Apple

china needs the spyphone of course, and the apple gaylords with their nsa wimps can celebrate the idocy of mankind ...other than that, who cares.

yetanother**ixuser wrote: china needs the spyphone of course, and the apple gaylords with their nsa wimps can celebrate the idocy of mankind ...other than that, who cares.

Pretty much

But we've been through this before, it appears that all the business writers in the west have the brains of a flea. Collectively. One flea.

1) China Mobile has been selling iPhones for over a year now.

2) We don't have "plans" here ... okay, that stupid system exists in some dark closet somewhere but no one uses it. In China you :

a) go to the store and buy a phone. There must be more than one million telephone stores in China. Went thru this last year with smj, put up photos. Every single village has at least six phone stores. Bigger cities have six phone stores per block.

b) each phone store has a minimum of fifty or sixty different models. You can find phones anywhere from $25 to $600. If you go to some of the big building stores, you can find diamond-encrusted celebrations of bad taste for over $1,000 USD. Many of the phones are nicer than the iPhone. Without the fanboy crap, many of the Samsungs in particular are better phones for less money. And HTC is popular. I'm currently seeing more of the bigger-screen Samsungs - people like to watch movies in the elevator, on the subway, on the bus, at the top of the escalator right after they step off, in the middle of doorways, all kinds of groovy places.

Unlike the US free market, we have dozens of choices. That free market competition thing is waycool, guys. Sure glad we don't have it.

c) you buy the phone, then you either buy a sim card for $15 or use the one you already have

d) you are now a "subscriber" with either China Mobile or China Unicom. China Unicom has slightly cheaper data prices and CDMA, while the China Mobile service is more reliable. They are basically two fingers of the same hand. Dig 1/8" below the surface and everything in China is the government. The "reforms to enhance capitalism" are nothing but some nice pablum to allow the religious zealots of the west to overcome their dingbat superstitions in order to buy from China. It's still a thoroughly planned (or unplanned, depending on your perspective) economy.

e) A "subscription plan" as in the US does exist. It's called Go-Fone. No one, and I mean no one uses that stupid shit. Real people buy a prepay card at any of the 36 million little stores, news stands, post offices, China Mobile stores, booze and smokes stores, China Unicom stores, even on the street. There's a photo of that here somewhere also. Cards come in 50 and 100 rmb denominations. Scratch off the covering layer of dust, dial 13800138000 and enter the secret number. Phone bill is now prepaid for the amount of the card. This takes about two minutes total. I go through about $15 per month. Assist goes through a little more. Phone service is cheap. (Another example of the superiority of communism.)

Und zoooo ... the big "China Mobile will add the iPhone to their service plans with 800 million subscribers ! They will sell a gazillion more iPhones !!" AP wirefeed breaking news business information hi-tech story !! is either deceptive or terminally stupid, you choose. No one, NO ONE * in China falls for that "subscriber" scam.

In the matter of sales, this will make zero difference. Z-E-R-O. The iPhone has been on sale at China Mobile stores for well over a year. They are also for sale at other stores. Even before that, you could just buy them (cheaper) from Hong Kong. They were never impossible to get in China, as far back as the iPhone 4 that I can remember.

This is all just fluff to temporarily jack up Apple stock and make some brokers 1% here, 2% there on the churn. It's a scam.

* Foreigners don't count. They are the only ones so addicted to their ridiculous kapitalist butt-raped habits that they can't adapt to a better way.

Bought an iphone two years ago, used it with verizon until I had to start paying for it, now I use tmobile. Better service and half the price. They even provide the tiny sim card that an iphone needs.

But Me and Wifey are moving back to canada next year, might get one of those lumia windows phones with the fancy camera. Reminds me of my zune which I enjoyed fondly. Or not, since there's nothing wrong with the phone I have now.

I don't see what the problem is with being a subscriber. You pay the bill and get service, or don't pay and thhe service stops. I guess your account goes into collections the way the telco has worked for the past 100 years, but I've never tried it. $50 for unlimited everything is better than $120 (and up) for 400 mins and 2gb especially since it's now my only internet connection.

I used cincinnati bell with it for less than a month when I had their fiber optic internet. Tried to do a bundle. Their data service didn't work right so I had to do the old-fashioned voicemail hokey pokey, among other things.

guardian452 wrote: I don't see what the problem is with being a subscriber.

It locks you into their crappy overpriced "choice" of equipment. I can buy any phone I want and it will work. Go into a store here and there are literally 50 different phones I could use. What do you get, two ? And they're not even yours ?

