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Dirty Percent

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91–98 of 98 posts

Re: Dirty Percent

#91
Funnily enough, one of the people on HN screaming the loudest about this 30% was essentially trying to cut Apple out of any revenue at all.

What they were doing for their app was giving it away as a free download, then charging a one off subscription. Ta Da! No $ for Apple. Apple closes this loophole, and this guy starts screaming blue murder.

I've got very little sympathy for anyone like him who is just trying to rort the system and get something for nothing.

----

All the people screaming about Apple's 30% cut should just pack up, shut up, and go to Android where Google will take a 32% cut of their ad revenue. Vote with your feet peeps.

Re: Dirty Percent

#92

Apple doesn’t give a damn about companies with business models that can’t afford a 70/30 split. Apple’s running a competitive business; competition is cold and hard. These two statements are fundamentally at odds; it's highly unlikely that Apple is making more money from App Store purchases / subscriptions than from iOS hardware sales. Consequently, for Apple to be competitive, they need to offer as much value as pos…

I think that in their quarterly financial calls they've consistently reported the iTunes store as running "about break even". They don't sound unhappy about it, so presumably they're on the positive side of break even rather than on the negative side.

The following Dickens quote springs to mind: "Income, twenty shillings a week, expenditure, twenty shillings and sixpence; result, misery. Income, twenty shillings a week, expenditure, nineteen shillings and sixpence; result, happiness."

However if Apple cut back to say 25% then it might mean that they are subsidising people's use of the store. This would be bad for Apple because they would be losing money. Boo hoo. On the other hand, if they were losing money with one hand in order to (as you suggest) gain it with the other, then they would open themselves to questions of dumping, price fixing, abuse of monopoly etc.

Selling at below cost is a typical strategy to keep new entrants out of the market, and so would be evil. But apparently taking 30% is evil too, so it doesn't matter what they do, somebody is going to be unhappy with them.

Re: Dirty Percent

#93
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From an actual, yet unnamed, Apple Staffer: http://www.cultofmac.com/apple-staffer-ipad-3-is-the-one-to-... That's what I was thinking of. Kind of throws a wet towel on the already rumored incremental iPad2 release.

I wonder if they are releasing too fast with the iPad - with a mobile phone an annual release cycle makes sense as that market changes so fast and they are subsidised for a lot of people. However the iPad is pretty billed as the future computer replacement. I don't think a new version every year will sell as well.

It's a computer too, so billing it as a computer replacement is fuzzy thinking at best. I note that I cannot recall anyone at Apple saying this.

According to Fortune, either Cook, Oppenheimer or Cue said this "Capitalizing on the "explosive" demand for the iPad, believing that tablets could end up being a bigger market than PCs. (If this is so, Sacconaghi calculates that the iPad could eventually be a $60 billion to $100 billion business for Apple.)"

That doesn't mean that PCs will go away, at $500 for the average (future!) price of a PC that still leaves room for 100 million PCs to be sold each year, which is still a lot of PCs. It also doesn't say at what point in the distant future this might occur.

On the other hand, if it is some breathless pundit speculating hard (as they are wont to do) who claims that the iPad is a future computer replacement, I take it with exactly the same seriousness as I do all their other breathless pronouncements about the 101 iPod/iPad/iPhone killers that are announced each week, which is to say I don't take it seriously at all.

None of the tech pundits can predict the future worth a damn. They've proved this time and time again. Gruber has a running joke with claim-chowder (a play on words for clam chowder), where he takes the stupid things people said in the past and calls them to task for it.

Re: Dirty Percent

#94
post #76

I don't like Apple's business practises and never have, but this 70/30 split furore is hilarious to someone who has worked in retail and supply before. It is entirely normal for a retailer (apple) to take this kind of split in the retail price and the supplier/wholesaler to take 70%. In the retail industry I worked in, the retailer took a 35-40% portion. This split is yawningly normal in retail. What's not normal is…

Thank you. There are plenty of legitimate things to criticise Apple for (they are far from perfect) without making stuff up.

Re: Dirty Percent

#95

I just know one thing: the moment Kindle is removed from the app store, I'm selling my iPad.

I'd love for Amazon to remove the DRM from their books, and just sell books in epub format which can be read on any device without a Kindle app. That would solve Amazon's problem with iOS/Apple, and also be an ideal solution for end users. EDIT: what I mean is, music is now sold without DRM. Why do we still need DRM for ebooks? I'd love to be able to just put all my ebooks in a Dropbox folder, and not depend on Amazo…

I may be wrong, but I thought the choice between DRM or not for books was up to the publisher and not Amazon?

Re: Dirty Percent

#96
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if they are releasing too fast with the iPad - with a mobile phone an annual release cycle makes sense as that market changes so fast and they are subsidised for a lot of people. However the iPad is pretty billed as the future computer replacement. I don't think a new version every year will sell as well.

