Yes, a sideways monitor is clever everyone. But if you look at the submission rather than the edited entry, he's clearly complaining about laptops. Which, if you turn sideways, are kinda tricky to type on. I guess "get an additional monitor" is legitimate, but it seems like there must be some vendors who are not shrinking their vertical pixel counts.

Good progress on fusion right? It's what, about 50 years off for you?

Paragraph 3 - "Plus after Econ 101, you learn the price curve is somewhat BS".

The real problem is that he seems to be thinking that if $3 covers the costs, $6 is greedy. He's ignoring anything fixed costs. And the real problem with price curve isn't it's degree of complexity but that for most of us not selling to huge numbers in various markets with massive research arms, we're blind to where demand comes in at various prices.

Worse yet, we know that humans aren't rational. People who would never buy your product at X will buy it for 3X either for vanity or "because you get what you pay for." You may even increase demand by raising the price.

Oh come on. No shit $2.99 covers the cost. It's digital. The incremental cost to the developer to ship another unit for a piece of software is tiny, tiny, tiny. Most of the $2.99 goes to profit, R&D and fixed costs.

Now, he still needs to pay those developers who made the software, buy computers, rent office space, etc. I'm sure he's done the math and knows he can achieve that by selling X at $6 or 2X at $3. Of course, he could go open source, set the price at 0 and make it up on volume [/stupid slashdot joke]. In Econ 101 he would have read about the price curve that suggests that fewer people will buy at $6 but maybe not so much fewer that it isn't the better price for his business. For a businessman, the ideal scenerio is to charge everyone the most their willing to pay - price stratification. This is why you have coupons at the grocery store. People with little money and lots of time can clip coupons and pay less. People who have more money will not and will pay a higher price.

The play here is not that he's trying to sell the 2X number with some paying $3 and some paying $6. He wants to first make sure he is able to break even by selling something like .5 X @ $6 and X @ $3. The $6 price helps him break even the same way the $3 price does. Plus, after Econ 101, you learn the price curve is somewhat BS in the first place. Part of what he's doing is stating "We think the product is worth $6, but are offering a 50% discount to poor people and assholes (distinct groups)." Now, regardless of why I look at the $3 price, I am much less likely to think, "Is $3 too much for this expansion?" because it's already a half off discount and be more likely to purchase. He may actually sell more units at $3 than he would have without the $6 option.

These guys are just remarkably (for better or worse) upfront about the price stratification. He's also a freak'n brilliant marketer. Free publicity on Slashdot is a win.

All software pricing is arbitrary. Always. It's up to a vendor to ask for what they think the product is worth, offer discounts / sales / etc to those who think it's worth less, and for the consumer to either purchase or not. The vendor needs to deliver a product that delivers a fair enough value that consumers will purchase their products again / not leave angry messages on forums or app stores.

It's a matter of trust. If someone I trust sends me a shortened link, or posts via a blog or twitter, then I'll follow that link if what they're talking about seems interesting. Never been burned. Helps not to trust 13 year olds that would send you to goatse.cx. And to answer the obvious retort: Part of that trust is the likelyhood that this person does things that result in their account being hacked.

I'm with you that endless copyright is bad.

But we can probably agree that copyright for some period is reasonable. Right?

So, in order to protect our computing devices, do we simply never load copyrighted material on them, or do we compromise and say, "If it's on loan, I'll let it delete itself after some time period to enforce the loan?" That's a compromise I think is pretty reasonable. If my library books would return themselves automatically and I didn't have to remember to take them back or face penalties, I'd be in favor of that as well. Personally, I'm often willing to sacrifice some control for some convenience.

No infrastructure? Really? Network building costs billions. Pricing is about percieved value not the cost. For printers or razors, the disposable bit is cheap to make and expensive to buy to cover the prices of the more expensive to make but cheap to buy part. Ditto your cell carrier giving you a phone for free and charging for SMS.

This is no fat and happy oligarchy. Sprint has been struggling to stay in business, Verizon and ATT&T are at each other's throats and smaller / regional players pop up regularly.

This whole complaint is like saying software should be free. It doesn't cost anything to let me download it, why shouldn't I get it for free? Oh crap, right. I'm on slashdot. You actually do think software should be free.

It's possible that if the poster is finding the cost outrageous, it's because his teams needs don't align super "super fast, super reliable, super awesome" storage. Perhaps he needs to beg IT to also offer a slower, cheaper option. Or perhaps they do and he's whiner .

Before I bought my first iPhone? Surf the web happily from my phone. There was mobile web browsing pre-iPhone but I found it unpleasant. On the iPhone, it worked.

Actually, basically all the things that a blackberry did three years ago, but did in an unpleasant enough way that they were not compelling, the iPhone made compelling.

Ease of use (and pleasantness of use) is a feature. I know that's an unpopular sentiment on /. where ease of use is to be ridiculed (see MS vs Linux), but similar to how Apple made a unix based operating system accessible to the masses, they also made the smart-phone accessible enough to me, that I would buy one. Their competitors have (largely) caught up, but give them their due. Apple democratized the smart phone with the iPhone.