Posts by Steve Todd 2645 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Sep 2007
Firstly the rumours of Apple cutting screen orders were wildly overstated. The estimate is they actually cut orders from about 17 million for this quarter to between 12 and 15 million. Secondly you're assuming that the screens were the cause of the supply constraint. It's pretty likely that there were other factors and they now have overstock of screens waiting to be used, hence the cut in orders.
There's no way that a company can introduce cheaper products and it NOT effect sales of their higher end kit. There are always going to be a proportion of people who buy the cheaper device instead of the premium model they would have purchase otherwise. The only thing they can do is hope the result will be net positive.
In the current financial climate coming out with about the same growth in profits as Google (the 14 week vs 13 week thing equates to about 7% growth) isn't bad, but cheaper devices command lower margins.
>OIC; having a powerful car like this means that you can overtake the Kia Picanto in the queue in front?
Yes, it does. You need a much shorter clear stretch of road to get past moving obstructions like this, and you can often safely get past 2 or 3 vehicles at a time. The ability to get from 40mph to 60mph+ quickly, smoothly and well under control is the big selling point for these sports tourers. As they say: been there, done that, got the T shirt.
Funny, I and most office workers stare at LCD screens all day long without any serious problems. eInk may be better in full sunlight (most teaching happens indoors in case you hadn't noticed), but the small screens don't match well with the format of textbooks, their resolution isn't great (600x800 typically) and screen response is sluggish for things like links and cross references.
You still haven't answered the central question of the tools for creation and distribution of textbooks (Amazon's ebook format isn't good at complex typography for formula etc).
Even a basic 16GB iPad has far more space than you need for textbooks. All this talk about memory cards and file systems is an irrelevance to what it's needed for. Don't forget that Google's Nexus tablets also lack card readers.
The Note 10.1 is a huge step down compared to the iPad for this kind of work (much lower Rez screen, more than two hours less battery life, but most importantly it hasn't got the text book creation and distribution platform of the iPad). Add to that you're saddling the students with an additional GSM data contract and saving much less money than you're talking about (factoring in just the standard 10% educational discount and looking at the best Galaxy Note 10.1 prices shown by Google your saving is £15, and I expect they're getting a better discount than that).
Oh, and there is LOTS of free stuff in the Apple App Store for students to download. Google are far from the only provider of this.
Textbooks. Rather than carting around 1/2 a hundred weight of dead trees, the contents of which are guaranteed to be outdated in a year or less, the students can carry a single electronic device the size and weight of a single pad of paper that holds all of them and picks up updates almost as soon as they happen.
There is definite evidence that textbooks benefit students. Providing them in a more compact, more up-to-date form is a usability benefit and also a cost benefit (the electronic versions being typically 1/3rd of the price). Given this why does the iPad need to be any BETTER for teaching? Providing it's no worse than using a text book then this by its self is a win.
Why bill for the mobile data if you're running via your home broadband? You're being charged for it already by your ISP, which AT&T aren't going to refund if they AREN'T your ISP.
If, however, they ARE your ISP and data caps have any meaning (other than they just want to screw more money out of you) then the data used by your mobile should count. THAT's why it's against net neutrality, not because they "have" to bill you twice.
PCs built to the same spec are normally similar in price to Apple kit, and sometimes MORE expensive. Take a look at the Ultrabook market for example. Where are all the Ultrabooks that are significantly cheaper than a MacBook Air without cutting corners (like using spinning rust rather than flash)
Jobs was definitely pushed rather than jumped. NeXT wasn't a commercial success, but then neither was it run into the ground. It became the basis of OS X and iOS, so the worst you could say was that it was a technology ahead of its time. Meanwhile,he also ran Pixar, which has been insanely successful and made him one of the biggest shareholders of Disney when he sold it to them.
Jeremy Clarkson is agin anything which gives him less power from a given size engine. If he could get a street legal car that burned nitromethane then he'd love that. Diesel is however better at delivering torque (which is why it is popular in trucks) and delivers better fuel economy (though modern petrol engines are getting closer).
Since diesel oil is a by-product of the cracking process we may as well use it productively, but it needs more effort to clean up its exhausts.
But I live and work there and I think I might have noticed things like black mucus. Much of the air quality issues are down to NOX emissions and the PM10 levels are generally low in places other than the middle of busy roads. It needs work, but its nowhere near as bad as you're trying to make out.
I don't suggest that we charge in, all guns blazing, and ban these things, but failing to look for and implement cost effective measures to mitigate or reduce things that we think are causing a problem is the height of irresponsibility. If we followed your model then no car would have seat belts or air bags, after all those folks were going to die sometime weren't they?
Running a Diesel engine lean reduces particulates at the cost of increased NOX. Adding the urea mix into the exhaust brings the NOX back down, so it's a two part strategy.
There are strategies you can use to get people to refill the urea tank (anything from a warning light on the dash to refusing to start when it runs empty). NOX is pretty nasty stuff and we definitely want to keep emissions of it down.
There's always a balance to be found between utility and impact. Unless something is seriously dangerous or harmful then make the cost of buying/running it at least cover the cost of the impact. You can then let the public decide if they are prepared to pay for the utility.
You're confusing different problems.
The Chinese are suffering from smog. It's a localised effect caused by soot, sulphur dioxide and hydrocarbons combining with fog to form a dense cloud. It's less of a risk to global warming and more of a risk to actually breathing, so needs to be dealt with pretty quickly.
