mike_galloway

crowley said:

mike_galloway said:

bloggerblog said:

Are we going to pay less in taxes now that G7 is collecting more taxes and closed the loopholes?

Also in the end, all companies will just tag on any extra taxes to to the consumer. Taxes are always paid by the buyer!

Agreed - The G7 have agreed to increase taxes (hopefully) to all their people whilst labelling it as taxing the greedy multination companies - a win - win

The point is to level the playing field between multinational corporations with clever accountants and smaller, more local or regional companies who don't have the infrastructure to avoid tax in the same way, but therefore aren't able to compete on price.  It was never about what consumers pay.

bloggerblog said:

Are we going to pay less in taxes now that G7 is collecting more taxes and closed the loopholes?

Also in the end, all companies will just tag on any extra taxes to to the consumer. Taxes are always paid by the buyer!

Agreed - The G7 have agreed to increase taxes (hopefully) to all their people whilst labelling it as taxing the greedy multination companies - a win - win

rcfa said:

LeftyLisa said:

Is it possible for anyone to asses the life of the SSD inside all M1?   I have already bought the IPadPro M1 and the new MacMini M1 and sure would like to find life expectancy…..or when the hard drive fails you just toss the whole kit?

Pretty much you toss the whole thing.

Modern hardware is optimized globally, to last longer than the normal useful service life, at the cost of repairability.

Say the normal use case for a widget X is three years. But making it repairable introduces failure points (like a moving battery, corroding contacts in component sockets, etc..
Soldering and gluing things into place reduces the potential for premature failure, makes things lighter, reduces weight and component counts, support incidents, shipping to/from service, etc. in short in aggregate it’s a massive win in terms of sustainability. The product now easily lasts five years, even though the vast majority gets rid of it after three (to stick with the example).
The exceptions is what you hear about: the few people who want to use it for more than five years, and the unlucky few who have an unexpected failure well before the five years, but after warranty runs out.
Then of course, it’s obnoxious, if repairs are difficult, impossible, expensive. But these are the exceptions, and overall, everyone is better off with the “difficult to repair” product: users who have fewer incidents and higher reliability, manufacturers who have less warranty expenses, less support expenses, and higher customer satisfaction, and the environment through lower energy and resource usage and less waste though longer service life of products.

cropr said:

AppleZulu said:

cropr said:

sdw2001 said:

The problem with all of this is Apple does not have a monopoly.  There are plenty of viable alternatives to using Apple products, namely Android.  A user is making a choice to be in Apple's walled garden.  Developers are making a choice to access that market.  This is the problem with the EU's initial conclusion as well. They claim Apple has a monopoly for "iPhones and iPads."   That's like saying Toyota has a monopoly on Camrys and Rav4s.  Their reasoning...that people won't change devices just because things are more expensive, blows their entire conclusion out of the water.  The consumer is actively making a choice.  Moreover, the notion that Apple's system has somehow harmed consumers, developers or innovation is comical.  The entire ecosystem (including GooglePlay) wouldn't even exist without Apple.  Apple literally created the entire market.  

Form an end user perspective this is correct. But from an app developer point of view the App store is a monopoly: it is the only allowed way an app developer can distribute his iOS app.  

Making an app only for Android is in most case commercially not an option.  A lot of apps only make sense if they run on all popular platforms.   

That's not how monopolies work. App developers can choose not to put their app on iOS, and they can choose to sell on other platforms. Certainly there are some that don't sell on iOS, just as there are some that only create apps for iOS. There are millions of potential customers available via Android, Windows, X-Box, or other game platforms. Just because a developer doesn't like the terms at any given one of those does not mean that the platform represents a monopoly. 

I am an app developer and my most successful app is an e-voting system used during general assemblies of large organizations and companies.  The customers (the organizations) are requesting that the app must support all eligible voters, independent of the device of the voters.  This means that my app must be available on iOS, Android, Windows, Mac (and some require also Linux).  An IOS only or an Android only e-voting app is commercially seen suicide:  I would have $0 sales .

I assume that Spotify can only attract artists to its platform if Spotify  can guarantee that all people can listen to these artists and not the IOS users only or the Android users only.  It might even be that this is the main reason that Apple Music is available on Android.

 

Maybe we all have too much time on our hands (agonising over the relative merits of different trackers)

Since I can’t remember having lost anything of any significance over the last 40 years, maybe a tracker does not need to be so important and a bit of organisation works better. 

My wife would probably disagree, although most of her lost items end up being in the house.

Mind you I can’t remember where I was last Tuesday! and I have photographs of thing I don’t remember possessing.

Maybe I need a TAG.