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

Don't be stupid. Cyanogenmod is for programmers and hackers, which is exactly 0.00001% of the customers who buy these devices.

Try to at least be realistic.

-Matt

But that's just plain wrong. If you take the entire possible set of customers who need 'computing devices', most of them will not EVER need anything more powerful than what the ipad provides. Period. That's why consumer PC sales have been plummeting. PCs and more capable laptops are still alive because they are a good fit for businesses. But in the consumer space they are screwed and it shows.

You are thinking only for yourself and not thinking with any business sense whatsoever. What you are hawking is something that only a relatively small number of people actually need. And, Frankly, Apple takes a huge bite out of even that customer group too with their line of laptops. Almost totally maintenance-free devices whereas with Windows... good luck when you break something.

Which is why my brothers and I ripped Windows out of my parent's house and replaced the whole mess with Apple gear. We spend a hell of a lot less time having to fix things.

-Matt

No, I have the same crash-drain problem on my Nexus-7 too. Actually, every Android device I've ever owned has *very inconsistent* battery draw-down when sleeping.

-Matt

Apple makes the same amount of money either way. Doesn't matter to Apple which way you go. But for very old devices no consumer is going to replace e.g. an ipad-1 with another ipad-1.

It comes down to statistics. Apple offers deals for cost conscious consumers but a large percentage of Apple customers are either going to want a newer device or are not so price sensitive that they aren't willing to spend $200 more for a new device. In fact, a lot of customers don't use the trade-in at all and keep the old device.

So even though Apple offers these deals, garnering very high customer loyalty in the process, it doesn't actually impact their bottom line a whole lot.

-Matt

Ok. Here's my suggestion then... run Debian on a Chromebook. Yes, you can run Debian on a chromebook. I know that for a fact because I have an Acer C720 in front of me running whatever the hell I want.

There are three caveats:

(1) Make sure the chromebook can run linux. Google it for the specific chromebook. Older chromebooks are locked to chrome, but newer ones tend to have a special mode that allows you to boot whatever you want. The chromebook under the hood is just a basic Intel system, albeit with a nice Haswell laptop cpu, with a few special I2C devices for the touchpad etc.

(2) Chromebooks usually only come with a 16GB SSD (M.2 form factor SATA SSD... i.e. tiny). Not enough if you are serious. Buy a bigger M.2 form factor SSD. Also be sure to configure a good amount of swap space, most of these babies only have 1-2 GB of ram in them. But paging to a SSD every once in a while is not a problem and very fast so you won't notice it.

(3) Once configured you will have to hit CTRL-L on boot to get it past the warning screen. Every time you boot.

The chromebooks based on the Haswel architecture laptop cpu's are MUCH faster than the old atom-based netbooks (I have both. huge difference). Not as fast as a higher-end laptop obviously but still blasted fast and my little Acer C720 only eats 5-8W of power... that's at least 6 hours of battery life at normal idle without going into a full sleep mode (not sure if Debian can enter a full sleep mode anyhow on these things).

-Matt

This is not correct. First of all, all devices have a life cycle. They wear out, they break, the screen cracks from a fall... with Apple's astronomical customer retention numbers pretty much everyone who owns an Apple device is going to replace it with a new Apple device. If you consider the life cycle extending to around 4 years (up from 2 years). Apple fully expected the life cycle to increase and has planned for it meticulously. The trade-in program, the frequent iOS upgrades, and the longer iOS sustain on older devices are a direct response to the phenomena.

The second problem with your assertion is that I think something like 40% of Apple device buyers are newcomers.

Apple is sitting in a very sweet spot.

p.s. Android vendors are completely screwed from the lengthening device life cycles. Every single android vendor depends on their customers buying a new device on a 2-year cycle or less, so as consumers hold onto their devices longer the Android vendors lose serious sales momentum and then when the customer replaces the device Android vendors lose market share to Apple. Android vendors have not planned for the lengthening cycle and frankly they are stuck between a rock and a hard place because they will lose even MORE sales if they keep Android more up-to-date on their devices.

-Matt

Your reasoning is just plain incorrect. Obsolescence on Android is far worse than it is on iOS. With Android you might see one, maybe two OS upgrades before the vendor stops supporting the device. App support is even worse... every device has device-specific quirks which many app vendors on Android have NEVER bothered fix.

Developer support on iOS is far better, for far longer. Apple supports their devices far better, and for far longer.

