Greg Alexander's Profile

Does it matter who makes the games machine you're after? I mean, what is it that makes you wish Apple did it instead of the others? They're far enough out of this market that they'd have to do some catching up. And it's a cut-throat business with small margins.

No, we're already on the right track. LTE is looking very good for the future (interestingly, WiMax seems to be the main competitive technology at that level, now). And the competition between technologies has been good for making things improve more quickly. The main problem now I think is that frequencies are used in different ways all around the world and new technologies have to be massaged into the available spaces. (That's why we don't get satellite radio in Australia - the frequencies used for that worldwide are already in use in Australia, so they have to black out transmissions here.) Anyway, technology is getting better at handling multiple frequency bands, AND governments are aligning where they can. Smaller countries have an easier job as they can often pick a bigger country to copy, and use their equipment.

RoughlyDrafted always has a strong Apple bias. Anything Apple does is presented as a good idea with an amazing backstory. I find the articles quite insightful, but have to be careful as they can overlook the mundane reasons for things to happen and paint an overly amazing future. It's harder to use that filter when they write for AppleInsider now. So perhaps their pro-AT&T;is just about saying Apple has made the right choice?

I've been doing this for years using an IMAP server. It doesn't do push - so there might be a delay (up to an hour) before what you did on one moves across to the other.... UNLESS you actually open your mail on the phone, in which case about 5 seconds later they are fully in sync. By all means use push, but you don't need push to get what you've described (mostly).

Damn no corrections... "6 months leave" not "6 months lead"

Didn't mean to imply Apple was inherently "good" - in fact if they had Microsoft's marketshare they'd be scarey. But I don't think my belief that Apple removes little used features to make things simpler to use is wrong. I DO agree that cut/copy/paste (& MMS) should never have been left out and as we can see now, MMS will not make things more difficult. I'm not sure what I think about the story that cut/copy/paste has taken this long because they wanted to get it right. But if they did it to force people to upgrade then they're immensely stupid to give away the software upgrade for free. I really don't believe Apple could have doubled the processor power of the iPhone last year without losing something significant - but I've had that argument here already :)

Chris Howard - you bought your iPhone outright? My wife (we're in Australia) was choosing between US$40 (for 8GB) or US$140 (for16GB) on a US$54 plan. Paying US$600 or US$700 for those phones outright just seemed way too expensive. Of course, now she's stuck for another year on her 2 year contract - but it's worth it. We're lucky to have 3 carriers competing here - of course our US$54 plan gets limited data and less minutes than AT&T;gives. As for the original article.... negative much? Chris Seibold - would you also argue that Apple doesn't build the best computer it can so that next year it can build a better computer and people will want to upgrade? Yes 3G was available on mobile phones 2 years ago and Apple was building a smaller phone than others were doing - with more functions - and 2G chips were MUCH smaller than 3G chips. Video too requires the extra processing power that wasn't available to do well (though jailbroken phones gave it a go).... and perhaps Apple could have done that if it took something else out. Apple does good things - and one of the reasons is that it takes out the things that the majority of people won't use and focuses on making the rest simple. The majority of pc & phone makers think more features are better, and if some features add a little bit of weight or size that's entirely fine.

The MBA is more expensive because smaller parts are more expensive. Smaller is fine to a point. It's when you go beyond that point that new tricks and technologies push the price up.