nht

boltsfan17 said:

AppleExposed said:

For what? So I can play some cheap iPhone games for free?

Unless Apple starts developing its own games and getting 3rd parties on board to bring console games to the next Apple TV, then who cares if I can play the paid version of Angry Birds and other indie titles?

Older console games could be possible on the ATV4. Newer console games are pretty much impossible on the ATV4. It's not nearly powerful enough. I wish Apple could work out a deal with Nintendo to bring some older classics to the Apple TV. 

AppleZulu said:

Seems like the “eventually” part is the thing that all the “if Steve Jobs was still alive” people don’t want to remember. There really weren’t any instant successes in Apple’s history. It’s almost always a new thing that gets incremental upgrades until it becomes the brilliant thing everybody thinks it was in the first place. 

Then we forget all that, and when we watch it happening again in real time, It’s all “Apple is doomed, Tim Cook is an idiot, and if Steve Jobs were alive, we’d have an instant success every six months!”

gatorguy said:

nht said:

gatorguy said:

nht said:

gatorguy said:

nht said:

gatorguy said:

nht said:

gatorguy said:

jbdragon said:

Corporations don't pay taxes, YOU DO!!! So you tax them more, they will just raise prices and YOU are the one that's actually paying.

If they raise prices then wouldn't that obligate them to even more taxes since they'll make even more profit?

Besides that how do you raise prices after the sale occurred? Corporate taxes are paid on profits, which can only be determined after a sales period has closed.  How would you know how much to add in advance? I have zero doubt that Apple has already computed the optimal prices for their products, right to the final dollar to maximize its profits. Raising them more because France wants a bit of what they are paying as a corporation to end up in French accounts for French use rather than Irish ones would be counter to that. 

If I'm off-base maybe you can explain.

EDIT: It seems after doing a bit'o reading that the claim companies simply raise prices is more a FUD-ism than fact. I guess it gets repeated so much that some folks just accept that it must be true. 
https://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/19/who-pays-the-corporate-income-tax/

"Probably most people assume that the corporate income tax is largely paid by consumers of its products or services. That is, they assume that although the tax is nominally levied on the corporation as a whole, in fact the burden of the tax is shifted onto customers in the form of higher prices.

All economists reject that idea. They point out that prices are set by market forces and the suppliers of goods and services aren’t only C-corporations, which pay taxes on the corporate tax schedule, but also sole proprietorships, partnerships and S-corporations that are taxed under the individual income tax. Other suppliers include foreign corporations and nonprofits."

Explain to me which "sole proprietorships, partnerships and S-corporations" competes with Apple, Google, etc?  None.  There are also no foreign corporation that are in the same league as the targeted US companies.

If French taxes are higher then these companies can and will charge French consumers more than for other consumers for these services.  Since the tax is levied against all providers then unless demand is very elastic there isn't anything to keep that from happening.

This is a tax on "digital services" AFAICT. Depending on the details this might have negligible to zero impact on companies like Samsung and Huawei or force a price increase in their handsets. Apple's ability to simply raise their iPhone prices and pass their French taxes on without also pricing themselves further away from competitors may be limited.

Wait for details to see who this actually affects but the acronym for the tax is pretty telling : GAFA, named after Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon 

And what competitors to GAFA would not be taxed and therefore able to take Digital Services consumers from GAFA?  None. 

So who prevents GAFA from raising prices of movies, music, etc in France to cover the tax?  Samsung and phone prices are simply you trying to muddy the waters since they aren't competing with GAFA in digital services.  So not them.

So who are the competitors in your "pricing themselves further away from competitors" statement?  

As I said, unless demand is very elastic for digital services there's not a whole lot to prevent GAFA from pushing the costs onto the French consumer.  It's just another tariff. 

What's the impact of $200B worth of tariffs against Chinese goods is pushed completely onto the American consumer?  About $60 a year.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/07/12/upshot/trade-war-cost-families.html

Maybe there would a few French consumers that would reduce spending but not likely very many if the French economy is stable.  

Further, some of the consumers of some of the GAFA companies are advertisers and not citizens.  Do you think they're really going to be that price sensitive and who are the competitors they will move to to reach the same demographics?

I'm not going to even attempt to argue economics when actual economists (perhaps you too are one, I'm not) have already commented on whether product prices are increased equally by the corporate tax expense incurred. As far as I can tell those professionals "trained in the art" in general say no. 

