Louis G Wheeler

Will a Black Eye from Consumer Reports Hurt AT&T, iPhone?

No, sgnorr, Verizon chose, long ago, to use CDMA technologies and frequencies while the world uses GSM which AT&T is on. AT&T started off in the US very far behind Verizon, so it had to spend billions to upgrade to 2.5G EDGE service for the original iPod. AT&T is always behind the curve, especially, in hilly places like San Francisco, California. AT&T has a micro-cell technology which will cover the grayed out areas of SF, but it hasn't implemented it yet.

For more information, read the following:

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There is speculation that Apple is planning to create a CDMA/WCDMA iPhone as soon as its contract runs out with AT&T. But who knows?

www.roughlydrafted.com...

Will a Black Eye from Consumer Reports Hurt AT&T, iPhone?

There are no solutions for the next two to four years. AT&T is spend billions to improve its service but this cannot happen over night.

Apple can improve its hardware, by upgrading to the ARM Cortex A9 processor, but that does not help with phone service. Increased iPhone sales could, actually, cause worse service, because of increased web overhead. Currently, the iPhone consists of 3% of AT&T's mobile phones, but it consumes 50% of AT&T's mobile web services.

Once AT&T gets adequate 3G service, it will then be necessary to upgrade to 4G. Apple could extend its service by licensing T-Mobile, but Verizon is out until 4G service is offered. That won't be anytime soon.

Can Apple Stop the Android?

Google is copying Microsoft's business plan: one OS for many manufacturers. I don't think that will work out well. The hardware is the big problem; there are many incompatibilities between the phones. A number of Android 1.6 phones have not enough memory to run Android 2.0. The manufacturers are producing on the lowest possible cost, not what benefits the customer. That is very short sighted. That is no way to compete with Apple.

Why Is Deflation Scary?

We can hardly tell what a deflation is or if it is a bad thing unless we understand what an inflation is. Consider a balloon: is it a bad thing if the air is let out? What put the air inside the balloon in the first place? How does a money supply inflate and are their bad consequences from that? Why assume that the bad consequences derive from the deflation, not from the delayed results of inflation?

The old name for a deflation was a Banking Panic; It was replaced with words like deflation or depression, because it was too descriptive. It all has to do with fractional reserve banking, but a better term for that would be checking account counterfeiting or creating bank accounts out of thin air.

At one time, there were honest banks. If you placed your money in a checking account, the bank was too honest to touch it. They were called 100% fractional reserve banks. You could loan your money to the bank so they could loan it out to someone else. You got an interest rate from doing that, because you were taking a risk. The point about a checking account was that you knew that you could instantly receive your money back or transfer it to someone else, but dissolving a loan meant waiting until the loan period was over.

The owners of dishonest banks noticed that many people parked their funds in the bank and only a small percentage withdrew their funds. This meant that dishonest banks could take the funds which were safeguarded with them and steal it temporarily. This is what embezzlers always do; they start out intending to repay what they steal.

These dishonest bankers could steal the money and spend it on high living. The problem with doing this is that eventually enough people want their money back from the bank. If it isn't there; then rumors cause a panic. It creates what is known as a run on a bank when people try to get their money back. An honest bank would have no problem if there were a bank run. They would simply repay what was deposited in their vaults.

A smarter way for the dishonest bankers is to steal the money which is in checking accounts and to make loans with it. That way the loans would be constantly rotating, interest would be charged on the stolen money, so the profits went into the banker's pockets. No one would be the wiser if the banker didn't get too greedy.

But, there are results from this, too. The numbers of good and valid loans were small. Every loan you made beyond that was more risky, because of the bad character of the person you were loaning to or the validity of their business plan. Also, making this loan meant that the recipient bid up the price of goods and services. So, monetary inflation always causes an increase in general prices. This causes the value of the checking account to fall in the good or services it could buy.

Factional reserve banking is a confidence game, so the dishonest bankers have to keep up appearances. Just like, in Gresham's law, bad money drives out good, hence debased or paper money drives out gold coinage, dishonest bankers drive out the good bankers. The dishonest bankers must confuse their victims, too, so honest economists, politicians and newspapermen must be corrupted, as well.

The meanings of words must be changed to protect the guilty: a mythical Business Cycle must be invented to explain away the effects of dishonest banking.

The Bankers always fear a deflation because that is when their corrupt game is over. But there are worse things than a delation. The dishonest bankers have used many mechanisms to keep their Con game going, but the most common is a Central Bank like the Bank of England or the US Federal Reserve Bank.

