Apple? As in there ebook business they were fined for? I don’t know of many mom and pop cell phone or laptop manufacturers. I’m curious as to what you are referring to.
Traditional media does not serve underserved markets.
If you want to target Christian moms over 40 who live in Southern markets…
Or Muslim women 20-30 year olds looking for stylish but conservative clothing…
Then your best bet was social media.
Keep in mind, the Facebook, TikTok and Shopify partnership were growing into strong competition for Amazon.
Once they were dead in the water, Amazon raised prices and put the squeeze on its small FBA sellers by forcing everyone to sell FBA and purchase advertising.
I’ve found the Tabasco Sriracha to be the best of the alternatives I have tried. I’ve lol have to try the Hoy Fung brand again when available again but we will see. I was very surprised because I think Tabasco tastes awful.
You describe the exact reason I sold my Civic for a Rav4. My commute often had me looking at tires out my sides, headlights and grill in the rear, and a tow hitch out the front.
If the feature is built in to the car from the factory and disabled via software so they can charge more then you are already paying for the parts and lugging around the added weight in the vehicle thus costing you more in fuel. Software locking a hardware feature that is integrated is an awful practice.
Telsa chose to do this presumably to only have to buy a single seat configuration and streamline installs so they could hit production quotas.
For many features it makes sense. Heated seats for example have trivial hardware costs. It's basically a couple resistive wires, plus the necessary controls. The process costs of manufacturing some cars with and some without heated seats likely far exceed the cost of the heated seats themselves, so it's cheaper to just put them in every car. But heated seats are a great upselling opportunity, people are willing to pay $200-400 for them, more if you bundle them in a package with other stuff the customer doesn't actually need but that creates a vague sense of value.
The compromise that minimizes production costs and still allows that upsell is to put them in every car and disable them via software.
They could do that but would have to raise the base price. These addon features allows a cheaper entry point and price discrimination for those who are willing to pay more.
Whether it ends up being wasteful is complicated, there are would be operating effeciencies in putting the same hardware into every car.
>> They could do that but would have to raise the base price.
Why? The component is already in every vehicle. This is not like binning for chips: every vehicle must (and does) have the capability because it’s unknown whether a consumer will pay for the upgrade. If anything, the price should go down because software costs have decreased by removing the software locks.
You're assuming that the cost of the component is being recovered through the base price of every vehicle, but that's not likely because the base price has to compete on price against other vehicles without the feature.
Instead if, for example, the component adds $30 to the BOM and they know from market research that 10% of buyers will pay $500 for the software unlock within 3 months of purchase, they don't have to include the cost in the base price and still make very good margin on it.
The value of the option could be enough to allow below-cost pricing on the base model. Completely made up napkin math…
Base price: $10,000.
Cost to produce (including profit): $11,000.
Cost of option: $2000.
51% of buyers opt for the option at purchase.
Some % of resales result in additional sales of the option.
Heated seats were a "standard feature" and every single car had them? I guess maybe, if you drove porsches and higher trim Mercedes cars 20 years ago (or any comparable luxury vehicles).
Otherwise, I can totally assure you they were not "standard features", and they didn't even exist for most car models, regardless of the trim.
Or maybe your definition of "older" vehicles means those that were produced in the past 5-10 years, but that's a fairly controversial definition of "older".
Not heated seats specifically, but any "option" that was cheaper to include than not. That's the definition of a standard feature, where it's just built into every car.
Power windows were originally an expensive option, but they got cheaper, and the fraction of cars ordered with manual crank windows dwindled, to that point that power windows are simply standard on most cars now.
If somebody said, okay every car has power windows but yours don't work unless you pay a monthly fee, I'd break out the wire cutters right in the dealer lot and fix the problem myself. Screw that. It's a standard feature and someone broke it, I'm fixing it.
I'd be hard pressed to imagine a greater waste of resources than to include all possible hardware in all possible sold goods, with only some of the features enabled. That maximizes waste with only a portion of buyers able to use those things.
Right. Instead of manufacturing a 50, 80, and 100 kWh battery pack, and having to go through the whole process of getting certifications and everything for each size, they just make 100 kWh packs all day long, and then software limit them to 50. Which means, in the case of an emergency, the company can bestow extra range on lower-end vehicles, which they did for Hurricane Irma.
