This depends on how high the operating costs are in Europe. If their profits are approaching zero in the market, pulling out of it entirely would have less of an impact. Obviously that isn't the case, but operating costs for the market also aren't zero.
Apple gets 25% of their revenue from Europe, but only 7% of their app store revenue. This means that most of their Europe revenue is from hardware and AppleCare/services. Even if they opened up the app store completely, they would lose much less than when pulling out entirely. The fact that they work so hard at complicated solutions in order to open up the app store as little as possible shows that they think it’s worth it.
A lot of the value proposition of owning an Apple device is that it doesn’t get bogged down by rogue software like other phones. So that 25% of revenue that doesn’t involve App Store revenue can still go down if they mess up the App Store too much. But I think as long as rogue apps is something you have to opt into with full knowledge of the consequences, it should be fine.
I suspect this is for a few reasons, and somewhat agree with your conjectures.
One of the reasons being the platform's popularity and quality of work, which has allowed them to attract higher quality talent (which in turn costs more). Another reason is anticipation of an increase in royalties/residuals as a result of the end of the writer's strike and the eventual conclusion of the SAG-AFTRA strike.
And finally because the Apple TV platform now has considerable more content than it did at launch, and can command a higher price.
Even they're not exempt from being messed with. I had an HP color laser printer which, when purchased, would print on any paper size that would fit in the printer. (Specifically used it to print to US Legal Size.) A firmware update some years back disabled printing to anything larger than US Letter Sized.
I now own a Brother printer that is perfectly happy to print to larger paper.
It's difficult to explain to people today just how good Microsoft tech support was in the early-mid 1990s. We had a similarly complex issue with DOS 6.something that I don't remember the full details of, and I think I learned more about operating systems in the couple hours we were on the phone with MS than I did in the semester-long operating systems class I took in college. Some days after the call we got a stack of floppies in the mail from Microsoft with a small bug fix that helped with whatever the situation was we had encountered. Just night and day compared to most modern interactions with tech companies.
> Some days after the call we got a stack of floppies in the mail from Microsoft with a small bug fix
That is just so utterly inconceivable today that I didn't believe it at first. Not just being physical media, but receiving that level of attention and care.
The best you can hope for these days is a vague forum reply with some shockingly bad information from an "official Microsoft rep" who is at least 5 degrees of separation from anyone who has seen code before. Disgraceful.
I was on official Microsoft support forums for Xbox cloud this fall. Many of us had similar breaking issues that did not appear to be a pebkac. I provided reasonably detailed description, what I tried, what I discounted, my full hardware software and network setup, testing results on different machines etc.
But couple of other users provided hours of their own network traces and wiresharks and extremely detailed investigation. Basically handed a full replication and analysis to them for something that affected a significant number of people. Continued copy and past response from "support" was basically to send us to reddit or stack or some other even more social support.
I worked for a summer at a managed service provider that was a certified partner of Microsoft, Cisco, HP, etc. The level of service you get as a (technical) business partner is unbelievable compared to what you get as a consumer. Cisco TAC made a custom firmware patch for me once.
This is something you only see from indie FOSS developers nowadays. I used to do this, and my users were always delighted. They usually became pretty loyal to the project, and the quality of bug reports they submit got exponentially better as a result.
It's a great strategy all around if you take an hour to care about another person.
The Affinity products on Mac are some of the cleanest, polished, reasonably easy to use, responsive, and stable pieces of commercial image software I've used in years. Very impressed with what they've done so far.
They also have a good offer on at the moment. They’ve released V2 and are offering all 3 apps on all supported formats for a single payment. Personally I only use Designer so didn’t partake, but even that is discounted a little.
So that's what happened to those. I knew I wasn't completely crazy and that I'd heard and/or "bought" some early Ray LaMontagne music, but last year when I was trying to find it the tracks I was thinking of were nowhere to be seen. Just "Trouble."
A guy I knew in high school released seven or eight albums with a co-conspirator and also felt the same way about their early work. Some of it was admittedly a bit rough, but some was also very good. He eventually relented on his opposition to re-leasing any of it, and those early songs have long since made it onto iTunes (and basically every streaming service). So I can definitely understand artists not wanting to see or hear their earliest works, worried that people will hate it and judge them based on who they used to be.
It's interesting that there are many different trajectories for musical artists, the ones that this particular narrative most applies to are the ones that become more polished as they get older but whose creative genius was spent in the early years. And there are quite a few of those. Listen to early recordings of 'The Police' and what they - and Sting - put out later for some nice examples of that. The early stuff was definitely rough, but it has so much energy and originality.
