Actually, it wasn't bad if you had a less powerful Mac. I remember watching videos on my black and white Mac Plus--dithered appropriately to create faux greyscale at 320x240 (since the screen was 512x384, it took up better than half the screen!).

I would love this for my phone.

I am nearsighted. I have no problem reading my phone but I have problems seeing things that are far away. So I wear my glasses when I drive, bike, or go to movies. It's not too bad--I have driven without my glasses by mistake before with no major collisions. I've seen movies without my glasses and I can tell what's happening on the screen. But having glasses on definitely helps.

So if I'm nearsighted, why would I need this?

Because, with my glasses on, I have a hard time focusing on close things--like, say, my phone. Yes, I know, the answer is bifocals. But wouldn't it be cool if my phone could look at my face, go "Oh, look, he's got his glasses on!" and adjust the screen appropriately for my eyes behind the glasses?

Well, you mention the vast increase in game sales on Steam. The question isn't "did you sell more games at the lower price point." As a company, I'm not interested in customers--I'm interested in money. As the dot-bomb taught us, having lots of customers doesn't mean a thing unless you're making money off of them.

Someone below had an entertaining post about a city that had floated a bond to pay for a bridge and had set up a toll on the bridge. As the bond was paid off, they lowered the price of the toll and made more money because more people used the bridge more often. So they lowered it again and made still more money! They lowered it a third time and made less. So the whole "lower prices equals more money" doesn't work--like I said, if it were free, you should have an infinite amount of money. There is a point where you're leaving money on the table.

Setting a price is usually based on assumptions of how many people actually want this thing. For example, when movie studios started selling movies on VHS, they priced them around $80. They figured that only a small number of movie-buffs would actually want to own a particular movie. So the prices were set for the rental market--they knew that Blockbuster and local video stores were the ones buying the movies and that they were going to make money off the rentals. But when the video store bought 50 copies of a new release and, six months later, sold 40 of those copies cheap, people snapped them up. So the studios tried lowering the prices to catch those people and they made more money.

Now you look at that example and say, "See? You're making more money by selling for less!" I look at that example and I say, "Their assumption as to the size of the market was incorrect."

Assuming that developers are making more money by selling their game for $5 versus $20 (you state that sales increased, but did they increase more than 4x?), I'd be curious as to what assumptions they made causing them to set the price so high to begin with.

Agreed. By the logic of some people, if I gave the product away, I'd have an infinite amount of money. Obviously it doesn't work that way.

For example, consider this $14.99 book. If I reduced the price to $13.99, would I make more money than if it was $14.99? I might actually make less money because the price different isn't enough to make me buy it. But at $9.99, I've crossed a psychological barrier--under $10--and I might see more sales and more revenue than at $14.99.

A little off-topic, but I sometimes get a big grumpy about the whole, "Publicly traded companies are required by law to care more about profits than anything else." You get it right in the second sentence fragment, though.

Publicly traded companies are required by law to protect their shareholders' interests.

If their shareholders care about immediate profit and stock price more than anything else, then you're right. If their shareholders care more about not damaging the environment more than anything else, then you're wrong.

I'd agree that shareholders are mostly concerned about ROI, share price, dividends, and the like, so it kind of works out the same way.

When iTunes first came out, of course, their prices were cheaper. You could usually get the whole CD for $9.99.

The interesting thing is that when Apple allowed the music companies to set the price to $1.29, the companies that did so made more money. While some people were not going to pay $1.29 for a song, there were plenty of others who said, "Yeah, okay."

Again, the whole, "lower prices mean more money" is not always true. By that logic, selling something for $0.00 would give you an infinite amount of money. Obviously that's not true.

What's interesting with digital items, of course, is that the cost of what you're selling is low. It costs money to print a book and ship it stores. It costs significantly less money to ship bits of data to a customer. So those cost-savings can be passed on to the consumer. However, other costs--like actually generating the content--haven't necessarily gone down.

By that logic, if it were free, I'd have an infinite amount of money!

It doesnt quite work that way. We've also seen that if you raise music prices from 99 cents to $1.29, revenue increases as well. So in "mass-market," the trick is to find where that magic price point is. Am I more likely to buy a book that sells for $9.99 than I am to buy one that is $14.99? If I made it $8.99 instead of $9.99, would I sell more copies to make up for the price difference?

It can also depend on what you're selling. If I write a good pulp-fiction novel, I may do pretty well selling it for $4.99 because lots of people will buy it. On the other hand, an insightful treatise on the condition of the economy of Lithuania and how it relates to grain costs in Poland probably would need to be priced a bit higher if I'm to eke out a living off of it because there will be fewer buyers.

Mmm...tantalizing enchiladas...

Popularized it, perhaps, but I wouldn't say created it.

That said, I think the GP may have been talking about the Mac.

According to the article, it's larger than a Boeing 737. For a seaplane, that's pretty impressive.

And heavier in an airplane is better...how?

Seaplanes only land on water. Amphibious planes usually have retractable landing gear that goes into a water-tight compartment so that they can land on either water or on an appropriate runway.

Well, to each their own.

As always, it depends on a few things. I have no problems renting movies from Netflix and not owning them, but there are some movies I prefer to own. I can imagine the same thing--I've bought some "throw-away" books for airplanes and such and would be fine with the idea of just being able to pull up one to read. But there are some books that I've read that I enjoy and I want to keep and re-read every now and then. So Apple wins both ways--you "rent" the book, read it, decide you like it, and then overpay to get the book from Apple's Store.

Depends on what you're using it for. If you've got your standard courseware, why would you need to upgrade the iPad? So it's running iOS 5 instead of iOS 8, that doesn't affect your courseware.

I'd also point out that an iPad 2 from 2011 is compatible with iOS 8 from 2015. So there's four years right there.

One of the things I always like to point out in the "Manned versus Unmanned" arguments is comparing the amount of lunar material brought back. The Apollo program returned something like 800 KG of moon rocks. The Soviet Union's landers returned something like 0.8 Grams of moon dust. And those rocks were brought back because an astronaut (who in later missions was trained in geology) actually thought they were interesting, whereas the moon dust returned by the Luna probes was whatever happened to be within reach.

So it costs a lot more. The question is, do you get more value out of a manned mission versus a robotic mission? Apollo brought back 1,000,000x the amount of lunar material for 1000x the cost. So if you're just calculating based on those numbers, Apollo gave a better return than the Luna program. But that initial cost was pretty off-putting.

As people at NASA and others have pointed out, what the rovers have accomplished on Mars could have been done by an astronaut in a couple of days.

An analogous issue is time versus money. I could buy a ticket on the Concorde way back when and get from New York to London in three hours for $6000. I could buy a ticket nowadays on a non-supersonic transport for maybe $1500 that would get me there in 8 hours. The question is, is it worth the extra $4500 to get there five hours earlier?

Mars isn't really changing. There's really nothing about Mars we need to know right now, such that it would be worth spending that initially large amount of money to find out.

With appropriate equipment, you can camp in Antarctica...