As this excellent piece by Thomas Friedman points out, manufacturing is rapidly becoming a global commodity. The real value resides with the creators of a product, the designers, engineers, marketers, etc. Factories are just big machines into which you plug your designs, and they can be swapped in and out of your logistics chains if necessary.

The "big machine" analogy is even more apt as manufacturing eventually shifts more and more to automation. How many workers does a robotic factory need? If you've ever seen videos of the Lego factory in Denmark, the answer could be as few as none, and it operates 24/7, 364 days a year (down one day for maintenance). Jobs was right to tell Obama that manufacturing jobs aren't coming back to the U.S.

Apple is merely acknowledging the fact that the "Designed in" sticker is coming to mean a hell of a lot more than the "Made in" sticker.

It's a pleasant surprise that Intel is offering this option at all, and you're calling them assholes because they're not offering it for all CPU's? I bet you're also pissed that this optional protection plan isn't free either. You arrogant, entitled jackass.

That's closer to the truth than you think, except that I personally don't believe that they have the slightest interrest in monetary compensation. The feeling I get is that Apple started the patent litigation ball rolling for the express purpose of doing as much damage to Android as possible, not for the potential of licensing fees or financial relief.

By raising the specter of lawsuits among hardware manufacturers, with the attendant legal costs, as well as the massive wastes of time and resources, Apple may well be gambling that a lot of manufacturers, especially smaller ones with limited resources, wouldn't be willing to take on the huge headaches of tackling a well-funded, utterly ruthless titan like Apple. Apple seems to me to be far more interested in chilling, or better yet killing, the adoption of Android than collecting money, a la Microsoft.

I agree with you completely, and it could get much, much worse for the people who have to defend against these weapons if they are deployed from the launch tubes of attack submarines. Then defenders will be faced with a hypersonic weapon that suddenly pops up thousands of miles closer to an intended target than expected than if they were land based. The warning window will be much smaller, and the direction of attack may be completely unexpected.

Interestingly, the political value of this weapon system may far outweigh its military utility. Just knowing that the US has these weapons, especially sub-launched versions, will force potential adversaries to rethink their entire defensive strategy, possibly futilely. They'd have to extend their radar coverage and air defenses to all possible avenues of approach to lucrative targets, or relocate those high-value assets, or both, along with the necessary extensions of command and control infrastructure, and swallow the concomitant expense associated with any of those decisions. The very existence of such a system could force an adversary to the realization that a viable defense against it is neither militarily nor economically feasible.

When Page took over as CEO from Eric Schmidt, he asked Steve Jobs for advice. After initial reservations, given the competitive animosity between Apple and Google, Jobs told him in so many words that Google's product strategy was all over the place, and they needed to stop releasing half-baked products and to concentrate on just five. He said that Google needed to focus on just a few things, and to polish them into world-beaters before releasing them.

And Jobs was absolutely correct. Google's "throw-it-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks" strategy is causing serious damage to their brand, and by killing off products which don't gain traction immediately they're sending the message that they weren't too committed to their success in the first place.

Jobs was many things, a significant number of which were downright despicable, but the one quality of his I really admired was his ability to say no to the multitudes of ideas percolating up to him, and to focus on just a few that he felt could be brought to fruition in a reasonable time frame. Google's attitude appears to be the diametrical opposite: the impression I get, and it's just an impression, is that Google treats all good ideas with equal priority, which ensures that the ones that actually have a chance of succeeding don't get the attention they need. They need to get out of the "engineer's playground" mentality and focus on a rational and sustainable product philosophy.

The only possible explanation for that statement is that it was posted by Iris.

Dammit! Where are my mod points?

Agreed. Those are trademark, not patent issues, but the core of Apple's complaint against Samsung cites the latter's "slavish copying" of Apple's designs, and those two examples do nothing to deflect the criticism. It may have been nothing more than oversights by the graphics department, but Apple's counsels could argue that they demonstrate a pattern on Samsung's part. The stakes for Samsung are extremely high, and one would have thought they would have been much more circumspect. They appear to be doing the best they can to undermine their own defense.

Are they in effect admitting that their previous Android phones were ignoring Apple's patents? Samsung has not been doing themselves any favors recently, what with the "app wall" in their store display in Rome featuring icons from iOS, and the webpage for the Galaxy Player 50 (since removed) that showed a 2008 screenshot of the iPhone's Maps app.

Thanks for the correction. I know he had demanded they be removed, but I don't know why I was under the impression that they had been given tot the Computer History Museum.

