reinharden's Comments Stream Stats
- 58 Comments, 14
, 1 
- Total Comment Stream rating - = 13
- Free E-Newsletters
- About Seeking Alpha
- About Us
- Contact Us
- What's New
- Readers Feedback
- Advertise With Us
- Contributors
- Contribute an Article
- Feature Your Book
- Our Contributors
- Anonymous Contributions
- Dispute an Article?
- Legal
- Terms of Use
- Privacy
- Copyright
iTunes Breaks 6 Billion, DRM is Dead
For what it's worth, iTunes says I've purchased 730 items including 584 audio files; however, I've been stupidly fanatic about getting the free songs each week. After 4 years, that's 400+ right there.
Seeing as how I came into iTunes with a few hundred CDs (and eBay and used stores have usually been cheaper than iTunes), I've personally been more interested in ripping music from my CDs than buying new music directly from iTunes.
And since, for the last nearly 2 years, we all knew that iTunes was going to go DRM-free any day now, I've avoided buying any music there.
So, the combination of $.69 back catalogue songs, finally DRM-free music, and over the air purchases for iPhones means that there *might* be some pent up demand...I guess we're find out this quarter.
reinharden
Steve Jobs Explains His Weight Loss as 'Hormone Imbalance'
> As a physician, "hormonal imbalance" means nothing to me. This is
> incredibly vague. If it wasn't a serious problem, then he would have
> revealed the names of the diagnosis and the treatment. It sounds
> like he is being evasive.
Which part of "private" don't you understand?
The only two people who should know the name of the diagnosis are Steve Jobs and his physician.
reinharden
It's No Big Deal That Apple Is Pulling Out of Macworld
Now AAPL can unleash updates to the iPod and their consumer Macintosh products in September/October and people will buy them confident that they're getting the latest and the greatest. Of course, that may well make calendar Q1 even weaker for Apple than it has been traditionally...put AAPL would probably rather have the money in their greedy little hands a quarter earlier. ;-)
reinharden
Infineon's Woeful Outlook Is a Result of Apple's Slowed iPhone Production
So one would expect Apple to reduce orders of components in calendar Q4 because most of those components would be going into products to be sold in calendar Q1 -- traditionally Apple's weakest quarter.
I don't track IFX, so I can't speak as to its previous behavior. But it'd be worth comparing and contrasting the two company's previous quarterly reports so as to get a better feel for the correlation between IFX and AAPL as a predictive tool
reinharden
Web Browser Wars: Google Looking Beyond Market Share
1) Chrome and Firefox are indeed open source; however, Chrome is built upon WebKit which is an open source tool strongly supported by Apple (it's the basis of Safari on the iPhone and under MacOS X). Assuming that all of Chrome is maintained in the open source arena, Apple will benefit relatively quickly. As Firefox doesn't use this software, their benefit will be less direct and immediate.
2) Chrome is designed to slide right into Android. So Chrome is Google's Mobile web browser (akin to Apple's Safari on the iPhone). Obviously Apple wasn't likely to do something so potentially competitive with the iPhone and Google would be nowhere with a PhoneOS without a web browser.
3) Google's line of web applications (Google Documents, gMail, Google Reader, etc) are currently hobbled by the absence of some key features in the web browsers. By providing an open source web browser that is optimized for enabling these web applications, Google is better able to compete with Microsoft's (and Apple's) more desktop centric application suite.
In the final analysis, short of buying Opera, Google really had little choice but to develop their own web browser.
reinharden
Invest Cautiously for the Rest of 2008
While not growing as fast as we'd like, the computer side of the tech industry is still clearly growing.
reinharden
Why Is Google Entering the Browser Market?
And if Firefox / Mozilla / Netscape remnants were more useful, Google would have used that as the base of Chrome rather than the more Apple-based WebKit. And with Apple and now Google pouring resources into WebKit-based products for Windows, I suspect that Chrome and Safari will happily co-exist on Windows for at least a while longer.
reinharden
Steve Jobs: Honesty Is the Best Policy
Steve Jobs can choose to discuss his health with people. Apple Inc., until such time as his health is a material fact, cannot initiate such disclosures.