The Central Bank tries to keep the dishonest bankers from getting too greedy and ruining the scam for everyone. Consequently, the Central Bank tells the bankers how much money they can steal from their depositors and what interest rates that can charge on loans.

The Central Banker, to protect themselves from the crimes they are committing, combine with government officials and politicians. So, the government become a major beneficiary of the con game. No Welfare state can be run without dishonest banks. The problem is the politicians always get too greedy. They need money to buy votes from the voters. They constantly need give new away programs so that the PUBLIC sector must increase and regulations increase to control the economy. If the con game is carried too far, then there is a risk that people will avoid taking the dollar in return for goods and services. The Federal Reserve bank temporarily curtails stealing bank deposits and making loans, so it creates the boom / bust cycle which it blames on everyone else.

Banking Panics were usually over very fast until the government started to interfere in the economy after the 1929 crash. The economy recovers only when wages and prices, which were bid up out of reality, fall. Only those industries where misallocated funds were placed must fold, so a banking Panic was usually over in six to nine months.

But, when President Hoover interfered in the financial markets, and propped up wage and prices in 1929, the bad economy lasted much longer. FDR continued Hoover's interventions and added new ones of his own. Hence, a Banking Panic which should have been over in 1931, lasted for 13 years.

The reason that it lasted so long was that the government would never allow the economy to recover. It was not until after World War two impoverished the country sufficiently to make up for the disparity in wage and price rates. Only then was the economy allowed to recover.

The point is that we should hope for a recession where the government doesn't try to repeat Hoover's and FDR's mistakes. So far, given the fact that the Obama is out bidding FDR in his foolishness, there as been no hope for a recovery. But, all is not lost. This recession is world wide. Actions are being taken in the rest of the world which may spike Obama's guns. But, since the Obama lunatics are running the asylum, much economic insanity lies before us.

Is the Deal Between Apple and AT&T Anti-Competitive?

Is the deal between Apple and AT&T anti competitive? Of course not. There was too little competition in the Smart Phone market, before.

What Apple's competitors are complaining about is that Apple is competing too well. It's been two years and Apple's competitors have little to vie with what Apple offers -- not even on price. They are always a day late and a dollar short.

The reason that their response was so pathetic is that the phone companies were already local monopolies. Ma Bell once had a total monopoly. When it was broken up the government gave the local Bell companies territorial monopolies. This corrupted them; it turned them into bureaucrats.

Naturally, those bureaucrats attempted to maintain their monopolies against all comers. When the mobile phone business picked up, those local Bell companies intentionally used incompatible technologies and frequencies. Then, the big Telecoms began gobbling up the smaller ones, so that the big winners are AT&T and Verizon, which use different mobile phone standards. Apple's deal was with Cingular, before AT&T bought them.

The cell phone markets was stagnating before Apple's entry. Almost every cell phone was locked to an ISP then. Apple's entry shook up the mobile phone market; it is breaking up those monopolies. It is forcing the phone companies to compete.

Apple is leading toward a phone that can use all technologies and frequencies, but this is about three years away. It is unlikely that these new technologies would have been used under the old monopolies. In five years, all cell phones will be able to use any carrier.

Apple can, then, sell its iphone without an ISP, but not now. The technology isn't ready.

It's All About the Apple Ecosystem

There is an excellent reason Apple is so secretive. Back in the 90s, Apple would get an application within 20% of being done and the word would slip out to Microsoft about its features. Going from 80% to a 95% complete for shipping takes longer than the first 80% of code. Microsoft could get a placeholder application out into the market that was 80% done and fix it later. This copy would be junk that wasn't remotely useful, but it would beat Apple to the punch.

Second, Apple doesn't seem to be interested in the Enterprise market. What it wants is the Small to Medium sized businesses which are more flexible than companies with IT departments. Those SMB companies need to interface with Enterprise, so Apple will be providing them the tools to do so.

But, directly engaging in the Enterprise market would mean that Apple would need an Enterprise sales staff, issue long term hardware plans and shave pennies off huge purchases. Apple is unlikely to follow through with that, because it raises hell with its consumer marketing.

Third, the nature of computing is entering a new phase. It is unclear that the Enterprise market will survive the transition.

The current form factors in computers will disappear in five years because the technology will allow distributed processing. There will be a true ecosystem of parts which make up a computer. Every peripheral will have its own computer chip inside. We will buy bits and pieces to make up a computer.

We might have five or six monitors in our home or office; as we walk from room to room with the keyboard the nearest monitor would start responding to our input.

