees at hotels for things like spas, gyms, and pools.

HOW DOES EXPEDIA GET ITS DATA?

Does Expedia have full-time employees whose sole responsibility is to troll the internet to find hotels that they can buy rooms from, and then contact those hotels and reach an agreement for those rooms? Definitely not. Expedia has a third party sourcing organization that does all that for them. This method is called “Merchant Inventory.” They have local contractors, essentially the ‘boots on the ground’ people that are collecting data about hotels in different areas as well.

I'm thinking that this guy needs to have his business model exposed...

jeffharris said:

I’m looking for an excuse to buy one.
They’re just so amazing looking.

It would be nice if there were a VESA mount option.

GeorgeBMac said:

tmay said:

GeorgeBMac said:

tmay said:

GeorgeBMac said:

melgross said:

GeorgeBMac said:

melgross said:

GeorgeBMac said:

melgross said:

GeorgeBMac said:

thedba said:

GeorgeBMac said:

For all those defending the "Everything Glued together & soldered together" assembly of the MacBooks by saying "Nobody ever upgraded a computer", Andrew just called bull!

His biggest (only?) complaint about his M1 MacBook Air is that it can't meet his needs because it is frozen in time with what it came with when he bought it -- versus his MacPro which grew and developed with enhancements as his needs, wants and requirements grew.

Likewise, my 9 year old i7 Thinkpad runs perfectly well and meets all of my needs -- because it's been upgraded to a 500Gb SSD, 16Gb Ram and an internal harddrive used for ongoing, real time backups.  Without those cheap and very simple to install (5 minutes or less) upgrades the machine would have been scrap

Statements such as this remind me of my now deceased father who used to long for the days of when he could service his car himself. 
I sometimes wonder what he would say seeing today's Teslas or Priuses. 

Either way, all technology will move towards this way of doing things with ARM architecture taking up more space. Apple is just ahead of the curve on this. 

I don't see the logic behind equating an inability to service or upgrade something as synonymous with better products.

For many products, a lack of upgradability means a smaller, sealed product which is more reliable and easier to carry around. In my own business, we generally had about 32 Macs. We would replace about a third every year, moving them down a tier in production until the forth year, when we either sold them or gave them away to employees. So we replaced all of our Macs over a three year period. Every other production house I knew did pretty much the same thing. My wife worked at Citicorp for 28 years, and she got a new computer every three years too, and most corporations are on a three year replacement schedule.

we found that it cost more, and was a loss in productivity, to upgrade machines. For a short while that was a popular thing, as you could get excellent CPU upgrades for the Mac, significantly enhancing performance, something that never worked well with Windows machines. What we found best was to just get machines equipped the way we needed them in the first place. If you’re making real money with your machine, either as an individual, or as a corporation, you get to deduct many expenses, such as cost of equipment in several ways for tax purposes, making your purchases less expensive over the life of the machine. Discuss it with your accountant.

increasing RAM can help, but not by nearly as much as you think. The reason why some claim this as a big thing is because they bought the lowest config in the beginning, which was below their needs. So yes, increasing it made a noticeable difference. But if you buy what you need in the beginning, adding more leads to a minor difference. Same thing with drives. Don’t skimp on a startup drive. Smaller drives and storage is always slower. That’s true for hard drives, SSD’s and internal NAND storage. There are real reasons for that. Figure out what you really need, and double it. Be realistic about both. Remember these days that 512 NAND will be almost twice as fast as 256, and that 1TB doesn’t add much speed above that. But I always get 1TB startup because you really shouldn’t keep NAND more than about 60% full for good NAND long term health.

there are a bunch of common sense rules to follow if you understand your needs and how to satisfy them. Upgrading in mid stream rarely gets you much unless you starved your machine in the beginning.

I agree.   a completely sealed, integrated, non-upgradeable device makes sense in something so small and portable like an iPhone or maybe even an iPad.

But in a larger machine that serves no functional purpose -- except for planned obsolescence.  And, the larger the machine the more sense it makes to make it upgradeable -- such as Andrew's MacPro in this instance.

I do wish that people would stop talking about planned obsolescence. That’s very rarely a thing. Things become obsolete because technology passes them by. What was a top line machine when bought becomes a low end machine in a few years. That’s the way technology works. New software often doesn’t work on old machines, often it’s not because of a lack of RAM, or drive space, though, yes, sometimes it is.

mostly advances in technology on processors and related technology means that an OS has new features, ir is even redesigned. Sometimes new security protocols cuts software out of the loop. There are many reasons. But again, don’t be cheap, and figure you can get away with less, when what you do, or will be doing at some point, requires more. That’s a sure way to obsolete a machine. But, more RAM and bigger drives likely won’t save you, because the processor and bus are too slow. So you get a machine with a PCIe 2 bus (years ago, of course) and you found, two years later that all new upgrades are now PCIe 3, and that PCIe 2 upgrades are discontinued, and you have to scramble to fine one on eBay or some such place. And you can’t play the new games properly on it anyway, or do much else.

so being an upgradablecmachine doesn’t always help. Who has a separate modem in their computer these days? No one. So you can’t upgrade that either. We could go on.

