I HATE APPLE

At CompUSA I picked up something I wanted, carried it to the register, paid and walked out.

At an Apple Store, I fight for space with a crowd of yuppies and yuppie-children, try to flag down a lackey for service, evade them trying to sell me anything, tell them what I want, wait for them to go find one, then wait for them to make their handheld register work and finally get to pay and leave.

Fuck Apple Stores, IMO.

Milo Z? the band?

Sounds like your Apple Store sucks, man.

I usually walk over directly to what I need, some drone asks if I need something, and I yell "SCAN THIS HERE'S MY CARD MY EMAIL IS (my email) THANK YOU SIR!"

sooo.. iTunes Match is in beta

"some drone"? it would be interesting to know what the "drones" make of your robotic all-caps sgt. major dickface schtick, mh

whatever they would make of it, it would be in a tasteful font and elegantly designed

"some drone"? it would be interesting to know what the "drones" make of your robotic all-caps sgt. major dickface schtick, mh

― TracerHandVEVO (Tracer Hand), Tuesday, August 30, 2011 4:50 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

easy tiger

I AM DRONE-MAN, HEAR ME ROAR

Meantime, turns out iTunes Match *does* allow for streaming:

http://www.macrumors.com/2011/08/29/itunes-match-allows-both-streaming-and-downloading-of-music/

so this is basically Spotify for ppl with no friends?

(obv ignoring the file uploading)

so this is basically Spotify for ppl with no friends?

― now I have to imagine your penis (DJP), Tuesday, 30 August 2011 13:48

*signs up*

recently I seem to have become spotify santa as I keep getting all these "invitation tokens"

spotify for ppl that hate ads?

if you pay for Spotify, you don't get ads

is there a free option for Apple Match? doesn't appear to be

so this is basically Spotify for ppl with no friends?

― now I have to imagine your penis (DJP), Tuesday, August 30, 2011 1:48 PM (46 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

no that's Post your Audiosrobbler userlink so we can always watch what you're listening to

if you pay for Spotify, you don't get ads

is there a free option for Apple Match? doesn't appear to be

ah assumed Match was free for some dumb reason

Probably got the tone wrong, I was going for a "rushing my request out in a monotone before my agoraphobia kicks in due to the hundreds of families around the store." I'm a corporate drone in a cubicle, but Apple Store employees get to buzz around. No classism.

Btw I prefer "major dicknose" as a title

via "ACTUALLY ..." (no eye contact aspie hardman geek banter)

omg lol

haha i didn't mean to link to that post, but it is definitely the best post in that thread

I was going for more aspie and less hardman but the absence of affect always makes it hard to differentiate.

I kind of think the Apple Store is actually designed to be counter-intuitive and disruptive to aspie hardmen to keep them away! It's a feature.

at times it is also designed to be counterproductive to actually making a purchase, unless of course I'm just experiencing SWB (Shopping While Black)

yes I'm still annoyed that the last time I went in to check out microphones, three Apple shits stood around playing dubstep at each other off the display iPhone dock clock radios and ignored me

last time I went into an apple store the genius tried to hardman me into believing that a bulging battery was a 'design feature' and that apple batteries were 'designed' to make the trackpad unusable

hahahahahaha amazing

never talk to a nerd w/ tattoos and who looks like he only ever uses the curl bar at the gym

guilty lol @ SWB

Yeah, the employees that IGNORE customers are a whole different type of annoyance compared to the ones who keep bothering you. I think they slept through the training or think that working a floor job in a retail store is somehow cool because it's the Apple store.

Still rationally angry at dayo's bizarro experience

I've talked to exactly one helpful Genius in the Apple store, who was a slightly older dude who looked a little like he detoured into retail after a career in corporate IT fizzled on him; he was the only person who actually lit up when I started quoting specs at him and could talk back to me without referring to a web page, plus he was the only one with any conception of the various processors' capabilities and how they matched up with what I wanted to do with the computer.

My favorite Genius experience was when I got my iPhone 4 and dude made a big deal about unwrapping it for me and then wandered off so I could marvel at it while he helped someone else. I plugged it into the computer and activated it and when he came back he was shocked and amazed that I wasn't still just sitting there drooling and staring all starry-eyed at it.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-27076_3-20099494-248/apple-wants-its-3g-macbook-prototype-back/?tag=contentBody;topStories

Apple's 30% cut for in-app sales/subscriptions has pretty much killed ipad publishing, hasn't it?

why do you say that?

FT switched to an HTML 5 web app, Amazon pulled its in-app sales completely, all the excitement (from industry) about ipad subscriptions seems to have flatlined, etc. Companies like Conde Nast have thrown themselves in pretty hard but it's not the all-in race some were expecting.

All right not ~killed~ but it's hardly the Next Big Thing in its current state.

that's because the iPad publishing business was based on reading

What I'm wondering is whether Apple will relent and drop its cut to say 15%.

