cloudguy

tht said:

It's perhaps an agonizing decision for Hyundai as they do not know what they want to be, but they have to know the status quo can mean death. Any traditional car company needs to change their company focus now. Being the next Foxconn would be a very very very good position to be in.

No it wouldn't. First off, Foxconn is a white box manufacturer for a lot more companies than Apple. They also build Amazon Fire devices, Acer laptops, Cisco networking equipment, Dell laptops and PCs, Google devices (consumer ones, servers and networking equipment), HP computers, HMD Global/Nokia, Sony, Microsoft, Lenovo, Visio, Huawei, Xiaomi etc. In a lot of cases, Foxconn manufactures essentially identical devices with the only meaningful difference being the brand sticker. Foxconn could lose Apple's business entirely and still quite possibly be the #1 white box operation. Also, even Foxconn has been credibly accused of using equipment and facilities that were supposed to be reserved for Apple to fill orders for other companies in order to squeeze a bit more revenue. That is mighty revealing!

The landscape is littered with Apple suppliers who declared bankruptcy after Apple used them up and went elsewhere. There have even been Apple suppliers who went bankrupt because they tried to meet Apple's terms during the life of the contract! They would sign a contract to supply massive orders at low margins in return for the ability to charge higher margins from others down the line because being an Apple supplier is like having a gold star ... only for the economic circumstances to change and the low margins become negative margins. Guess what? Apple won't renegotiate to give you a higher margin AND you have to supply ALL the components that you contractually agreed to OR APPLE WILL SUE AND WIN. Either way you go bankrupt so it is best to just fill the order the best you can anyway. And when you go under, Apple just switches to your competitor, who hires your former workers and rents/buys your facilities in order to be able to fill the order.

Apple's relationships with their suppliers are one way streets: to benefit Apple only. They are not designed to benefit the suppliers. You should only supply Apple if you are A. a huge company and B. have no real competition so you are able to force Apple to pay your standard rate and C. have cash flow to survive if Apple decides to play hardball midstream and D. can afford the lawyers to sue if Apple decides to do C. In other words, only deal with Apple if you are a Samsung - no one else makes better screens or memory cards - or Qualcomm (no one can match their LTE and 5G modems). Samsung had the clout to negotiate a deal where Apple was forced to pay a penalty for not ordering a minimum of OLED screens, Qualcomm had the legal ability to get several countries to agree to ban iPhones and iPads from being imported if Apple didn't pay their licensing fees. Imagine if Samsung or Qualcomm were much smaller companies who lacked the clout and lawyers of both. 

Do I blame Apple? Of course not. They are a business and it is their job to look out for themselves. But please know that companies who refuse to deal with Apple are just doing the same. If Hyundai decides not to deal with Apple, it is because they justifiably fear that the terms won't benefit them financially and may actually cost them money. As far as having to compete with the Apple Car down the line: Apple is only able to devastate immature markets with bad products like MP3 players and wearables that allowed Apple to define it, making everyone else look like a bad copycat. Apple's attempts to get into more mature markets with good competitors i.e. PCs (IBM was already there and the clones were seen as copying IBM, not Apple), smartphones and tablets (Android came along before it was too late), set top boxes, streaming services, smart speakers, routers, peripherals etc. were nothing like that. So people aren't going to stop buying Fords, BMWs or even Teslas because Apple enters the industry. Especially if these people are already among the 85% of the population that has an Android phone instead of an iPhone (BMW originally didn't want to accommodate Android Auto and even trashed it but were forced to because so many of their customers demanded it), the 65% who own an Android tablet instead of an iPad and the 93% of the population who buys Windows or ChromeOS PCs instead of Macs. For those, if the Apple Car is an "ecosystem device" that locks out everybody else - iTunes on Windows is what makes owning an iPod, iPhone and iPad practical for most people - then you will be looking at very expensive HomePods that are basically worthless to people who don't own other Apple tech and don't subscribe to Apple services. And no, such a car wouldn't be a threat to Hyundai.