I have an ipad 1, and an ipad 2 (and many other devices). The ipad 1 is too old, period. The cpu is too slow and it only has 256MB of ram. I still see regular developer app updates for my ipad 1 but it just can't run all the apps out there due to the tiny amount of ram it has. It can barely load some web pages. It isn't the OS's fault. The OS version has nothing whatsoever to do with it (other than developers keying off the OS version when making assumptions about RAM use). Even my second-generation ipod touch still runs Pandora, which is all it is really good for with its tiny amount of ram and slow cpu.

And frankly, Apple supported my ipad 1 for far longer than any Android vendor supported my Android devices from that era. My ipad 1 is still usable. My Android devices from that era are not. They are all dead or worthless.

My ipad 2 with 512MB of ram only has trouble with the more bloated games, and its plenty fast enough for me. It is still my go-to device when I travel. If I can only bring one thing (other than my phone), it's the ipad-2 and not the chromebook and not the nexus-7.

More importantly, Apple devices are under Apple's control, not other vendors. In particular not the phone vendors. I've had to remove most of the apps from both my android phone and my nexus 7 because so many of them access *all* my personal data and accounts these days. The telcos install all sorts of crap onto Android phones that I don't want and can't remove.

On Apple you don't have to worry about that. The App has no control over what resources it's allowed to access, the user does. My next phone is going to be an iphone-6 (my current phone is a Motorola Razr M which is great except I can't run any major apps on it any more due to security issues). And, no, running an android app that forces permissions off doesn't work either... that crashes the target app more often than not (when it works at all).

So if your complaint is that Apple is not supporting their customers, it falls flat on its face. Apple is doing a far better job than anyone else.

-Matt

I don't understand why you are trying to turn a pad into a laptop. Pads aren't laptops. You want to run Debian on something close? Buy a Chromebook that you can load Debian onto, like the Acer c720 or c720p.

-Matt

Yes, but there's no point doing that. You might as well just get a normal desktop at that point. Or a laptop if you want the portability. Which is part of Microsoft's problem. The Surface Pro is competing against *everything* which means it can get beaten out by anything.

Case in point. The thing weighs 2 lbs (the Surface Pro 2). The ipad air weighs 1 lb.

-Matt

The real joke here is that the inventory issue was explained in the conference call and anyone who bothered to read the actual source knows that ipad sales were actually down only 3% or so, and roughly flat across two months. The whole tablet space is flattening out but all that means is that Apple will start pulling more market share from Android just as it has been doing with the iphone... in the markets that matter that is. This is more junk like the 'world wide market share' crap that's proven to be such a bad predictor of Apple's business the last year.

Apple is "getting its clock cleaned by Android"? Only if you've had your head stuffed down a rabbit hole for the last 5 years. Helps those of us who actually spend a few minutes doing real research, I suppose, but I'm just flabbergasted at how little posters like you seem to know about Apple's business when you can literally find out with only a few keystrokes in a browser.

-Matt

Sales in this quarter only dropped around 3%, and frankly it's a big NOP. The production numbers you are quoting are including inventory effects.

-Matt

No we don't. Hybrid drives are stupid. The added software complexity alone makes them a non-starter for anyone who wants reliability. The disparate failure modes make it a non-starter. The SSD portion of the hybrid drive is way, WAY too small to be useful.

If you care enough to want the performance benefit you either go with a pure SSD (which is what most people do these days), or you have a separate discrete SSD for booting, performace-oriented data, your swap store, and your HDD caching software.

-Matt

MLPs can be a holy mess if you do partial sales. So basically if you want to own a MLP, either buy and hold forever (pass it on to your kids in your estate), or when you do want to sell you sell the whole thing.

Pretty big tax hit if you've held a MLP a long time and sell since you will owe taxes on all the distributions you received from it over the years (if in a taxable account). If in a retirement account you need to be careful of any positive UBTI (unrelated business taxable income) on the K-1. And there may be multi-state filing requirements as well (usually not an issue for most people as long as the apportioned amount for the other states is less than $1000).

If you still want exposure to the space but don't want to deal with the MLPs, then look at the GPs (the general partners). e.g. KMI, OKE, LNCO, and so forth. Those are C-corps but tend to run up and down along with their MLP partners.

-Matt

The press blurb is full of nonsense. Not one real performance statistic. Not one.

-Matt