Latest Parries
December 2012
Some Consumer Affairs
I’ve tried to enjoy schlepping water, thinking that it serves to keep us to some human roots.
April 2012
From Nokia N95 to iPhone 4S
Annoyances and upsets with the iPhone 4S have been more than offset by its screen, the silkiness of its surfaces, the camera, and the third-party market for both software and hardware.
February 2012
2001: A Space Odyssey: Dry, Juicy, Linear, Luminous
After they finished watching the Bond movies, I figured the next series John Gruber and Dan Benjamin would discuss on The Talk Show would be Stanley Kubrick’s oeuvre. But Gruber refused — too personal for podcasting, he said. Disappointed, I rewatched 2001.
January 2012
A Scheme of a Number of Friends
Instead of acknowledging the wisdom of leading from behind, the Right jumped on the Obama administration’s handling of Libya as yet another example of at best incompetence. They lost me there.
October 2011
The Mouse and the Cantilever
Steve Jobs we lost at the age of 56; when Frank Lloyd Wright reached that age it was still only 1923, the time of merely his second comeback with Tokyo’s Imperial Hotel.
March 2010
Friendship is for Weenies
It’s amazing, given the adulation he enjoyed elsewhere, that the Israeli public knew from the start not to trust this US President.
Before the Setup
Nobody from usesthis.com has asked me what my setup us, nor is likely to anytime soon. So I’m just going to mouth off here about it. But first, some background.
February 2010
Walter Russell Mead steps gingerly into the Wieseltier/Sullivan imbroglio
On the Leon Wieseltier/Andrew Sullivan spat, Walter Russell Mead seems to want to have his strudel and eat it too.
October 2009
My Hope: Obama’s Change
Defeat in the Olympics bid may focus the mind in the Oval Office where it should be: Afghanistan.
July 2009
At Modi’in Mall
There’s nothing else around here except empty desolate pretty hills. The Israel Trail passes by a bit to the west. It’s a hot July Wednesday morning. Things are reasonably busy. The shops are mostly franchises, almost all homegrown — Super-Pharm, Aroma, Tzomet Sfarim, Cup O’ Joe’s, LaMetayel, Mega, Fox, Castro, H&O.
A t 77, Warren Buffett is now the world’s richest man. To me it makes sense that this position is held not by someone whose primary job is to produce goods or services but to invest in those who do. Me, after two decades of wanting to, I finally bought some stock. It wasn’t just poverty that got in the way; I think it was also the hassle. Now I can trade online via a web site — no visible middlemen — which is the way I always wanted to do it. The site I chose to use from here in the UK is the aptly named SelfTrade.
What I bought is no big surprise: AAPL. The stock had reached a peak of $200 and I bought a month or so ago in two little batches, at $133 and $127. Hey, it’s a start. Today the stock closed at $126 after reaching a recent low of $119 yesterday. Buffett talks about good companies having moats protecting them from competitors: Give me $100 million to dislodge Coca Cola from being the world’s soft drink and I still couldn’t do it, I read someone recently attribute to him. That’s a moat.
To my mind, Apple’s operating system is such a moat. As one of the many people who spends too much of his day in a chair in front of his computer, the computer’s operating system is a genuine contributor to quality of life. Apple would have to seriously mess up and somebody else would have to do some amazing work to make me change. I’m locked in, as are very many others. Few people now are likely to switch from Apple to Windows — but that does not hold true for the other direction.
This is one big reason for believing in Apple as a great investment: the dominance of Windows. Though it may take some time, Apple’s OS is eventually going to dominate, it seems to me, and right now with only 6% or so market share that’s a lot of computers to sell. And of course, Apple is the only operating system manufacturer that also sells the machines it runs on, let alone owns the shops that sell them, so that Apple stands to become a colossus, even a frightening one. There is no other company in the world that has a vertical monopoly on a must-have consumer product costing around $1500.
Beyond that, it seems to me that having the dominant computer operating system in the world really does put you on top of the world. Is there any other product that is such a glue holding together our current modern global society? Commercial aircraft I guess, Boeing and Airbus, but still, these are not mass market products so the number they can sell is limited, and they are not digital so profit margins can never get too huge. I suppose this is very intangible, not something that a stock market cares about, but it seems such a fabulous position to hold.
When working at Deepend in 2005-6 I was the only Windows guy. Just as I base my shopping on the prices of some common baseline items, eg, chicken corn soup in Chinese restaurants, so I based my opinion of Apple’s OS X on its window handling. In OS X a window can only be resized from a very small handle on the bottom right corner whereas in Windows it can be resized from anywhere along an edge. The Windows way seemed so obviously more helpful that I presumed OS X would be riddled with other idiocies. But OS X’s Dock made me think otherwise: here applications are hidden but appear when you need them, and grow as you approach them, making it easier to click on them, whereas in Windows they stay small.
Apple’s unhelpfully limited windows manipulation turned out to be an outlier rather than emblematic. And there’s now a solution, Zooom, which remedies OS X’s window manipulation weaknesses by allowing you to increase a window’s size and pick it up and move it from anywhere on the window, making it instantly better than Windows’ window manipulation.
And I’m writing this blog entry using MarsEdit, great software for blog publishing. The equivalent for Windows is Live Writer. While looking for that (aren’t I helpful?) I see there’s such a thing as Windows Live. When in the Apple ecosphere you can happily forget all about the Microsoft one. I wonder in which year it will be that most of us do. Until then I believe I’ll be buying more AAPL whenever I can.
My thanks to you and goodnight.
Previously
Clash of the Midgets
Nextly
All So Simple