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Comment Re:Apple is on very shakey ground (Score 1) 386

Actually iPhone sales have been falling.

They sold 37.4m iPhones in 2013Q2 and 43.7m iPhones in 2014Q2. That's a year-over-year increase of about 16%.

I'm afraid you fell for a classic misleading graph.

I didn't fall for anything, that article is just dumb. It makes no sense to compare quarterly reports with immediately preceding quarterly reports for highly seasonal products like the iPhone because different quarters perform differently.

Of course if you look at the numbers that way in early September 2013 you're going to see decline - that year's iPhone model was released in late September. iPhone sales spike after launch and during the holidays, tail off through the rest of the year, then spike again when the next model is released. You can only gauge trends properly if you compare year-over-year numbers. And the year-over-year numbers show that iPhone sales are continuing to grow.

Comment Re:Apple is on very shakey ground (Score 3, Insightful) 386

Apple's entire business is based on breaking new ground with an innovative new product, exploiting that products uniqueness before the rest start copying them and flood the market with "me too" devices. Then Apple has to move on to something else.

The smartphone market has been flooded with iPhone copies for years now, yet iPhone sales continue to grow. Their Mac division is still profitable and growing, despite it being decades old.

I agree that Apple get a huge first-mover advantage - this is to be expected. But I think you're dead wrong about Apple being reliant upon it. Apple will still be making money hand over fist with the iPhone when it's a decade old. They don't need to move away from old products at all.

Comment Re:One simple reason for this (Score 2) 386

It would be interesting to know how the story went inside Apple HQ as they added things like in-app purchases, set minimum prices/price increments/etc. for the store, and so on. Did they fail to foresee the problem? Saw it coming but figured that so long as their platform and hardware remained nicer it wouldn't hurt them since it would happen to the competition as well? Felt forced into it? (if so, by Android? by online/partially online stuff that got money out of users on the desktop/browser side and offered free mobile clients? by concern over some other potential competitor?)

One thing that seems to have been forgotten - when in-app purchases first came to iOS, they were for paid apps only. Freemium was against the App Store rules. I know as an app developer, I had a lot of clients who were unhappy about this. I also know as an app developer that Apple really couldn't give a shit about my clients being unhappy about it.

I doubt they felt pressured, but I expect that they foresaw the problem but underestimated how bad it would be for games. There are signs they are making small changes to the App Store to compensate for this, e.g. marking free apps with in-app purchases in listings. The App Store is so large now that I doubt they'll want to make large sweeping changes to policy, so I expect to see regular small changes to steer it away from the more shitty freemium business models.

Comment Re:Good luck (Score 4, Insightful) 201

in my experience the bug reports and feedback you'll get from Joe Public will be next to worthless

Bug reports and feedback aren't the only valuable things that can come out of this. If an application crashes for a significant number of users at a particular point, it makes it easier to prioritise. It also makes it easier to detect problems that occur with real-world data and system rather than test data.

Comment Poor design (Score 3, Insightful) 72

It seems to me that they are reinventing the <a> element, badly. Semantically, what they are trying to express is a series of related links. What they should be doing is relaxing the restrictions on nested <a> elements and defining the meaning of this, then defining a suitable URN for dated copies of documents. That way they don't need to replicate perfectly fine attributes such as rel in a DSL that isn't used anywhere else and the semantics of the relationship are more accurately described.

Comment Re:Not the first time this has happened (Score 3, Interesting) 642

I wouldn't really take that exact approach as she's probably not going to be acting in any more Trek. I'd point out that she earns X amount of money by going to fan conventions, that she anticipates being able to do this for Y number of years into the future, and those fans are the type that would be extremely alienated by the perception that she's so scientifically illiterate, so she stands to lose X*Y amount of money. I daresay there's enough backlash in Trek forums to be able to prove this already.

Comment Re:In a way its a good thing it didn't happen (Score 1) 149

Not sure if you meant to imply otherwise, but SSL certainly makes a website slower. No, on most devices, there's plenty of CPU available to do the actual encryption, so that's not usually a problem. But there's still the initial handshake to consider, and it still disables shared caching. And of course, there's a lot of devices that use HTTP that don't have desktop-class CPUs, so the CPU issue isn't as non-existent as you might assume.

Comment Re:Are people not allowed to have opinions? (Score 1) 1482

But in no way do I support the demonization or boycott of people just because they have a different opinion of something than I do. To me that's a for of bigotry itself, and why would I want to be bigoted?

This guy financially supported an unconstitutional attempt to stop certain people getting married. It's not bigotry to shun people who are trying to change the law to reduce your legal rights.

Comment Re:conversational format (Score 2) 142

If they weren't the first with conversational layout, they were the ones that popularised it.

They didn't get Ajax right. They just based their user interface around it, which none of the other major webmail providers were doing. This made things a lot faster, which most users appreciated. In fact, their use of Ajax was pretty lousy. You couldn't even open an email in a new window because instead of using proper links and hooking into them with Ajax, they concocted fake links based on spans that could only work with Ajax.

Comment Re:Trojan Horse (Score 1) 150

I can't believe Comcast wouldn't see something like that coming though, nor have term limits that would let them stop it quickly enough for it not to be a viable proposition for Apple.

I wouldn't be surprised to find out that Apple have something in the works for a network. So far they've been happy to make deals, but Apple like to be in control of everything themselves. If they were going to do something like that though, I would assume that they'd try to jump straight to mobile networks and skipping wired connections altogether. They've got the cash to build something like that and every incentive considering all of their mobile devices would use it as well.

It used to be the case that if you wanted to make a great device, you needed to own both the hardware side and the software side. These days, you also need to own the network side as well.

Comment Re:Trademark Violation (Score 1) 78

Trademark law, like copyright, is relatively sensible as it is designed to be used. Trademark law is designed to protect customers, not corporations. It's there so that when you buy a FooBar, you know you are getting a genuine FooBar and not a knock-off. However some people treat it like ownership of words and use it as a club to censor people. That's what people usually object to, not trademarks as they were intended to be used.

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