As a mental exercise, consider the thought process behind the perspective that this is "anti-competitive".
1. Apple has taken a technology- metal milling- that has existed for at least half a century, and used it to make a nicer laptop case.
2. Apple uses the modern manufacturing method to do this, requiring expensive CNC machines.
3. Apple introduced popular products that, when you open them, look like they were hand crafted by master metalworkers in the 1940s (I'm serious!) while their competition is still shipping cheap plastic cases.
4. Even though there are dozens of suppliers of CNC Mills of all type, Apple's requirements contain the market for a particular type (this is speculation on my, and the articles part.)
5. Therefore, this is "anti-competitive" because Apple's competition can't just copy the unibody case idea and order machines and make their own unibody cases?
6. So, what could possibly be the remedy? To fine Apple for being successful with an innovative new case design? To institute some government board of allocation to allocate the (currently, and only temporarily) limited supply of CNC machines?
If Apple hadn't been competitive-- that is, if Apple hadn't innovated and come up with a new case design-- there would be no demand for these machines from non-Apple people. So, this is a result of competition on Apple's part.
Sometimes I imagine that people think that if Apple is successful by doing something better, that this is "unfair" and that Apple should be punished.
Hell, I wish I could make a crapy video editor and then force Apple to give me some of their final cut profits, because, really, it is so unfair that apple makes such a good video editor, I'm just one guy and I can't hope to compete with that, right? (Just kidding, forcing Apple to do that is aggression, and is immoral. I'm just being illustrative. While I've thought about making a video editing app, I've not done that, actually.)
I don't think the article is suggesting that this activity is anticompetitive... I think, rather, it's being held up as an example of the genius of Tim Cook and Apple's lesser-appreciated operational excellence.
Well, I am suspicious about an article that talks about lathes with regard to making Macbook parts. A Lathe is a machine on which parts are spun at great speed. It is good for making things like the legs of tables, etc.
Apple's unibody technology uses CNC machines which are more appropriately called mills. They are not that uncommon, and are widely available to everybody... and have been for years. Maybe Apple uses machines from a particular segment of the market that has dried up supply, but it is rare that a company has too much demand for a product and isn't interested in building more.
EG: There's no evidence Apple has cornered the market on CNC machines, which can come from a wide variety of companies.
However, companies like Foxconn, do invest billions in buying large quantities of such tools and then dedicate them to manufacturing apple products, because Apple's specifications require them to do so. (This from an article I read interviewing Foxcon's founder.) The Band on the iPhone 4 required 1,000 custom metal machines, for instance. No doubt many of those billions invested in those machines come from Apple.
For instance, New Zealand. Nice place. Great People. First class quality of life-- better than the USA. Higher taxes than the USA in many ways, but the government is so much less corrupt that the taxes are much less of a burden. You don't mind paying when you see you're getting value for the money.
There are many places an american can go. Unlike the USA, most countries don't tax your worldwide income. So, for instance, you could become a citizen of any of the EU countries that don't tax worldwide income, and earn your income outside that country tax free (and live outside it as well.)
I know of several countries within the EU where you can be a citizen and pay essentially no taxes, or extremely low taxes. These are very pleasant places as well. For instance, one location is the side of a very nice lake in switzerland (Campoin d' Italia) and Andorra has some nice tax advantages, and one of the best climates in Europe. Monaco is not bad, though expensive for my tastes, while Licthenstein, Austria, Switzerland, and all this british islands whose existence is for purposes of avoiding taxes aren't too bad either.
The idea that you can't have a high quality of life in China or India compared to the USA seems silly to me, but I haven't lived in either of those countries. There are many countries in Latin, South America, Asia and Europe where you can have as high a quality of life as the USA, or higher, and at much less cost than the USA.
I think the idea that anywhere desirable is worse than the USA is a kind of parochial perception. Of course ones preferences can vary, but, for instance, in many ways much of eastern europe is nicer than the USA, even though they are "poorer". There are many countries that are in many ways richer, or where you can have a better quality of life at the same or less cost.
I just think that people in every country believe that their country s superior to others, and can't imagine how anyone would want to live in another country... but they also haven't experienced those other countries.
I've visited a lot of countries, and have yet to visit one that was terrible, and about %50 of them are better than the USA in noticeable ways, and the ones that aren't as good, aren't as good in ways that aren't really all that bad.
"I know of several countries within the EU where you can be a citizen and pay essentially no taxes, or extremely low taxes."
If so, then why have the rich not moved already? Indeed, why have you not gone to these places? I mean, no tax, whether on capital gain or income, is better than any tax is it not?
That's the number of people who renounced. And that number is going up dramatically, and I've heard that the published figures for renouncement are way under-reported. (as in here are lawyers who have more clients who have renounced than the government claims renounced in total.) But on both sides these are just claims.
The number of people who simply moved their butts and their assets overseas is much higher. You can tell this is the case because the administration has been saber rattling for the last four years, and starting to work their way into currency controls.
