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Comment Steve said the TV market is hard (Score 3, Insightful) 232

At his last All Things Digital (fast forward to 1:31:30 or so), Steve Jobs said that the TV market was hard because the hardware was subsidized, which prevented doing anything interesting. The set-top box from your cable company is "good enough", it's free (at least, you think it is), and enough people won't spend money for a wow-cool interface to allow someone like Apple to make money. He referred to Apple TV as a hobbyist product.

So it sounds like the strategy now is to make the whole TV and not just a set-top box. I'm curious what that is going to bring. Sure, it'll be a nice set and maybe the interface will be better than the typical clunky "navigate a menu without a mouse" things. But so much of what's controlled on the TV is controlled outside of it - i.e., through my Dish/Cable/etc. carrier's box.

Will iTV replace those boxes? Is this a sort of androidy model where Apple provides everything those carriers do and then says to the carriers, why keep building your own set-top boxes when iTV can do that for you?

If it's just a nice TV with a better interface for adjusting the brightness, I can't imagine anyone getting excited, so there must be something more...speculations, please.

Comment Re:Further soiling Apple's name (Score 1) 114

Currently I believe the ethnic cleansing is at its most obvious in the capital city of Jerusalem with a little in the West Bank, but historically speaking the entire country was founded on systematic ethnic cleansing and some members of the Knesset would quite like to see it make a more widespread return.

"Some members"...who?

Comment Re:Further soiling Apple's name (Score 2) 114

Investing in a regime that has WMDs, with a long history of ethnic cleansing, and brutal racism, doesn't seem like a good move to enhance one's reputation.

Doesn't it get boring jerking that same knee all the time?

Good thing they didn't buy a company based in the U.S., Russia, China, Britain, France, or India...all of which fit your criteria of having WMDs and a past that includes racism.

Clearly, they shouldn't buy companies owned by humans.

Comment Phone Vendors Don't Think Platform (Score 5, Insightful) 364

It seems to me that phone vendors have not changed their mindset from the pre-smartphone era. Back then, no one cared about OS or version. You got an integrated product and it never changed. Today, it feels like phone makers still think "we put it together and ship it - this idea of later changing or upgrading the software is kind of weird to us."

To them, a phone is complete and unchangeable one it leaves the factory. Alas for their mindset, consumers see phones as customizable, upgradeable devices. If they were $50 each, sure, just replace it, but at $500+ (even if it's stretched over two years), people are making a more significant investment and don't want to be left behind.

Comment Re:Needed to be done. (Score 2) 938

The reason I talk on the phone is that it take me 50 minutes to drive 15 miles on the freeway. Fix the roads, and I won't need to talk on the phone. The problem, as is often the case, is government incompetence.

(And no, public transit is not the answer. I live in a city with excellent public transit, light rail, etc., and the fastest public transit trip is 1.5 hours.)

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