How about we instead stop turning off page zooming on mobile sites. The least of my concerns here is the stupid 300ms lag, when it seems like 80% of mobile sites these days don't even allow pinch-zooming anyway. Remember when one of the great things about smartphones was that you could use the "real" internet? Yeah. My poor eyeballs (and fat fingers) miss those days.
Sure, if taste is not at all a factor. But since we're human beings, it is a factor. It's "easy" unless you are someone who is repulsed completely by the taste of most vegetables. There's nothing "easy" about choking down food that tastes like poison to me. I wish I could flip a switch in my brain and suddenly love vegetables, for more reasons than just potential animal cruelty. But I can't. So it will always be "hard" for me to not eat meat.
These things look insurmountable from the outset, but tastes and food craving are actually a very malleable, and change based on what you eat - just at a time frame that is too long for us to be aware of: a matter of weeks and months, rather than days.
If you genuinely feel bad about what you are doing, I would suggest a two pronged approach: try and incorporate more kinds of vegan foods in your diet over time and educate yourself on a visceral level on the nastiness that is the food industry: watch the videos made inside slaughter houses and feedlots. Having options will make you want those options, and seeing the unhappiness that is actually going into your sausage will make you >feel< differently about the sausage, rather than just knowing that it's wrong.
I was vegetarian for 10 years before going vegan (vegan for 10, now), so I'm the last person to point fingers at people taking the slower road. That said, the selections and choices available (at least in western countries) today were inconceivable back when I became vegan ten years ago. It's the promised land!
The social part (ie, people being shitty, every dinner conversation revolving around what I just ordered, etc,etc) is always the hardest, still as hard today as it was then. Sure, people are more tolerant of dietary differences, but for the same reasons, they are also more full of dietary scientism (Soy gives you man boobs. Wheat gluten is a radioactive GMO byproduct. By eating locally, no cows were harmed in the creation of this steak.)
I posted a very similar reply to a post a couple of days ago linking to the same article (uh..see EDIT below, this is slightly different article), submitted by the same person, who also happens to be the the author of the story (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4425673). It appears that post was either flagged or downvoted into oblivion, because it disappeared shortly thereafter (and after seeing this hit again 2 days later, I'm thinking it was pretty justifiable...)
EDIT: okay, so I missed a small detail, the other was about the MBP, this one is about the MBA. My bad..I guess.
Anyway, my experience has been largely the same as yours...I lost a significant amount of battery life when I upgraded to Lion, and apparently it seems like the problem is only getting worse.
The author replied in the other post that he would add Snow Leopard to the test, which should be interesting...I'm expecting that the difference between Snow Leopard and Mountain Lion will be huge.
Yep, I'm currently sitting here running 10.6.8 battery life tests as we speak. I'm going to make it as comprehensive as I can and run multiple tests on each build of OS X from 10.6.8 to 10.8.2 (prerelease). It will take a while; should be ready by the middle of this coming week.
Though 10.6 did improve overall benchmark performance from 10.5 which was arguably the first regression in OS X, which from its rough inception managed to get better by the point release. It's actually rather alarming that 10.8 is a continuation in decline rather than making up from 10.7's failings.
I switched from using OpenBSD on all my laptops at 10.3 and now I find it very difficult to continue justifying OS X with all of these performance regressions and how increasingly annoying it is to treat the OS as a solid desktop *nix, which is all I ever wanted. As much as I admire DragonflyBSD, I'm likely going to Linux next.
(What I really miss was how snappy and responsive IRIX was...)
The most frustrating thing is that both "the internet" (the blogosphere or whatever you'd call it) and sales numbers are absolutely in favor of Apple's strategy. Sometimes I need to open up the Mac App Store to look at all the grumpy one-star reviews for 10.8, just to know that humanity hasn't completely lost its mind.
I wish they would/could also include Snow Leopard in this comparison. I lost about 20-30% of my battery life after upgrading to Lion, so the further reduction seems pretty horrible. Guess I'll be waiting a little longer still before upgrading to Mountain Lion.
