Apple has bought back a huge number of shares, as well as increased their dividend 8% this round. The share buy-back is capital-efficient for investors and a big deal. Not only that, but at a minimum they can fold in the dividend they don't have to pay any more for those repurchased shares into the dividend they are paying the remaining shareholders, so you get the best of both worlds.

Believe me, it actually is a big deal. Ignore the crap that comes out of the media.

-Matt

Well, you are assuming that the company is valueless when you say that. Most companies are not valueless. Most, in fact, make a profit, and as an investor you own a piece of that profit. The profits are not a phantom... that's cold hard cash and it means something whether the company has a dividend or not. It's very real.

Many people treat the market like a game, and there are some game-like elements to it, but the underlying reality is that it isn't a game. The secondary markets have many uses... it is the liquidity and transactional efficiency of the secondary market that gives U.S. industry a level of flexibility that no other country can compete with. our energy infrastructure, renewables industries, small businesses. When the world changes, dollars flow where they are needed.

By dismissing the secondary market you basically dismiss any need for liquidity. You are wrong. The markets aren't about giving people a free pass... it's survival of the fittest. If anything, investors have it the easiest. We can shift our resources literally in a few seconds, and other than the crash of 1929, no crash since has lost investors who stuck with it any money in any reasonable period of time unless they were stupid and sold at the bottom (not understanding what stock ownership actually means).

Look at a graph of the 2008 crash. The economy might have gotten screwed due to the lack of regulation of the financial industry, but the markets recovered relatively quickly and that happened because the efficiency of the secondary markets allowed investment resources to be shifted very quickly. Just looking at tops and bottoms doesn't give you a full picture... very few investors actually went 'all-in' at the top and sold 'all-out' at the bottom. No matter how hyped-up a story you get from the media, it isn't an accurate representation of what people actually made or lost.

If you think the stock market is a crap-shoot then you are probably thinking a bit too short-term. It's never been a crap-shoot. Not even during the 1929 crash.

-Matt

Sounds idiotic to me. Non-linear steering is great, but any sort of dynamic/adaptive steering that changes according to conditions is stupid beyond belief and will cause an endless stream of accidents because the driver can no longer predict how the car will react to similar steering motions.

-Matt

Reading Rainbow was a wonderful show on PBS that ran for a long long time, and LeVar Burton has been involved with it and with kids education for decades (even before playing his role in Star Trek TNG). Even though it has reached its goal, I'm throwing in a hundred or two myself. My opinion: Anything donated will be well spent, LeVar Burton is just that type of person, who you know you can depend on.

-Matt

It's kinda hard to have any sympathy when only an idiot connects these 'smart' consumer devices to the internet in the first place. These devices do not have any functionality that I can't already get simply using a Roku or AppleTV or Airplay or Chromecast.

I have a bunch of these... VCRs, Receivers (for the integrated Pandora), etc. I leave them all disconnected from the internet, and so should everyone.

Having just one media device be connected to the internet is kinda like picking your poison, but at least you have a choice. And something like a Roku or an AppleTV is going to be far, *far* more secure than the crap you find in VCRs and SmartTVs and other devices of that ilk.

-Matt

I was driving down the street and noticed something odd about the car in front of me... the keys were dangling off the back of the trunk! We came to a red-light and I hopped out and tapped on the woman's window.

She was rather startled but I put on my most innocent face and she rolled down her window a little and I said "Miss, sorry for startling you but your car keys are dangling off the back of your trunk!". She did a double take and then realized that it was true! Her button ignition switch had worked because the keys just happened to be 'close enough'.

I said "wait a moment, I'll get them for you now" (I didn't want to get them first because she might have driven off and would then not have had her keys at all). I went to the back, got the keys, and handed them to her through the window. She smiled and said thank you.

I went back to my car and managed to get my seatbelt back on and ready to go before the light turned green again.

True story :-)

-Matt

That Canon can actually do 4K video uncompressed. Why he wasn't using Magic Lantern I just don't understand. There's no point comparing ANY 1080p output against 4K output under those lighting conditions, the post production run has so much more information to work with when downsizing 4K output it isn't even funny. Not to mention the poor lens choice.

-Matt

I guess the real question is... why would someone want to take 4K video with a cell phone anyway? What's the point? If the lighting conditions aren't perfect, the output is going to be crap.

