And they do need the hype - they have a large portion of customers who are more likely to be repeat customers if they're gently pushed to upgrade instead of waiting.

You misunderstand, they don't need the hype not because hype is not useful, but because there is already boatloads of it. The amount of hype from "iPhone Plus sold out" is minuscule compared to already existing hype from all other vectors; it adds zero to the push to upgrade compared to months of relentless news about the iPhone 6 beforehand.

No, you don't get a free version, you don't get the media. You wipe it you've lost it. Not too mention the OEM version runs about $100. So no it's not free. Moron.

Except it is almost free because software vendors pay computer vendors money to bundle in their software. Basically a company like Dell or HP go to Symantec and McAfee and ask them how much do they want in on their new PC. Highest bidder gets installed. repeat this several times and the cost of Windows is recovered.

Windows OEM to you and me may be $100, but Dell/Sony/Acer/HP/etc are not paying that - they're paying far less. Add in the bundled crapware subsidy and it can pay for the hardware too.

The rear metal-rimmed camera is not flush with the case

Only true on the 6Plus, not the 6.

Only an idiot holds back physical inventory when they can sell it easily.

Apple doesn't need more press or hype; it already has those. They simply sell as many units as they can make.

If your "theory" is correct, then why do shipping times gradually get longer as more orders are made? If your "theory" is correct, why would the 6Plus ship a week after the 6 even for the earliest adopters?

Whatever happened to the belief that the simplest answer is usually true...

The Apple Store app started working well before the website did, say 30 minutes after the supposed launch...

The early parts of selection worked fine, it was when you chose a carrier that things timed out.

Once the website came up (about two and a half hours late) it was pretty speedy.

So it was something around the carrier gateway that was the issue.

The interesting aspect of that, was that people had no issue ordering from carriers directly that supported it (Verizon and AT&T were the two I knew people ordered from shortly after midnight Pacific)

The only real feature of note was Apple Pay, which might finally make NFC payments take off in the US. It's been a technology that should have hit it big a couple of years ago, but has never seen much consumer buy-in for some reason.

Because no one unified around it. You have credit cards and phones and all that, and the phones were all fragmented into using Google Wallet or other custom thing so it was impossible to actually use.

Effectively, Google thought "If you build it, they will come" and everyone basically gave a collective "meh" and promptly did their own thing.

What Apple did was try to be a de-facto standard. Apple made deals with Visa, MasterCard and American Express (which probably covers the vast majority of credit card charges out there). Apple made deals with big retailers people used. So in the end, Apple has, upon launch, the support of the vast majority of credit card payment companies, and big companies that most people shop at.

Plus, Apple has money on their side - the people who buy Apple products tend to be ones who have money, and are the kind of people who do spend it. Android users tend to be more tight-asses (given the vast majority of them are free phones that their carrier gave away), so are in generaly seen as a "lesser valued" market.

So you have companies agreeing to Apple because they know Apple customers generally have money. As a side effect, it means the technology being promoted gets widely distributed so everyone else benefits as well.

What does MS sell their OEM OS for anyway? Probably not that much. No one will likely bother.

Roughly $10-50 or so. It's hard to pinpoint an exact figure because the bundled software often pays for that stuff. So the refund you get is often far less because they have to take out the software that subsidized the cost of the PC. It's one reason why Linux PCs often cost more.

Anyhow, you can still bundle in Windows on the hard drive and all that, and separate out the software as a line item. If you choose to pay for Windows, you get a card with a unlock key on it. You boot the PC, enter the key, and it boots up with everything.

If you choose to not pay for software, you just click "I did not buy software" and it erases the hard drive.

You'd think people wouldn't get taken in by those Nigerian 419 scams as well, but they keep falling for requests to send money to make money.

You would think they'd stop before they'd send away $25,000 or more, but...

I can understand elderly folks falling for the "Hi I'm your grandson stuck in the middle of nowhere" scams, but the people who traditionally fall for the 419s know they don't have grandkids, and typically middle-aged people.

I guess greed blinds.

The writers of the US Constitution has the foundational documents of Sparta available to them. They deliberately chose to go in the other direction. This point seems to be one that is conveniently ignored by self-styled originalists.

I think the militaristic jingoism is a result of how the US came into existence - through war.

I mean, most countries only have one day to remember their war dead (Nov 11), while the US does the same (Memorial Day), as well as those in service (Veterans Day). Interestingly, while most of the world celebrates those who gave the ultimate sacrifice, it's when the US celebrates those in service, preferring to be different and celebrate its war dead separate from everyone else.

That's not the issue. The issue is that the low-cost asthma medications that poor people bought for their kids used the CFC propellants. The FDA would not let them switch to a new propellant without spending something like $200M on a new approval study, which was not cost effective in their OTC market, so they pulled the product. Poor kids don't suddenly get expensive inhalers because their cheap ones went away.

And the real issue is that people ignored the deadline which was issued by the Montreal protocol to address exactly that.

Inhalers were the last source of CFCs and the people who got together to limit CFC usage knew it would take time to approve new propellants. So they allocated over 20 years to do just that - enough time to find a new propellant, get it approved and phase the old one out well ahead of the deadline.

What did people do? Screw it - profits profits profits. The long deadlines was to deal with all this, not to simply ignore the problem until it was too late.

from what i understand of the definition of "customer", a "customer" means "someone who is paying for a service". here, there's no payment involved, therefore there is no contract of sale. i would imagine that it's fairly safe to say that we're most definitely *not* quotes customers of google quotes.

if on the other hand these individuals are actually _paying_ google for service and are not receiving a response, _then_ i could understand.

Of course not. But you give the right answer immediately.

Exactly. Embargo is a convenient scapegoat - it lets the government to explain away harsh life and crackdowns by an ongoing conflict, "us vs them", "everything for the victory". Remove it, and it makes that much harder for them to maintain that. Long term, it will accelerate the inevitable collapse of the dictatorship and the transition to something saner. If Castros are smart, they will do what Chinese and Vietnamese elites did, and head the transition rather than trying to resist it, so as to reap the maximum benefits. If not, there will be another revolution.

Either way, all that embargo does is delay that process. So it hurts the people of Cuba, not its government.

The embargo started before the Cuban missile crisis (in fact, many historians believe that it was the extreme hostility of US towards Cuba after the revolution that pushed the latter towards Soviets). In any case, the notion that if the embargo is lifted, Cuba would rebuild the missile bases, just defies any common sense. It was not their bases to begin with, and if someone else would want to rebuild them today, the embargo makes it easier not harder (because it takes that much less to pay to Cuba for them).

If you seriously consider the Black Book of Communism to be the "best estimates for communist regimes killing people", you're either deluded or retarded. Heck, even if you take the book at its face value, even then it counts "victims of communism" - and by this they mean anyone who has died due to e.g. starvation during a famine, regardless of whether said famine was artificially induced or not (and Soviet Russia had plenty natural ones in the aftermath of its Civil War). For the actual killing estimates, they tend to take the highest figures from the sources that are basically pure guesswork, like Solzhenitsyn's books.

The embargo is by US on Cuba. If US truly wanted to lift it, it could just do that. The fact that it is not lifted because "Cuba does something" means that US doesn't really want to lift it, either.

Which is stupid, because Cuba is as communist as it is only because of that embargo. Hell, look at Vietnam: a country that US actually went to wage war in, with numerous civilian casualties, and now? They're rapidly catching up with China on that whole capitalism business, and you can actually talk to a Vietnamese guy on the Internet and ask him what he thinks (and tell him what you think).