Reasonable and just, that's exactly the point everyone is trying to make.

I don't think calling briefly Apple support saying "hey, I found an prototype iPhone, and I want to return it to you guys" is reasonable and just... handling it to the police is.

Of course, I am not familiar with Californian law, but in France, where I live, you have to handle lost and found property to the police if you don't manage to directly contact the legitimate owner, this would be considered the only "reasonable and just" effort in this particular case.

I guess that if Apple does push it to court, the fact that calling Apple is "reasonable and just" enough will be settled. I wouldn't like to be in that guy's pants right now.

The OEM may also not charge for support in the first 90 days after purchase.

So, after 90 days it is OK to charge?

You must be a) not aware of the OEM licensing terms or b) your shop is doing something really stupid/illegal.

a) guilty as charged, I was just speculating on what might be the reasons behind this reasoning. b) I don't buy OEM, I wouldn't know. And c) I don't live in the USA, so the laws might be different.

When the PC has a problem, the average customer calls the OEM that selled it to him. So the customer comes back, and you can make money on support calls.

The context was between Android and Apple.

We were talking PCs, not handhelds.

Which is it? The first quote is from the message I first answered to.

Apple doesn't have a $600 iMac because the iMac is overpriced, it doesn't have a $600 iMac because a $600 iMac would suck.

So we agree, Apple products are overpriced? You may be happy with this, I'm not. And I assure you, while low-end, high-margin products may not exist, high-end, low-margin do, and it's better for the consumer than the same kind of high-end with a high margin.

Google has one phone, sort of.

Wait, what? Are you saying every Android-powered device is exactly the same? Or that the Nexus One is the only phone that somehow counts as a Google phone? I'm confused here.

Markets don't work like that. You can't just follow a trend line, then extend it two years into the future.

That's why the GP used the word 'may', I think, because he understands that the market is not something that is easy to predict, and that two year-extrapolation on such a young market is quite random. Then apparently, he was citing a source, so some economists seems to agree with him. And by the way, if you just extend the trend line, it beats Apple in a little more than a year. So I guess that wasn't the method used then.

No, you have it exactly backwards. Margins like that can't proceed from crappy hardware. The margins on the low end are razor thin. That's why HP, Dell, and Acer (and sometimes Toshiba) sell more PCs than Apple, but make much less in profits. The bulk of those sales are on the low-end, low-margin segment of the market.

Low-end is completely different than low-margin... Actually, the GP has a point, how can you sell $500 a device that is supposedly "cutting-edge", and make a huge margin? Are the production costs that low? Then how is it high-end.

And then there is the HP/DELL/Acer vs Apple argument... So how is a low-margin PC at $1000 crappier than a high-margin iMac at the same price? (disclaimer: I don't follow the price market for pre-assembled PCs nowadays but I am quite sure that some PCs are sold at the same price range than some iMacs, the figure is not that important, replace by whatever price range you wish to compare). Low-margin PC would mean that the components plus manpower cost almost $1000, High-margin iMac means that components plus manpower is significantly lower than $1000. Now DELL or HP manpower is probably cheaper than Apple manpower (design isn't everything for those companies), so components are easily better in an HP or DELL machine than in an Apple machine, for the same price.

Of course if you compare a $600 DELL to a $3000 iMac, you will probably find better hardware in the latter, but that's hardly the point, is it?

For DPI settings to work perfectly, the simplest solution is to let the OS (and granphics card) handle it completely, therefore getting rid of any handles in the API that uses pixels as a metric. So a word processor says to the OS, draw a 0.25" 'Hello World'.

The problem with that approach, is that every graphic thing must be vector graphics or scaled by the OS (this could be done by transmitting the native DPI of a picture along with it when asking the OS to display it, for instance).

For 3D graphics, this is less of a problem, as the graphics card doesn't really care what DPI it renders, it can do it for every display resolution available, and it is not hard to include a zoom option.

Oh, my. I had no idea. I'm going to shut up now! :)

Oh, I didn't know that, thanks.

But, the final user who doesn't have to program on Windows cannot make Word or Windows Media Player run on a specific core, can he?

Of course the OS chooses on which core a process/thread runs on. Generally speaking it doesn't let the final user choose because it is of little usefulness in everyday computing, but for these kind of tests, the OS will control and tell which cores are working fine and which are not.

Chip makers could have their own testing software, which they don't disclose. I think very few people would be interested in a tool for stress-testing their CPU. Benchmarking would probably be more popular, as it is already for GPUs. The reason memtest exists is that at one time, RAM memory was more frequently failing than anything else in the computer, and that it was useful to have a piece of software that tested it completely. I don't think there is the same kind of need in the general public for testing CPU.

Games already are on the very limits of a platform. They already are optimized to the breaking point. There’s nothing left.

That may be true for a very small number of games actually... Games use whatever resources they need, and sometimes, it is not everything. If that were the case, all games would have mind-blowing graphics. No game would ever have a memleak, no games would have any bugs. This is very far from reality, as some gaming companies release games that are not optimized correctly, with poor graphics.

And schedulers are becoming quite good... Beginning from scratch is not really going to work better.

Microsoft spends almost twice as much as Apple as a percentage of revenue on marketing.

The conclusion that I draw is "Apple is better at marketing, it achieves more with less money". This has nothing to do with quality.

Yeah, multitasking a third party instant messaging is soooo hardcore!