But I gotta question the Canon setup... was he intentionally trying to create the worst setup possible? It was clearly not in focus, and I sure hope he wasn't running that Sigma lens either wide-open or fully stopped-down because its junky when it isn't mid-range. And if the intent was to compare 4K video he should have done all the tests with Magic Lantern on the Canon and the YouTube video should have been cropped rather than down-sized. There's so much post-processing being done that those videos just aren't meaningful as-shown. He also didn't define what he meant by 'raw' vs 'not raw'. What exact video mode was he using for the two halves?

Well, you get the picture. It's just not a valid comparison. Apples and Oranges.

In anycase, I think a large percentage of people will be quite happy with their cell-phone cameras and video. Cell phones have taken a huge bite out of the camera maker's point-and-shoot cameras as well as the DSLRs. But it's like the pad-vs-PC war. Those people didn't need the DSLRs in the first place, and the people who care about quality are still going to stick with their DSLRs.

It only takes once expensive vacation with poor shots for someone to start wishing they had brought something a bit better than their cell phones along.

-Matt

Well they don't really make 5.25" HDDs anymore. 3.5" is next on the list to go. I don't bother with 3.5" HDDs anymore myself, in fact, not even for servers. I stopped buying them last year. Everything is 100% 2.5" now. It's a much nicer form factor and easier to match IOPS requirements against the enclosure with today's drive densities.

In the beginning there were 3.5" SSDs. OCZ for example. They rapidly disappeared. If you go on, say, newegg right now, they list 724 2.5" SSDs and exactly 6 3.5" SSDs. 1.8" is starting to creep up, with 16 offerings.

Performance per cubic meter, anyone?

-Matt

You are talking as though joe consumer can actually run something like that when joe consumer cannot. With Android, joe consumer downloads an app from the app store and runs it, and the app happily slurps all of his data. With Apple joe consumer does the same thing and iOS pops up windows asking him if he wants to allow the app to access his contacts, or his GPS position, etc.

Similarly, Apple at least encrypts everything by default. Android requires you to use an option. Apple closes jailbreaks. Android... not.

VPN? You'd better hope Google store does a better job vetting those apps because the little requestor they put up is generated by the app, not by android. Apple puts VPN apps in its store through a sieve.

Joe consumer... you know, 99.9999% of the customers of these devices, can't program a single line of code and thinks linux is some sort of marsupial.

Guess which one is more secure? I'll give you a hint: People who give a shit about the security of their data and the integrity of their device don't choose android.

Google knows this is a problem. They just don't know how to fix it. But they had better pretty damn fast because fewer and fewer people are interesting in giving away all their personal data to every little app they download.

-Matt

Urm. You are implying that this isn't a problem on Android devices? Sorry to break the news to you, but App incompatibilities on iOS get fixed. I've seen Apps on my ipad-2 break every once in awhile, but they don't stay broken for long.

App incompatibilities on Android, particularly when it relates to a driver bug that requires a vendor fix or app-developer work around, often do not EVER get fixed. It's one reason why apps tend to get developed for iOS first, because developing an Android app that works across umpteen different devices each with its own hardware bugs is a nightmare.

-Matt

If you are an Apple user then buy an AppleTV ($100) to hook up to your 55" screen. You can then AirPlay video from your ipad onto your T.V. wirelessly. You will find yourself wanting to watch certain programs on the 55" screen a lot more often.

Probably 80% of what I watch on my T.V. these days is AirPlayed from my ipad. The canned iOS apps (such as PBS's app) are much nicer operated on the ipad than they are through the set-top box's remote. Website video works just as easily. Mostly though, it's the great iOS apps that make video streaming a pleasure to operate.

(There are numerous TV box products, the Roku is a fine box as well and Amazon has a box out now, but for an Apple device user, the AppleTV's AirPlay feature is fully integrated, convenient, and seamless).

-Matt

*NO* Android vendor keeps their phones up to date past one or two updates, and sometimes not even one. They can't, because their business model isn't compatible with keeping old phones around. They need sales volume to make any profit on their thin margins which means they want their customers to 'upgrade' to new hardware as often as possible.

Even the Motortola's (when Google owned them) were woefully behind (and still are). I think of all the devices over a year old only Google's nexus series is running a reasonably recent version.

Apple only needs customer retention (which they have), and has additional revenue streams after the iOS device has been purchased, so Apple's business model is very different.

-Matt

To be fair though HTML5 apps, and I run a few of them (Google's gmail app for the ipad for example) aren't anywhere near as smooth as native apps.

-Matt

So basically you aren't willing to write Apple a check for $100 for a hassle-free battery replacement on a pad that you've used to good effect for, say, 5 years?

I'll bet 95% of Apple's customers would have no trouble writing that check. I would do it in a heartbeat, if that were the only thing that needed replacing.

-Matt