"we need more security... now move it all onto the cloud"

What's really ironic is given Trumps hatred of Jeff Bezos, he's basically demanding the government start spending billions and billions on Amazon's offerings. Perhaps no one alerted him to this?

I still have an ATV2, which had Youtube until it disappeared from the home screen...

No matter. Apparently, at the time I typed this, Amazon and Apple came around to my viewpoint, and Amazon has made a Prime App for the Apple TV 4. You can thank me later, meanwhile, my conundrum about which little black box to buy got easier.

They're both for Net Neutrality. But they're also both for the DCMA act, which allows them to pull this stuff.

Let's not forget, both Amazon and Google don't have their applications on Apple TV. Which is incredibly lame, since they both have free downloads for iOS, which is what Apple TV runs, a variant of it at least. But they both said "F the customers". They have no problem offering their apps on the iPhone, but won't offer the same exact apps for Apple TV unless they can get different terms. It's only us that suffer by this meaningless battle.

I'm not buying a Google device. Although I much prefer having youtube than not, I already have small libraries in both Amazon and Apple, I'm not about to add a third entity.

Nah, things like Colbert, Daily Show, Morning Show, etc, are all on YouTube if you can stand to watch with a little delay. I always start out the night with Youtube to catch up the days news and commentary, and the previous nights laughs. Then I might go looking for something interesting on Netflix. If there's nothing there, I then need decide whether I want to look for something on Amazon and stay in the living room thanks to the Roku, or check out Apples offerings on their little black box in my bedroom.

IT's really getting maddening.

All I want is a box to plug into my TV to watch my media. I don't want to have to worry about who I bought the media from.

Currently, I have an Apple TV. I'm fine if my Music stays apple-only, but since Apple Music is available for Android, I feel like that's portable enough. Which leaves me with video.

I do Netflix, Amazon, and Apple. I used to do Youtube on the Apple TV, and still can (last I checked) by running the app on my phone and streaming THAT to my Apple TV.

There is no combination of devices that allows me to play all 3 vendors' material. Roku might be the closest.

I think these giants are all dropping the ball here, and perhaps they oughtn't not be the ones selling the media. Why can't the studios sell media licenses directly, so that if I buy a WB or Miramax movie, I can play it on ANY device with a WB or Miramax player, which they could then develop for Roku, Apple, Amazon, Google, etc. I guess that's the Model HBO is taking actually. I'm just sick of these disputes, where Company X wants to make money from selling someone elses content, and therefor moves to cripple its competitor by NOT letting it play the same content (even though that content is available for it on another App), etc.

It's just getting beyond frustrating, for us consumers.

I'd say follow Apple's lead and make the money off your hardware, but given that Apple won't let Amazon onto the Apple TV unless they get their slice of in-app purchases, that's not the way either.

These movie studios need to realize that consumers would be happy as hell to buy from them without the middle man, and wind up with media purchases that are portable across platforms. That seems like the only real solution.

Well, the patent has either expired or is just about to. So the news is it'll soon be available to anyone.

As a current iPhone owner of a somewhat older model (5S), I'm torn between going with a 6S or 7 in the future. Should the 8 arrive and be within the "regular" iPhone price range, my debate will change to whether to get a 7 or 8. If it arrives at the $1200 price range, no matter what cool new features it offers, it would probably be uninteresting until software developers actually wrote stuff to take advantage of the new features. Meaning, I'd just assume wait til the iPhone 9 arrives, so that software is available, and (presumably) the part shortages the author alludes to would be remedied.

But somewhere I read that Apple refuses to use a part in their phone unless they can obtain them from two independent sources. Makes me think the scenario that the author alludes to wouldn't occur at all. Yes, Apple sells pricey gear, but they're in the "pricey but reasonable" area, in order to maximize both sales and profits. Going all in on price to the exclusion of sales at all, that would be a reversion to the tactics of the 80's/90's which saw them in doom and gloom mode...

Ditto.

