Pretty much if you want to put out an application in this day and age, especially for anything mobile, you have to put out an iOS version. Apple pretty much controls the smartphone and the tablet computer market. Defying them is practically fiscal suicide. You’ve got to have deep pockets to defy the biggest company in the world.
You know, like being the biggest web store in the world. Or the biggest retailer.
Yes, the stock market is currently tanking thanks to political problems; yes, people are worried about a double-dip recession; yes, rioting in London is making people think the end times are upon us. But Apple is still the most valuable company in the world.
Not that it was unaffected: its stock price was dinged 1.46% amid the trading chaos. But everybody else, in every sector, got dinged worse, sometimes much worse.
This is pretty much contrary to what everyone insisted would happen. Apple was a luxury supplier. Apple didn’t provide necessities. Apple was going to fall and fall hard if the economy ever took a turn for the worse, and all the Chicken Littles (and PC fans) would be justified in insisting it was overvalued. Instead it’s stayed fairly consistent while everything else burns.
Consider what this means. Apple is bigger than food suppliers, bigger than oil suppliers, bigger than companies that turn out guns by the bushel. And they got that way not by selling what people need, but selling people what they want.
There isn’t a better, if perhaps a little disturbing, argument for Apple being the most important company of our time. Because, let’s face it, if this won’t ding their stock seriously, nothing will.
The Dow dropped below 11,000 for the first time since November 2010, capping off two weeks where the market lost 15% of its value.
The reason? Due to gridlock in Washington, the United States’ credit rating has dropped from the best possible rating, AAA, to the second best, AA. And it might keep dropping: unless Washington can demonstrate an ability to get past political differences and work on reasonable compromises, another downgrade may be possible within two years.
Here at GadgetCrave, we spend a lot of time featuring cool new gadgets designed to make your life a little more convenient and entertaining. Not all gadgets provide an improvement, however. Many gadgets serve to anger and annoy their users and others around them more than they actually provide any positive function. Here’s a list of gadgets and devices that have all undoubtedly found themselves at the wrong end of a mallet or strip of asphalt countless times.
Being a gadget nerd, I own a lot of computers, and, owning a lot of computers, I experience something breaking on them on a fairly regular basis. Even so, every time something does break, it’s a frustrating reminder of just what a rip-off the brick-and-mortar stores that want us to buy gadgets from them actually are.
In this case, the obscene prices they’re demanding for a power source.
A lot of companies have put out tablets, and the critical response has been, almost universally, blah at best, unless you’re the Dell Inspiron Duo, which was driven off of most gadget sits with torches and pitchforks.
Research In Motion recently put the Blackberry PlayBook up for review, and, well, the response was not what we call “enthusiastic”. Or even “friendly.”
According to the CEO of RIM, though, that’s because critics don’t understand the desire of Blackberry users for a crippled product.
If there’s one thing that’s annoying about having two major phone OSes in the marketplace, it’s that nobody cares about the small fry like Windows. Granted, Windows Mobile has a history of failure, clunkiness, and general pain, but it’s only got so much to work with.
Anyway, Windows Phone users are about to get a function almost as crucial as air to most people: Skype. And this after all that talk about it never happening!