Actual economists who aren't peddling something agree that there is disagreement as to whom pays the majority of the corporate tax burden.  Economists, for the most part, agree that the majority of the burden is generally not paid by the stockholders/owners but by the workers or consumers.  Which pays most varies based on situation but as noted in the GAFA the group with the weakest bargaining position is the French consumer.

By requiring that the product price increase equally by the tax incurred is simply not arguing in good faith which is par for the course when discussing anything with you.  

This is the comment that began the discussion:
"Corporations don't pay taxes, YOU DO!!! So you tax them more, they will just raise prices and YOU are the one that's actually paying."

How would you interpret that statement if not the same as I did:  Corporate taxes paid are passed thru in their entirety to consumers in the way of product price increases. 

If your takeaway of the posters meaning is the same as mine would you consider the comment accurate? Everything I've read today on the topic says owners/stockholders pay some (sometimes most) of it, workers might also be "paying" some of it (sometimes a LOT of it), and consumers might of course pay some of it. Maybe a little, maybe none at all, maybe a lot. 

Claiming that the amount of corporate taxes paid are automatically passed thru in the way of price increases for that company's products and thus directly paid by the consumer doesn't appear to be true AFAICT. Agree or disagree? Will I get silence now or will you too argue in good faith as you expect me to? As far as I can tell I was not dishonestly misconstruing what he said. 

"Corporations don't pay taxes, YOU DO!!!"  This part is true.  

"So you tax them more, they will just raise prices and YOU are the one that's actually paying.". This part is partially true, *and therefore also partially wrong.* 

tl;dr:  Yes, you the consumer do usually pay the larger burden of corporate taxes when there is an imperfect market...say when there is a monopoly or oligopoly.

Huh, only partially right in your opinion...

@carnegie made a very good post just above yours (#46), including this excellent point:
"...Corporate income taxes are raised from, e.g., 25% to 30%, the way to maximize after-tax profit is the same as it was before: Maximize pre-tax profit. If X is greater than Y, then 75% of X is greater than 75% of Y as surely as 70% of X is greater than 70% of Y. Say a company is making $100 million a year before incomes taxes and $75 million a year after taxes. Income taxes are raised from 25% to 30%. So to make that same after-tax $75 million, it needs $107 million in pre-tax profit. If it thinks that raising prices would increase its pre-tax profits to $107 million (e.g., because it wouldn't hurt demand that much), then why wouldn't it raise prices regardless of the tax increase? Then, without the tax increase, it could make $80 million a year after taxes instead of $75 million."

Be that as it may, and in order to clarify your position: You believe that when the French law taxing digital services above a certain threshold goes into effect that Apple will simply raise the price of Apple Music specifically for France so that its users are the ones paying? Seems as tho that would assist Spotify, Deezer, Napster and others assuming they stay under the threshold where the tax kicks in. And if Apple thought they could raise the price without reducing their profits why don't they already do so? What about Apple Pay, how will Apple pass thru the tax on the profits from that? Similar questions could be asked about Google services such as Cloud and ads passing thru the tax as a price increase for French citizens. 

Perhaps you'' get lucky tho. There's another proposal on the table to tax digital advertising 3%. Apple only has a little finger dipped in those waters, so that one is targeting Google and Facebook. 

madan said:

The lowest end Mini has an i3 that trades with a 2400g...a 150 dollar CPU.  Hardly a world beater in an 800 dollar computer.

The DDR4 in a Mini isn't 3200.  It's 2666 which is fast by Mac standards but isn't even the fastest on the market.


The only great part about the Mini is the fact that it's:

A. Small & stylish in a nice aluminum box with excellent heat management through shared blowers, proper air routing, software cooling profiles and thermal skin dissipation.

B. It has that insane motherboard design with fantastically forward thinking IO (thunderbolt-enabled USB-C ahoy!).

Beyond that, you mentioned it.  It uses IGP.  The issue isn't whether Mini purchasers need it.  It's whether Apple charges people like the Mini *has* that grunt.  Which it doesn't have.

A 2400g, some fast RAM, a nice PCIE SSD on a mini ITX would be about twice the size.  Sure.  And no Mac OS X.  And you'd lose 2 or 3 USB C ports.  But you'd also chip 400 dollars on a computer that could tie the Mini on half the tasks and run rings around it on the other half.

Again, Mac OS is the best OS on the market.  Apple hardware engineering is great.  But is it worth 100% markup great? I wonder.  They're charging the same that a Dell with a Core i5/twice the fast RAM/and a GTX 1060 costs.  And those two systems aren't even in the same solar system, much less planet.

So yeah. Mazda.  Ferrari. Fits.