From: LA Times ~ Amazon Targets Apple’s iPad In Kindle Ad

Right, she got three different gadgets to do what one iPad 2 does with no problems because the Kindle tablet runs like molasses and their eBook reader is a cheap piece of plastic that she threw in with the purchase as a impulse buy and well not a whole lot of thought went into that purchase and…

I’ll let the article explain it to you in great big color coded easy to understand concepts.

those low-cost Kindles actually cost more to manufacture than they do to buy. Both the $79 Kindle e-reader and the Kindle Fire tablet are loss leaders. It costs Amazon $84.25 to make the $79 Kindle, and the $199 Kindle Fire costs Amazon $201.70.

So are you getting the picture clearly on how these Kindle whatevers are not built to last and no matter how well they sell it is not really making the company any money unless you buy content and it’s all a big old school come on? This is why the typical Jeff Bezos fact-less proclamation of a successful iPad killer for the cheapest price rings false. Is it too hard to see the problem here of cheap razor blade handles and getting stuck buying expensive proprietary blades?

Apple at least lets you run whatever eBook reading app you want on an iPad 2 because it is a real platform not a razor blade handle and they let you buy your content from whomever and wherever you find it cheapest and Amazon will never ever allow that to happen on their shit without you paying them somehow. For as long as you own their cheap ass plastic sucker magnet razor blade handles you will buy their crap through their store.

As someone on Gizmodo said this is like comparing and then complaining that a Lexus is not priced like a KIA. I would go much further and say this is like comparing a mini SUV to a pickup truck.

She could have had three mini SUVs for the price of that pickup truck but then maybe someday soon she wants to haul some dirt. Not many mini SUVs haul dirt because pickup trucks are pickup trucks and mini SUVs are not built to be pickup trucks but lets ignore all that and make the whole concept of our commercial about how cheap our mini SUVs are next to that pickup truck. Tomorrow we will do one comparing the size. Oh and forget all about telling people how any passengers using our mini SUVs have to be bought from us.

And this is why I think some people do not need to be buying tablets in the first place because they have no clue what purpose they are buying them for. These are the same idiots that kept Gateway Computers making a profit for decades.

Well it’s a desktop! You said you wanted a computer. What’s wrong with it? Oh, you are just hung up on those brand names and we can’t afford a Dell. The guy at Radio Shack said this Gateway cow computer would run Windows just fine and it cost 500 dollars less so this is what we will use.

The fact is trying to sell the whole “just as good as” is short hand for being a rip off of other companies better ideas and products. It means Amazon simply repackaged some off the shelf junk made by some no name Chinese factory probably worse than Foxconn will ever be and has no clue how to actually build a decent tablet but they sure know how to lock your ass into their store with a good bait and switch.

X Lossless Decoder

Let’s all admit that iTunes despite being really useful for your iPhone and iPad and iPod and everything else in the iWorld has some hateful drawbacks. One of those is the iTunes store simply will not sell you music in the Apple Lossless format.

That means that still to this day if you take to time to buy the CD you can make a better copy of the album by hand than you can buy from iTunes. Except for the fact that the iTunes CD rip function also has the freaking worst error correction out of any of the music programs I have ever used. IT SUCKS! Like I just re-ripped the Eurythmics 1984 album and found iTunes had somehow encoded drops in the music volume right in the middle of Julia the quietest song on the whole album.

Apple with this new iCloud feature and all that has still got to go back and rethink iTunes so that it does better at grouping and storing your music in a sane fashion AND ripping CDs better. It’s not like Apple does not know what CD/DVD makes they have used in the past and know how to fix the error correction process better than what they currently got in iTunes.

One of the things I used to use in Windows was called EAC Exact Audio Copy and it still is one of the best Windows solutions to making sure you create perfect CD rips of your music. On the Mac OSX side unfortunately there is no EAC to be found.

Then I found XLD X Lossless Decoder which is extremely easy to use and does a much better job than iTunes natively does in getting your CD music into a useable iTunes Apple Lossless format. Just remember Apple Lossless is exactly what it says it copies all the music information available on the CD. Which means it does not compress anything so file sizes are huge next to the music files you buy from iTunes.

So be prepared to NOT go stashing these huge ass perfect music files on your laptop hardrive or on your iPod even. Try getting one of those small 1 TB harddrives for real cheap at Best Buy or something but I totally recommend you keep your entire music library and eBook and movie library on a separate drive that will never effect your running computer and if your computer happens to crash then it won’t effect your music library. Then just switch out whatever music you want to keep readily available to listen to. It’s just better to not take a chance of eventually blowing up your computer.

Now at least with XLD I do not have to worry if the music was ripped with all the data intact or not.

From: The New York Times ~ Chinese Readers on the ‘iEconomy’

The News York Times posted their scathing indictment against Apple and Foxconn in chinese and recently posted the comments in translation. This makes my comment of the week because it was exactly what I thought when I read the story.

No Duh! It’s China and they shoot people there for protesting. We just send people to Gitmo to disappear or kill them with drones and why not name all the companies doing this instead of just the two best run examples? Anyway far more interesting reading than the original hyped up article.

But then where is the sensationalism in that?

If not to buy Apple, what’s the substitute – Samsung? Don’t you know that Samsung’s products are from its OEM factory in Tianjin? Samsung workers’ income and benefits are even worse than those at Foxconn. If not to buy iPad – (do you think) I will buy Android Pad? Have you ever been to the OEM factories for Lenovo and ASUS? Quanta, Compaq … factories of other companies are all worse than those for Apple. Not to buy iPod – (do you think) I will buy Aigo, Meizu? Do you know that Aigo’s Shenzhen factory will not pay their workers until the 19th of the second month? If you were to quit, fine, I’m sorry, your salary will be withdrawn. Foxconn never dares to do such things. First, their profit margin is higher than peers as they manufacture for Apple. Second, at least those foreign devils will regularly audit factories. Domestic brands will never care if workers live or die. I am not speaking for Foxconn. I am just speaking as an insider of this industry, and telling you some disturbing truth.

