The Mac Observer Forums

Political rants

2010-01-25T20:24:53-05:00

This is for exiled posts unsuited to their topics

Whatever happened or was posted was literally years ago, so get the f over it ok?

Time to move on.. enough with this petty political bickering. Got a political rant? Post it here and get it off your chest. This topic is NO HOLDS BARRED so say whatever you want. Political correctness does not exist in this topic, so nobody get offended at what anyone says, but try to keep it at least rational, reasonable, and above all, logical. I don’t care if you think white people are trash, black presidents are stupid, republicans hate gays or democrats want to rape your kids’ trust fund to pay for medicare. Just get it off your chest ok? Knock yourselves out, just keep it out of the other topics!

kindle comercials

2010-03-21T21:42:30-05:00

I have seen my second Kindle commercial in the last week. Until now, amazon was silent about this product as far as I am concerned. There commercials are not very good either.

AAPL Intraday Updates

2010-03-21T18:23:36-05:00

The iPad is the talk of the town. What will early Monday trading activity bring to the share price?

System freeze with iTunes

2009-11-03T12:10:29-05:00

Got a strange problem with Snow Leopard that I was wondering if anyone had a solution for.

If I run iTunes, and it has a lot to do (e.g. downloading podcasts, plus maybe a TV show, etc.), about half the time the entire system will freeze up. First iTunes becomes unresponsive, then things like the dock become unresponsive, and eventually (within about a minute), the mouse becomes unresponsive, and the system turns into a big brick, requiring a hard reboot.

Any thoughts?

Thanks…

Textbooks And The iPad

2010-03-21T10:51:05-05:00

I selected this post from pats in this topic for discussion on its own:

pats - 21 March 2010 10:10 AM
Interesting discussion on Ebooks for the education market on the iPad from Wharton

While some students may be using notebooks or their more portable cousins, netbooks, to read textbooks, some experts predict that within the next 10 years, most U.S. college students—and many high-school and elementary-school students as well—will probably be reading course materials on an electronic device instead of in a paper book. And that will have a broad impact on students and teachers, not to mention the $9.9 billion textbook-publishing business.

Within days of the iPad announcement, a group of major educational publishers announced they all would use technology developed by ScrollMotion, a New York-based content technology company, to transfer textbooks to the iPad. The group includes McGraw-Hill Companies; Houghton Mifflin Harcourt K-12, which is a unit of Education Media & Publishing Group; Pearson’s Pearson Education, and Kaplan, the test-prep unit of The Washington Post Co.

This is what Scroll Motion has to offer.

pats, you’ve hit a couple of home runs this weekend.

Should Apple buy Palm for their Patent Portfolio?

2010-03-19T09:11:11-05:00

Just a thought… Any thoughts on this?

AAPL and Fantastic Share Price Forecasts: Investors Beware

2010-03-20T17:49:26-05:00

In response to fantastic AAPL price models and forecasts often mentioned in discussions in the AFB and other AAPL-related boards around the Web, I’ve posted a response.

As an investor (not a trader) I’m keeping my share price forecasts at a reasonable 22 times trailing 12-month earnings. Considering Apple’s current rates and earnings growth long-term investors should continue to be richly rewarded. However, at price multiples above 25 times trailing earnings investors may be buying into a bubble. I do expect the share price to double or near double over the next twenty four months. That’s a pace of price appreciation that should satisfy all but the most impatient investors.

The missive, due to its length, I posted at Eventide.

Apple Growth Prospects By Product Segment

2010-03-20T22:30:41-05:00

pats - 20 March 2010 02:11 PM
When you look to areas where future growth can come from such a large base, it means finding entirely new business areas on a regular basis. Apple has been successful in doing this for the last 10 years not only growing their core Mac business but adding Ipods, Iphones and Itunes. As far as segments the Mac business is in a maturing industry and so most of the growth will come at the expense of competitors or from emerging market countries, that means that Apple will have to move down the price continuum at some point to capture the next increment of customers. With 90% share of over $1000 computers there is limited growth at higher price points. The Ipod as a music player has reached a mature industry but they have now morphed the product with the iPod touch providing new growth as a portable gaming device and the nano as a video camera. The iPhone is still an early grower in an expanding market and will continue to power earnings for the next several years. iTunes has captured digital music and is fighting it out for Movies/TV and created a whole new market for Apps and will battle for Ebooks, Newspaper, Textbooks with the new iBook store. These new areas should provide excellent growth in the 3-5 year timeframe. Apple has added a new hardware platform, the iPad and it is anyones guess whether it will be a major hit because we are in the startup phase of the product. If the pre-orders are any indication the early adopters as a minimum want to give it a try in fairly large numbers but it hard to judge the shape of the growth curve. So then what next, I try to keep an eye on Apple’s patents for a sense of what they are looking at, but what makes it past SJ to market is another unsolved question. Apple has built a huge data center which should open in 2010 and it was built with something more in mind then what is available today so we’ll have to wait and see. Projecting growth beyond 5 years is a waste of energy in high tech, Too much change happens to project growth for an individual company so most folks accept that growth will drop off in the out years. You can bet Apple is looking for the next big thing but so are all the rest. I just hope that Apple surprises us all.

I’m starting this new topic based on a post by pats in this topic.

Let’s go around the block and provide views on growth prospects in each of Apple’s major product segments.

Health Insurance Legislation

2009-09-16T05:59:39-05:00

This concept of compulsory insurance coverage is a tax on living. Most taxes are activity based, income, sales… But this is payable for just being.

Defining The Apple iPad’s Market

2010-03-14T13:21:33-05:00

I’ve been reading comments around the Web about the Apple iPad in response to reports of robust pre-order activity. It’s clear this is a misunderstood product. I posted my views on defining the Apple iPad’s market at Eventide.

The blog post started as a response to comments about PED’s column on early iPad sales. But when my intended post became lengthier than his original column, I chose to post it on my blog instead.

The iPad isn’t intended to compete with laptops, it’s intended to compete economically with netbooks.