What are you talking about? Do your research, iAd has been a huge failure for Apple, and accounts for a minuscule fraction of their revenue and the mobile ad market as a whole.
http://www.businessinsider.com...
http://www.businessinsider.com...
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/20...
Probably part of the reason it's not nearly as successful as Google is the very fact that they don't read all of your emails, messages, posts, pictures, etc. to target you.
Oh give me a break with the semantic bullshit. I'm not even making a judgment call here, I'm just stating facts that companies who's business model is based on ads (Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter, and many thousands of other companies are the same) consider their user base (eyeballs, whatever you want to call it) their product. And, yes, they are sitting around in meetings discussing this fact and figuring out how to monetize it.
Are you or have you ever even been in this industry? I have, and I have no problem with the model, but I'm not going to pretend that's not the way it is, and if I did I wouldn't be very good at my job. I assume you aren't or wouldn't be making these silly posts.
Well obviously they don't put it on billboards. But their employees freely admit it's true. And why shouldn't they? It's been the cornerstone of advertising-based business for a LONG time. Denying it to themselves would not be in the best interest of maximizing revenue and profit, the primary goal of a public company.
Come on, you can do better than ad hominem. You have made three posts with zero content so far. Explain it to the rest of us reading the thread, then, I'm curious.
Especially since Google and all other ad-based businesses freely admit the advertisers are their customer and the users their product. That's the whole way ad-supported companies work.
If you were going to argue the OP's point, you quoted the wrong line. "They [Apple] see you as a customer, not as a product" is completely correct. But that doesn't necessarily make it better, just a different business model.
That has nothing to do with the very valid original point that Apple's hardware buyers are their customers and the phones are their product, while Google's advertisers are their customers and the users are their product. In fact you pretty much restated that in your post.
Except it is better in the only way that matters: many people prefer it - especially those who can afford the premium over Android phones. The fact is, convenience and ease of use most definitely IS a feature, and for many it's the most important one. Calling 500M+ people worldwide "zealots" is something only a zealot would do.
Perfect example: Apple Pay. Google has had NFC payments via Google Wallet in Android for years. They could have built a huge business there, but they completely fucked it up. They put out the feature with almost no retailer support, minimal bank support, even worse CE vendor support, only in the US, and a half-assed marketing effort even for Google's usually low standards.
Apple waited until the feature was relevant (secure credit cards are coming to the US this year), they could design a much more convenient UI (iTunes/Passbook/Thumb ID), launched their solution with dozens of major retailers, bank deals, service beyond the US, and the usual insane Apple marketing hype. Rumor has it they even negotiated a small transaction fee from banks - that alone could make it a multi-billion dollar business very quickly.
Technical innovation is not everything, and it's often not the most important thing. Timing and execution are often the difference.
Of course it's who they approve of - because the point of carpool lanes is to effectively remove significant traffic and air pollution, and they felt that Uber doesn't qualify.
Also, "ride-sharing" is such a bogus term for Uber, since "ride-sharing" = carpooling = picking up passengers to go where you are already going. Uber is 99% a taxi service with the drivers specifically going to pick people up and transport them, not some guy splitting gas money while commuting to work.
Sure it does. Even with the new rules that for-profit "ridesharing" (i.e. independent taxi service) can't use the carpool lane, ANYONE with more than one person in a car not charging the passenger gets to use the lane, which makes it pretty silly to pretend it's some "protected class".
Sorry, but that makes no sense whatsoever. You are now speaking for all computer users? That only takes one counter example to prove false.
And it's easy to provide an example that affects a lot more than 1 person: iTunes. As crappy as it is, it's used by several hundred million people - and it doesn't run on Linux. (And please don't try to start explaining how you can do it with Wine, because that already goes WAY beyond everything you just said about "able to the things they know how to do")
And it you are talking some philosophical "if people can't tell what OS it is they don't care" - sure, but that will never be the reality, and is about as useful and practical an argument as hypothesizing we are all living in The Matrix...
I use Linux on a workstation for many things at work, and as a server at home. I also use a Mac (with OSX, Linux, and Windows installed) because their hardware is really nice and Parallels works well. And I also have a Windows machine because I do like the occasional PC game, and Windows is the only OS that supports all of the mainstream games. I absolutely care which OS I am using for each because the reality is, they all have their strengths and will never be 100% interchangeable.
Wait, so anyone who has more than one person in their car and doesn't charge them for it is part of the "protected class"?
Either you replied to the wrong comment or the whoosh over your head sounded something like this:
Your post is absurd, though I guess I should get it from your username.
This is about someone getting paid to drive someone else somewhere for a profit (a significant portion of which is taken by a large company), and that person not being able to use the HOV lane. That's it.
And what's wrong with that? It's not a carpool, it's a business. And in fact it often doesn't even get any cars off the street, anyway, so why should they get to use the HOV lane?
Except no, that's completely incorrect.
That's silly. If you are just driving someone somewhere because they paid you, you are not removing any cars off the street.
The point is it answers the question that is the title of the article: "If Tesla Can Run Its Gigafactory On 100% Renewables, Why Can't Others?"
If everyone did the same thing as Tesla, there would be so much excess generation in the day much of it would be wasted, and you'd still have the same non-solar requirements at night so you could never offset that with solar. Without storing all of the excess capacity in the day it's never going to be possible for *everyone* to run "neutral".
If all else fails, lower your standards.
