The Apple Store wages are plenty to buy a lot of products they sell. Not everything, but I doubt that 90% of electronics store employees could buy the most expensive 20% of the products on sale either. That's besides the point because retail theft isn't about "oh, I can't afford this and want to own it" anyway. It's about "oh, I can resell this and supplement my income quite handsomely". Most of the stuff people shoplift from supermarkets (staff or customers) isn't stuff that's very overall expensive, but stuff that's easy to steal and fences well like batteries and razors. High value per unit volume, lots of volume available, fungible.

Apple basically has no reason to be doing these checks because there's nothing about their employees or product that makes it any more likely to be stolen than anywhere else. They hardly keep anything out on the shopfloor for deus' sake.

A kickstarter for a version that'll launch 1lb loads up to a small portion of the speed of sound. You're not getting anything in to orbit on the back of this, just helping this guy make a marginally more convincing case to bigger funding agencies. Although if the physics and engineering made sense, I'm not sure why a marginally larger prototype than the ones they already have is needed.

I'm sure you're very pleased with yourself, but if I'm reading this report right you got ripped off by about 50% on your hardware, and any music or videos you happened to pay actual money for.

That's not because vanadium is rare but because silicon is absurdly abundant; there's more vanadium than chlorine, lithium, cobalt, copper...

I really doubt scarcity is an issue here.

AOL is a good comparison. They had their own little corner with its own content, which AOL built and maintained, and when you paid for AOL you paid for that safe - but restricted - little selection. You might think that's a dumb idea and prefer to go elsewhere, but that's the basic idea.

Of course this makes a games console rather like a PC that could only access AOL, which is a nightmare vision that never came to pass in this universe.

More like "Sony did it, so should we."

Has MS made a decision regarding the Xbox where they haven't backtracked to "whatever Sony is doing"? It seems like Mark Cerny has more control over the Xbox One's capabilites than Ballmer does.

Ford doesn't take responsibility for the quality of the highways and what happens on them, although that would let them sell more trucks. (The Turnpike, now with 99% less accidents and Smoothdrive(TM)!) Microsoft does take responsiblity for the quality of Xbox games and what happens on the Live service, using that as a selling point.

Yes, exactly. You wouldn't use a lathe to cut two-by-fours and you wouldn't use a handsaw to make a bannister. You're going to need both to make a house.

If you take 10% from each exchange the value will never reach zero (Zeno's paradox). Regardless, a Ponzi scheme extracts no value from the original capital. There's no arbitrage. It's a zero-sum game. That's what distinguishes it from markets, which are supposed to be about finding areas where someone has under- or over-valued something relative to its actual value, and extracting that difference.

They haven't been able to keep up with demand for the One because their component suppliers looked at their past performance gave them a low priority, so they literally couldn't make them.

http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/19/4122798/htc-one-delayed-because-of-component-shortage

That's a bit like arguing that a computer's a terrible content creation tool because it's no good as a woodworking lathe or sewing machine. No, a tablet's no good for doing multi-track video editing. (Most single-display computers aren't any good at it either.) However it's a remarkable tool for gathering, organising and triaging information. (Papers, the science literature tool, is its killer app in my environment.) It's the swiss army knife of desk references. It's an x-windows client I can pass around at a scientific meeting. It's the world's least annoying way to deal with email.

You'd be surprised. I could touch-type with my thumbs within a month, and I'm not exactly an avid texter. I imagine hunt-and-peck people might have a problem with the lack of feedback though.

For $229 you can buy a computer the size of a small book that connects wirelessly to the internet. If you can't find interesting things to do with something like that I worry for your imagination. I'd already dreamt up a dozen uses for something like that when I was a teenager and it was a ridiculous space-age fantasy.

What do you think most people use computers for? There's a reason computer use exploded around the time the web went mainstream.

Maybe people don't talk about them because they stopped being novelties and started being an unremarkable part of the computing landscale? I don't talk about how amazing computer mice are any more, but that doesn't mean that they're a novelty that's destined for the bin.