The biggest advantage HTML5 has is that one app can work on several platforms with some pretty minor considerations. When you pit that against a locked-in ipad app that (a) doesn't work on anything else and (b) actively cuts your profit by 30%, whatever advantage you might have by being in the App Store is diminished.

...so if Apple wants to neutralise that, dropping its cut would almost certainly stimulate growth in its App Store.

You can still buy Amazon content from Safari, though! It's a little clunky but it's doable. I think the lack of a significant discount/incentive for magazines is killing it, if anything. I can still get most magazines at a lower price in the print edition, especially by subscribing.

I see your point about magazine and newspaper app rates being too high (given that you're not paying for printing, transport or distribution) but, where apps are concerned, it's Apple's cut that eats into that difference. If you're going directly to the consumer via, say, HTML5, and you still charge like a wounded bull, you'll probably fail, but at least you can drop your price enough to generate sufficient sales.

Amazon is the perfect example here – the 30% that it would give to Apple essentially comes out of the profit margin it makes for being a shopfront itself. Playing by Apple's rules would break Amazon's whole business model. btw being able to buy Amazon content via Safari (and the Kindle Cloud HTML5 app) is exactly what I mean about companies circumventing Apple's rules – if Apple dropped its cut by at least half, the most likely outcome is that Amazon would allow in-app purchasing, more sales would be made and everyone would be better off.

Apple's cut is a thing, but I think it's partially a diff in advertisers and what they'd pay. Subscriptions -- not buying off the newsstand -- is a lot cheaper in most cases. Not all, especially not with boutique magazines, but I'm thinking of stuff like Wired where a subscription is heavily subsidized by advertising and is like... $20 for 12 issues, as opposed to...

Wait, I just looked at it's $20/yr as well since the print subscribers get the digital! Oddly, single issues cost $3.99, but you can buy a "one month subscription" for $2?

This is why nobody buys magazines on iPad. Because it makes no sense!

What got me thinking about all this is that I pre-ordered a subscription to this a few weeks ago. It was supposed to launch as an iPad app on 15 August but didn't. As recently as Thursday the business was talking in direct terms about waiting for Apple to approve the app, but yesterday the site suddenly changed the description to "NOT an app".

Obv I'm jumping to conclusions here (there's seriously NO information coming from these guys) but I can't help assuming Apple threw up a roadblock that has made it impossible for them to launch this thing as planned.

The only magazine I have an e-subscription to is The Economist and their app is pretty much an example of how e-publishing can work (and increase the paid subscriber base). Slightly less expensive than a print subscription, beautifully rendered (on iPad), and on iPhone it streamlines downloading the audio edition.

this was discussed in the observer at the weekend (says pretty much what everyone's said upthread)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/sep/04/apple-ipad-apps-subscriptions-revolt

Schlafsack - the 30% cut isn't really the bone of contention afaict. more serious is that publishers lose their direct relationships with the customer. apple holds all the info about them. so FT - or whoever - can't start bugging you to renew your subscription, or upsell you totebags, or whatever. and all the advertising is controlled by apple as well (iAds).

otm

agh of course, I completely forgot about the loss of data. Massive factor. As usual, Apple's self-imposed gatekeeper role is nice for consumers but quite an arrogant dick move where industry is concerned.

Found this via koogs's link:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/31/us-apple-ft-idUSTRE77U1O020110831

The Pearson-owned FT and Apple had been in negotiations for months but ultimately failed to reach a compromise, an FT spokesman said on Wednesday.

(re FT pulling its apps)

agh of course, I completely forgot about the loss of data. Massive factor. As usual, Apple's self-imposed gatekeeper role is nice for consumers but quite an arrogant dick move where industry is concerned.

― Autumn Almanac, Tuesday, 6 September 2011 11:28 (16 minutes ago) Bookmark

the new yorker gets around this i think, even if you subscribe in the app. you have a new yorker log-in and enter it into the app, in return it realises you're a subscriber when you try to get access to the web archive. so they've got your details regardless of the apple opt-in. plenty of other publishers could copy that, and at least the customer gets something in return.

it's not true that the advertising is controlled by apple, afaik no publisher uses iAds (not least because they're better at selling ads than apple is).

Ha yeah. I read recently that Apple's acquired office space in the US to expand iAds so I presume it's got some pretty solid plans for that.

I did notice that you can subscribe off-app and just log in. The problem with that is that you have to give the user an option to sign up through the App Store (afaict) and give Apple a 30% cut. Ready to be proved wrong with all this btw – I'm still struggling to pin down the way Apple implemented this bloody thing.

i think the bigger point is that it's probably wrong to expect things to change more quickly than they have done. the ipod took about three years before it had much impact; the kindle was a flop for a similar period. the ipad has taken off more quickly but it's still only 25m people, in many different countries, which isn't a very dense population for publishers to aim at. the fact that they've got so many publications on board is probably an indication that they're not doing much wrong.

also: still no competition. (and when the kindle was the only successful e-reader, amazon charged 70 per cent.)