It's a computer too, so billing it as a computer replacement is fuzzy thinking at best. I note that I cannot recall anyone at Apple saying this. According to Fortune, either Cook, Oppenheimer or Cue said this "Capitalizing on the "explosive" demand for the iPad, believing that tablets could end up being a bigger market than PCs. (If this is so, Sacconaghi calculates that the iPad could eventually be a $60 billion to…

Let me replace the word computer for desktop/laptop if that helps you understand my point.

Don't get me wrong; I think there will still be developers using a laptop/desktop - I can't imagine trying to develop using an iPad. However for the average user do they really have the need of a desktop/laptop? For most people I would say no and ultimately it makes their lives easier.

I'll see if I can find the article where Jobs was saying that basically he saw the way computers [read desktops/laptops] are now as a dying market and the iPad/mobile market was the future. Maybe my statement was pushing it too much but the way I read it I think not.

Anyways my main point was that I just wonder if they are trying to push the iPad cycle too fast. Where in the subsidised mobile space it makes sense; will it make sense for tablets to be changing every 6-12 months?

Re: Dirty Percent

#97
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a computer too, so billing it as a computer replacement is fuzzy thinking at best. I note that I cannot recall anyone at Apple saying this. According to Fortune, either Cook, Oppenheimer or Cue said this "Capitalizing on the "explosive" demand for the iPad, believing that tablets could end up being a bigger market than PCs. (If this is so, Sacconaghi calculates that the iPad could eventually be a $60 billion to…

Let me replace the word computer for desktop/laptop if that helps you understand my point. Don't get me wrong; I think there will still be developers using a laptop/desktop - I can't imagine trying to develop using an iPad. However for the average user do they really have the need of a desktop/laptop? For most people I would say no and ultimately it makes their lives easier. I'll see if I can find the article where J…

http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/

used to be quite good, doesn't seem to be working at the moment. It shows the time between each revision, and when it was working clearly showed that sometimes there were only a couple of months between revisions, and sometimes there was a couple of years between revisions (the 30 inch monitor springs to mind).

Most Apple products were completely unpredictable in this regard. You could perhaps argue that the release of new computers or laptops was tied to intel's cpu release cycle, which while still appearing pseudo-random in terms of when Apple does their refresh, at least gives it some sane causal tie to the real world.

Oh, it seems to have loaded. So okay, right off the top we can see the iPod classic has in the past had refreshes as little as four and five months apart, and then 4 years (2006-09) where the new models came out in September each year.

Note that with Apple sometimes what counts as a 'new model' is really minor, even just something as small as a price drop.

iPod Touch, same thing, releases in September. Nano, September.

Shuffle, updated twice a year during 2006-09 period, only updated once last year.

Mac mini, updated twice in 2009, and not at all in 2008.

Since 2003 there have only been 4 years with a single iMac update, all the rest had two or more (2003 had 3!). So 13 updates in 8 years.

Mac Pro, only updated once a year since 2003 (2003 seem like a year where Apple pushed out a lot of refreshes).

MacBook, twice a year every year except 2005 and 2010, so 9 updates every 5 years.

MacBook Pro, multiple updates in a year not uncommon, 3 updates in 2006.

MacBook Air, once a year.

The first three iPhone updates were all 5 months apart (!!!)

The slowest updating ones of that lot mini, air and Mac Pro all feel (to me) like they update really slowly. Maybe the Pro will pick up with the switch to consumer chips instead of the server Xeons. In an industry with Moore's law (price per transistor halving every 18 months) running rampant back in the 2000s yearly or year and a half updates feel very slow.

The average Apple (hardware) product (including taking all the slowpokes into account) updates every 0.700205338809035 of a year. Call it eight and a half months.

So if they release a new iPad in March, seeing another one in November (just in time for Xmas! Funny that) would not be at all unreasonable.

Re: Dirty Percent

#98
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a computer too, so billing it as a computer replacement is fuzzy thinking at best. I note that I cannot recall anyone at Apple saying this. According to Fortune, either Cook, Oppenheimer or Cue said this "Capitalizing on the "explosive" demand for the iPad, believing that tablets could end up being a bigger market than PCs. (If this is so, Sacconaghi calculates that the iPad could eventually be a $60 billion to…

Let me replace the word computer for desktop/laptop if that helps you understand my point. Don't get me wrong; I think there will still be developers using a laptop/desktop - I can't imagine trying to develop using an iPad. However for the average user do they really have the need of a desktop/laptop? For most people I would say no and ultimately it makes their lives easier. I'll see if I can find the article where J…

After reviewing yesterday's iPad2 announcement, where they were talking a lot about the 'post PC' nature of their product line-ups...

I concede your point. You were closer to truthiness than I was. I apologise and applaud your insight/foresight.

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