> Microsoft manipulated the output to prefer their own products and boy is that a risky strategy.
Makes me wonder how they plan to monetize these chatbots and if they won’t just fizzle out like voice assistants.
I don’t see how there won’t be concerns over asking a chatbot for the best pizza in town and receiving an answer like “Customers love the new Meat Lover’s Pizza from Pizza Hut! Brought to you by Pizza Hut… (list of pizza places here)”. Amazon couldn’t figure out how to make money off of Alexa, how are Chatbots any different.
Chatbots just seems like the marketing tool if we're being honest. I can't see any way to monetize them without destroying them. Even just having them could threaten their own existence (or make bloggers higher qualities if Google fucking decides to fix SEO...). LLMs on the other hand have plenty of use cases, though I think people are still way over hyped on them and aren't interested in how the boring stuff has good utility.
VSC Remote I can agree with. Gateway feels like such an after thought. So many bugs and it's very resource intense in my experience. I really like Jetbrains products but their remote offerings are lacking. Makes me wonder if that’s why they are working on Fleet to fill that gap.
Funny, Apple made a fuss earlier this year that they were cracking down on "My First App" type applications, but they let shoddy, fraudulent, poorly translated applications through no problem...
There are entire classes of applications that solve real problems that people have. They are aimed at adults, which means they might show a bit of nudity. Those applications are absolutely disallowed by the Apple nanny.
It pisses me off to no end that you can't build those applications, but this stuff isn't caught by their filter.
This is my personal problem with the walled-garden approach. If you aren't 100% consistent, you start to lose credibility fast. Everyone knows Android apps are shit, so people are typically wary about what they download. Apple gives the impression that they filter out all the bad stuff, but they don't actually. This, IMO, makes their rules look hypocritical and arbitrarily enforced.
Can you firm this up a bit? If money talks, why would Apple want to keep crappy apps in the App Store? These apps aren't going to make much at all in the short run for Apple, and in the long run will turn off users. Do you think Apple isn't going to do something about these? Or is it more that they haven't been proactive enough? Something else?
How is it an alternate explanation? If you hire only one janitor it takes longer to clean the premises. Its not really an explanation when you're sitting on piles of cash.
Assuming hiring and training janitors is instant, and buying them up on a massive scale does nothing to the cost of each janitor, and there is no pressure to accept apps quickly, sure, but that's not the scale world Apple lives in.
I think that's a false equivalence. The devil is in the details with large projects like this.
There will be absolutely no change to the cost of each janitor because the scale is not massive at all. Apple is most certainly not hiring thousands of full time employees for app reviews. In 2009 they had 40 employees spending 6 minutes (at most) on each app.
There is supposed to be a review process that Apple started on Septemnber 7th which was supposed to clean up the store removing outdated and unsupported apps. Haven't seen any results from this yet. Downloaded apps yesterday that haven't been recompiled for 64-bit and show the popup on startup.
FYI - I have had a bunch of apps on the App Store from way back in 2012 that I never updated because I lost interest, or the apps just aren't relevant any more.
Been receiving a steady stream of notification emails from Apple about them, and some have already been taken off the store as a result of my inaction. Not all at the same time mind you - about a week or so between apps.
They are serious about the cleanup, but I expect it will take time to go through the millions of apps on the store.
Interesting. I have an app that most likely needs updating, but I just haven't got round to it. It does provide me with some pocket money so I wouldn't like it to be removed. Did you get some warnings from Apple before they were withdrawn? If so, how much notice time did you get?
I think all up I got the first email from them about a month before they removed it. They explained why they were going to remove the app(s) and the reasons why they did not conform.
For most of them, it was because I had never updated the screen sizes or anything to suit the newer iOS devices, plus used old SDK calls or Ad plugins etc.
Then I got another email about two weeks before. At the same time, the app were flagged on my iTunes Account, and I received 2 notifications (2 weeks before, and on the day of removal) via the iTunes Connect app that I have on my phone.
There was also an email a few months back explaining that they would be conducting this clean up in Sep/Oct.
All up, I believe it was plenty of warning. I just couldn't be bothered to make the changes as the apps were pretty much dead anyway, and there were too many competitive ones that were far better, so I let them kill them off.