Did you know, in order to renounce, you have to get the permission of the government? They charge an exit tax too for your funds. This is a currency control and it is one of the things that marked the soviet union as a bad regime. If you can't move your money in and out of a country, then you're not likely to invest in that country.
I'm not very rich, and I will renounce as soon as my second citizenship gets in. It will be easier for me because, not being very rich yet, I will be more likely to get permission of the government to give up my citizenship.
Yeah, I'd support making it both easier to leave the U.S. as well as to enter it--- make both renunciation and green-card procurement easier. I think the U.S. would come out pretty well on overall balance there, because it's a fairly popular place to live, and is artificially keeping out many people who would like to live there.
The evidence I can find is that the outward flow is a trickle rather than a flood (or even a modest current), though. Even if the 743 number is a 5x underestimate, that's still not much. I'm not sure it even balances the rich people flowing the other direction, e.g. the businessmen getting green cards under the ">$1m to invest" criterion (and no doubt there would be more of them if the green-card process were streamlined).
I don't think the U.S. is particularly unique in making it hard to renounce citizenship, though perhaps it's for different reasons. Many countries make it very hard to renounce citizenship if they think you're doing it to get out of mandatory military service, for example. For economic reasons, many require that there no longer be any links with the country, e.g. you can't renounce German citizenship if you still own businesses or property in Germany. France seems to have an additional timing requirement, where you can only renounce French citizenship within the first year after acquiring a second citizenship, so dual nationals can't decide 10 years later to leave the country and renounce the French citizenship.
Gold was criminalized for use in transactions in 1933 by executive order. I think that's a fair point to mark the end of the "gold standard" and the beginning of the fiat era. It is true the US government would redeem dollars for gold for foreign countries up to 1970 or so, under Nixon... but indie the USA, it was a crime to use gold as money. (Though jewelry was allowed) up until the 1970s.
He's using the term "counterfeiting" in the economic sense.
One of the things that makes something money in economics is that it is difficult to duplicate, so you can't just make more of it for yourself. Fiat currency doesn't have that restraint. So, we can say it is not money, or we can say that it is being counterfeited. This is not a word chosen for its alarm value, though it should make you alarmed.
Not really. Gold is held as a standard, but I would argue that gold itself is nothing more than another form of fiat. Why is gold worth anything? Because we all agree that it is. How much gold is there? Whatever is reported by the governments who hold it. There's no way to check. There are ways to guess, but it's just a shiny metal that we all agree is worth exchange.
Limiting us to gold also exposes us to massive economic swings, due to the limited ability to control how much or how little we all agree exists. I always hear people talk about how we 'print money' when we need it but NO ONE mentions that we also take money OUT of the economy all of the time.
"Why is gold worth anything? Because we all agree that it is."
True to some extent, but it does have more intrinsic value than paper currency. 1) It's rare enough that small amounts can be used to trade, but common enough that lots of people can have some. 2) It is pretty (subjective, but agreed-upon across many cultures). 3) It is chemically stable - doesn't rust or tarnish - so if you have 5oz today, you'll still have 5oz 10 years from now.
Reasons like these were explored on a Planet Money podcast, and they concluded that gold isn't an arbitrary choice; if you could pick any element from the periodic table to use for money, gold is the logical choice.
You described the requirements for a medium of exchange, and they make sense. But I don't think that that means "value" necessarily. Value is bread when I am hungry. Or gold when I need to make microchip contacts - but that usage is nowhere near justifying the price that gold actually trades at.
This is just a nitpick with the use of term "intrinsic value" - gold's characteristics make it a good form of money, but it's still (abstractly speaking) on a fiat basis.
I don't see how it could really work otherwise. There is no such thing as a good that everyone would value equally. Intrinsic value varies depending on the needs of the traders.
See, that's exactly the problem. The intrinsic value of anything - in this case, gold - relies on agreement of the scarcity. Truthfully, we don't know the scarcity of gold, or the amount that exists. We have only educated guesses.
Controlling the monetary supply with "paper" currency (which is an inaccurate term, "digital" currency is the reality) is much more stable and controllable. The US Government says they have $50,000,000,000,000, and the global economic capital markets either agree or don't agree.
Taking twitter for example, it is rendering content in a native app when you're looking at tweets. The content is delivered in json (or whatever) standard format and rendered in native controls, namely tableViewCells. Webkit is used if you look at a web page... but otherwise it is native.
The flexibility and quality you get by taking web "content" via json (rather than HTML) and rendering it natively is a huge win.
I don't see android customers paying for websites wrapped in an app anymore than I see iOS users paying for it, actually less.
Of course if you're making SaaS such as base camp then you can do native clients on either platform.... and sell them successfully... while selling a specialized web browser (That just gives you the base camp website in WebKit) wouldn't likely fly.
The pain of doing web development for a maze of twisty browsers, all alike and incompatible makes iOS a "superior" choice in the sense that it means less headaches.
For me, it doesn't really matter which is easier or harder, but which has the best return on invested pain.
