I'm not sure what agenda you are talking about. Is that some kind of lame accusation of being involved in PR for one of the companies I mentioned? Because that's the typical response from fanbois and other zealots whenever someone is not bending over and praising their false idols.

Your emperor has no clothes, it's a greedy corporation with a lousy track record for security and no concern for their customers. Saying that is not a blasphemy or a PR operation, it's just the naked truth.

It's like you think that going private is a bad thing or is a sign of financial struggle. But it's quite the opposite; a company that goes public is basically borrowing money from a shitload of small investors, and giving away the control of the company to a group of board members elected by the investors. And from that point there is an ongoing conflict between the people in the company who want to work on long term projects and the investors who want to see the stock price go up and to receive higher dividends quarter after quarter.

Going private for a public company is difficult because the company needs the money to buy back all their stock in one big swoop, and they have to do that more or less at the current market price, which may be insanely higher than the amount of money the company got at their IPO. So the company needs to have tons of cash, a somehow realistic market cap (i.e how much money is needed to buy back the stock) and private investors who believe in the future of the company enough to pour billions in the operation.

So Apple has never been in a position to go private, even if they had wanted to. When the stock price was low the company had no cash and no investors would take the risk, and when the stock price started to skyrocket even with the good annual profit it was still too expensive. Apple has a buyback program but it's not making a dent. The stock price is way too high for the actual value of the company, and that does not mean the company is not making good products, it just means that investors have unrealistic growth expectations.

The Apple bubble will burst sooner or later. It won't be a bad thing because then maybe the company will be in a position to start innovating again, with less pressure from investors to deliver huge sales every quarter. Then maybe they will have the opportunity to do like Dell, but I doubt it because Apple never had the kind of cash Dell has.

Don't put iCloud in the same category as Dropbox, OneDrive or Google Drive. iCloud is a joke and people use it only because it's bundled with the iDevices and shoved down people's throat (like IE).

Apple has a culture of nonchalance and carelessness because they have a strong brand and a captive customer base. Shame on them for putting their users in a tough spot and not caring about it.

Most cloud providers offer a very secure hosting environment. Apple should do the right thing: forget their iCloud and build instead a partnership with a company that knows how to operate cloud services. Just like Netflix had the guts to pull the plug on their own infrastructure and leverage AWS.

Last week I broke my Nexus. As I was shopping for a new unlocked phone I was astonished by the price differences.

iPhone 5S: $780
Galaxy S5: $580
Nokia 1520: $500
Nexus 5: $350

Yet the actual hardware is not in line with the prices; as an example most of the non-Apple devices in that list have twice the RAM as the iPhone and a much more powerful chip (such as quadcore Snapdragon vs a basic dual-core A7). Or for devices with the same OS, the difference in hardware does not really make up for the difference in price.

For the record I ended up buying a refurb Samsung S4 for $200. It feels less elegant and more clumsy than a Nexus, and it took me a long time to get rid of the Samsung bloatware, but it does the job and it does not get as warm. And next time I buy a phone I will definitely have a look at the sub-$100 devices to see how things have evolved. Who needs a $800 phone? Even $500 feels absurd.

You don't know what you are talking about. Dell went private because they wanted to switch the company's focus on enterprise services and software, but the short-term agenda of shareholders was preventing them to do that and was forcing them to keep wasting energy trying to increase their PC sales.

Apple is facing the same problem. They have to deliver gigantic growth each quarter to please investors. That's why innovation has been stalled for so many years in that company, they have to sell and sell and sell - and if management can't deliver that, the board will find someone else that will. That happened in the past.

Dell was in a position to go private because they had a shitload of money and a low market cap. For Apple that's impossible because they don't have the kind of money needed to do that and their stock is immensely overpriced so they can't finance a buyout - they are like someone driving down a hill with no breaks and with the owner of the car screaming in their ear to go faster.

So your evidence that Apple makes environmentally friendly products is that Apple says so, and that Greenpeace (basically the greeners equivalent of Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition) is singing their praise?

Here's the real thing (read more on http://www.naturalnews.com/031...):

Many large, multinational companies have operation facilities in China, including HP, Sony, Nokia, Samsung, and Toshiba. But among a list of 29 major companies that run facilities there, Apple turned out to be the worst overall, routinely evading inquiries from environmental groups about environmental pollution and other factory problems.

The report, issued by a group of 36 Chinese environmental groups, cites HP, BT, Alcatel-Lucent, Vodafone, Samsung, Toshiba, Sharp and Hitachi as among the best companies for both addressing environmental and workplace concerns, and working on specific ways to fix them. But at the bottom of the list were Nokia, LG, SingTel, Ericsson and Apple.

"Apple behaved differently from the other big brands and seemed totally complacent and unresponsive," said Ma Jun, author of the report and Director of the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, a Chinese non-governmental organization (NGO).

Before making this kind of statement, did you ever listen carefully at a Justin Bieber's song? Did you take a minute to read the lyrics and reflect on their meaning?

Haha just kidding. If I was not boycotting the mod system (which leads to a situation where someone saying that the iPhone is the best phone is voted "insightful") I would mod you up.

So Apple's share of a growing market is shrinking. That's exponentially worse. It means that as more and more people decide to buy phones, less and less choose Apple products. I don't see how this vindicates you, but logic was never the strong suit of Apple customers anyways.

Maybe you long for those days where being an Apple customer was special because the company's market share was in the low single digits - but don't worry, it's heading there fast.

I don't know where you get your information, probably on some SF local news media like techcrunch, but Samsung alone owns about 2/3 of the Android market. Which itself happens to be 85% of the smartphone market.

But of course while Apple's share keeps going down year after year, there is always a justification in the iCommunity, such as: oh people are just waiting for the iPhone5, or oh people are juste waiting for the iPhone6. Keep the dream alive if you want, but meanwhile the market has spoken. The iShare is about half what it was 5 years ago.

The "as much as I hate Apple" line is getting old. That's like a sentence that starts with "I'm not racist but...".

Now that Android has won, bashing Apple is not fun anymore, so get out of the iCloset. It's safe for you out there, your brand is so far in that last descent in the late adopters segment of the technology adoption curve that even IBM wants to sell iPhones. Next stop: wal-mart checkout bins, next to the iTunes card who have been there for quite a while already.

They tried to book events in Laramie, Muskogee, Tupelo and Pine Bluff, but even if a few people tore off the vertical phone numbers on the ads posted in the community centers in those cities, nobody reached out to the local organizers so the events were cancelled.

Too bad for you, 1335 was pretty good. Look it up in your non-Google search engine, you'll see.

Dilbert -> XKCD -> Red Meat -> Plastic Brick Automaton -> obscene graffiti in the bathroom of a rest area in Idaho.

If you maintain an email account, it's not a burner.

Thank god for the Alibaba IPO. Someone has to pay for Tumblr.

This being said she can't take the whole blame for the Yahoo downfall. The company was already not doing well. At least they got some press coverage and nice photo ops out of the deal.