"Apple iPhone Will Fail"

• April 18, 2012
• 125 notes

parislemon:

Matthew Lynn, January 14, 2007:

To its many fans, Apple is more of a religious cult than a company. An iToaster that downloads music while toasting bread would probably get the same kind of worldwide attention.

And:

Don’t let that fool you into thinking that it matters. The big competitors in the mobile-phone industry such as Nokia Oyj and Motorola Inc. won’t be whispering nervously into their clamshells over a new threat to their business.

And:

First, Apple is late to this party. The company didn’t invent the personal computer or MP3 player, but it was among the pioneers of both products. Yet there is no shortage of phones out there. There are already big companies that dominate the space, all of whom will defend their turf. That means Apple will have to fight hard for every sale.

And:

Yet Apple has never been good at working with other companies. If it knew how to do that, it would be Microsoft Corp.

And:

Lastly, the iPhone is a defensive product. It is mainly designed to protect the iPod, which is coming under attack from mobile manufacturers adding music players to their handsets.

And:

It won’t come from the iPhone. Apple will sell a few to its fans, but the iPhone won’t make a long-term mark on the industry.

Nailed it.

I mean…

I’m absolutely flabbergasted. Where to begin? Nokia Oyj?!

Hindsight is 20/20 and all that. But come on. What a huge jackass. If he had said the exact opposite of everything he said, he would have been much closer to the truth than he was.

[thanks Tobin]

10 Big Companies That Pay No Taxes (and Their Favorite Politicians)

• April 13, 2012

America’s budgetary problems arent entirely because of “wasteful spending” on you know wasteful things like education, science, and infastructure. The real problem is that we’re not taking in enough to pay for those things. Of course the extraodrinarily low taxes on the wealthy dont help but neither do the Corporations that profit in BILLIONS and pay 0 in taxes. More often than not they end up taking more in from the government than they put back.

Verizon last year took in 19.8 Billion with a B in profits. It had a tax rate of -3.8% meaning it received money from the federal government.

And of course everyone knows about GE. GE which racked in 19.6 billion last year and had a tax rate of -18.9%. 

The Government Case Against Apple Looks Flimsy At Best

• April 12, 2012
• 10 notes

parislemon:

Report Declan McCullagh and Greg Sandoval:

The U.S. Justice Department’s legal pursuit of Apple for alleged e-book price fixing stretches the boundaries of antitrust law and is likely to end in defeat.

To be clear, that’s just the case against Apple. McCullagh and Sandoval note that the case against the publishers themselves seems much stronger. Given the evidence laid out right now, they’ll simply have a hard time proving that Apple was colluding in this from the beginning. 

The fact remains that what this really is about is Amazon versus the publishing industry. We’ll see how this plays out but Apple appears to be more of a (albeit willing) pawn. 

Agreed, I work for a book publisher Apple’s not forced us our conspired with us to set our iBook prices at $9.99. We’ve always priced our digital books at that price point, from Kindles to Nooks.

Foresight.js | Makes retina images less of a pain

• April 12, 2012

Brilliant work from Adam Bradley. Foresight.js checks to see if a users device 1.) is capable of viewing high res retina images before the image is even requested from the server, 2.) it determines if the device has a fast enough network connection to pull the high res images. Depending on either it will serve up standard images or retina. BRILLIANT!

HBO Renews 'Game of Thrones' for Season 3 | EW

• April 10, 2012
• 81 notes

As if any of us were surprised heres confirmation.

(via alex-lately)