Apple is breathtakingly ruthless about killing off what it sees as legacy technologies, and I've always had the impression that they have no desire to be shackled to the backward compatibility train as Microsoft has been. Jobs was well known for being totally unsentimental, almost contemptuous, of the past, and when he became CEO of Apple in 1997, not only did he kill off a number of product lines and projects, he also donated Apple's large collection of historic products to the Computer History Museum.

As Apple demonstrated with the then-new version of iMovie, when they decide to go in a new direction they simply make the leap, and devil take the hindmost. They infuriated untold numbers of iMovie fans when all of a sudden all their projects wouldn't work with the new version, but Apple's rationale was that the new iMovie provided the basis for an improved way of doing things, and they refused to hobble it by making it backward compatible. They gambled that it would lure enough users to their point of view that the discontent would blow over, which it eventually did.

They took a similar gamble with Final Cut X. They were fully aware that it would probably alienate the entire professional editing community, not only because their projects wouldn't work with it, but because so many features they depend on were absent at launch, and worst of all, their years-long investment in polishing their workflow and expertise was suddenly out the window, and they'd have to start again from scratch. I'm still amazed that angry mobs of video editors didn't storm 1 Infinite Loop with torches and pitchforks.

That being said, some professional reviewers were of the opinion that despite the fact that they couldn't and wouldn't recommend it for production because it was clearly unfinished, Final Cut X really was a huge leap forward and some of the features already present would lead to greater productivity. One reviewer (forgive me; I can't recall the link) predicted that while it would certainly alienate current professionals, it would eventually attract and give rise to a new generation of professional video editors, especially those familiar with iMovie, and that it would only be a matter of time before Final Cut X was once again the industry standard.

To revisit the premise of this story, Apple made a conscious decision to potentially push away the current generation of professionals, because they're gambling that they can spur the rise of a new, larger generation. It's a bold, incredibly arrogant move on their part, but frankly I think they're going to pull it off.

Insightful comment, but that's only half the story, and despite what you might think, they don't have it easier. The holy grail for Apple is to make the hardware disappear completely, leaving the user focused on the task at hand, not the care and feeding of the device. They've come pretty close with the iPad, but it's really damned hard to mask complexity with simplicity. For the last few years Apple has suborned the technical aspects of their products to what ordinary folks can actually do with them. Note that they don't talk about the speeds of the CPU's in iOS devices or how much RAM they have, and the message of their ads is getting things done with their devices. This is what appeals to the majority of consumers, and conversely what drives tech-minded folks up the wall. Contrast iPhone ads with Droid ads. The Apple ads show people listening to music, having Face Time chats ith their grandkids, taking pics at the beach etc, while the Droid ads come across like trailers for "Tron". It's amazing that Motorola doesn't grasp that the ads only appeal to a very narrow segment of their target market, the techies. They hobbled their horse at the starting gate.

Everyone is talking about Siri, not because it's amazing technology, which it is, but because this amazing technology is finally accessible to ordinary folks, not just researchers in an engineering lab. This knack of taking existing tech and presenting it to consumers in a package a majority of people find useful is Apple's strength. The mouse and GUI, MP3 players, touchscreens, voice recognition etc all existed prior to Apple taking them mainstream. Apple made a conscious decision to ignore the technorati in favor of a vastly larger market, and their bets have paid off big time.

And frankly, I think much of the Apple hatred among tech enthusiasts is sparked for this very reason. Apple makes some really cool toys, but they've made it as plain as day that they're not interested in catering to gadget enthusiasts, and they're sealed and locked down to make them as reliable as possible for Joe Sixpack. It's plain that much of the disappointment evinced over the iPhone 4S was from enthusiasts and analysts expecting something new and shiny, but got what they thought was a warmed over iPhone 4. Nothing could be further from the truth. The iPhone 4S only shares the appearance of it's predecessor, but it's a new device with expanded capabilities. It's like complaining that they're disappointed with Boeing's new 747-8 Intercontinental because it looks almost exactly like a first generation 747-100, despite the fact that it's completely re-engineered, with dramatically better performance, electronics, systems, engines etc.

It's world changing when the masses can easily use it, or when it impacts everyday life. An honest-to-God working teleportation device wouldn't be world changing if it never got out of the research lab and only a few scientists used it.

Pogue suffers from severe RSI and has relied on Dragon Naturally Speaking for years. His books and columns are all dictated to his machines.

It's more than just marketing, as so many here fail to realize. Marketing may entice you to buy a company's products or services, but it won't keep you buying from that company if you think their offerings suck. They actually have to live up to the marketing. Apple products have very high user satisfaction ratings, and marketing alone can't account for that.