Apple could sell a lot more phones if they didn't bother making money too.

You must be an idiot.

Sitting on the board of Directors of another company while developing a competing project of your own. That's wrong, him (Google) not being legally punished with a fine for every cent he ever had or will make is what is wrong with intellectual property.

Apple fighting samsung completely legally within the confines of the system (and trouncing them because Samsung is a shit company that can't create anything in the consumer space worth owning) is not what is wrong with intellectual property.

Your ignorance and stupidity aside, you know perfectly well they you're wrong here. That means this conversation is over.

You make the self-righteous mistake of assuming they were talking to you.

You think wrong.

Apple customer support is generally regarded as some of the best in the world, and most definitely the best in tech.

- Within 2-3 seconds you know exactly what Apple is marketing with these ads (which is not the computers, but the software and support network surrounding computers).

- There are no god-awful sex appeal tactics

- They get the point across very clearly (when you buy an apple, you can count on a uniform and cultivated support network, and usability out of the box)

- They don't have actors/actresses with horribly annoying catch phrases or voices to try to "stand out".

This ad campaign is completely fantastic. They know they don't need to build the mac brand; they also know that they have to make very clear what makes them special.

I would believe you if Apple hadn't sold so many $600+ iPhones unlocked direct from Apple.com/ca/retail stores

The real problem with Google selling phones in the past is that

a) not that many people wanted them*

b) they fucking suck at it (read the horror stories of buying the nexus online direct from Google)

*Keeping in mind, that although android has a large portion of the US market share, any given phone has very little

Simple fact is lots of people bought the most popular iPhone direct from Apple, then proceeded to move up the chain until they were all sold out.

When the most popular version of the iPad sell out, it's usually minutes before the rest sell out as well (because people are easily pushed into paying more or in many cases accepting less storage). The true popularity test for the Nexus will be just that.

However, due to Google's piss poor marketing the situation is a little different. Apple nearly always manages to have it's most popular model be the lowest end - so that you never have to settle, only pay more.

I'm watching this with quite a bit of interest. Google has a product here (a physical product) that people actually want, and historically they manage to fuck that up every time.

More interestingly, if the terrorists attacked solely critical care centres and retirement homes the outcry would most likely be greater. But flu works exactly the opposite (it gets less attention because it mostly kills those groups).

I'm not going either direction here, I don't care enough about other people to give a damn which is the "correct" attitude. I just find it quite interesting.

You need to read what you write before hitting submit

You're quite confused about the purpose of patents... The slide to unlock patent is doing exactly what it should: it's giving apple a legally protected head start for being the first to design something.

Now, is it too trivial? Could be, but the roar of applause for it when it was unveiled suggests otherwise. Should such things be patentable at all? Maybe not, but they are, so either work to fix it or suck it up.

Making a light bulb became instantly common, trivial knowledge after it was invented, so do many other patents. The point is not about what *becomes* obvious.

You're wrong,

The only reason patents do anything at all is because you can get injunctions and unreasonable settlements out of them. If infringing was only ever penalized with paying a back-royalty no one would ever license something properly and there would be no incentive to actually develop technology.

You have absolutely no clue how much useful transmission equipment costs. You probably think that you could just work out a mesh system that would magically work without 75% transmission loss and individual devices that cost at least an oder of magnitude more.

Actually, your comment might be the most ignorant I've read all month... congrats!

I'm amazed that some people think that $10 is a legitimate cost.

You have to realize that the company:

1) needs to provide you the server
2) needs to make a profit (or they will be crushed by a competitor that does)
3) needs to maintain the current infrastructure
4) needs to implement new infrastructure

You simply aren't going to get that for $10 a month. $20 might be in the ballpark.

Safety is still an issue with cargo.

A train derailment at *100*kmh can be catastrophic. A train derailment (it's tens/hundreds of thousands of tons of cargo) at *4000*kmh... that's considerably faster than most muzzle velocities, except instead of a few grain bullet you're talking about hurling a skyscraper that fast.