Blog Backlog: The iPhone early adopters & the demonization of profit.

Over in the Macintosh net-community there was a lot of cry about the sudden $200 drop in the iPhone's price when it happened a few months back.

The Mac community is no stranger the the concept of the "early adopter tax" where the people who gotta have the latest thing as soon as it hits the streets pay more for the privilege, knowing that the price will eventually drop.

But this dramatic drop of 1/3 the cost, a mere two months after the iPhone's debut, has caused some of those hardcore Apple fans (known in some circles as "mac-macs") to cry about how they were fleeced.

Mac-macs have been crying for an iPhone for years before Apple ever announced the product. They let Apple know about how hungry for the phone they would be. They lined up for hours for a product which was not in short supply. Why did Apple charge so much of a premium? Because people were willing to pay it.

Now so much of the cry seems to be people are shocked, SHOCKED, to see Apple working for a profit.

These people found room in their budget to buy a $600 phone. They also pay at least $60 a month to use it. When someone spends like that, they've got no business crying as if they were the exploited proletariat, railing against the plutocratic Steve Jobs.

That's the big problem with so much education today. Scientific illiteracy can be bad in society, but at least schools at least try (or give lip service to trying) to educate people in how the world works, and how science works. No such effort is given over to explaining the basics of economics. Instead we have tons of people, many of them college educated, who know nothing of economics, and view the economy in mystical terms. This has led to so much of the demonization of profit, even if it is gained honestly.

And don't give me any bull about Marx. Marx saw that so many attempts to implement socialism failed because they were unscientific. Marx tried to apply science to find a better form of socialism that would work. It still hasn't worked, and even worse, science and logic isn't really embraced by socialists, and Marx is merely used as wallpaper to make their mystical thinking look scientific.

The Un-boxy Mac-Men and the Brotherhood of Evil Windows

Dan Moren at Macworld muses over the rivalries Apple has had over the years:

Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are the Professor X and Magneto of the technology world: alternately rivals and allies, they have markedly different means to their respective ends.

Sooner or later, everything comes back to comics.

Moren's column speculates about a future where Apple has no rivals left who would spur it's competitiveness on.

I wouldn't worry about it. The computing business is a very dynamic one. Tomorrow's competition probably hasn't been invented yet.

Even so, one can find a new challenge, a new market to win over. To quote from Uncle Scrooge, there's always another rainbow. I'd presume there would be another leprechaun defending what's at the end of those rainbows too.

Non-fiction Comics: The Dvorak Zine

And you thought talking about the intersection of comics and politics was geeky?

There's a mini-comic that's been published to the web about the history of the Dvorak keyboard layout.

I myself retrained myself to type with this layout about fifteen years ago, ticking off everyone who wants to use my computer, when the keys they hit don't produce the letters they're "supposed" to represent.

I guess this could be geekier. You could somehow take the Dvorak keyboard and turn it into a metapor in economic and political discussions...

Nah, no one's that wierd... Oh, who am I kidding:

• Mises Institute on Dvorak & "market failure"
• Reason Magazine on how such market failure arguments fail
• The "Qwerty Myth"
• The "Fable of the Keys"
• and a discussion about market lock-in, including a comparison between the Qwerty keyboard and the AK-47 rifle (!?) over at Unqualified Offerings

In that last item I add to the discussion in the comments thread

The market wins as all points of view have their freedom to use the keyboard layout of their choice.

Which of course exposes the whole fraud of using Qwerty vs. Dvorak and other comparisons as a barometer of wether or not markets are successful or not. The point of markets isn’t to provide “The one true solution”. Which is why it pisses me off that free market advocates fall into this trap and feel that they have to defend Qwerty and bash Dvorak in order to defend markets. (The same thing has been done with Windows vs. Mac time and time again)

There you have it: Comics, keyboards, computers, politics, and economics. The only thing holding this out of contention for geekiest post ever would be a lolcat.



Lord help me, it was only a Google search away...