You’ve all heard the reports:
In an open letter posted today, AT&T revised its policy on upgrade eligibility for the new iPhone 3GS for a small number of iPhone 3G customers.
Good news for iPhone owners in the US, but this doesn’t really change the bottom-line, which is that that AT&T still needs money for the cost of the phone. In Australia, Optus is requiring that customers pay out the remainder of their contract and start a new one with the iPhone 3G S.
The unavoidable and often unspoken truth is that all iPhones are expensive. If AT&T had posted the same contract upgrade prices for any other new phone, it would not be newsworthy. However, this is Apple, and AT&T is selling to Apple users. Whatever competent business practices have worked in the past for regular, less passionate mobile customers, suddenly don’t because, well, they are ridiculously unattractive for the consumer.
So this is not just a story about Apple’s influence on telcos, but about fans of a company rich in support standing up against what would typically be just another day in the office.
Safari 4, which came out of beta today, modifies a few user-interface elements and also invents a few of its own.
Among them is the new sea green ‘Loading bar’, which isn’t really a loading bar at all (we haven’t had physical loading bar since Safari 3.0), but a panel that sits in the address bar alongside the spinner.
The panel glows white when the page load is almost complete.
View the entire post.
Apparently:
Bing isn’t a just search engine. It’s a decision engine.
I’m glad we cleared that up.
2007, from SMH:
Rudd inherited a government with no net debt and a budget surplus of $20 billion.
2009:
The government has forecast a budget deficit of $57.59 billion for 2009/10 and a record net debt of $188 billion by 2012-13.