We would have specialized computers to act as tablets, keyboards, wireless headphones, mass storage, wireless internet servers, wireless security cameras, etc. Our household appliances will tell the computer what stage they are in process of, that we have run out of milk and which items are too far past their freshness date. This would be reported to the computer or our iPhone. We will have so many devises that we still need an operating system to make sense of it all and control the various pieces.

Apple seems to be slowly moving in this direction, but it is being cautious, because most of the current form factors will die out.

What I would like is a pocket book sized iTouch with a seven inch, high resolution screen with 1344 by 840 pixels. It would be a great movie viewer, an ebook, game machine and a web surfer. It would be small enough to slip into a back pocket or a purse.

What Snow Leopard does is to provide a springboard for the future. Many new features are coming. New software will take advantage of 64 bit processing, Grand Central Dispatch and OpenCL.

Snow leopard leaves behind the compromises that Steve Jobs had to make back in 1997 to fit the Mac GUI onto NeXTstep. The Developer base refused to rewrite its applications for Rhapsody, so Apple had to create Carbon API's for Mac OS 9 to act as a bridge to get them to move to a modern, real, Unix Operating System.

The Intel Move was used to force the developers to rewrite using XCode 2.0. A Cocoa application can, now, be recompiled in 64 bit for Snow leopard, so all of Apple's aps will be 64 bit within a year. The Carbon API's and applications will be allowed to slowly pass away.

Apple: Creating the Device the Netbook Wants to Be

I suspect that Apple's dismissive remarks regarding the Netbook are similar to the ones which Apple issued before the iPod and the iPhone. The statements weren't exactly lies, in retrospect, but they condemned the serious drawbacks which the then Music Players and Mobile Phones had. Apple intended that its entry would cure those deficiencies. Such statements can, thus, give a forecast of what is to come, because if Apple wasn't interested it would keep its mouth shut.

So, what are the deficiencies which Apple remarked upon? Tim Cook complained of cheap prices which lead to poor quality and poor performance. I also suspect that the Netbook designers can be faulted on what they gave their highest priorities. The current Netbooks are nothing that Apple would be proud of delivering to its customers. Therefore, Apple is unlikely to provide an equivalent to the Netbook in today's form factor.

So, what might Apple think is a poor design priority in current Netbooks?

Weight -- too heavy
Physical size -- too large
Screen size -- too large, but still has poor movie viewing
Keyboard -- unnecessary
Mobil Phone connection -- expensive

All of the above add to the expense and weight of the Netbook without giving the customer what they want. A ten inch screen forces an unwieldy package. The Keyboard is hardly necessary for a devise which mainly used on the web. A Mobile Phone connection adds about $1000 a year.

If Apple intends to carve out its own niche, rather can slavishly copy what its competitors do, then it needs a new form factor. But, the form factor needs to be time tested, so that it feels customary even in a new product.

That is why I suspect a larger iTouch in Paperback book format of smaller than 6.75" by 4.25." A 6.6" screen with 240 dots per inch resolution would give 1344 by 840 pixels in 16/10 format. The screen itself would be 5.6" by 3.5" so a finished product would be the same size as the US dollar bill, but an inch wider. Many a wallet is in that size, so it would fit into a back pocket or purse if it were slim enough.

The main advantage is that it would not compete with Apple's laptops even if the Apple Netbook would cost about $400 to $500 because of the bigger screen with a high resolution. Apple hasn't minded competing with itself in the iPod market.

Anyone who seriously needs a keyboard would be willing to pay $500--$600 more for a MacBook which has a good keyboard and a bigger screen.

Best of all, a bigger iTouch would fit right in to Apple's current line up. It would leverage on Apple's previous successes.

Betting Apple's New Netbook Is a Big iPhone

I'm less inclined to think a big iPhone is coming than a pocketbook addition of the iTouch.

A 6.6 inch screen in 16/10 format at a screen resolution of 240 dots per inch would deliver 1344 by 840 pixels in a very acceptable devise that would fit into a purse or back pocket. It could be an e-reader, personal movie viewer and game machine. The important part is that it would only cost about $100 more than the current iTouch.

The reason I back a bigger version of iTouch is that phones are shirt pocket devises, not back pocket. An iTouch which overall is 6" by 3.75" and very thin would be the same length and an inch wider than a dollar bill. Hence, it is in the same size as a slim wallet.

Huge phones are déclassé, but small computers are not. Image is important and wide phones are ugly.