Also, it'd be mind-boggling stupid to get stuck in the never-ending loop of "What is the current state of Steve Jobs' health?"
One, Steve Jobs can die at any time in any number of ways. If Apple Inc. claims he's healthy and he dies of an aneurysm or a heart attack or a stroke the next day, how many class action lawsuits will there be the day after that? Apple Inc. isn't a medical profession -- they can't affirm or deny his health.
Once Steve Jobs goes on the record, the only way to control this issue would be to providing constant medical data with increasing amounts of information. For example, the treatment can affect one's immune system. How long before people want to know his white blood cell counts? Survivors often develop diabetes. How long before people want to know his blood sugar levels? Diet is believed to play a role in avoiding recurrence of problems? Will Steve Jobs have to issue a weekly menu? Will Apple have to disclose that Steve jobs had a steak dinner?
The only reasonable and correct answer is "Steve Jobs' health is a private matter".
reinharden
Low Flash Memory Prices Pressure Chip Makers
I'm just saying...
And, if AAPL is unsure of their own demand, definitely better to stay on the spot market unless supplies start to look tight.
Perversely, generally speaking, in the current market, the longer AAPL goes without entering into new contracts, the less their supplies will cost.
reinharden
SanDisk: Risk Down $3, Reward Up $30
> Our back-of-the-envelope math gets us roughly 4.5B GB
> of incremental NAND demand in '09 versus 1 billion GB
> shipped in '06 and about 2 billion GB shipped in '07.
Um, going from 2 billion GB in 07 to even 6 billion GB in 09 would represent increasing demand by a factor of 3.
An order of magnitude requires increasing demand by a factor of 10. Two orders of magnitude would be at least a factor of 100. Several orders of magnitude requires at least a factor of 1000...
reinharden
China Mobile, Apple Butt Heads Over iPhone
That having been said, China Unicom offers GPRS service in 250+ cities across China and claims that they'll have it enabled in "all" cities prior to the 2008 Olympics.
Nearly all current GSM base stations are capable of supporting GPRS. For most GSM service providers, it's just a matter of logistics and provisioning...which are not admittedly not necessarily easy matters in the countryside.
But I'm not convinced you were actually distinguishing between GPRS and GSM in your article since you were comparing to CDMA...
reinharden
China Mobile, Apple Butt Heads Over iPhone
China Unicom operates both a CDMA and a GSM system. They have 100M+ GSM subscribers and a substantially smaller number of CDMA subscribers.
I didn't bother digging up the most recent numbers, but this article from the summer of 2006 discusses their GSM subscriber base reaching 100 million:
www1.cei.gov.cn/ce/doc...
Of course, that you're using phrases such as "The odorless-feces-factor&... pretty much makes it clear that objectivity and facts aren't really the goal of your article. So sorry if I've harshed your buzz by interjecting inconvenient and likely unwanted facts. ;-)
reinharden
Google Reader: Security By Obscurity?
Sharing worked before; however, you chose with whom you shared things.
Google unilaterally changed the sharing model so that anything you had previously shared with a very small, self-selected group of people was instead shared with everyone who was in your Contacts list.
Be they friends, family, or business contacts.
Google would have been fine had they even simply warned people that the functionality was changing. Instead, they changed what it did and "publicly" revealed everything to everybody.
I don't much care since I'd never "shared" anything using Google Reader (why would I want people to know what I was reading?)...but I certainly understand why people were angry when the functional model changed without warning.
reinharden
A Glimpse Into Apple’s Future
With the possible exception of, you know, changing out everything that was on the inside of the box?
The first Intel iMac shipped in January, 2006.
Yeah, it might be worth tweaking the products now that the Intel transition is truly done. But AAPL did quite a lot of work to make those boxes look like they hadn't changed.
reinharden
Employees Determine iPhone Success in Business
That doesn't give one the full functionality of Exchange, but I think it's important to recognize where the lines really are whether than where the media says the lines are.
reinharden