My late 2013 MBP with retina is still serving me just fine... At least, when i look at each new batch that comes out, I don't see any compelling reason to upgrade... Well, no... there is an upgrade path, but it involves going Dell and Ubuntu.

Sad that its 2017 and Apple can't deliver a knockout punch to its own 2013 tech.

WHat'd the latest round bring? Touchbar and removal of all ports except USB C... I"m sure those were features everyone in the world was dying for...

I came here to say something like that. Read the headline and was like "altbaba? really?"

Lets see... names of some successful tech companies:

Google
Apple
Netflix
eBay
Tesla
Slashdot :)
Reddit
Cloudflare

Two syllables is the charm.

3?

IBM
Microsoft

more?

Hewlett Packard

I know, I missed gazillions of them, but just saying Altbaba doesn't exactly roll of the tongue. Even "The corpse of a company formerly known as Yahoo" has more cachet than "Altbaba".

We view everything in the past and describe it as if we saw it in real time. Only difference is, the light from the tree falling in front of me only took 20 nanoseconds to reach my eyes. Still, I just say "that tree just fell", not "that tree fell 20 nanoseconds ago and I just witnessed it now"

This is stupid. Here's his quote.

"Even if you estimate that they average a measly $15/hr with their autonomous cars, working an average of 20 hours per day, 50 weeks/yr, that's $105,000 per year. I think that's what they call profitable."

The post I was replying to specifically believed Uber could get 20 hour per day, 7 day a week, 50 week a year utilization out of their cars.

That's the only way their $105,000/year/car calculation works out.

Alas... Demand for Users isn't constant.

Going into this assuming a constant 20 hour per day usage of every car in the fleet is called looking at things with rose colored glasses.

Knock that down to 6 hours a day, to have enough cars to accommodate the extremely busy times, and then idle a portion of the fleet waiting for the next call (probably by parking all over the city and powering up the closest car to the next fare).

Now you're down to $32,000/year.

Now subtract:

Insurance.

Gas or or power recharging

Inspections/Maintenance

Regular cleanings

Maybe you're looking at $15,000 per year after all that.

How much will a 4 person electric vehicle cost? $60,000? So that's 4 years til you see the first penny of actual profit. Unless you lease or borrow, then you're looking at financing costs/interest, etc. It'll allow you to see positive cashflow each month, at the cost of less actual profit over a longer period of time. Well, scratch that. No one is going to lease you the cars for the fleet - you're going to drive them into the ground by the time the lease is up. But Ubers big, they can obtain other financing either borrowing from banks or issuing bonds, for 4, 5, 6 or 7%.

And what will the useful life of these cars be? If they're averaging 30 mph for their fares, that's 63,000 miles per year. (not including other incidental mileage such as traveling to the next fare, returning for maintenance, getting a fresh charge, etc).

So after 4 years you've got a car with 250,000 miles. You got next to no resale value there. And this is when you start seeing actual profit from operating the vehicle (again if it was paid for in cash).

That's not so profitable anymore, is it?

>the touch bar which removes physical keys from the keyboards of high end users - the one most likely to want to use physical keys.

And the ones least likely to be looking at their keyboard while they work.

Seriously.

OK, a macbook keyboard and screen are close together so shifting eyes isn't too much. Adding a external monitor? And then being supposed to switch where you're looking like that?

One of the important things (yet another) that people in general (and Tim specifically) forget that Steve Jobs did was, was not messing with the Pro users when rolling out new technologies. That's why the iMac was the first one with USB ports, to give device manufacturers time to write driver that would presumably be tested by the consumer level buyers before messing with the Pro work flow. Which is what they ought to have done with USB C. Rather than yank out all the ports that many pros use in order to saddle them with dongles and shit.

Besides getting rid of one of their best innovations in a decade, the Magsafe connector, just to make sure all the ports look the same...

* 2013 Macbook Pro, iPhone owner, etc... Have now seen two hardware updates that I felt safe ignoring. That's rather sad. A) Apparently Apple doesn't want our money anymore or B) we're a week away from 2017, and for 3+ years, the only upgrade path to better performance from my laptop has been to shed MacOS.