Another thing: 

Tim Cook. From Mobile, Alabama. B.S. in industrial engineering from Auburn University in 1982. MBA from Duke University in 1988. 
You know something? The southeast played a huge role in the development of Internet and web 1.0 and was the single most important region for it - companies like Hayes Microcomputer, U.S. Robotics, Scientific Atlanta and Mindspring - until the dot.com crash and the web 2.0 relocating to Silicon Valley. Not only does Tim Cook know this but he almost certainly went to school with some of the people who made it happen as well as worked with some of them during his time at IBM! Yet he allows his company to traffic in these same stereotypes that he personally knows are not true.

AppleInsider said:

Singer Justin Timberlake returns to the movies on Apple TV+ in the engaging "Palmer," a Louisiana-set drama about an ex-con who becomes an unlikely father figure.

While some of the characters are a bit one-dimensional -- especially Dean Winters as Shelly's one-note violent redneck boyfriend -- Palmer is both a better film, and a much more respectful portrayal of small-town American life than Netflix's recent drama Hillbilly Elegy.

As for its position in the culture wars, Palmer is a film that's respectful of churchgoing and Southern culture, although it also has considerable sympathy for the recently incarcerated, and for the plight of a bullied, gender-nonconforming child.

Yeah ... no. I have stated several times in the past that Apple TV+ programming is going to struggle to find an audience because - unlike Netflix which is legitimately broad based - Apple TV+ programming is aimed at a coastal, progressive feminist audience. There is virtually no programming aimed at different audiences or truly challenges its target audience. So yes, they have a film set in the south. Big deal. It still solely depicts:

1. rural areas despite Texas and Florida being #2 in population (to California which really should be 3 different states) which Georgia and North Carolina also being in the top 10. Add Virginia and Tennessee and 6 of the top 15 states in population are in the south.
2. poverty ... despite Texas, Florida, Georgia, Virginia and North Carolina undergoing economic booms for the last 30 years, generally outstripping the economic growth of much of the west coast and northeast. South Carolina and Tennessee have transforming economies due to automobile - and in the case of SC, Boeing - manufacturing plants also.
3. crime and football. Any movie about southern whites - do movies about southern blacks, Hispanics or Asians exist at all? - is going to have an ex-football player (hello, people play basketball, golf, tennis and even soccer in the south) and this movie simply goes with an ex-football ex-con as the same character
4. severe family dysfunction (movies set in other regions generally more positively depict family relations, even blended family/divorce situations)
5. rednecks and other violent/bigoted people

This isn't "a movie about the south" but rather a movie that only depicts the south in a way that western and northeastern progressives insist on seeing it. What you will never see depicted in a movie set in the south:

A. research universities
B. urban life
C. educated, highly paid professionals especially in the tech sector
D. cosmopolitan, urbane people who attend symphonies, ballets, opera, museums and regularly travel etc.
E. interest in sports and other activities other than football and NASCAR (Atlanta alone is the #3 market for the NBA, regularly hosts NCAA Final Fours and has MLB and pro soccer teams as well as hosting significant ATP, WTA, PGA and LPGA events)

Meaning movies set in Houston, Dallas, Atlanta, Charlotte, Tampa etc. (though Miami is fine because it isn't really considered southern) aren't going to happen. This is despite so many movies actually being filmed there because of lower shooting costs an increasing number of movies are shot there! That is the really frustrating part. These directors, producers, actors, writers etc. now regularly go to Georgia, North Carolina and Florida to shoot movies. Several state of the art studio facilities are there now, as well as cutting edge animation and VFX startups. Lots of talent has actually moved there full time. Yet we still get the south depicted the same way by Hollywood. 

Wake me when we get a legal thriller set in Austin/Atlanta/Charlotte where Luke Wilson is a law professor at Texas-Austin/Emory/Duke and Constance Wu is his cybersecurity researcher wife at Texas-Austin/Georgia Tech/Duke and they track down extremists who operate on the dark web or expose some bitcoin scam or something. Or maybe starring John David Washington and Awkwafina as medical school students - there are multiple such schools in the metro areas of all 3 southern cities - who uncover collusion between big pharma and big insurance.