I wish I could recommend "For All Mankind", but I can't. And while I feel the first three episodes were strong and well produced, I just really really didn't agree with where it ended up going. I'll still watch the second season because it's scifi on TV and it's a genuinely interesting show, but I can't shake the "late seasons of Battlestar Galactica" feeling the later 2/3rds or the season left me with.
The way the natural gas issue has been explained to us over the last two days is there are two issues. First: natural gas is prioritized for home usage, which has understandably skyrocketed over the last several days. There was not enough left in the gas market for the standby power plants to buy up to burn; and what was available was inaccessible due to price and price caps. Second: The standby generating plants themselves suffered failures due to excessive cold. This also affected coal and nuclear plants (one of the reactors at the South Texas plant shut down automatically after the intake water in its cooling pond froze).
The emergency charges for the spot prices changes from that order are recent news that I've not had time to digest yet and as such can't reply to.
Apologies for not providing sources - barely have cellular data service at the moment and have only had electric back for a handful of hours. (Edit: And I jinxed myself there... back in the cold dark again.)
I'm not 100% sure if it was intentional, but there was a span of time when AT&T's customer service queue (for land lines) behaved like this. You'd call in, your call would be placed on hold (with their terrible hold music), then if you hung up it would call you back when an agent answered your call. I only discovered this behaviour because one day I was fed up with waiting, hung up the phone, and then an hour or so later got the call back. Repeated this a couple times after that call and it worked the same way. I have no idea if that ever worked for their cellular accounts, or if it was peculiar to their land lines.
It is a somewhat common feature of customer service phone systems to have a way to do callbacks, though I hadn't heard of one that did it automatically without your consent. The feature costs the company using it money, since they have to place a second outgoing call which may have different charge rates than the incoming call did.
> they have to place a second outgoing call which may have different charge rates than the incoming call did.
It's probably a wash: their outgoing call to you costs as much or less per minute than their toll-free incoming lines. At least in North America where Calling-Party-Pays isn't really a thing.
In cellular plans that don't include long distance calling, it could cost you more to receive a call when you're out of your home area, while the same toll-free call is (usually) never long distance.
> somewhat common feature of customer service phone systems to have a way to do callbacks
Maybe on the sales side, but on the service side, many vendors (particularly b2c) prefer that you give up entirely and never call them ever again.
To give an example of the cost,
Plivo[0]:
Make call: $0.0065/min
Recieve call: $0.0025/min
Twilio[1]
Make call: $0.0045/min
Recieve call: $0.0020/min
Flworoute[2]
Make call: $0.00833/min
Recieve call: $0.0050/min
So double to triple the cost from some providers for just this feature sounds very expensive. But perhaps with large commercial pricing this difference shrinks.
Yep. Surely the phone system costs for AT&T calling their own customers is so close to zero as to not matter even at telco scale, compared to the minimum wage they're paying the people on their end of the call.
(Also, isn't there some weird thing in the US where cell phone users get charged for _inbound_ calls? They might even make money on these...)
I expect that the hourly rate for the CSR dwarfs the cost of the telecommunications, and efficiently allocating resources and being more convenient for the customer vastly outweigh a few fractions of a cent per minute cost.
You missed the rates for receiving toll free calls, which are generally higher than both incoming and outgoing regular calls. For example, Flowroute is $0.00975/min.
Surely the incoming rates on a toll free number are higher than the outgoing rates for a regular call. I wish the call costs were large enough to move the needle - eg encourage the company to hire one or two more reps, which would drastically reduce the queue. Alas.
Besides the obvious business incentives (eg Comcast wants to make their phone experience as bad as possible), I'd guess the main obstacle holding this feature back is the specific PBX system a business is running on.
A cellular company faces disconnects more often than others, and can plausibly attest that customers prefer to be called back when disconnected, since the company is the provider for disconnect support — when other companies might not be able to without permission.
It helps that they can link your caller ID conclusively to your account since it’s their own systems.
Working for a .edu in the UK, we do/have done this during Clearing[0], which is where prospective students who didn't quite make the cut can apply to empty spaces on the course(s) of their choosing. The user dials up our number, is placed into a queue and is told that they can hang up. They're still in the queue, and we'll dial them back when they reach the front. In our case it's profitable because we _want_ to talk to people on the phone, whereas sales departments might not want to talk to people who want to cancel their contract.
