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Technology Stocks : Apple Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: clean86 who wrote (148570)	1/18/2013 9:48:16 PM
From: slacker711	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 213177

You buy an iPhone, iPad or iPod maybe once very couple of years but you buy stuff to load on to that device sometimes daily so what is the bigger money maker in the long term? Easy answer, the iPhone. Seriously, you really question this? Slacker

To: clean86 who wrote (148570)	1/19/2013 3:35:59 PM
From: Doren	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 213177

> Content iTunes I think its important to remember Apple doesn't really make its money on hardware or content... it makes its money on design. The huge margins Apple commands for its products are a result of design NOT better hardware. Anyone can buy the exact same components or cases that Apple buys. It remains to be seen how long they can continue to create revolutionary products or improvements. In the past that seemed to be a dead end, how can you make inspired creation for ever? But maybe in the future they CAN continue the process. Maybe Jobs was the pioneer who developed the perpetual design machine. No one knows. CONTENT: I don't know if anyone has noticed but there is a price war going on on content. $1.29 > .99 > .69 ... pretty drastic margin drops. Its inevitable that the profit will drop to the lowest possible level, and may even drop to a loss for a time. There is absolutely nothing to differentiate one downloaded song from another at this point. A song from Apple sounds EXACTLY the same as a song from Amazon. Amazon will take profits down to a fraction of a penny IMHO. As I've said for years content is essentially worthless now. Only convenience (usability) matters. That's what you pay for. For example I can buy this fine Talking Heads Album for $2.99 including shipping Stop Making Sense: Talking Heads amazon.com which works out to .33 per song for much higher quality than a download and I keep the disks and art for backups or I sell it for a dollar at my next garage sale. Of course one could also buy a downloadable mp3 for .69 more than twice as much. The convenience of having it immediately and only having to buy one song beats the price of the physical product even with the lower (some would say crap) bit rate. They are paying for convenience, which is not worthless. In fact convenience is going to be essential to our society. Time is money, the more $ you make per hour, the more time worth. Some people can't count though. (Go to Costco and watch people who make $200 and hour wait in line 20 minutes to save $3.) ------ The record companies are going to collude on price. Amazon, Apple & all the other vendors will not make squat on top of the initial base price. ------ There is another fly in this ointment. If ReDigi wins its case - retailers of digital content are f..ked. bbc.co.uk My guess is the courts will find some (twisted) rational to preventing resales of digital content. After all they are employees of giant corporations. But there are likely to be multiple tries to resell digital content in various countries worldwide, multiple lawsuits... meanwhile people will download. How low can the cost go for a purely digital file? ----- And lets be honest about this. PirateBay is still in business. If government succeed in shutting them down eventually other will pop up. They already have popped up. Isohunt is just one example: isohunt.com Other method will also pop up. VPN networks, islands, etc. Content money? Don't count on it.