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YOU BROUGHT IT UP. I was talking about the "trap" set by Apple by offering dirt cheap software that's only available for Mac, which locks you to the platform. You then went on a mostly unrelated rant about Office being expensive and cried no fair because PC fans (a group I don't belong to, which should be obvious from my signature) bitch about prices of Macs, but not about the prices of Microsoft's software products. I then explained the (bleeding obvious) difference between a Mac made from commodity PC components with known prices, and a software product that isn't. You then argued that aluminum, backlit keyboard and glass screen would explain the hefty price discrepancy, which it doesn't even begin to do.Great, so buy a Dell. What's stopping you? Why b*tch and moan about Apple pricing if Dell better suits your needs? Seems there's an obvious solution here, but you'd rather just rant.
That's what happens when you go from focusing on producing high priced boutique workstation computers to run of the mill easily copied iCrap. Every company that has gone down that route has upped revenue in the short run, but completely destroyed itself in the long run as cheaper competition obliterated them and their boutique status was eroded to the point it no longer mattered.
The perfect example; in the 70's, there were ten great organ manufacturers, and when the 80's came along with cheap competition from Casio and other Japanese keyboard manufacturers, the companies that tried to compete with them by lowering the quality of their line were utterly obliterated by the competition within a single decade. NONE of them survive today.
The ONLY organ manufacturers that survive today are the ones making product lines that START at $20,000 and go up from there to well over $100,000. And there are about half the number of top manufacturers, around five.
And NONE of them make cheap iToys for kiddies. That is why they survived, and every other company that went down the short run route of choosing quantity of sales over quality died. And quality is producing CUTTING EDGE workstations that feature CUTTING EDGE technologies like Blu-ray. And anything else people who can afford Adobe's $2500 Master Suite need, like Flash. And people who aren't getting it are taking their BIG BUCKS ELSEWHERE. Just like organ buyers in the 80's went with the companies with the most expensive cutting edge products.
Are there cheap keyboards being made today? Of course, and selling like iCrap. But the big organ makers that tried to make them to compete with Casio are DEAD.
I know recent hop ons to Apple via iCrap will never understand this, but the old guys around, they get it.
Apple really needs to split into two companies. One that makes the iCrap, that can boom and quickly go bust as stronger cheaper competition kills it, and the other the original Apple computer workstation company that will survive by giving people what they need and want AND THEN SOME and continuing to charge a premium for it.
NOT tell them what they need and don't need and try to ram it down their throats like a tinhorn megalomaniac dictator pumped up by VERY temporary sales of disposable iCrap.
Someone who would have given them workable authorable Blu-ray BEFORE it became a standard, to MAKE it the standard QUICKER.
But that only can come from someone with the vision to see what people need now, and not try to live in 2030 when everyone has iChips implanted in their brains running the iBrain OS with all applications from the cloud and downloading low-res movies that Apple WOULD call HD.
I say WOULD, because Apple the iCrap iToy manufacturer won't last beyond 2014 at the current rate of arrogance.
You've never been addicted to one particular game? They're all interchangeable? "But dad, I wanna play Quake!" "No problem son, there's this other game called 'Monster shooter' that looks almost the same."
Realism. For instance, they could look at their own mobile platform that's been around for 3 years (iPhone / iPod Touch), sold at least 100 million, and has barely made a dent in Flash. Almost as many blue lego pieces now as it was in 2007. How many years do you think it will be before iPad has sold in iPhone volumes, and what makes you think that would trigger a move away from Flash any more than the iPhone did?
It happens to be the case that a bunch of sites have made iPhone friendly versions (For the small screen). Does the iPad show up as a normal browser or a mobile one? Will we see iPad formatted sites (what is the most common resolution for web browsers/sites)?
Nor can you do full screen...
Yes yes, but that's not what I'm saying. This isn't just about simple porting of ad banners and Flash based navigation panes to HTML5, that stuff can be done in a jiffy. I'm talking about games, animated Flash cartoons, big e-learning productions and other complex content that requires a production environment as sophisticated as Flash. Forget the Flash plugin/player, that's at the browser end, I'm talking about Flash itself. It's up to version 11.0 (CS5) soon. When will there be HTML5/Canvas tools of that caliber and maturity? The people who produce the material are very spoiled at this point, they want their tweening and their layers and their effects, not some dodgy tools that take them back to FutureSplash from 1996 as far as the creation process is concerned (or worse, animating by coding). You're all talking about HTML5 as if all it takes is for the browsers to support it properly, but the content isn't going to come if there are no tools for its creation. It's the kind of tools you'd be looking to Adobe for, but they won't be in a hurry for obvious reasons.
In my view it makes the web to a much more flexible media delivery platform, without giving any company propietary control over any of its technologies. Granted HTML5 doesn't do a magnificent job for games when compared to Flash and Shockwave and that's where Flash continues to be good, but I've always strongly objected to the use of Flash as a website delivery platform with no alternative offered as seems to happen quite a bit with the technology.
Pystar tried that.
Flash will continue, it's already been pointed out that it still has more on HTML5 with regard to interactive games, but the most exciting thing about it is that it removes the leverage of Flash as pretty much the sole medium for web video distribution.
Funnily enough, Psytar's probably the weakest of the possible attacks on Apple in my view. The aspect I immediately think of is the position with iTunes and the iPod where if you buy another music player then you're locked out of iTunes and if you want to buy your music elsewhere then it's at least a big faff to get your music on your iPod. Each is reinforcing the other and they're both the dominant products in their sectors: paid media downloads and portable media players.Already has been.
Right, but again... you're looking at it from a technology perspective, and a bit of a political one too. This may be true, but what good is an open standard if the creative tools are not there? Flash is a great environment to work in. Whether you're a developer or an animator, the possibilities are endless. In order for the content producers to give up Flash, there would have to be a production environment that's as good as or better than Flash, and the end result must look as good as or better than Flash. If people were crazy about open standards/platforms and were keen on not giving up control to one company, they would all flock to Linux and avoid Windows and OS X like the plague.
It sounds like Apple could be considered in violation should someone be able to successfully argue they have a market dominance... but I feel like that can't be too hard. Just use the slides that Jobs shows in his keynotes! He seems to be awfully proud of that.
It's a tricky thing but I feel like those to bennefit haven't made any attempt at this. What ever happened with Palm and the Pre? Did they try to make this case?