Carbon dioxide and carbon particulates from Diesel engines are a different issue. They are suspected of being a significant factor in global warming, which is a slow, long term effect. Modern diesels tend to be fitted with particulate traps and/or they inject an urea/water mix into the exhaust of a lean mix combustion to remove soot and NOX. The problem therefore is in older vehicles or engines that need to be cleaned up.
During the SEC mandated quiet period a company is not allowed to make any statements. That includes confirming or denying rumours. Analysts can say pretty much anything they want, start rumours etc and the price of the stock will react. Chances are the results aren't going to be stellar, so pump the price up and dump it before we get any real news.
The level of protection offered by the EU warranty isn't as high as Apple's own. Providing they honour the legal minimums for their customers (they only need cover items sold in their own stores, not at 3rd party outlets for instance) there's nothing to stop them offering extended warranties with better coverage.
The Belgians seem to be complaining only that this information isn't sufficiently well publicised in store.
But there is normally a lag between the R&D starting and the finished products being sold. For a while after that the company will be recovering the R&D costs, so while in long term it should be cash positive in the short term it is an expense on the company books.
The thing that you're missing is that most models in a given range only differ by their DPI. iPhone 3GS -> iPhone 4 was a simple doubling of resolution in each direction. Update an apps resource file to include extra bitmaps with the same name as the existing ones but with @2x on the end of the name and the system automatically picks the right one for you. The same when it came from moving to the iPad 2 -> iPad 3, just add extra bitmaps. The iPad Mini looks to software like an iPad 2, so no changes there. With the iPhone 5 Apple update the SDK so that it could automatically reflow forms on larger screens. Code had to be updated to use this.
So developers need to write code to support the iPhone (using the reflow) with two sets of bitmaps, plus if they want to support the iPad they need a set of forms designed for that (again with 2 bitmaps for everything). One program, two sets of forms (phone and iPad versions of the app), a maximum of 4 bitmaps for each item on the form (if you can't share the bitmaps between phone and pad) otherwise 2 (low and high DPI).
The problem that Android has is the concept that one size suits all. In practice iOS developers have made significant changes to their forms to make use of the extra screen real-estate. That's where Android is at a disadvantage in the App marketplace - there are only something like 10,000 apps that have been coded for Android to make use of a bigger tablet screen vs 300,000 for the iPad, and many of the gaps are from big-name providers.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" - Evelyn Beatrice Hall (in her biography of Voltaire, not Voltaire himself)
Unless people are inciting others to break the law in their writings or libelling a particular person or company then free speech should apply. I don't agree with what is being said, but they should be free to say it.
That Wheeeee noise was my points going right over your head.
1) As part of the standard setting process Motorola will have been asked how much they want to charge for the use of their patents. If they gave outrageous numbers there then alternative ways of doing things would have been found. The R in FRAND means that the rates that are charged MUST be reasonable.
2) The ND means that the same offers must be available to all. Not just the same percentage, but the percentage of WHAT. Unless they can show that others have been offered and paid this rate on a complete device then its is discriminatory. Worse still from Motorola's part they withdrew their licence to the companies making Apple's baseband chips (which is something that you're not supposed to do, ever, and is definitely discriminatory)
Wrong, and you're putting words into my mouth to boot.
ONE aim of FRAND is to provide a level playing field, but an important factor in the choice of those patents by the standards setting body is their cost. The standard needs to be affordable, and as something like 3G embodies thousands of patents so individually they need to be cheap.
Saying that doesn't mean that companies cant cross license their FRAND patents, it just means that their value isn't as high as non-FRAND patents. The aggregate rate is thus the cash rate plus the value of the cross patents. Patent holders are also allowed to do things like offer bundles of patents at a discount etc, providing the same deals are available to everyone.
What we have yet to see is any EVIDENCE that this is the same deal on offer to anyone else. Just about everyone else buys a baseband chip from the likes of Qualcomm, license paid. Unless Motorola can show examples of customers who are paying 2.5% OF RETAIL COST, not 2.5% of the cost of a component or module that is sold on to become part of such a device, then their offer wasn't FRAND. Stop fixating on the number and look more at what it is being asked of.
The whole point of FRAND and SEPs is that manufacturers give up their rights to charge arbitrary and large amounts of the cost of devices in exchange for a small fee per device, but for many millions of devices. If Mototola charged $1 per device to everyone then they'd be currently making over $1 billion per year in licensing. If they had refused to allow them to be FRAND then the patents wouldn't have been included in the standards and they would have been lucky to get a fraction of that.
Trevor, one of the principles of FRAND is that the patent holder should have a published price list of what it costs to use. Companies using a patent need to know in advance what it's going to cost them, and another principle of FRAND is that patents can be licensed after the fact (so that the patent holder doesn't get advanced knowledge of the plans of a competitor). They are free to agree cross-licences etc as part of the negotiation, but unless they can show other phone manufacturers (and there are plenty out there with fewer 3G patents to cross licence than Apple) are paying an aggregate amount equal to that percentage of RRP for completed devices then the offer isn't FRAND.
Conversely Apple are offering THEIR 3G/LTE patents at the kind of rates they are talking about for Motorola. Android fans keep on talking about what a small percentage of the market the iPhone represents. They want to set the principle that Apple can charge the kind of money that Motorola is asking just for 3/LTE?
I certainly don't think FRAND means what YOU think it means. By your argument a £50,000 car with a built-in mobile phone would attract a royalty of £1250 for Motorola. In reality the royalty is almost always on the module that embodies a SEP, not the completed device. For smart phones this is normally the baseband chip, and the royalty is paid by the chip manufacturer.
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