Hi toadkick,
That's a great idea. Our 2011 MacBook Pro that we used in the test can run 10.6, so this weekend I'll see if I can roll it back and run the tests on Snow Leopard for comparison.
I'd hardly call the 64 GB in the $999 model "massive". I still know a lot of people who won't make the switch to an Air due to the lack of an optical drive, and reducing the already small hard disk capacity would reduce the attractiveness of the Air to those folks even further. Also, I don't think iCloud and iTunes Match are good enough (yet) to convince people that the don't really need a hard drive anymore.
Personally I am waiting for them to put floppies back in laptops. Seriously, Air will never get a built in optical drive and you either accept that and use the USB drive once a year when you need it or you just go and buy a different laptop, but for everyone else they are picking up the air in massive numbers and it is clearly the direction laptops are heading.
I have a macbook pro that came with a built in optical drive, but I still spent the extra money (and time) to remove it and replace it with a second drive.
I don't buy it, and this article doesn't really make a strong case for it either. If the MB Air is a strong seller (and by all accounts it is), what sense does it make for Apple to drop the price down $200 to "compete" in a segment where it is already dominating? Clearly other "ultrabook" makers are already having a hard time competing at even the $999 price point, so there's no need for Apple to eat into its (presumably healthy) profit margins for the MB Air. With that said, I wouldn't mind if this was true, I would have a hard time turning it down at that price. The only way I could see this happening is if Apple takes a similar approach as it does with iPhones (and now iPads), where they keep the last gen hardware on the market at a reduced price when they update the lineup. But still...a $200 price drop seems unrealistic.
Maximized profit is achieved by hitting profit X unit sold
If unit sold goes up by more than the lost per unit profit, then that's a winning proposition.
If people convert to the Apple brand, then Apple is going to make tons more than just that first sale. SSD prices also have probably REALLY made that 1k MBA a high profit device (they dropped a ton in the last year)
I predict the $800 MBA will just be this years 1k MBA.
See: The iPod Nano, the still sold iPhone 3GS (for $0 with 2 year contract), etc for past downmarket moves.
This comment isn't clear, but you make a few good points.
Short-run profits are maximized by producing at the point where marginal benefit = marginal costs (I think you state as much: "If unit sold goes up by more than the lost per unit profit, then that's a winning proposition."). Apple might want to produce these if the cost equation works (it might not--see below.).
You're also addressing the halo effect ("If people convert to the Apple brand, then Apple is going to make tons more than just that first sale.") This is anecdotally true: after I bought my first iPod in 2004, I purchased my first Mac in 2005 and now purchase Apple products as I'm happier in their ecosystem.
With that being said, what will Apple cut back on to generate large margins for a $800 MBA? Do they decrease storage? Produce a smaller (9.6") laptop? I really don't see how they go to $800 and preserve margins.
>I really don't see how they go to $800 and preserve margins.
When manufacturing electronics, the cost curve has HUGE fixed cost elements (design, factory setup, supply chain setup, quality control adjustments), then relatively few marginal cost items (actual materials and shipping). Additionally, in tech, storage and ram of a given size typically gets cheaper year after year. SSDs have dropped precipitously from about $2 a GB wholesale to about $0.78 or less a GB wholesale.
So while they may only have had $50-100 profit on the newest 1k MBA on release day, they probably have 2-3 times that by now on the line. They can still sell it profitably (most likely) at this point as they get no more fixed costs with regards to the product.
Now you say 'Why not keep selling at 1k?'. The reason that doesn't work is because they're releasing a new line. So this older design (current 1k MBA) is just going to be obsoleted if they don't make a 800 MBA. They'll go back to the same initial high upfront cost 1k MBA.
Sure, some of the 800 MBA sales will be cannibalization of the 1k MBA sales they'd make this year. However, as I mentioned before, electronics have a very high start up cost for a new line, per item profit will actually be pretty similar between the new line and last years line, but they'll sell more total units, making higher profit.
