Posted on 06/06/2011 12:35:21 PM PDT by ctdonath2
Apple introduced OS X Lion, iOS 5, and iCloud today. Lots of articles at the link and elsewhere.
The manufacturer list includes all phones, from throwaways to top-end. The Samsung number is padded by the fact they sell a lot of dumb phones, for which there is almost no profit margin. Samsung/Android has about 5%. OTOH, HTC is doing very well.
If not for the oppressive socialistic regulations, they could.
IIRC, Apple wrote checks totaling $150M last week to make this happen.
This, vs. Amazon blindsiding the publishers. Sometimes what’s legal is still a bad move.
So now we've gone from "what's the big deal? All the cloud services already do this" to "a year from now ..." I wouldn't hold my breath. Ten years on, we're still waiting for the "iPod killer" (*cough* Zune *cough*).
As I said, the “cloud” idea is nothing new. The only “twist” is you can have your entire 100GB (or whatever it is) available to you, which I’m sure is probably nowhere near what the average user has.
Jobs said at the keynote that this isn't for most users. Heaven forfend, a company should offer a service for someone other than the average user.
Why is it that when Apple comes out with this “revolutionary” stuff, the only people calling it that were already Apple zombies to begin with?
Because you use a circular definition by which anyone impressed with Apple's services is an "Apple zombie."
iCloud (more precisely, the iTunes in the Cloud feature) hosts your iTunes library. Anywhere you have service, you can download songs to your iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad. When you don't have a signal, you can still listen to whatever you've previously downloaded.
The rest of iCloud is basically an upgrade of the services offered in MobileMe, but for free. It synchs contacts, calendars, documents, apps and settings remotely. It also supports backups and software updates remotely, so that now it's feasible to have, say, an iPad for someone who doesn't have access to a computer.
Oops, forgot to divide by 8 (bits vs. bytes).
That’s 33GB of content at 256kbps compressing a modest collection of 12 CDs per year for 30 years. A common collection will be several times larger.
Eventually American public opinion will turn strongly against companies which eliminate US jobs.
(and Republicans, if they don’t get as far away from them as possible) The time to start making plans is now - not once US public opinion start going south on the ‘free traders’ in a big way.
Around that time, China will begin to become more aggressive with those same companies, to attempt to leverage them against our own country, to influence trade policy.
The end will be a sudden collapse of any “American” companies which have not before then, found ways to wind down their operations there - suddenly those will no longer be their operations at all - they will belong to the Chinese government. They will be expropriated and collapse catastrophically as independent companies.
It would behoove “American” companies to start bringing back jobs now, before that happens.
I am not optimistic seeing the blind greed which drives most globalists, that they’re nearly sensible (or patriotic) enough to do that. No tears will be shed by this poster when they collapse.
They made their bed. They continue to sleep in it.
Screw ‘em.
For example, on my home iMac, there are three user accounts (my own, my wife's, and our eldest son's) and the computer is authorized with two Apple IDs (my own and my wife's). We can currently share apps, manually, by copying the app file to shared disk and double-clicking them to add to iTunes. All three of us have an iOS device (iPhone 3GS for me and the Mrs., iPod Touch 3G for the eldest) synced to that machine.
Now, with the App Store update as of yesterday, it does appear that I can see my wife's purchases as well as my own, and I was able to copy one of those apps directly to my iPhone, and what's more, using my Apple ID, not hers, to authorize the download.
So it seems that the iCloud might be tied to all devices that sync with each other, not by user or Apple ID.
I note that OS X Lion also has a low-power (CPU/disk only, no monitor or USB) wake on LAN feature for file transfers, etc. -- in conjunction with the iOS wireless sync, I'm curious to see how the sync will work given that each user logs into iTunes separately via their computer account. (Also, in theory, shouldn't the low-power access work in conjunction with being an iTunes client that Apple TV requires to play files from a network disk?)
Note that a single audiobook can run 10-20 CDs in length, too. With only a small collection of audiobooks, I have something like 200 CDs worth of books in my library.
You miss the point.
They CAN’T manufacture here, because our federal polypragmonocracy makes such high-end manufacturing infeasible.
Sure, it behooves companies to do the work here - IF it wasn’t somewhere between illegal and cost-prohibitive due to regulations.
Of course they can manufacture here.
That’s profoundly silly to claim. Stroke of the pen, and Apple could bring back all manufacturing to America.
Would win them millions of customers hearts and loyalty. And it’s not like their product pricing will not support US manufacturing costs - Apples are pretty expensive actually.
They decided not to manufacture here - and some day they will reap the whirlwind.
Perhaps soon. The current trends are quite literally unsustainable. Even short term.
Apple could lead the way in re-industrializing America, and be truly loved heroes doing so.
They should.
Dropbox is very nice for what it does. But it's still a folder in the filesystem. But with iCloud Apple has gone far beyond Dropbox. It syncs music, apps, iBooks, and files. And iCloud does this in a way that makes the filesystem disappear. And that is one of the primary ideas--to make the filesystem disappear.
By the way, iCloud will sync music between Macs and Windows boxes. But since I got rid of all my Windows boxes, I really don't need that. And once iCloud goes live, I won't have much need for Dropbox anymore since I have already made the transition to an all Mac shop.
I think I may have just realized the answer to my own question. Why on earth am I insisting on putting the computer into the equation? The iDevice will sync to the cloud, not the computer. The computer will be updated from the cloud when it gets the chance (assuming, say, that it's powered down at the time of the iDevice sync.)
360 CDs? I’m not a music fanatic, but I’ve been collecting CDs for about 23 years, and I’m over 1,000. That’s about a four per month average, including digging through bargain bins and hitting second-hand shops. Many of my friends have far more, and I’m not talking about the ones who DJ on weekends.
Thank you. My brain is a little like a cloud and sometimes this techie stuff sort of floats around in there and doesn’t really land! :) I appreciate you taking the time to hang some of this on a passing neuron! <3
So, if it’s encrypted, then that means if someone hacks it they won’t be able to know your info? At least in theory?
I'm sure there are lawyers at Apple negotiating with the movie studios as we speak. That's where the space really gets huge, and where Apple's "store an alias to a common file" approach really pays off. I have little doubt movies will show up eventually, but it will almost certainly be iTunes purchases only.
That's why American (and Japanese, and Korean, and British, etc.) companies contract work out. If the Chinese government decides to nationalize Apple's operations there, they'll get a few offices and several retail stores. If they nationalize Foxconn, there will be severe shortages while Apple tries to line up another contractor elsewhere; China, meanwhile, will simply be killing the golden-egg-laying goose.
I was responding to the claim that “anyone that can’t seem to fit enough music in 20GB, which doesn’t even count stuff from Amazon, has serious issues” by observing that even a paltry 1-CD-a-month habit would overwhelm the 20GB line with ease.
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