chasm

Thanks for this. I know it’s an economic truism that the public broadly thinks of costs as fixed or getting lower over time, and that’s not wrong with companies that sell roughly the same thing over many years, like McDonalds. But if you are in the technology sector, and especially if your Apple, you are constantly reinventing re-designing your products — which is an enormous extra expense of R&D and manufacturing compared to, say, the shoe maker.

The reason Apple is still here is because of that approximately 38% average profit margin, and it’s nice to see that they’ve maintained that level at around the same figure. I have an examined it that closely, but I would wager that if you adjusted for inflation, nearly all of Apple’s hardware is actually cheaper now (in real dollars) than it was in 1994. To be fair, the top-tier iPhone has more than doubled in price from its debut 11 years ago (when there was only one tier — but check out how much cheaper the entry-level Apple Watch or a MacBook Pro has gotten since their respective debuts.

Yes, a music distributor a company that takes recordings made by artists and makes them available through the top e-music outlets, including Amazon, Apple, Google Play, and so forth. Similar to book publishers or aggregators, these companies ensure that the files are rated properly (mature or not), files (including accompanying art or liner notes) fit the technical standards of the store (which vary), and often handle other aspects like reporting sales to publishing companies, paying the different entities that get a royalty, and generally handling the business aspect of selling music (or e-books, to continue the publisher metaphor).

Why this story is important to more than just the companies that achieve the top tier is that it lets artists know who is likely to get the most detailed reports and accounting on their music, which may influence who they go with for this service; it also signals that these companies are incentivized to be honest in their dealings, since they don’t want to lose their preferred status. It’s also important to know that services like CD Baby (et al) can assist in letting artists take more direct control of their digital music offerings, bypassing traditional record companies (which is likely to be the next big shift in the music business). This story being published here and elsewhere will also help get the word out to other vendors, who can then strive to become a Preferred or Preferred Plus partner over time. Yes, it’s a bit “inside baseball” to people who just buy music, but it’s certainly newsworthy to anyone involved even peripherally with the music business — which I should think a lot of AI’s creative professional readership would be.

Would be interesting to know if Koh forced “QUALCOMM” to license those patents on FRAND terms or not.

Bit of a mistake having a person who primarily edits video for a living make this comparison, surely?

I have been reading a number of articles recently about people who believe they could (or already have) replaced their notebooks with an iPad Pro (previous or forthcoming version) and that it could handle all their routine tasks with as little as just a keyboard to add onto it. I fancy myself a bit of a power-user (rather than a typical user, as I do use my computers to make my living), and yet I have found — much to my surprise over the past two years — that all but two of the things I routinely do with a computer can be handled by the iPad. If I really wanted to, indeed, I could get that list down to one without much effort

Out here in the non-nerd real world, people use their computers and phones primarily and almost exclusively for social, surfing, media, games, photo, and light (very light) productivity stuff. Not only can the iPad Pro handle all that with ease (and excels handily in some areas, like drawing and photo editing) — I don’t even need the Pro model to accomplish what I need!

Can anyone seriously say that the base new iPad Pro with a keyboard and optional pencil (around $1K) isn’t a better value for “normal” stuff than the MacBook? I don’t think you can, especially once you remember that the benchmarks of the iPad Pro are on par with the MacBook Pro, which costs quite a bit more. Yes, a user might be more dependent on cloud services for things like Photo storage if they only have an iPad versus having a notebook, but ... that’s the way things are going already, and it’s safer than local storage anyway.

Still has diddly-squat to do with NaNoWriMo ... which is the point you keep missing because you’re so interested in complaining about your irrelevant (to NaNoWriMo) wish list.