When a large mass of people are willing to pay, but you choose to limit the market to a much smaller mass just so that you can charge more, that's the definition of artificial scarcity.

The idea is valid for all of the smartphones running OLED displays. OLED's take no power (or very little) to display a black pixel. It takes full power to display white.

Problem is, they've already spent the money both on internal equipment and people's salaries. Even if you liquidate the company, you're not very likely to get even half of that money back and you'll put thousands out of the job. Granted it's probably jobs they should've never had, but still, politically, it's rather impossible to do.

Aside from the problem of lobbyists, a big difference between DoD projects and private companies is that you have very few (hell, if any) private companies with enough cash reserves to do one of these projects. The private sector has very few "here's the money, now promise with sugar on top that you'll spend it wisely" type of contracts. Generally, you build something using your own cash (or venture capital/IPO funding) and then sell it. A ~$66 billion project is something even Apple can't fund out of pocket, let alone smaller manufacturing companies.

So we're left with the problem of how you can reign in costs if you have to give said contractor money just to start research. You can't be overzealous with auditing as that has negative effects on results; they'll be too busy keeping records and artificial metrics that they will spend less time doing the actual R&D. But on the other hand you can't just let engineers/managers run wild with an unlimited budget.

And at the end of it, if they're late, you can't just cut them off because that would mean you've thrown all the money you've given them away.

I doubt there's anything so sinister. One thing to note is that TSMC's 28nm process is ready now; chips will start mass production at the end of the year on it.

I don't think Samsung has their 32nm HKMG ready for the type of volume that Apple would need for A6. The A5 is already huge and would likely not fit in a phone. Apple's only chance of getting some more horsepower inside future iPhones without having to use the A4 again is to switch to a smaller process.

2012 is the release schedule for 28nm ARM SoC's. Intel's processes are still way ahead, of course, since they've already moved into several generations of HKMG.

I don't think they're switching to x86. Rather, Intel will be fabbing ARM chips again.

Jesus man.

Not really. Even if you count "other related music services", iPods are still half the revenue of iPhones. There were more iPods sold but the profit margin isn't as fat on those as iPhones.

That being said, I think you can clearly say tablets and mobile media players are dominated by Apple. And even if you could dismiss Android's success as "carriers who don't have iPhones provide it", there's still no question that in their most profitable product space (smartphones), Apple is losing out.

That being said, with as much profit and mind-share that Apple gets -- and how huge the smartphone market will grow to be -- even if they own 20% of the market, that's still enough to be a huge wad of cash.

"I think, therefore I am"

What you're arguing here is that all observations and internal consistency of the human brain is up for question. Which may be technically true but hardly equivalent to belief that scripture describes accurate non-observable phenomenon and history.

Are they both leaps of faith? Sure. The former leap of faith (believing in observable reality) causes me to get up in the morning and eat instead of going "fuck it, none of it is real anyway".

People made planes without physics? Many modern day integrated circuits wouldn't work without understanding quantum mechanics....

Of course, if that's your definition of "faith", what you're talking about here is the same as faith of existentialism. If you want to really expand faith to that level, the everything except self-existence is a leap of faith. And in that respect, there's no difference between me believing that I'm typing on an actual computer -- interacting with physical matter -- rather than just dreaming all of this.

Do I commit absolute certainty to the fact that others exist in the world? What about history? Do I believe that historical documents describing the actions of Einstein is true? Do I believe that mathematics is consistent and axiomatic? Do I believe that the logic and reason my brain is capable of in any way corresponds with the workings of the universe? Do I believe that any empirical observations made by anyone ever isn't just the result of some invisible, intangible flying spaghetti monster mucking with the results?

We've decided to narrow down the definition of faith with respect to religion to not encompass such a broad topic. Simply: religious faith is narrowed down to absolute certainty of the teachings of some organized scripture.

Said organized scripture may even have scientific or archeological evidence associated with it. But the definition of faith is that, regardless of whether or not anyone can produce any observable, repeatable evidence, one accepts something as truth. And in that respect, science is never like that because every theory comes with the caveat: "this is simply what is consistent with recorded observations". Science relies on faith in the general case the same way that your belief that the reality you observe is real relies on faith in the general case.

Coding? A basic flier requires a simple text editor like Wordpad. Hell, even if you include Office basic, you're still only up ~$80 over the sticker price.

What default software does a Mac come with that makes flyer making so much easier? I don't think it's any of the iStuff.

I'm sure the Apple fans comprise a core part of the sales but look around at an Apple store, most people aren't hardcore iPeople. They walk in, use the product, ask questions and get somewhat informed answers. Even if they don't buy, this gets you into the consumer's brain as a solid buy because you're informed about what you're getting.

Contrast this with a Xoom sitting around at a Best Buy. Nobody's around who knows anything about it. If you ask questions like "how do I purchase music" they can't just do a quick demo using iTunes.

HP might have the clout to fix this as they are used to large-scale sales but they'll have to step up their game of forcing retailers to educate their staff; or perhaps just having dedicated HP salespeople onsite at various retail outlets.

Android has been popular because of both price and the fact that they had the carriers to do the selling for them. This isn't true of tablets.