51–60 of 114 posts
It now seems like he was just mocking the competition about being unable to ship a similar price competitive tablet.
I feel a lot of other companies are riding the tablet wave. Why would motorola underprice the Xoom when possibly they could make a killing on selling the next "iPad" killer. If its true that Apple is sitting on a pretty price margin on the iPad, then the Xoom, I feel, wouldent be to far off. If they had to they could lower the price to gain momentum but so far this is Motorolas first good tablet release and I dont th…
Apple locked down the 10" screens lcd market, why do you think samsung went with a 7"?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This makes Time Cook my dream date. Seriously, and I hear he swings my way too. There are many ways to innovate in business and technology and design get a lot of time in the spotlight. Operations, especially of a very large enterprise, with thousands of suppliers which also demands highly precise manufacturing and quality control, while having operations spread around the globe, and a public awareness factor that ma…
I'd be tempted to say that automotive just-in-time processes are, if anything, more impressive in terms of the industry integration. There you'll have hundreds of suppliers coordinating so that custom builds roll off the production line in an arbitrary order, with no more stock in hand than there are builds in the system for the next shift or so. I've seen it at work at BMW, and it is frankly terrifying to consider w…
From the mouth of the CEO of motorola, the wifi-only Xoom to be priced at $600, he announced Wednesday. http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2011/02/motorola-xoom-ta...
That's still $100 more expensive than the cheapest WiFi iPad and only $29 cheaper than the cheapest WiFi + 3G iPad.
Disclaimer: I have one on order.
Edit: I'm also struggling to see how they are cornering the market by consuming all the components that are manufactured, rather I think it a combination of clever marketing & strong fanboy base.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The wording here is "most" There was an article written in 2006 saying "Designed By Apple in California. Made in a sweat-shop in China." ( http://blogs.siliconvalley.com/gmsv/2006/06/designed_by_app.... ) Architecturally wise they are vertically integreated with all their in house hardware and software but I dont think anyone can argue that their manufacturing practices dont help that statement.
There used to be a time when Left-leaning people knew some history. Terrible as the worker conditions might have been at the dawn of the Industrial Age, they were a vast improvement compared to the past. Equally so, unpleasant as Chinese factories may look to a Westerner, they are an improvement over the past. Have people actually asked those workers if they were willing to quit or had better prospects elsewhere?
Everyone tends to view history from an angle that supports their preconceptions. You don't seem to be any exception.
> Terrible as the worker conditions might have been at the dawn of the Industrial Age, they were a vast improvement compared to the past.
How are you defining worker conditions?
A family with a small plot in the countryside could not occupy their full time with cultivating the land. If you travel throughout the deep countryside of countries like Cambodia, Vietnam, China and the poorer parts of Thailand like Isaan, you still see much evidence of this today.
People moved to the cities because they could make more money. It's that simple. In no way were working conditions an improvement if you care about hours, health and safety. The ready availability of jobs for unskilled labor also created perverse incentives for parents to send their children to work at the factories. That was true in late 18th and early 19th century Europe, and it is still true today in the poorer emerging economies.
One factor that the author doesn't mention is Apple's success at lining up deals with component manufacturers. A couple years ago (before anyone had heard of the iPad) they locked in great prices on flash memory and LCD displays. They could do that because they were about to invent a huge market, and they knew it. Anyone trying to get into the tablet business in 2010 had to pay much, much more. Steve Jobs and Johnny…
This makes Time Cook my dream date. Seriously, and I hear he swings my way too. There are many ways to innovate in business and technology and design get a lot of time in the spotlight. Operations, especially of a very large enterprise, with thousands of suppliers which also demands highly precise manufacturing and quality control, while having operations spread around the globe, and a public awareness factor that ma…
nook color is $250 (sold at a loss, but available nontheless) xoom is $600 Archos 70 and 101 are $300 notion ink is $425 I call shenaningans
Ironically Apple's true advantage, that it can deliver a better end-user experience per unit of hardware power, by clever holistic hardware/software/product/ecosystem design is pretty much the opposite of this new theory, and Apple increasingly finds itself in a tech arms race that it doesn't want to be in. It wouldn't surpise me if Apple conceded the high-end hardware in both tablets and phones this year to better pad its margins on devices that are expensive yet middling in raw power, instead focussing on user experience issues like battery life.
I feel a lot of other companies are riding the tablet wave. Why would motorola underprice the Xoom when possibly they could make a killing on selling the next "iPad" killer. If its true that Apple is sitting on a pretty price margin on the iPad, then the Xoom, I feel, wouldent be to far off. If they had to they could lower the price to gain momentum but so far this is Motorolas first good tablet release and I dont th…
Apple locked down the 10" screens lcd market, why do you think samsung went with a 7"?
One factor that the author doesn't mention is Apple's success at lining up deals with component manufacturers. A couple years ago (before anyone had heard of the iPad) they locked in great prices on flash memory and LCD displays. They could do that because they were about to invent a huge market, and they knew it. Anyone trying to get into the tablet business in 2010 had to pay much, much more. Steve Jobs and Johnny…
I know this is going to burn my karma, but having watched the personality cult of Jobs grow to dominance, and now observing the mantle being handed over to Cook in a way that the cult appears just to have adapted to follow the new leader... it's a very disturbing sight. Apple are a great company for sure, but I'm extremely uneasy reading things that make any individual such an icon, let alone with Apple where it's ha…
Personality cults are much more important than you realise. The post-modernist approach seems to be to downplay the significance of individual visionaries in favour of diffuse accolades attributed to the group or larger corpus. It's nonsense.
Shakespeare was an individual (not a nebulous, anonymous, amorphous collective) of unique literary gifts. Jobs is a design and technological wizard who single-handedly righted the ship. Tim Cook is a process engineering and business operations mastermind of the like that has never been seen since Carnegie. Ives' industrial design methodologies will blaze the path for decades to come.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of course. I'm simply saying it makes them less vertically integrated.
But in spite of the fact that they outsource manufacturing, they have their own OS, hardware they've designed for the external (such as the chassis), and components they've designed internally (like the A4) - they're still far more vertically integrated than any competitor. Do you have any more vertically integrated player in the market that has yet to be discussed? The rest of the companies use off-the-shelf parts a…