Wired: "It's little mistakes like that that you're tempted to leave in. It's a signature that says, yes, it is fiction, it is moviemaking."
Paul Krugman: "This is why it's true both that rich voters tend to be Republican, and that rich states tend to be Democratic."
INTEL DUMP: "We are asking a tiny fraction of Americans to bear the burden of the long war. I think that is a strategic blunder, and one which will eventually lead to defeat."
washingtonpost.com: "Furthermore, a new experiment by Kimberlee Weaver at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and others shows that hearing the same thing over and over again from one source can have the same effect as hearing that thing from many different people -- the brain gets tricked into thinking it has heard a piece of information from multiple, independent sources, even when it has not."
San Jose Mercury News: "Premiums, which are divvied up between employers and workers, still have vaulted 78 percent since 2001. That's four times faster than wages or inflation."
iTnews: "The botnet actually is attacking computers that are trying to weed it out. It's set up to launch a distributed denial-of-service attack against any computer that is scanning a network for vulnerabilities or malware."
Robert X. Cringely: "So why did he do it? Why did he cut the price? I have no inside information here, but it seems pretty obvious to me: Apple introduced the iPhone at $599 to milk the early adopters and somewhat limit demand then dropped the price to $399 (the REAL price) to stimulate demand now that the product is a critical success and relatively bug-free. At least 500,000 iPhones went out at the old price, which means Apple made $100 million in extra profit."
Can I have my $200 back?
Russell Beattie:: "I'm sure the rest of the world will be waxing lyrically about all the new gadgets and the new price point, but to me today's announcements are a clear sign that Apple's original segmentation wasn't working and they are scrambling to adjust their model."
If Apple intends to sell 10m by the end of 2008*, they need to sell over 18k units per day. They've sold fewer than 15k units per day (in the neighborhood of 11k units per day after the opening weekend). Their long-term run-rate isn't clear (has the post-launch lull finished?), and predicting based on iPod sales patterns is hazardous (while iPods make a nice holiday gift, $1,800 in liability does not). The big wild-card is the European market. Will Apple find a partner? Will they ship HSDPA support? Will HSDPA then make its way to the US iPhone line for repeat sales?
* Apple may actually hope to sell 10m in 2008, which makes current rate less relevant except for the need to double it.
Some of the other announcements are more interesting -- e.g. the iPod Touch means you can now develop app interfaces for the iPhone without having to pay AT&T.
Update: it seems the market is starting to notice.
Jonathan S. Shapiro : "Servers are now cheaper than tape."
Financial Times: "The Pentagon acknowledged shutting down part of a computer system serving the office of Robert Gates, defence secretary"
New York Times: "'The reigning theory is that the taste for risk is as arbitrary as the value of a painting,' Seo says. 'But if this is so, why are these preferences so consistent across markets?'"
Ajaxian: "We can soundly say that the box model today is a bug and not a feature"
The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs: "What's left? You've already gutted your news divisions, which was a truly moronic move since that was the only place where you really could continue to add value."
BusinessWeek: "'If you can't deal with scheduling,' observes former Transportation Dept. inspector general Ken Mead, 'you don't have as much authority as people think.'"