Act 1 – the optimist

My Samsung D-600 is a pretty decent phone. I trusted it to make calls, send text messages and take a few pictures. Lately however, it’s behaving very suspiciously. When plugged into it’s charger, no matter how run down the battery was and how short a time it has been on charge, when I remove it, the D600 will tell me it has a full battery.

An oh-so-obvious lie, look, my bars are full… take me with you, I’m ready for 240mins of talk time. Are you fuck. We both know that even turning the backlight on once will force you to reveal that you have only one bar of charge and then flash the giveaway – “Low Battery warning”.

Act 2 – the lazy shit

My 3G 20gb iPod has started to display the opposite syndrome. After charging for an entire night, me waking up late in the morning, rushing to get ready, grabbing the iPod off my desk, yanking the charger off my desk, unplugging the charger, putting on my coat, stumbling out the door, running to make the train, finding a huge queue at the station, risking financial and legal ruin by getting onto the platform without a ticket in the hope of buying a ticket at my destination, finding a seat on the crowded commuter service, sitting down, getting out my iPod, untangling the easiest-to-tangle-headphone-wire in the world, putting the headphones in my ear, taking the iPod hold switch off and pressing play…

The iPod chooses to show the Apple booting logo and then switch off after displaying the pathetic image of an empty battery in order to get some sympathy. What type of deceit is this? I’ve made all this effort, the least you could do is to give me some John Legend in the morning. It’s the laziest electronic device I’ve ever had.

On a Monday I’m in no mood to hear all the Essex girls talk about their which white boots and denim skirt they bought on Saturday only to have them ruined on Saturday night at the Venue.

Just play… please play.

The last thing I want to do is to take out the headphones signalling to the rest of the carriage that I’m some sort of loser who doesn’t charge his iPod. They’ve all seen me put them in, I’ve charged you all night. Just play! I try and hit it gently to wake it up. I do it in time to an imaginary beat in my head to make it look to others as though I’m tapping in time to the music.

But by now, I know the routine, you’ll do the switch off automatically thing another 2 times, then you’ll turn on, let me see the menu and die. Then you’ll start playing, flashing up an empty battery meter as a pathetic excuse. As the train rushes towards the city you start to understand I will persist and gradually start to show a battery level that reflects the truth. I crank up the volume, open up The Game section in The Times to read about the weekend’s premiership action and settle into my seat to the soothing tones of Mr. Legend.

All of a sudden, I’m interrupted by a beeping.

My phone battery is about to die.

Fuck.

The disagreement is quite interesting, let’s take a look. Firstly, I think the economics used adds up neatly to a pseudo-mathematical summary:

Revenue = Price x Volume
Cost = (Variable Cost x Volume) + Fixed Cost
Profit = Revenue - Cost

Value != Cost + Margin

With me so far? We have seen that revenue maximisation is a function of price and volume and that value is not equivalent to your costs plus a margin. Instead, it’s the price the market will tolerate.

The area where Dan Nystedt and John Gruber disagree appears to be on the degree of price elasticity in the market. Dan believes that the lowering of prices could stimulate new demand:

The second-generation iPod Shuffle, for example, could have been priced closer to US$49 to stimulate demand from users, since the cost of materials going into it amounts to only $30, the analysts said.

Whereas Gruber states:

But I offer another explanation: that Apple can only manufacture these new iPods so quickly, and that they expect to sell them as fast as they can make them, or nearly so, from now until Christmas at these prices.

So Gruber takes the position of either a) believing that the price is already low enough to stimulate sufficient demand to satisfy the available supply or b) that the market isn’t as price sensitive (or elastic) as Dan thinks.

Since Apple’s closest competitors use similar pricing it would appear to demonstrate an industry perception that, currently, there isn’t much latent demand that could be stimulated by more agressive pricing.

Digital Audio Players are not a commodity. Yet.

If you’re Flickr Pro, get on their offer to give you 10 free card samples.

Via DF

- Ravi, when finding out a little about joga bonito is all about.

“Holy shit! This chicken is even better than that Romaldo guy”

- Ravi, at his first Nandos.

Thanks to mrsandeepsings on the forum, managed to find it. You can get it for nada by signing up with Sunset Entertainment Group. They’ll send you a link to a high-quality 320kbps version.

For the more impatient of us, direct download the 128kbps version.

Expect to find an array of uninformed opinions, outlandish claims that I fail to backup and irrational, biased comments I’m forced to retract.