I am working on some solutions to get web pain down for our particular area of the industry, and as a result, I think the web may have a positive return on the amount of pain it causes. (FWIW, of course iOS has pain too, everything does, just using this as a measure of the relative joy vs. hassle of doing what's needed for business reasons, vs. hassle of having to deal with painful technologies metric.)
-- The Apple frameworks are first class. In the past 20 years, there has never been a set of GUI frameworks that I've seen that was anywhere near as good as things are in iOS right now. (I've not looked at android, but it being based on Java doesn't fill me with hope. A lot of what makes CocoaTouch work so well is due to Objective-C.)
-- You can write an app once and have it run on iOS on the iPhone, the iPod touch and the iPad. This is really great. No phone outsells the iPhone, no tablet outsells the iPad, and there doesn't seem to be any competition for the iPod touch. This means "cross platform" or, across the spectrum development is really easy. In fact, with some tools you can include Mac OS X in the mix, though it isn't as trivial as doing an "iPad Port".
-- The above means that you have the largest addressable market for your software. It is true that this market is also the one that is more likely to buy software. But, while people talk about android as a "platform" it really isn't, from the developers point of view. Android ships on phones with keyboards, and much of its volume is on phones that really are just feature phones that can run apps. IOW, they are low end cheap phones sold for little, or given away for free to people who use them only to make calls and whose design is such that you can't really do a modern iPhone style touch app for them. Or if you can, it involves a lot of porting. IF the phone doesn't have a touchscreen, it doesn't matter if it's android or not, you have to do another port.
-- Apple has proven to be a trustworthy partner. People like to complain about Apple and make them out like they don't treat developers well, but they really do. All of the reviews (and the one rejection) from the Appstore review team have been fair. Apple pays on time and reliably. Apple sells software world wide and supports addressing a worldwide market easily. Apple's terms are consistent and they keep expanding and improving their market. As someone whose business is selling (rather than writing, though I do all of our development, the software is worthless if it isn't sold) having a good market is really critical to success.
-- The consistency of the platform means that we can have free apps or very low cost apps and not be buried in support requests. I think this is really underestimated. On other platforms, either you're ignoring the customers, or you're dealing with innumerable bugs that show up on a particular model of device. You don't have that fragmentation or variation on the iOS platform, and you can therefore afford to do real customer support.... though most customers contacting us are telling us how much they love our apps rather than complaining about problems.
-- Apple keeps giving us really news stuff to play with. They don't have fundamental problems they have to address (like androids fragmentation) and when they do give us something where they're behind (like iCloud) when they deliver it is generally a first class implementation. I'd wish there was more sample code for iCloud but they took their time and did it right, and I appreciate that.
Of all the platforms I've developed for this has been the best so far. So, while there might be some financial advantage to developing for android as well, I don't really see it.
Here's the costs that keep me off of android:
-- Maintaining separate port of our software would be too much. One set of source code for all platforms keeps us working on new features and moving the ball forward, not maintaining a another code base.
-- As I mentioned, we'll be able to add Mac OS X to our single code base, and that's nice. Where we're likely to have to do a separate port is the web. I'm much more interested in doing a web app for our customers, because then I can point everyone to it-- android users, palm users, windows phone 7 system home plus users, etc. If I'm going to support an incompatible platform, its going to be the web.
-- Java. Frankly, at one time Java was my favorite language... but having worked with Objective-C, erlang and other languages, I've grown to hate it. It is ... bureaucratic, for lack of a better term. Like nails on a chalkboard now.
-- I don't see the market there for apps. The quality of the market in which we'd sell, and the quality of the customers doesn't seem like it would produce a worthwhile return on our investment. Sure, angry birds can do well, but that's a different kind of situation, that app is a phenomenon.
I love Apple products, and am learning C++ on my own, alone along with web development, (huge task I know)
but the one thing I noticed about apple these days is that if you create an idea on their platform and they like it, it could be an feature in their next upgrade with no compensation to you,
also could someone please point out any other use case for Obj-c I come from a background of using/instructing with proprietary software and I despise the idea of learning a language for one platform and being locked in to that platform.
As for learning Obj-C: yes, it's only widely used for building iOS/Cocoa apps. There's also Cappuccino (http://cappuccino.org/), where you can reuse your knowledge for web development. Even if you use another language, your code will probably still heavily interact with the Cocoa framework and effectively lock you in too.
I think you're prolly selling Android short and leaving money on the table in the process. All reports are that most code is fairly quick to port and the sheer number of phones is hard to ignore, even if many of them aren't app shoppers, there's still many many many that are and the app store will iterate quickly. Chrome sucked too at 1.0.
If you don't want to deal with the backend on Android there are solutions that shouldn't be all that different from Apple's 30% cut.
I'm kind of shocked that "all reports" would say code is easy to port between iOS and Android. Have any sources for this? For me its not even just the differences between unmanaged Obj C vs managed Java + XML, but also the overall development patterns used are fairly different (note that I'm not a professional mobile guy, I do .Net and web for a living but I've looked around at both platforms before).
The rich are leaving and renouncing. There are a lot of countries out there, and many of them provide a more hospitable climate for wealth.