Not an individual winning stock (though you may still call me an idiot), but the S&P 500 is up about 60% over the past 10 years, a time period including the massive drop in 2008-09, and the smaller, but significant drop of the last couple of months. That's an annualized return of about 4.7%. Not great, historically, for the S&P, but quite a bit better than the pitiful returns on ordinary savings over the same period. That also doesn't include the dividend yield of that index, which is currently over 2%.

Different situation. In that case, the oil companies made more profits not because they sold more product, but because world oil prices spiked artificially (due to OPEC, if I recall correctly). Apple sold more stuff by making stuff more people wanted than the competition.

They do have more than half their cash offshore. On the other hand, about 60% of their revenue was generated outside the US, so that might be fair.

They make very little from the software/media sales. Gross margins on the hardware are huge though: 44.7%. Tim Cook indicated in the conference call that that's probably not a sustainable number (their margins are typically in the high 30s). But the raw numbers of devices they sold grew by stunning amounts. Even Mac volumes rose by more than 25%, and that's in a PC industry that's not doing that well in aggregate.

Say what you want pro or con about their products, but they know how to make stuff that people want to buy.

Case in point: Verizon reported that iPhones accounted for 55% of their smartphone sales last quarter. That's against how many different models of Android phone?

So, if the browser is faster because everything goes through Amazon's servers, does that mean that they know everywhere I go on the web? And do they then get to use that information to "optimize" the ads presented to me to buy things from them?

I suspect the answer is "yes" to both questions.

Their prices are lower for the razors because they expect to make the money back from increased sales of blades. It's a different business model from Apple's, but it's still a plan for extracting maximum cash from customers. TANSTAAFL.

I believe that, like all App Store purchases, you get to install on up to 5 machines. Essentially the same as the old Family Pack.

According to the live feed I was following (macrumorslive.com), Jobs explicitly said you could upload any songs they don't have. Otherwise, you get access to their 256kbps copies.

OK, "universal" in the iOS sense.

I suspect the issue here is that iWork is *only* available on Mac and iOS, but lots of people who have iDevices are not Mac owners. Since the iOS App Store (TM, may it burn in Hell, etc) doesn't really allow convenient price discrimination, it's not clear how they would make it so that iWork Mac owners got it free for iOS while charging for non-Mac users or Mac users who have some other office suite. Seems like many free companion-to-desktop-application apps don't have a lot of independent functionality--that is, they require some kind of sync with the desktop app. The iWork apps for iOS can work independently, though I've read mixed reviews about how well they do that--I don't have them, so I can't speak from experience.

Not saying it wouldn't be nice if the Mac and iOS versions were bundled, just that it seems to be outside the limitations of the App Store ecosystem (may it die a thousand horrible deaths, etc, etc).

Not seeing this upthread, but might be redundant by now: The iWork announcement was for the "small" iOS devices (iPhone and iPod Touch). Those apps have been available for iPad (also iOS) for over a year. The update makes them universal. If you own them for iPad, they'll now work on the other devices (it's a free upgrade).

Reasonable points. Thanks.

Indeed, my point exactly. Doubling the resolution doesn't *require* a redesign. Nearly any other scaling would. If you want the added depth of images designed specifically for the Retina Display, you replace the images. In the meantime, images for the old resolution look basically the same as before. That wouldn't be the case if the resolution went to, say, 1440x900.

On a desktop, adding more resolution to your monitor allows you to fit more stuff on the screen. On iOS devices, where each app takes over the entire screen when it's running, the only way to scale up the resolution without making everything look like crap (anti-aliasing, anyone) would be to *double* the resolution in each direction. That's what the upgrade to the iPhone 4 Retina Display did. Is that even technically feasible for something the size of an iPad at the current price point? Thousands of app developers are thrilled that they don't have to redesign their applications for a new resolution.

This is ad hominem. Call the argument "retarded", if you must, but not me. I'll cop to fat and lazy, but I haven't been called "retarded" since I was 9.

Never said they were mutually exclusive. "Hostility to customers" is, of course, in the eye of the beholder. I assume all their customers, deprived of acceptable alternative products, are masochists, considering Apple's revenue growth over the past decade. Apple and Google have different revenue models and different ecosystems. I personally prefer Apple hardware and iOS over Android, but I take no position on which model is better, in some objective way. Preferences are, by nature, subjective. And I use lots of Google tools on a daily basis, so I think they're a great company, too. One can enjoy oysters and snails, as it were.

I live in Boulder, where the sky is normally a crystalline blue. Pretty much paradise.

There are multiple forms of ad hominem. You didn't use the "abuse" form of the fallacy, but you did use the "circumstantial" form. You can use that to reduce the weight of the other's argument, but it's not a proof. Even assuming bias, which I'm certainly willing to concede, you still have to address the substance, which you did not in your original comment.

Now you have. -o-

I read the essay you linked. He cites one line out of a long post, without really addressing the main arguments. In any case, I provided a link to a piece that asked some questions about this decision. Are the questions less salient because they came from Gruber? Dismissing the point of view because of the author is pure ad hominem.

Google is not in this for the good of humankind, nor is Apple. They're a public company, looking to make a profit. So is Apple.

But we're talking about one specific issue: if Google is more "open" than every other for-profit enterprise out there, why keep Flash while dropping H.264?

Address the substance. Flash is pervasive, but distinctly not open. Same with H.264. What's the difference?

it's true that HTML5 is not universal, but the H.264 codec is very widely used. In fact, it's the codec used by most (if not all) Flash video. Google will have to reencode the entire back catalog of YouTube, for example. That shouldn't take long.