Well, typically Apple just sells all of the stock of their current Macs when they are about to release a new model. The rumor mill usually kicks into high gear around the time all of the retail and online stores start running low on stock. In fact, with Macs, they typically do just upgrade the hardware and keep the price point the same on the newer models. I'm not saying that it's impossible that Apple would release an $800 MB Air, just that it would be atypical for them, and it seems unlikely. Maybe if this story offered some actual evidence for why Apple would drop it's prices, but it didn't. All it says is "Somebody somewhere said so", and continues on to actually weaken it's point by saying that everybody else in the "ultrabook" segment is cutting back production, presumably because they aren't selling well vs. the MB Air.
It's one thing for suppliers to leak info on hardware they are supplying, but I'm sure Apple doesn't give inside information such as end product pricing to them. It's BS. And the fact that it's coming from Digitimes makes it even more suspect.
It's one thing for suppliers to leak info on hardware they are supplying, but I'm sure Apple doesn't give inside information such as pricing strategy to them. It's BS. And the fact that it's coming from Digitimes makes it even more suspect.
Digitimes is completely worthless as a source of info on Apple. (They're right sometimes insofar as a stopped watch is right twice a day.)
That said:
1. Apple is pointedly not afraid of cannibalizing its own markets.
2. Apple is pointedly thinking in terms of "the Mac should respond to the iPad as a competitor" and this basically puts the iPad + keyboard case directly in competition with the Macbook Air (expect the SSD capacity of the Air to be reduced or the iPad to increase -- no way a 64GB Air sells for the same price as a 64GB iPad).
3. Now that the Mac is decidedly not central to Apple's revenues, expect Apple to rethink its Mac pricing in (to competitors) scary ways. Apple can afford to license its OS to third parties, and/or replace the Mac Pro with a dongle-based OS X license (buy whatever beastly workstation you want, and install Mac OS X Workstation Edition on it).
4. Apple really has no-one to compete with but itself at this point. Its competitors are a joke.
Yeah, Digitimes is notorious for being completely wrong about Apple's plans.
#1 and #2 are fair points, in light of the fact that the iPhone completely cannibalized the iPod market. But, the amazing iPod sales weren't going to continue forever, and I think Apple just took the next logical step when they released the iPhone.
As you mentioned, an $800 MB Air would be in iPad + Keyboard/other accessory price range territory, which could certainly cannibalize iPad sales. But in this case it doesn't make much sense to cannibalize the still young and very profitable iPad market with a product that has been around much longer, has historically had low market share, and doesn't have the same "new and cool" factor.
#3 I don't see happening as long as Apple still intends to sell Macs, because that would dilute one of the things that makes a Mac a Mac (the combination of the hardware + Mac OS X), and they've fought pretty hard to keep Mac OS off of other machines.
I would add another point to that. Until a few years ago Apple built relatively expensive products and tried to make them good enough that buyers would want them enough to pay more. With Macs and to some extent with iPods that let Apple collect a nice big share of the market's profits, but not much of the marketshare.
Now, they've learned to make products price competitive without sacrificing quality or much of their profits. iPhones and iPads are not a more expensive option. They stay well away from the low end, but they are not expensive relative to the competing products especially those with similar specs.
Thats a whole other kind of strategy ('penetration' they called it at Uni) and maybe they're bringing it to the mac.
iPhones clearly are a more expensive option. It's just that in some markets the cost difference is hidden from the final customers, with the operator eating the difference. An unlocked 3GS (three years old!) costs about as much as an unlocked Galaxy Nexus.
Now, clearly some people place enough value on iOS that they're willing to pay the comparatively expensive prices (or move to another carrier that subsidizes the iPhone sufficiently). Good for them. And good for Apple that they're able to sell phones at absolutely staggering margins without anyone grumbling about the cost. But let's not pretend they're competing on price.
Exactly! I don't recall many times (if ever) where Apple has competed on price. Gotta keep those margins healthy. To me it seems the article is link-bait.
