ualdayan

Don’t kid yourself though. Comcast alone had PROFITS of over 18 billion dollars last year. (And their big drain is content providers like ESPN, Fox, etc.) Data infrastructure is even more profitable than that – for example AT&T Mobility bragged about smartphone data plans bringing their profit margins up to 42% profit (every $1 you spend, 42 cents of it is pure profit after all equipment costs, the executives receive their millions in bonuses, the rest of the employees are paid, etc.) For Verizon it’s even higher – 46% profit margin.

The most annoying thing is I own from apps from the amazon appstore and the google play store, so the amazon appstore will constantly tell me I need to ‘update’ to the latest version they have (an old version), while google play will then tell me to update to the actual newest version since Amazon’s appstore downgrades the app. It just goes in a loop like that to the point I have to just keep clearing my notifications section of amazon update notices, and ignore them.

@hurracayne: This happened on a cruise ship and the one that stole it was a cruise ship employee. It’s actually fairly likely that he WAS able to just go in the room and take it. It isn’t like you actively carry your phone everywhere with you when on a cruise ship for obvious reasons.

Apple actually does justify their prices. Look how long the Macbook Air has been around – and yet it wasn’t until Intel pushed and pushed and pushed that other manufacturers even started to come out with ultrabooks (and then the only ones beating the Macbook Air’s pricing while matching hardware specs like included SSD usually make sacrifices like replacing the metal body with plastic)

You look at the iMac line of all in ones, and compare it to the all in ones from competitors that have IPS screens and similar other hardware specs. You come away with the Apple being cheaper.

Remember the first iOS tablet? $500. The first Android tablet (Xoom)? $800. With Motorola insistent they couldn’t get the price any lower at the time – that components were just too expensive.

They USED to have excessive pricing for the same quality. Now however they actually use their enormous economy of scale to force manufacturers to make things cheaper for them, and are able to simultaneously maintain a high profit margin while offering products at some of the best prices for their specs.

Yep. I have a Samsung TV right now. Did I specifically start out ’I’m going to buy a Samsung’? Nope. Heck, I didn’t even start out with ’I’m going to buy a TV." My current TV was probably good enough, but then an excellent deal came along and I got it.

If they were enforcing minimum pricing back then I probably would be using my older Sanyo LCD still rather than a Samsung LED.

Technologically – I don’t know how different Windows 8 is compared to Windows 7 but what I do know is when I’m stressing my system really hard on Windows 7 the mouse would even start skipping around the screen. On Windows 8 the mouse stays fluid and everything just appears to have a higher framerate to it. Maybe it’s the graphics drivers, I don’t know (I had the latest for WIndows 7 before going to Win 8), but all I care about is the end result – higher performance.

The problem is it seems so insurmountable and liability prone that no car manufacturer has wanted to spend the money on it.

The only reason it’s making progress now is because you have a company (Google) that lets it’s employees pick projects to put their extra time towards with the company’s financial backing. It’s always been a ’wouldn’t it be cool if’ for most tech geeks – and now finally they have the money and ability to go through with trying it.

I doubt Google will ever actually release a car you can buy though – at best they’ll try to perfect it, then give it out like they do Android to try to avoid any liability issues if it’s actually made into a product for the average person to use.

Only Sprint MVNO that allows BYOD that I know of is Zapp wireless.

Nobody knows how they plan to kick people off. It could be just going from 3G to 4G, or it might be change of phone at all.

Actually, I can remember having a gaming notebook once where I had to wait for the manufacturer to provide an updated driver, OR on a 3rd party guy to provide a custom driver that would ignore manufacturer flags and install anyway. (the equivalent of custom ROMS for phones)

Computers used to have much the same problem, so maybe phones will evolve out of it just like laptops mostly have.

iPad makes more sense, not because of people consuming more data, but because the iPad is one of the prime examples of why a person might want data sharing. Data sharing that lets them buy 1 pool of data, and share it between their phone and their iPad so they don’t have to tether to their phone.

That’s the first time I’ve heard ‘saturated market’ applied to the wireless market. If it were truly saturated AT&T and Verizon wouldn’t be able to continually up their price and add new fees. Afterall – wireless is less expensive than wired infrastructure (just ask Verizon who has been chanting that cost comparison for awhile to justify selling off their DSL business and replacing it with wireless) by the carrier’s own admissions, yet how much is your home internet? Now how much is the average cell phone monthly price?

Well, we have 4 national carriers, so beyond that it’s pretty much all MVNOs or regional carriers that roam onto one of the 4 to claim ‘national coverage’ while having a smaller ‘home region’. What’s the point of so many? Not really sure. Where they use the 4 national carriers for the most part they can’t compete on price. A few do offer unique offers though – Republic wireless for instance where you buy their phone, agree to almost always be in wifi range, and agree to let them terminate you if you talk/taxt/use data very much while away from wifi.

The last Gamestop I went to they didn’t try to sell me anything extra. Before that, I had a guy actually try to talk me OUT of buying what I’d gone in there to buy. (Granted, most of you here probably would have done the same, but I knew what I was getting with my Ngage – a cheap Symbian OS phone in an era when it was the top smartphone OS. Most people still don’t get the concept of $199 being a good price for an unlocked, off contract smartphone with high end specs.)