From: Gizmodo ~ The One Reason the iPad Can’t Lose

Two out of three tablets sold today—ebook readers included—are iPads.

Datacolor ~ Spyder 3 Express

Used to be back in the day to even see one of these doohickeys meant you were in a top shelf advertising agency who spent huge money to automatically color calibrate their monitors. Now you can actually get a hold of your very own monitor color calibrator for under a hundred plus free shipping.

It might not be as Pantone perfect but for people pinching pennies who cares about perfect? Close to perfect will do just fine.

So my advice is do not buy from the maker Datacolor who proudly wants you to pay $90 bucks for the privilege of owning this thing. Go click around though and find it for sale at $70 sometimes even $55 dollars and free shipping then you too can rest assured what you see on your monitor will be the exact same color when you go to print it out.

Smartphone customers with unlimited data plans may experience reduced speeds once their usage in a billing cycle reaches the level that puts them among the top 5 percent of heaviest data users. These customers can still use unlimited data and their speeds will be restored with the start of the next billing cycle.

Both my iPad and iPhone are grandfathered AT&T $30 unlimited accounts from the first iPhone introduction where i stood in line for hours to get my first AT&T iPhone to where I stood in line for hours to get my first AT&T iPad.

This is why my next iPad 3 is going to be a top of the line wi-fi ONLY model and I am getting one of those little 4G Verizon data cellular wi-fi router boxes. No more “built in” or let’s admit “locked in” cell phone based support on my Apple products for me.

I want to ultimately move where the best service contracts and the best network data speeds are for my money without worrying about what kind of Apple iPad I bought. The iPhone will simply have to follow along since I really do not use it’s data connection very much or maybe I will just try a free Android phone out.

Apple needs to step in here and simply dump the carrier limiting contract crap with these clowns or make sure the Apple users never get fucked with like this or the consumer is simply going to stop using some of their “locked in” cell phone equipment because it is simply not versatile enough to handle the new consumer demands of carrier switching.

I personally am not going to be held down to contracts anymore if the cell phone companies think they can simply change the plans any way they see fit on the fly. I don’t give a fuck how their antiquated systems are getting hurt by this data traffic. They run the business and they provided the contract and they better provide the service or go bankrupt buying new equipment. Either way they will soon figure out they are not the only game in town because I am really liking those european regulations a lot more I bet they would not like those here in the US.

Dupin For iTunes

iTunes can be a real bitch sometimes. I was moving my iTunes library from my MacMini to my Hackintosh and found that the old library was missing file links all over the place and then when I decided to take the time and do it right and try and simply tell the new iTunes install to go look for what files were actually in the old library area and list them out well it then went and decided to copy over two sometimes four copies of the same files over and over again.

My whole library was swamped by the time I was done and every album was copied over at least twice. Thanks Apple! You guys really need to sit down and reconsider the whole iTunes interface but also it’s underlying functionality that works without really interacting with the person trying to use it. Because even after all this time iTunes may talk to every iPad and iPhone fine but’s it organization skills still pretty much suck as much as Safari still pretty much sucks security wise.

Anyway, I like to give credit where it is due and for fifteen dollars this guy here sold me Dupin a full blown Mac OSX script that literally cleaned my whole mess up but also seems to have set things right again. I told it to filter on the highest bit rate copy and uncheck the rest and then told it send the unchecked rest to trash because it’s not like I don’t have enough copies to choose from and wham I was done.

I still have to try and copy back in all my eBooks from the iPad but that is far more do-able than trying to recreate my whole music library from the ground up. Jesus, I have like 10 old out of print Ella Fitzgerald albums and about seven Patsy Cline collections and the list goes on from there so you can imagine the work involved and the amount of music and literally the amount of hunting and pecking to find things.

From: The Verge ~ A good smartphone comes but once a year

I love this graphic. It explains without any words WHY a consumer will get an Android phone for free or for next to nothing but eventually they will pay top dollar to switch to Apple out of pure confusion and relatively poor user experiences and the overall feeling of being ripped off.

Sure Android will “dominate the market” for the simple fact that phone makers flood the damn market pumping out millions of cheap disposable Android phones a year most of which will never actually be sold with the product lifecycle of a fanboy on meth. Just look at all the Android phone versions a single company HTC brought to market this year alone. How many iPhone killers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

It has also been proven again and again that only the most popular models, even though the pictured Android phones are all made by the same company HTC, will be supported properly and updated in a timely manner so choose carefully which one you put your money on. Then expect whatever Android phone model you do end up choosing will be outdated the minute you walk out of the store by the same company that promised you that was their best phone a minute ago.

My advice is only idiots spend any money on Android products whatever the function you want it for so stay as close to getting it for free with your contract as it allows with whatever selection they have and get the biggest screen size with the highest resolution you can find by either HTC or Samsung which tend to be the most popular and decently made.

Just remember it’s not an Apple!

Android setups are not a stable environment to invest any real time or effort or money into. It is never “done” or even out of Beta very long and it will always be better with the next OS version or with the next firmware update or with the next super mega powerful chipset just like Windows/Intel messed with us for years before people wised the hell up and said enough a more powerful chip in a new plastic shell does not make up for crappy software. These tablets and phones will never be worth anything for any length of time and this is plainly the philosophy of Google.

Now look at Apple… Once a year update with something a little bit faster and a little bit better and no surprises and they all function the exact same rock solid way. That’s why Apple is winning in sales of apps and happy repeat customers who keep coming back for the functionality and simplicity and longevity of the product.