Uh, no, that's baseball.

Dun-dun-dun...

"We can't communicate with the pilots!"
"Why not?"
"Somebody hacked the WiFi network and put 'Plants vs. Zombies' on the pilots' iPads!"

Now we know what happened to MH370...

Credit card data, perhaps? I assume they want you to pay for that infotainment, not to mention any food or drinks you're ordering.

While I don't necessarily disagree with you in regards to the benefits of free downloads, if I wrote the book, shouldn't I be the one who decides how it is going to be distributed and marketed? Or at the very least, someone that I have decided will have that responsibility (i.e., a publisher)?

...and I assume your next complaint will be how inefficient government is and why the hell should you have to pay for inefficient government?!

Actually, it wasn't bad if you had a less powerful Mac. I remember watching videos on my black and white Mac Plus--dithered appropriately to create faux greyscale at 320x240 (since the screen was 512x384, it took up better than half the screen!).

I would love this for my phone.

I am nearsighted. I have no problem reading my phone but I have problems seeing things that are far away. So I wear my glasses when I drive, bike, or go to movies. It's not too bad--I have driven without my glasses by mistake before with no major collisions. I've seen movies without my glasses and I can tell what's happening on the screen. But having glasses on definitely helps.

So if I'm nearsighted, why would I need this?

Because, with my glasses on, I have a hard time focusing on close things--like, say, my phone. Yes, I know, the answer is bifocals. But wouldn't it be cool if my phone could look at my face, go "Oh, look, he's got his glasses on!" and adjust the screen appropriately for my eyes behind the glasses?

Well, you mention the vast increase in game sales on Steam. The question isn't "did you sell more games at the lower price point." As a company, I'm not interested in customers--I'm interested in money. As the dot-bomb taught us, having lots of customers doesn't mean a thing unless you're making money off of them.

Someone below had an entertaining post about a city that had floated a bond to pay for a bridge and had set up a toll on the bridge. As the bond was paid off, they lowered the price of the toll and made more money because more people used the bridge more often. So they lowered it again and made still more money! They lowered it a third time and made less. So the whole "lower prices equals more money" doesn't work--like I said, if it were free, you should have an infinite amount of money. There is a point where you're leaving money on the table.

Setting a price is usually based on assumptions of how many people actually want this thing. For example, when movie studios started selling movies on VHS, they priced them around $80. They figured that only a small number of movie-buffs would actually want to own a particular movie. So the prices were set for the rental market--they knew that Blockbuster and local video stores were the ones buying the movies and that they were going to make money off the rentals. But when the video store bought 50 copies of a new release and, six months later, sold 40 of those copies cheap, people snapped them up. So the studios tried lowering the prices to catch those people and they made more money.

Now you look at that example and say, "See? You're making more money by selling for less!" I look at that example and I say, "Their assumption as to the size of the market was incorrect."

Assuming that developers are making more money by selling their game for $5 versus $20 (you state that sales increased, but did they increase more than 4x?), I'd be curious as to what assumptions they made causing them to set the price so high to begin with.

Agreed. By the logic of some people, if I gave the product away, I'd have an infinite amount of money. Obviously it doesn't work that way.

For example, consider this $14.99 book. If I reduced the price to $13.99, would I make more money than if it was $14.99? I might actually make less money because the price different isn't enough to make me buy it. But at $9.99, I've crossed a psychological barrier--under $10--and I might see more sales and more revenue than at $14.99.

A little off-topic, but I sometimes get a big grumpy about the whole, "Publicly traded companies are required by law to care more about profits than anything else." You get it right in the second sentence fragment, though.

Publicly traded companies are required by law to protect their shareholders' interests.

If their shareholders care about immediate profit and stock price more than anything else, then you're right. If their shareholders care more about not damaging the environment more than anything else, then you're wrong.

I'd agree that shareholders are mostly concerned about ROI, share price, dividends, and the like, so it kind of works out the same way.

When iTunes first came out, of course, their prices were cheaper. You could usually get the whole CD for $9.99.

The interesting thing is that when Apple allowed the music companies to set the price to $1.29, the companies that did so made more money. While some people were not going to pay $1.29 for a song, there were plenty of others who said, "Yeah, okay."

Again, the whole, "lower prices mean more money" is not always true. By that logic, selling something for $0.00 would give you an infinite amount of money. Obviously that's not true.

What's interesting with digital items, of course, is that the cost of what you're selling is low. It costs money to print a book and ship it stores. It costs significantly less money to ship bits of data to a customer. So those cost-savings can be passed on to the consumer. However, other costs--like actually generating the content--haven't necessarily gone down.

By that logic, if it were free, I'd have an infinite amount of money!

It doesnt quite work that way. We've also seen that if you raise music prices from 99 cents to $1.29, revenue increases as well. So in "mass-market," the trick is to find where that magic price point is. Am I more likely to buy a book that sells for $9.99 than I am to buy one that is $14.99? If I made it $8.99 instead of $9.99, would I sell more copies to make up for the price difference?

It can also depend on what you're selling. If I write a good pulp-fiction novel, I may do pretty well selling it for $4.99 because lots of people will buy it. On the other hand, an insightful treatise on the condition of the economy of Lithuania and how it relates to grain costs in Poland probably would need to be priced a bit higher if I'm to eke out a living off of it because there will be fewer buyers.

Mmm...tantalizing enchiladas...

Popularized it, perhaps, but I wouldn't say created it.

That said, I think the GP may have been talking about the Mac.

According to the article, it's larger than a Boeing 737. For a seaplane, that's pretty impressive.

And heavier in an airplane is better...how?