Why not? I mean, saying "OK, Adobe has a flash application, it is like any other application, accessing the API, if the API changes, Adobe changes their app. Or they can compile it without needing the API, then, when hardware changes, Adobe must make the modifications. Where's the problem?

And if apps were a feature to sell more hardware, why not allowing third party? And market it as a feature? It would sell even more hardware!

You mean, if I want to develop for Playstation, I have to buy Sony hardware in addition to my Playstation?

And how is this different exactly?

Tricks like that will be very hard to pull. I am not an expert on that field, but it seems a little too far-fetched :)

And a person will not see a fourth primary colour, but it would extend the spectrum of an existing one (red, green or blue), which may be very useful for some. I would prefer a totally new photoreceptor for myself.

I have to admit, this would be cool, because it couldn't be localized precisely on the retina when scientists first try it, so you would have glow-in-the-dark eyes. Science is way cool!

Actually, treating coulourblindness could be achievable, adding completely new receptors would be not be possible... Genetic engineering is able to take genetic material from a source and give it to a target, but is not actually able (yet) to completely invent a new organ or type of cell, or even a new photoreceptor molecule... You need to completely control the whole chain of events that leads to this new structure, and this is not achievable with today's science.

They aren't well known to the general public, but a lot of professional system's administrator knows them.

5-10 years is a little short, indeed.

But say 30 years, and it's all OK, 10 years to bring the physical gizmo to market acceptance, 20 years of profit, 20 years of recoup of the R&D and marketing. This seems reasonable. If it takes more than that, perhaps the idea was crappy to begin with, perhaps the marketing was crappy, perhaps people weren't ready, but there's nothing much you can do about all those things.

Today, AFAIK, patents extend until the end of the inventor's life, plus a given number of years after that, where they profit someone else entirely, (e. g. the son of the inventor). This is not something that helps R&D indeed, it encourages companies to buy patents and exploit them as long as they can, and then buy some more.

Reasonable and just, that's exactly the point everyone is trying to make.

I don't think calling briefly Apple support saying "hey, I found an prototype iPhone, and I want to return it to you guys" is reasonable and just... handling it to the police is.

Of course, I am not familiar with Californian law, but in France, where I live, you have to handle lost and found property to the police if you don't manage to directly contact the legitimate owner, this would be considered the only "reasonable and just" effort in this particular case.

I guess that if Apple does push it to court, the fact that calling Apple is "reasonable and just" enough will be settled. I wouldn't like to be in that guy's pants right now.

The OEM may also not charge for support in the first 90 days after purchase.

So, after 90 days it is OK to charge?

You must be a) not aware of the OEM licensing terms or b) your shop is doing something really stupid/illegal.

a) guilty as charged, I was just speculating on what might be the reasons behind this reasoning. b) I don't buy OEM, I wouldn't know. And c) I don't live in the USA, so the laws might be different.

When the PC has a problem, the average customer calls the OEM that selled it to him. So the customer comes back, and you can make money on support calls.

The context was between Android and Apple.

We were talking PCs, not handhelds.

Which is it? The first quote is from the message I first answered to.

Apple doesn't have a $600 iMac because the iMac is overpriced, it doesn't have a $600 iMac because a $600 iMac would suck.

So we agree, Apple products are overpriced? You may be happy with this, I'm not. And I assure you, while low-end, high-margin products may not exist, high-end, low-margin do, and it's better for the consumer than the same kind of high-end with a high margin.

Google has one phone, sort of.

Wait, what? Are you saying every Android-powered device is exactly the same? Or that the Nexus One is the only phone that somehow counts as a Google phone? I'm confused here.

Markets don't work like that. You can't just follow a trend line, then extend it two years into the future.

That's why the GP used the word 'may', I think, because he understands that the market is not something that is easy to predict, and that two year-extrapolation on such a young market is quite random. Then apparently, he was citing a source, so some economists seems to agree with him. And by the way, if you just extend the trend line, it beats Apple in a little more than a year. So I guess that wasn't the method used then.

No, you have it exactly backwards. Margins like that can't proceed from crappy hardware. The margins on the low end are razor thin. That's why HP, Dell, and Acer (and sometimes Toshiba) sell more PCs than Apple, but make much less in profits. The bulk of those sales are on the low-end, low-margin segment of the market.

Low-end is completely different than low-margin... Actually, the GP has a point, how can you sell $500 a device that is supposedly "cutting-edge", and make a huge margin? Are the production costs that low? Then how is it high-end.

And then there is the HP/DELL/Acer vs Apple argument... So how is a low-margin PC at $1000 crappier than a high-margin iMac at the same price? (disclaimer: I don't follow the price market for pre-assembled PCs nowadays but I am quite sure that some PCs are sold at the same price range than some iMacs, the figure is not that important, replace by whatever price range you wish to compare). Low-margin PC would mean that the components plus manpower cost almost $1000, High-margin iMac means that components plus manpower is significantly lower than $1000. Now DELL or HP manpower is probably cheaper than Apple manpower (design isn't everything for those companies), so components are easily better in an HP or DELL machine than in an Apple machine, for the same price.

Of course if you compare a $600 DELL to a $3000 iMac, you will probably find better hardware in the latter, but that's hardly the point, is it?

For DPI settings to work perfectly, the simplest solution is to let the OS (and granphics card) handle it completely, therefore getting rid of any handles in the API that uses pixels as a metric. So a word processor says to the OS, draw a 0.25" 'Hello World'.

The problem with that approach, is that every graphic thing must be vector graphics or scaled by the OS (this could be done by transmitting the native DPI of a picture along with it when asking the OS to display it, for instance).

For 3D graphics, this is less of a problem, as the graphics card doesn't really care what DPI it renders, it can do it for every display resolution available, and it is not hard to include a zoom option.

Oh, my. I had no idea. I'm going to shut up now! :)