It is true that, eventually, a machine reaches a point where its core components (mother board, etc.) just can't hack it anymore.  But I don't see the logic in hurrying that by gluing and soldering the typically upgradeable components like RAM and Harddrive.  That does not benefit the customer in any meaningful way.

Another aspect of making the SSD upgradeable is data security:  If a machine dies (say by drowning in a Starbucks) a socketed SSD can be pulled and the data on it recovered.  That is not the case if it is soldered & glued to the motherboard.  Then your data dies with your machine.

I take it that you’ve heard of backups? No responsible person with valuable data doesn’t backup. We (my company) stored data for some customers. We had three backups. One was in the area where we had our computer systems. One was in a room three floors above ours in the building the lab was in. And another was off site altogether, in another building several blocks away. We also carried millions in insurance just in the extremely unlikely situation that all three backups failed.

Not a single person I know backs up their computer.

Well one does...  But only because I installed a second harddrive in his desktop and started up "file history" for him.

It's also one of the reasons why I like my 9 year old but upgraded Thinkpad:   I installed a second drive in it so that the data is automatically backed up.

But, even for those who do run backups, unless they're done automatically, the backup is seldom fully current -- so the most valuable data (the most recent) tends to be lost.

Strange though that you mention three backups -- that was my introduction to backups!
in 1977, while working as an accountant, we accumulated a year's worth of production data from a newly implemented cost accounting system.   When I asked for a report so I could do some analysis we discovered that all three backups of it had were gone -- lost, damaged or accidentally written over.

That's one of the reasons I'm so opposed to non-removeable drives -- I know there is only a single part of any computer that cannot in some way be replaced.  It's the most valuable part:  the data.

If however, Apple would implement iCloud backups for Macs, that would take away one of my reasons for wanting removable SSDs.  I don't understand why they have not done that.

FFS George, Apple has iCloud backups;

"Tap Settings > [your name] > iCloud > Manage Storage, which will list how much iCloudstorage you're using and which apps are eating up the most storage. To automatically back up your device each day, turn on iCloud Backup via Settings > [your name] > iCloud > iCloud Backup and toggle iCloud Backup to on.

You consistently amaze me with your misinformation...

We're talking about Macs, not iPhones

It works for Macs as well/

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204025

You get 5 GB free, but that isn't enough to backup much of your data.

2 TB will cost you $9.99 a month. You can buy an external drive from Amazon for less than the cost of a years iCloud service and better than that, it works as a Time Machine.

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=wd+external+hard+drive&crid=3N6IYEQ79AEK3&sprefix=WD+,aps,241&ref=nb_sb_ss_ts-doa-p_1_3

But of course, you don't want to use an external drive...because house fire. So you buy two drives, and store one either offsite or in a fireproof safe, rotating between the two.

Gaslighting us again...

So iCloud Backup runs on Mac's?

Or are you Gaslighting again?

Hubro said:

sdw2001 said:

crowley said:

I don't think many people defend the butterfly keyboard design any more, but we were talking about RAM, storage and the M1 SOC.

Gluing is a bit more divisive.  You're right in that it's less repairable, but there's also a strong argument that gluing improves overall integrity meaning that you may not need to repair it nearly as quickly.  It's a trade off either way, and some people will likely get burned by misfortune.

Yes, we agree here too.  Apple's recent approach involves tradeoffs, as most things do.  What I'm seeing though is there's a contingent led by a certain individual who is claiming that there are no benefits, ergo there are no trade-offs at all.  I suppose the real point I'm making is that there are two sides of the equation here.  I totally understand that lack of upgradeability and user serviceability is a disadvantage for some people.  But the current approach also clearly has several benefits.  I really don't see why those arguing the other side won't acknowledge that.  

To be honest, I do not believe that gluing (or actually "using adhesives") makes it that difficult to repair. One just have to follow the relevant procedures properly when dismantling the beauties. The chassis doesn't flex much, thus heating/solvent and "pulling" and so on should be fairly predictable. 

What makes it troublesome is that a certain number of individuals are attempting this without proper knowledge and qualifications.
E.G: Overheat and get a mess, heating too low, break the removable unit. A technician with the knowledge and tools will have no difficulties.

M1 is IMHO the first significant proof of the pudding on the laptop side of things that heftier integration really is the right way ahead, and I'm convinced that it leads to even more reliable Macs.