I can even buy a phone with two separate sim cards and run two accounts on the same phone. Total cost, $30. (A lot of people in Hong Kong do that because the strange dual government system doesn't cross the border.) It is way cheaper because AT&T and Verizon do not give you a lovely deal on that "subsidized" phone. Over time you guys pay ten times as much.

$50 for unlimited everything is better than $120 (and up) for 400 mins and 2gb especially since it's now my only internet connection.

Meanwhile, it costs me about $15 a month. Admittedly, I don't use the phone very much for Internet access because a 3" screen really doesn't cut it. And I can entertain myself (oogling real live pussy is more fun than watching a Flash animation) for a few hours a day

But the point is, in the US people don't have that choice. If you don't belong to a "plan" you're screwed.

Here'a a big fat clue, guys : credit is NOT free. All you are doing by going the credit route is adding another mouth to your table. A self-righteous greedy mouth, at that. Every time you pay that phone bill, you should see Jamie Dimon's smug face in your mind. Here, Jamie ! Take twenty bucks ! It's your right !

Here ya go, I'll help you :



See that third spot from the top left side on that tie, guard ? The small one, not the big one. It's yours. Well, not exactly. It's his but you paid for it. Doesn't it make you feel all warm and fuzzy to know that your masters are doing so well ?

Health insurance ? Nah. Can't afford it. The economy can't bear that entitlement. Single payer ? that's socialism !! 1% federal income tax on Google, Apple, Microsoft, Cisco, Mittens, Kirk Kerkorian Carl Icahn Bain Capital et al while you pay 35%+, that's capitalism ! We sure as hell don't want to be doin' no redistribution of wealth !

If the feds or the state tacked a 5% tax onto every single thing you did, you'd all scream like Gloria Allred. But give you a shiny Gold Card ! that raises the cost of life 5 to 10% in every single aspect , hands the money to a bunch of slimy worthless bankers who do nothing useful with it but instead use it to further enslave you, and y'all bow down like acolytes at L. Ron Hubbard's feet.

Burn the goddamned credit cards and "payment plans" and pay for what you buy. Cash money. No more "security breaches" and banker horseshit. No more get rich quick schemes. No more "investments" that are nothing more than con games. No more "online banking." You can sleep like a baby because you no lonoger have to worry about hackers !! Tell the phone companies to fuck off and die with their stinky shyster tricks. Maybe you'll get your lives back if you try acting like adults.

The Tea Party has one thing right - if you don't feed these vipers, they will eventually starve. Take that first step.

Hamei speaks truth in his usual hyperbolic way (or so I hope)...

As a northern European, the US prices seem absolutely insane. The norm here used to be a per minute charge for phonecalls and per-message SMS costs (back when we have marks it was 1mk per message as I recall) in a subscription fashion, you signed the contract, got to choose your phone number and was given a (full size) SIM card. Thanks, goodbye. Also we sell phones here if... oh, you have one already, fine.

Data, as it were then, was a per-minute charge as well but as GPRS and EDGE moved to 3G it turned into rate-limited tiers, where you paid a certain amount for a certain level of service. Splendid. I can't remember what I paid before but the subscription I had up til last year with a 512k (up/down) speed limit (easily enough for my needs) was about 10 euros a month.

Some time after the introduction of EDGE the mobile operators started to get wind of this data cap business from abroad (I presume), and started selling packages with "1000 free minutes" and "1000 free messages" thing "for the heavy consumer", nothing that I was really interested in because I send and receive on average a quarter of a message a month and about as many phone minutes.

This has now morphed into a full data cap, all plans I found while looking for an LTE upgrade it seems come with "minutes", "messages" and "gigabytes" and cost a fair lot more... I was fortunate that my old provider allows upgrades of only the data service but I couldn't chose a rate limited one (but with the added latency benefits of LTE) so now I'm paying about 27 euros a month with (theoretically) more bandwidth to my phone than my home connection... (50Mb/s vs. 10Mb/s fibre) *grumble* PAYG please...

Prepaid is available, you can get a SIM card in any store or kiosk, as well as refills but it's socially seen as something for foreigners and losers

In any event, it boggles my mind that US subscribers blithely pay so much for phone service and can only hope that the service providers here get a grip and go back to the good old ways.

Also, is it true that you can be charged for receiving calls or messages in the US?

duck wrote: Also, is it true that you can be charged for receiving calls or messages in the US?

No. At least, not verizon (which is really vodaphone), tmobile, or mother bell.