But that would never happen because it would actually challenge the stereotypes that folks on the west coast and northeast insist on having about the south even as major employers - including again the film and TV industry - has spent the last 30 years relocating there. End result: movies like this only inflame the culture wars. And I am not an innovator here. Instead USA Today had an oped about how Monster's Ball and other Hollywood movies and TV shows depicted a one note version of the south meant to cater to coastal progressives and that was 20 years ago. Another thing: since Halle Berry in Monster's Ball no other black actress has won a major Academy Award (best Actress, best director, best film which goes to the producer, best original screenplay or best adapted screenplay) since which shows that despite their progressive pretensions, Hollywood isn't nearly as different from the southerners that they scapegoat as they think.

Sorry, but this is yet another example of why most viewers are going to pass up Apple TV+ in favor of content on Netflix, Disney Plus etc. that doesn't insult them.

Yeah people ... no. The iPad - whether Pro or not - is a mobile device running a mobile operating system. It can't run full-fledged PC apps and it lacks PC versatility. It can't even do what a Chromebook with 8 GB of RAM and an Intel Core i3 CPU or better is capable of in Linux mode. You can't even do something simple like install VSCode or Atom and write Javascript or Python code on an iPad.

Look, Apple types have been claiming "an iPad can replace a Windows laptop because Windows is horrible and people who use Windows instead of Macs are cheap dump unsophisticated uneducated losers" for 10 years. It won't work. You can't use an iPad for software development or engineering. You can't use an iPad for cybersecurity, network architecture or other IT work. An mechanical engineer can't use an iPad for CAD/CAM work, an architect can't use it for drafting. You can't use an iPad for data science. You can't even run full Excel or Access on an iPad for entry level analyst work. And those are the software limitations. If you are a sales/marketing/HR guy and are creating a presentation and need to use 2 screens: sorry you can't. The most the iPad is capable of is mirroring its single screen to a bigger one. And for entertainment? Sorry, you can't do AAA gaming with an iPad beyond the xCloud/Stadia/GeForce Now cloud stuff that you can also do on a $60 Walmart Android tablet. But you can on a Surface device that has an Intel Core i7 CPU and an Nvidia graphics card. And you will be able to do so on the next generation Surface Pro 7 which will have Iris Xe graphics. 

Sorry. The iPad is a tablet. The Surface is a PC. If you want a tablet to do real work, you should either get an iPad Pro - not an iPad Air - or a Samsung Galaxy Tab S7 Pro (which with DeX has desktop features that iPads lack). But if you want a PC, do not get an iPad or any other tablet. Get a MacBook, a Windows PC or - if you know Linux - a good Chromebook.

And if you want to know why Microsoft didn't compare this device with a MacBook Air ... honestly they should. The ad could show that the Surface can do all the PC things that a MacBook Air can do while pointing out the touchscreen/2-in-1 things that the MacBook Air can't do. But hey, remember it was Apple who began this in the first place with their utterly false advertising "the iPad can replace your Windows PC" campaign more than 10 years ago. So don't complain when Microsoft is throwing the same nonsense back at you.

rob53 said:

Sounds like judge is prejudiced against Apple. It’s like using witnesses in a murder trial who end up being caught telling lies about the murder and not telling the jury they did. 

How many of VirnetX’s patents in question are currently valid? One, two, none?

Sigh. Apple fans only believe the following patents are valid.
1. Apple's patents.
2. Patents relied on by Apple's competitors (Microsoft, Google, Samsung, Intel, Qualcomm etc).
According to you guys 1. and 2. must be strictly enforced to the maximum intent possible to the absolute letter, intent and spirit of the law with the widest possible latitude and most severe punishment of infractions permissible. All other patents, trademarks and mutually agreed upon and legally entered into contracts? Not worth the paper they are written on especially when Apple decides not to adhere to them. Good grief, even when Apple clearly 100% outright loses - the Apple versus Microsoft lawsuit that absolutely determined that it is impossible to copyright a general UX/UI implementation - you folks still act as if Apple won and root for Apple to sue them anyway.

That about sums it up, right?