Our new Indie Games subforum is now open for business in G&T. Go and check it out, you might land a code for a free game. If you're developing an indie game and want to post about it,
follow these directions. If you don't, he'll break your legs! Hahaha! Seriously though.
Our rules have been updated and given
their own forum. Go and look at them! They are nice, and there may be new ones that you didn't know about! Hooray for rules! Hooray for The System! Hooray for Conforming!
Why is Apple not a "good" company?
Posts
I give my employer the highest marks in every employee survey, because it is in my self interest to have my firm keep its high rankings.
"There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confine itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rains, shower its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing." -- Andrew Jackson
Obama's a BlackBerry man himself, so that doesn't scare him any.
But... that's fucking suicidal. No one needs to make shit in china. They have attractive labor costs, and pretty amazing logistics and infrastructure, but no one needs to make shit in china. Globalism and economic weather are why things are being made in china. If they are going to threaten the supply chains of their companies, if through government malfeasance, incompetence or political ridiculousness, Chinese companies can't reliably deliver products, their clients are going to take their business elsewhere.
Not like an instant thing. It would take time to disentangle their supply chains, and find suitable production in other countries, but you can't fuck around with a company's ability to sell products. With the effects of the stock market, even a potential threat to distribution is going to cost Apple money. It's basically the job of every C*O to make sure exactly this type of disruption doesn't occur.
Like, the additional cost of producing products in Not-China will very rapidly be outweighed by the cost of not getting those products to market.
Click here for a horrible H/A thread with details.
Go Africa or go home. You can't get better supply chain integration than having the conflict minerals you need right on your compenent maker's doorsteps.
"There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confine itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rains, shower its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing." -- Andrew Jackson
Plus moving shop is tough. You gotta build facilities, hire henchmen, instal sniper nests... it's a real pain.
Does anyone else remember the days when the only meaning Foxconn had in America was as a third tier motherboard manufacturer?
"There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confine itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rains, shower its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing." -- Andrew Jackson
You also have the warlords and child soldiers who make money from those conflict minerals. A major reason that the world hasn't invested heavily in African labor is that the cost of security from the local rebel armies are extremely high. It's only really worth it for resource extraction.
I was thinking that the end result could be a regime that is favorable to you, since you paid them so much for their conflict minerals.
"There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confine itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rains, shower its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing." -- Andrew Jackson
"Rebels" is the key word here.
Yeah but Africa doesn't have the 200k people with the very special skills that don't exist in the US that forced Apple to build its stuff in E Asia.
I mean, what skills do the chinese workers have that workers anywhere else in the world cannot be trained to have?
How long will it be before Foxconn just buys an island and imports people to do its work unencumbered from any laws or restrictions?
"There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confine itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rains, shower its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing." -- Andrew Jackson
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/business/apple-america-and-a-squeezed-middle-class.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&hp
I have a feeling that Apple's PR and marketing teams would like to ship Rigoni off to a "dorm" right now.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203961204577267831767489216.html?mod=WSJ_hp_LEFTTopStories
Sorry couldn't hear you over the voices telling me to kill supermicro's execs.
Reading that sure makes it seem like bald faced price fixing but I figure things are more complicated. The argument seems to be that if they didn't price fix to keep prices high Amazon would bury them which seems like both a good practical argument and an admission of guilt.
Way to knock it out of the park on your first at-bat, Tim Cook. :v:
So does Apple have a "every other generation is going to be great" policy or something?
There's really nothing about the iPad 3 that makes me want to give up my iPad 2, and I had my cash in my hand before yesterday, ready to go full-Phillip J. Fry.
There quite literally isn't anything remarkable on the new iPad other than better screen resolution (yay?) and a processor based on the same tech they put in a phone a year ago.
Really underwhelming.
Honestly, not a ton of new stuff, but more than we got. Each generation of tech has a tendency to be less collectively bettered than the last, that's just how things roll.
But off the top of my head, I'd be sitting here with a confirmation e-mail for my new iPad order if:
- They had the Retina display (as it does).
- It had a quad-core processor. This was one just about every rumormonger had as a given, and probably the most surprising omission.
- The camera was worth half a shit. Improving the camera to 5mp when competitors already have 8mp or better on the market is just bad. I don't need a 5mp camera. I need a good camera, or a cheap camera, but not a middle-of-the-road camera. Worse, their own iPhone has a better camera, and it's a year old. Also, no camera flash, despite again being standard on their phones.
- And a better front-facing camera. 0.3MP? What is this? The nineties?
- E-Ink or some other form of glare proofing. Even if it's just for iBooks.
- Improved battery life.
Past that, any lagniappe would have been attractive, such as some new video/photo/messaging application would have been nice, but not necessary. Something. A little flourish to grab my attention beyond, "Hey, it's got a pretty nice screen now! And some . . uh . . other stuff."
As it stands, I'd still suggest this product to someone without an iPad or even someone with an iPad 1, but there's no way I'd suggest this product to an iPad 2 owner.
Isn't African even more fucked up than China? China isn't a paradise by any means by they don't have regimes that encourage cannibalism, like Joseph Kony's. Don't forget the blood diamond debacle, either.
Corporations working with corrupt regimes should not be encouraged IMO. Where does ethics come into these decisions?
Which was arguably a little underwhelming since it wasn't the iPhone 5 people were expecting, so maybe the sentiment isn't so far off.
I still don't get why everyone was clamoring for an iPhone 5, or what they were hoping to get out of a new form factor. They'd been alternating between small upgrades and big upgrades for a while.
That's the way it goes, though.
Improvements become more and more minimal and incremental until some new paradigm comes along.
Which means unless something really great comes along, I have no idea what an iPad 4 would have.
How does it benefit you? Would you do this if your employers were terrible?
Well, that was very much Steve Jobs' thing. He loved being the center of attention and making a spectacle, and now that's the company's thing. So every new thing has to be a event.
However, Apple seems to be able to refresh their computer and software and peripheral lineup without having to rent out the Staples Center, so many they should rethink their approach to these things if they aren't going to do more than what they did here.
i dunno.
i like the keynotes!
i like it even more when it's a leapfrog product release that i want very much... but i like all of them, regardless.
I like the Keynotes too! I just hate the month-long teasing run-up when it results in a wet fart like the iPad 3. It's like getting socks at Christmas, except at least at Christmas the socks are free.
An heavily (though not wholly) industrialized nation with the same government for the last +60 years probably shouldn't be compared with a continent of governments that were colonial possessions 60 years ago.
Just putting that out there.
The primary reason I was comparing them was because Space mentioned Africa and someone else was already talking about China in the thread. They're both logical to compare since companies can operate there if they choose to. Africa being in worse shape is why I was bringing up the fact China is a better "lesser evil" to do business with.
EDIT: Specific to Apple, have they set it up so their various iDevices that have wifi support wirelessly sync on their own after they charge a bit? That's one thing the new iPad needs to have if it doesn't already.