"Apple is a status symbol" - I wonder where in the world that is true. Certainly not the case for Canada/US/Singapore - an iPhone is just another smart phone.
Just an anecdatum, for amusement: My kids seem to know which kids at school have an iPhone. But they think that Samsung makes a better phone. This is without them having first hand knowledge of either.
Also, my impression from conversations with them over the years: The kids who were the youngest when they got cell phones, e.g., fifth grade or younger, got iPhones.
talked to kids and minors? hipsters and millenials? people that do all their computing on their phones? the multitude of people that watch apple keynotes, youtube product reviews, etc?
You are right - it's all gut feeling, but one that's educated based on experience. I've been in Singapore since 2013. I carry my smartphone, visibly, in all sorts of social, work, and other scenarios - and not a single time in 2 years, has anyone even looked twice at it - even when new. Also, people aren't really into iPhones here - this is really a Samsung City.
Smartphones are so saturated in this city, with close to 90%+ of people glued to them on the MRT, that absolutely nobody pays any attention to what model somebody is using.
This is totally unlike what my experience was like in the Bay Area, 2009-2011, in which every time I picked up a new iPhone, everyone (Restaurants, work, friends) was all over the new phone, asking to check it out, see how light it was, etc, etc...
Now it's just a rectangular hunk of glass.
Your basic question, though, is a good one - how the iPhone / Galaxy / etc.. is seen as a status symbol, and how that might have changed over time.
You say that one key is experimenting on pets(which will have huge barriers in the west). In china, eating dogs is legal.So why haven't we seen such research coming from china, and especially successful drugs from there?
Actually there has been some research into cancer treatment using pets in the west, just not as much as we should be doing [1].
We really need to organise all the pets into clinical trials of new treatments. People have done surveys of pet owners and most people are happy for their pet to participate in such trials especially if they know that they are helping human research and other pets. We just need to start using this amazing resource rather than giving mice artificial cancers.
As for why more research has not come out of China, a lot of really interesting research is going on right now in China, it will just take a little time to filter out to us in the west. Drug development is a 15 to 20 year journey and China has only recently entered this domain.
Also on the horizon there is 3d chip manufacturing technology(3d-monolithic) ,with extremely large bandwidth between the two different layers of the chip,possibly being gpu + dram.
The bottleneck is not arithmetic for a long time, it's data movement. Arithmetic is practically free nowadays. See presentation by Horst Simon (Deputy Director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) "No exascale for you!" [0]
The energy cost of transferring a single data word to a distance of 5mm on-chip is higher than the cost of a single FLOP (20 pico-Joules/bit). 5mm =~ the distance to L2 cache or another CPU core. The cost of transferring data off-chip (3D chip and/or RAM) is orders-of-magnitude higher, see graph.
The bottleneck is often RAM. This is especially clear when writing performance-oriented code in CUDA, where the amount of cores (threads) per one shared memory controller is in the order of thousands.
...but since GPU's already exist, they kind of are the "already at large scale production" solution to the problem. For very little money you can get some pretty insane single precision throughput for SIMD calculations.
What you run in to are problems feeding the beast data fast enough.
>> Is Apple Radio really going to add that much to your bottom line?
They will try to use radio in 2 way:
1. Make it unqiue and hard to copy, to add one more reason for people to use their device.
2. When making content deals, it's hard to get good deals if you come without a large crowd of subscribers.So apple plan to to use your radio subscription as content negotiation tool, and than upsell you a tv service - and there's a lot of money there.
But still , that calls for something like UBER with democratic vote over it's decisions. And since most people will be consumers ,not employees of that service , the incentive towards how to manage it's drivers would be the same.
> But still , that calls for something like UBER with democratic vote over it's decisions. And since most people will be consumers ,not employees of that service , the incentive towards how to manage it's drivers would be the same.
You mean like mass transit provided by a government org? You own the roads, you make the rules.
Worker protection should apply equally to everyone, not give preferential treatment to one group(taxi drivers) at the expense of most other groups who just have minimum wage laws and osha.
They are contractors, though. They own their vehicle and set their own hours. They can choose if they want to work that day or not. Uber is just a lead source to the driver. My neighbor drives a black car, legally licensed as a limo, and drives for Uber. Not all of his fairs come from Uber. He owns his own business, Uber is not his employer.
Android supports pressure sensitive touch at the API level since 2009, and There's a phone from 2015 that supports this from huawei. But they didn't create useful interactions with it.
Say you we're a customer that bought an iPhone every 2 years.
Now Apple's yearly plan looks like:
1. A new iPhone every year + Apple care
2. Same price
3. Don't have to deal with salesman at carrier store.
So more people will be tricked for new iPhone every year.
And once this becomes the standard , since Apple is a status symbol - suddenly buying a phone every 2 years carries less status.