The year old iPhone and iPad seem to be pretty good examples of Apple competing on price first. They're able to, because they're selling older (cheaper) components in a product that they've already paid for the design/development/engineering for. It's not impossible to imagine that Apple would sell the current low-end version of the Air for $200 cheaper than it's current price. Doing so, should help them appeal to a new demographic of laptop buyers who buy on price first, and are willing to sacrifice performance. The same people who buy a 2 generation old iPhone for $1 are the ones who may be interested in a $799 Air.
I don't think that's competing on price first, I think that's a graceful and inexpensive way to increase market share in a very competitive mobile environment. From everything I've read, it's the $0 with contract 3GS that is accomplishing this, and I don't think the people who would get a 2-year old iPhone because it's free are the same kind of people who would spend $800 on a laptop, regardless of the brand. I don't think the drop from $1000 to $800 would really be that compelling to them, because they likely aren't type to care about getting the super-thin awesome hotness with a small hard drive and no optical drive at a significant cost over a run-of-the-mill Dell (or comparable) laptop. The Mac has never had huge market share, and their Mac business brings in a scant amount of profit compared to the iPhone and iPad business, where they can much more afford to lose a small amount of profit in the interest of increasing market share. I don't see why they would kneecap themselves by reducing the price so much just to increase market share, when they make such a nice margin already with what little market share they do have.
Mysteriously, AT&T changed their plans very shortly after Apple announced iMessage. Obviously they foresaw a lot of people downgrading their plans so they just did away with the tiered plans completely.
I worked at BB for a year back in the day. I can say that the blue shirt employees were only good for 2 things: attaching overpriced high-margin peripherals/cables to sales, and pushing the extended warranties. Those who were not good at either did not last long there.
This is what bugs me. I used to want to work at best buy being a geek, but instead they hire people with selling knowledge rather than technical skill.
Heh, which I find myself doing frequently. Every time I get to the point where there are no "easy" choices for words to draw, I find myself force-quitting the app, relaunching, and playing a round with someone different, and then coming back to the round I skipped (incidentally, you get offered new word choices in this case). Hard to say whether having a "back" button would end up discouraging people from continuing the game or not without some A/B testing, and I have a hunch that not having a back button probably keeps people in the game a little longer, but I still wish there was a back button. I'd like to be able to return to the same point in the round instead of having to completely restart the round again.
EDIT: something else occurs to me too. When you are presented with a list of words to draw, you have the option to "bomb" the list and get new words. As I mentioned, if you force quit the app at this point, and come back to that round, you will be offered different words, for free (definitely an exploit if you are patient enough to go through the process of force-quitting and restarting). I guess putting a back button on this screen would pretty much obviate the need for the "bomb" button, and would directly impact their bottom line since people wouldn't have as many opportunities to use their bombs. I have a suspicion that that's the reason there is no back button...the fact that it doesn't give players a chance to back out and keeps them a little more engaged it probably just a happy side effect.
I was frustrated by the new word choices popping up after quitting, actually. I had a pretty awesome drawing, the app crashed, and the new choices were pretty lame.
Minor quibble, I know, but it does seem odd that you get new choices just by quitting when they really want you to pay for them.
Yeah, I was wondering how they would have let something like this slip through. I figure either a) they weren't aware of the exploit (unlikely, but possible...Draw Something, while fun, is not a very polished game), or b) they know of the exploit, but fixing it is a non-trivial. I suspect b) because the game does not appear to store any state between the time you start guessing the other player's drawing, and the time you complete you drawing (so it just starts over if the round is interrupted, as if nothing ever happened). So, in order to remember the list of words that was previously presented to you, the game would have to 1) maintain state that indicates which "phase" of each round you are in for a given game, and 2) maintain the original list of words presented to you after you get to the "choose a word to draw" phase. I suspect they just decided that fixing the exploit isn't worth it, because a lot of iOS users don't even know that they can force quit the app, and a lot of the ones who do probably still wouldn't be bothered to actually do it. Also, having to go through the process of watching/skipping the other player draw his picture again can be tedious.