I get the point of phone subsidies, so long as it's not a smartphone. It's great for grandma who needs a large-print phone (free) and basic 300 minutes service for $25 a month. As soon as you need that data connection the price skyrockets. But yesh, I went to the apple store, bought a phone, went to verizon and made damn sure there was no 'early termination fee' before getting their service. So when something better came along I could move it.

The thing I don't like about samsung phones, and I've seen this happen twice now to my father-in-law, is that after 2 years the network sends an OTA update that bricks it, forcing you to get a new one. Was working before, 'required' network update, OK to start? and then it never reboots. I haven't updated my i-phone since OS 6.1.2, you can turn off all auto-updates and it will just run peachy pretty much forever. Just like my old nokia brick phone with snakes and parachutes. My wife has an old HTC incredible and the problem with that is a lot of the newer apps and games don't even run on it. I shouldn't say "old" as it is newer than my iphone 4s. And it is up-to-date according to the update program, running android version 2.whatever. No patches for it.

But hammie, I think you missed a few points. My cellphone is my internet connection for my computer and xbox as well, via mywi. http://www.intelliborn.com/mywi.html I agree, watching a movie on a cellphone is not a cinematic experience. But you can do a lot of other cool things with it.

Also, I'm canadian. After 9 months of working for the biggest bunch of cheats and liars I've ever met, they've finally decided to not pay me for the last time. So earlier this month, after told I may not see a paycheck again and could they pretty-please pay me in their worthless stocks, I demanded to be laid off along with a bunch of other guys. Nothing says merry christmas quite like "you're not getting paid for december and we don't know when you'll get your check from november". And never mind the fact that's a violation of many laws to pay monthly in the first place; the big one in Ohio is of course minimum wage. When they first started these shenanigans two months after I started, I started bitching to ohio's department of commerce and never stopped. But they continued not paying me.

So anyways, that's all well and good, but my wife IS american. Thankfully, she's finally thinking that, yes, the US is really not as great as the greasy goobers say it is, and she's finally thinking of moving back do Canada with me. Maybe a trip to my hometown helped. Not to say that Canada is without faults, but the more sleazy aspects of life are certainly toned back a fair bit. And the food is a helluva lot better. We've had this conversation before: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=16726740&p=7351234#p7351234
The original argument was how patriotic she and her family was, since of course her father was USAF. I countered that my grandfather was in the RCAF in the 50s and 60s and now those two get along great. An F16 mechanic and a radar engineer.

I know if the great and glorious 'AMP moteur verks' tried half of their shenanigans in canada (or probably any other country in the world), every single one of these men: http://ampelectricvehicles.com/our-comp ... ement-team would be in prison. In the USA they are free to weasel more and more investor money while keeping their façade of building electric trucks.

Not so much that they didn't pay their employees, they didn't pay anybody . For almost two months, not even the landlord. A fair bit of my time, as an engineer, was spent talking to angry parts suppliers and trying to get enough free samples to get a vehicle built. And their finished product is rather mickey-mouse especially with regards to safety. A big part of the reason why they moved away from the GM kappa-cars and daimler's grand cherokee and ML450. The heavy truck industry has many fewer regulations than passenger cars.

However, we did get that great pig of an old Navistar 1652SC to under 1 kWh/mile. With most of the original allison 2400. And that's gotta be worth something . Doesn't matter how sleazy the boss is, awesome is as awesome does I also got to spend a fair bit of time at honda's unofficial skunkworks and see the new NSX among other things. If you took jeremy clarkson here, he would die. (to quote him directly, from that millau bridge episode of top gear, "if you brought an american here, he would die")




Aaaaannnyways , and I apologize for the rant, but the fact is if you don't have anything more important to worry about than your phone bill, or the price of minutes in china, life must be pretty good

guardian452 wrote: Aaaaannnyways , and I apologize for the rant

No, it wasn't half-bad. Keep after it a little and you can join the Prophets Raving in the Wilderness club

but the fact is if you don't have anything more important to worry about than your phone bill, or the price of minutes in china, life must be pretty good

Yes. China is okay.

I absolutely do not get people's obsession with their phones, if I want to web browse I need at least a 21 inch monitor at 1600x1200 or it's not worth it, and why spend 45 minutes in a text conversation that could have been done in two minutes using voice? So alright, I'm a Luddite...

Tim Cook, Chief Slimeball Confidence Artist for Apple wrote: "In July, when Apple reported revenue in Greater China had dropped 14 percent in the previous quarter, he blamed a downturn in purchases in Hong Kong, where tourists and resellers are major customers."

Ahem. Does this answer your question, O45 ?

Can we say, "Another little con game", children ? I knew we could ....

My only question is, what is 'Lesser China' ?