UK Apple Stores remove inventory in face of ongoing riots
[Via MacDailyNews]
“We’re getting images in from around the UK of Apple Stores having removed their inventory after closing of business,” Seth Weintraub reports for 9to5Mac.
[More]
Since looting seems to be a big part of the riots this seems like a very reasonable thing to do. Apple products can easily be resold.
Apple offers gift cards for old iPhones, iPads, and computers (even PCs)
[Via Infinite Loop]
Users who don’t know what to do with old iPhones and iPads can now trade them in for Apple gift cards as part of the company’s changes to its electronics recycling program. Additionally, Apple says it will now accept computers or displays from any manufacturer for free recycling, even if you’re not buying a new Mac to replace your old junk.
Apple’s recycling program has gone through many changes over the last several years, but the current version was essentially birthed in 2005. At that time, the company announced that customers who brought an old iPod to an Apple retail store would receive a 10 percent discount on the purchase of a new iPod.
[More]
I’ve even still got the original boxes for many of my old Macs. And I’ll have to go through my stack of Mac OS intall disks but I could make enough to buy an iPad 2 or two.
German court bars Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 from sale in Europe in Apple suit
[Via AppleInsider]
A key legal victory for Apple in the European Union has reportedly blocked the sale of Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1 across the continent for alleged patent violations.
[More]
This was supposed to be the tablet that finally competed with the iPad – same shape, same size, optimized operating system.
Now it can not be sold in Europe due to patent infringements. This follows a loss by Samsung in Australia for its tablet.
Apple buys almost $8 billion in parts from Samsung a year. Have they started gaming how many of their tablets they would/could sell to make up for that? I’d say about 12 million a year or so. Before all the Europe and australia problems, Samsung expected to sell about 6 .5 million tablets total, including their smaller tablets. And the remarkable iPad only sold 14 million its first year.
It’ll be hard for Samsung to match that growth. How long before any revenue they get from their tablets match what they could lose from Apple’s anger?
Especially if they can not sell in Europe. They might just piss off Apple AND not be able to make up for that lost goodwill by sales.
And Apple is starting to look elsewhere for parts suppliers.
TIME: Fareed Zakaria
[Via FareedZacaria]
In narrow economic terms, the debt deal is actually not a big deal, neither as good as its advocates claim nor as terrifying as its opponents fear. The actual cut to the 2012 budget, the only budget over which this Congress has control, is $21 billion out of total expenditures of $3.7 trillion—a pittance. Everything else can and will be changed by future Congresses. What the deal does is kick tough choices down the road, this time to a congressional supercommission that will have to come up with a larger plan to reduce debt. And it does nothing to spur growth, without which the debt will expand well above projections. That’s why the usually circumspect Mohamed El- Erian, head of Pimco, the world’s largest bond fund, grades the deal somewhere between an incomplete and a fail. “Other than eliminating default risk emanating from a self-manufactured crisis,” he writes, “there is nothing good about America’s debt ceiling debacle.”
I like reading Fareed for, while I sometimes disagree with him,it is hard to argue persuasively against much of what he writes. Here he accurately, in my opinion, nails the problems facing us.
He discusses how in a working political system the $4 trillion in budget cuts might have been accepted, how Congress used to work in making grand bargains such as Social Security reform or closing military bases, how a small minority representing 10% of the population in the US can prevent 80% of the legislation passed, how our Federal taxes are less today than they were when Reagan left office, how we have Executive branch departments with no leadership due to that 10% now having to respond to extreme crises.
In many ways our system is broken. Based on the 2010 voting record, the Senate and House are more divided then every before. Every Senate Democrat had a voting record more liberal than every Senate Republican. Every Senate Republican had a voting record more conservative than every Senate Democrat. The House was similarly divided.
And that was before the Republicans took control of the House. The divisions are even greater today.
in a political system based on compromise, we no longer have any politicians who can span the divide of ideology while, at the same time, we have ideology driving almost all politics.
This produces stasis, something that does not work well in a rapidly changing world.
I fear this will not end well. As Fareed says:
The world once looked at America with awe as we built the interstate highway system, created the best public education in the world, put a man on the moon and invested in the frontiers of knowledge. That is not how the world sees America today. People watched what happened over the past month and could not comprehend it. We have taken something that the world never doubted—the credibility of the U.S.—and put it into question. From now on, every time the debt ceiling has to be debated, the world will wonder, Will America honor its commitments? Will it keep its word? Will the system break down? We have taken our most precious resource, the trust of the world, and gambled with it. If, as a result of these congressional antics, interest rates on America’s debt rise by 1% —in other words, if the world asks for just a little bit more interest to lend us money—the budget deficit will rise by $1.3 trillion over 10 years. That would more than wipe out the entire 10 years of cuts proposed in the debt deal. That’s the American system at work these days.
SpreadingScience
Sustainable Path Foundation Idea Club
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