Porn and piracy seems to be the common thing people point blame at, but the truth is there’s probably also a large percentage of people using residential connections to do work remotely from home. Technically, they should probably have business connections, which are practically capless (they might call you for using more than 1TB, but unlike the residential side who threatens to terminate you for excessive data usage, the business side will just contact you asking for more money).

If you can get past the initial installation fee ($250), and you don’t need the highest speed you can get the 12Mbps business tier, nearly capless, for $67 a month. Now, if you need faster speeds you’re probably out of luck cost wise. (the 105Mbps tier is $389 on the business side for example)

If ‘video can be edited to show a lot of things that are not true’ is a valid excuse or ‘reason to understand’ then by the same logic NOBODY should be recorded. For all I know the guy that owns that camera in front of a local business that records the whole street might be planning to edit it and make it look like various people did who knows what. (at some point you just have to accept that while that is possible, it isn’t a valid reason to go around destroying cameras or even ‘understand’ why people who do destroy video would do so)

I’d guess there is a reason they waited for Ivy Bridge before going with a thinner case for the Pro. They might even get rid of the dedicated mobile graphics they had before and just go with straight Intel graphics. (Ivy Bridge graphics are supposedly 2x as fast as Sandybridge graphics)

Isn’t that suppose to be the major downside to Apple notebooks? They custom design every little thing in it so it’s nearly impossible to fix yourself if something breaks. The flip side of that coin, the upside is that they can squeeze more into a smaller space to either make their notebook thinner, or have longer battery life thanks to a larger battery.

Don’t you remember the big OEM problem when Intel was first trying to push ultrabooks and OEMs said there was no way they could make something as thin as an Air, with a metal case, and even match Apple’s price (much less beat their price, which is what you have to do now with Apple’s brand recognition)? Intel had to actually start subsidizing ultrabooks to get OEMs to pick up on producing them.

Bottom line; here’s why there can never be a comparison between Apple and other OEMs:

If it’s the same hardware – eg you run Windows on the Macbook Air you get ‘Well, it’s Apple’s Window’s drivers causing OSX to perform better.’

If you pick something close to the same specs as a Macbook Air, but from another company you get ‘Well, the specs aren’t EXACTLY the same, so if OSX wins it’s invalid anyway.’

The OS has to be aware of DPI because it needs to scale text/icons/graphics to be a size you can still see even at higher resolutions.

Bah, wish we could edit, com = come.

I remember that hiker incident. First thought that came to mind is even the Iranian leaders think ‘Who in the their right mind would want to com here? They HAVE to be spies, no way a normal person would want to come here. We’re doing a terrible job running this country.’

Spectrum is NOT carrier’s ‘private property’. Carrier’s are given permission to exclusively use some of it without having to worry about other companies intruding on what they bought the right to use. That permission to use spectrum can come with whatever strings attached like interoperability and the carriers can act of their own free accord and accept or turn down the offer to accept a license to the spectrum.

That’s not socialism. Saying that it is shows a serious lack of understanding the definition of socialism. Socialism is if the government actually owned a telepohone company and competed with all the other carriers using government derived funds.

I guess that depends – personally I like Dave & Busters – ticket based games do hold more appeal for me than arcade cabinets because most arcade games can be played on consoles now.

That’s right. I don’t get it either, but, that’s right.

Well, apparently it didn’t. She told the judge she’d made up her mind long ago on which way she was going to vote (all by itself that should be a red flag shouldn’t it? Telling a judge you decided how you were going to go way before all the evidence had been presented by both sides.)

Sprint’s isn’t that bad. Verizon is the one that gets the worst version it seems.

I’d rate the various HTC (based on specs) , from highest end to lowest end, as: AT&T got the best one (One X), Sprint got the 2nd best (renamed One X but still 720p screen), Tmobile got the 3rd best (they lose the 720p screen, but still maintain same storage and design style), and Verizon in last place with a lower resolution screen, less storage, and what looks like a complete design change in their ‘Droid’ branding.

You think that’s bad – I have Comcast TV AND internet, but because the internet is business class I can’t use Xfinity on Demand.

The One X has a 1280×720 resolution. Here’s a different way of saying it – I want a version of the One X. Not a version of the One S. I meant they’re bringing a version of the One S instead – with it’s lower resolution than the One X (which is what I want).

Reducing storage to 8GB and then adding a microSD is not a wash – unless they include a microSD card with it which I didn’t see any mention of. When your competitor is offering the higher end version of the phone with 16GB of storage for only $199 you should try to at least aim for storage parity if you are going to price it near the same or more than the better version in the lineup.

Yeah, but the article says: “The court apologized but said a real jury summons could be coming soon.” Sounds like they aren’t considering it as your summons for the year, which will probably lead to even more confusion because people will either assume it’s a computer glitch again OR that it’s invalid because they’ve already received their summons for the year if they happen to get another summons soon.