ergo98

No, it isn't sustainable. History will prove me out, and in 3 years I would bet that Apple has seen a significant margin haircut. Quote me on a 50% decline.

As a comparison, by the way, look at Sony (which was the Apple before Apple). Once a purveyor of high margin audio equipment, they saturated that market and started moving to high markup mobile audio equipment...and then TVs...and then lower markup mobile equipment, etc, and then everyone started fighting back.

Apple is exactly following the Sony curve.

EDIT: Arrowed down. This is one of those seminal moments that speak volumes about a community, and I think HN is done (just furthering an observation that has grown). Account and site abandoned.

Apple's profit margin is an extreme aberration, and it isn't sustainable. Any comparison that relies upon profit numbers is...disturbed.

But regardless, what a way to try to dig a negative out of a story like this.

These sorts of complaints are ridiculous. It's one thing to host some little family site on GoDaddy shared hosting, but for anything real...come on. You get what you pay for.

So my question stands. Do people just see 37 signals and data and imagine that it's interesting, so they up-arrow? Are there bots at work? Etc. I am deeply curious.

We all know that Google is working on the next version of Android. Making up some inside sources, though, should not be rewarded.

My inside sources say that they like grilled cheese.

Even technically...to make "dual-core" apps work on single-core processors? Weak.

We've had survey, after survey, after survey, foretelling doom and gloom for Android. All while actual metrics have shown it gaining marketshare by leaps and bounds. If I have to pick between reality and "what a self-selected group picks on an online form, usually to get offered a $5 Amazon certificate or the like", I'll choose the former.

My observation stands. Just noticed that the original poster has the email address "iphone". Indeed.

I find these surveys in all their forms to be garbage, whatever the purported outcome is. They're almost always online (because it's no-name, no-budget survey companies), self-selecting surveys, and they seldom have any relationship to reality. Lazy bloggers use it to fluff up coverage.

Funny that the Fortune guy posted it given that I called him out for a prior one - http://blog.yafla.com/Lazy_Surveys_Enable_A_Lazy_Press/

I have demolished more surveys than I care to explain. I just have lost the desire to point out how naive people are for falling for this nonsense again, and again, and again.

But again -- let's revisit it in a couple of months, after those millions of Android users have switched.

So I guess Android is done then. Lets shut her down! Or we could just wait and see how it pans out.

Dell literally is bringing the whole Android platform down a notch. You heard about some great new Android device, and then Dell comes along and takes a piss in the water with some junk.

Dell needs to clean some house. They are too big of a company to be failing like this.

However I actually think there is a perfect medium somewhere in the middle: Granular permissions that allow for curation by an optional third party. That would be an ideal situation for the market, where Grandma or Joe User can select from a number of curation sources (or punching it in directly) where reviewers rate by quality, assess if the permissions are appropriate, etc.

Android sandboxes far better than iOS. It has a more granular, integrated security system.

The existence of "anti-virus" and task killers speaks more about customer ignorance and the placebo effect than it does to the platform.

I think the App Store review process is actually dangerous because it implies something that isn't true. Apple makes zero guarantees about the quality of safety of the applications.

I see that my post above got moderated down. People want to lazily, and sloppily, reuse passwords everywhere. It's ignorant. The world would be better if we got rid of this ruse that sites hashing passwords themselves offers any reasonable protection. It leaves the barn door open.

We should reframe the discussion around that, because it is the real issue.

But let's pretend that PoF stores a 128-iteration blowfish ciphered password for every user. The site is compromised, as it was, and the attacker now has the run of the place. They inject their capture into the login process and now they siphon off every plaintext password.

On the scale of things, whether the password is stored hashed or not is very, very low. It masks the real problem.

I'm not sure if the bump numbers are broadly relevant: who is the average user who will be running bump? It isn't a general iPhone user, but instead is a technologically savvy individual usually in a place like San Francisco. There is no relevance there to the broader market.

User "error" for sure, just putting that out there. Just because Apple makes updates available doesn't mean that most users have installed them.

I'm not pretending anything. Quit with the trollish tactics. The service adapts to the market.

Sure, people can increase their cap by buying the "insurance"

You realize that terminology was coined by Teksavvy right? That company has done a brilliant job playing the public like a fiddle, and you're playing just the note they want to hear.

I'm with Cogeco. I have a 60GB cap. I've gone over it once. For $6 more I have a 125GB cap and a higher throughput, so $0.09 per GB. For a few dollars more I would have a 150GB cap. And so on. The same is true at Bell, Rogers, etc.

It's there in the hopes that you worry about going over your cap

ABSOLUTELY! That is, without a doubt or question, exactly why they have caps. They don't want you to come anywhere close to your cap. They would rather Joe Average uses 5GB / month of their 60GB cap. On my cell phone I have a 5GB cap, and in an average month I use about 200MB (always around WiFi).

However every provider warns you as you approach your cap. One whiny complainer was posting a screenshot of how he went over his cap and there was big letters on it explaining exactly what happened and how, asking him to upgrade now.

They do exactly what you ask for. Turns out that some people are just irresponsible.

Congratulations on seeing it through.

Yes, 25GB is an absurdly low cap. Most providers have a basic plan that provides 60GB, with a usually quite inexpensive way to dramatically increase the cap. People keep quoting the $2.50/GB bit which is just shockingly ignorant -- if you know that you'll use more (which not everyone will. The casual user will not and Avg Facebook and Email User has no reason to subsidize the "everything through my internet connection" guy), it's more like $0.12/GB.

This whole discussion is a perfect example of how people can embrace positions wholeheartedly just because they selfishly want them to be true.

This is how every single element of the economy works.

The issue here is not about the last mile. I'll say it until I'm downvoted to oblivion, but people keep restating this incorrect statement.

Opposition parties are always quick in reacting because there is little to be lost. They get zero credit for that.

This was simply such a wildly unpopular decision that it would have been political suicide to support it

Again, let's be rational here- the UBB decision impacted a very small number of users (although its competitive impact may have been larger over the longer term). Further there is a political risk in taking action like this in that now the opposition has the ammo to say "Well can't you let the experts do their job? Isn't this what they're supposed to do?" (see also: Census).

It isn't as clear cut as you proclaim at all. Now Bell can intentionally cripple their pipes for a bit, blame bandwidth hogs, and the Consveratives will be in hot water.

Caps were in place on the vast majority of Canadian connections (meaning direct customers of Bell, Telus, Rogers, Cogeco, etc) long before Netflix came to Canada. The UBB decision impacted a very small number of customers on services like TekSavvy.

Not saying it's right, but just want some context in there.

Further, I hope you can appreciate how a provider's own internet services don't carry the same demands and costs as an outside source. Though perhaps they should be forced to allow Netflix to colocate a distribution server in each of their distribution points to deal with that.

I don't buy it, though.

My xbox is just a toy, in essence. It's an entertainment device that I could discard with little loss. A general computing device, which is what I think both smartphones and tablets are, however, are not game consoles. They are not merely entertaining frills. This sort of "landholder" gatekeeper model cannot and will not fly.

http://www.northumberlandtoday.com/ArticleDisplay.aspx?archi...

They slide out the little display holding the type you're interested in and you sit and mull over the aura of winnitude of each of them. There would be little tolerance for someone looking at each individual card for a minute, though.

The Ontario lottery corporation has come down hard on retailers because, of course, they're the ones who generally ply these scams.

However your original statement didn't have a lot of substance beside calling Apple's competitor's a "joke", and I took from it what I could glean.