What higher price? IPhones cost $100 to $300 new with contracts. The Android phones I've seen cost $100 to $300 with contracts. Most of the cost is in the service plans, which are very similarly priced.

I suppose there may be a bunch of crappy Android phones, floating around under my personal radar, available for even less than $100. That sounds like false economy to me. If you're gonna get soaked for $2400 in cellular bills over two years you might as well spend the extra 1-4% and do so in style.

Of course, this is a USA perspective. Things are probably very different outside the USA.

I have an HTC Hero on T-Mobile at UKP20 per month, which compares very well to the iPhone offering which is UKP35 per month, slightly less if you accept a lower offering in terms of calls and texts. So for a little more than the price of an iPhone, I can get two Android devices, one for me and one for my wife.

The experience is STUNNING with excellent performance and more features than I've yet had a chance to grok fully. It's definitely the most exciting computer I've used for a long time.

> Of course, this is a USA perspective. Things are probably very different outside the USA.

Yes, here in Italy it's pretty common to find phones that are unlocked, and full price. I saw a 3gs at the store for 600 Euro the other day. Android phones are also pretty expensive, but not quite to those levels.

Overall, I like seeing the full price as it helps you to compare phones, not phones + whatever wonky plan they're trying to sell.

http://www.amazon.com/Motorola-A855-Android-Verizon-Wireless... $20

Verizon's also advertising two Droids for the price of 1 (or buy one, get one "free")

Correct, the price of the phone is about the same and I'd say my Droid Incredible is quite comparable to the iPhone in terms of quality and experience (I had a G1 before, which I loved, but could not quite say was on par with an iPhone). But there's another price- being locked in to AT&T, being locked in to phones made by Apple, being locked out of web sites that use Flash or apps that Lord Jobs has not blessed. The original point still stands, IMHO.

Hmmm. I got my unlocked HTC Desire for £350, and googling for 'sim free iphone 3gs' shows me prices in the £600 range.

Sure, but that's not how 99% of people get their phones, especially here in the US. From the perspective of a typical US phone buyer, who purchases a phone along with a 2-year contract, the prices are about the same.

Same in the UK, but looking at the cost of iPhone contracts and HTC desire contracts, the difference in cost does seem to be borne out - iPhone contracts look to be more expensive here.

How else was Apple going to maintain their 55%+ profit margins on the things?

It sure does make you wonder why Verizon is charging as much as AT&T for their Android plans when the device is almost half the cost. I guess the answer is because they can, because they have a better network. I also wonder if Android handset vendors will try to get a cheaper plan out of Verizon when the Verizon iPhone supposedly lands this summer/fall...

> How else was Apple going to maintain their 55%+ profit margins on the things?

Gross margin on Apple products has consistently been around 33%, at least for as long as I've been listening to their quarterly conference calls.

> The Android phones I've seen cost $100 to $300 with contracts. Most of the cost is in the service plans

The unsubsidized N1 costs $1700 over two years compared to ~$2500. If you factor in the cost of the contract, the difference is huge.

Huh? The N1 costs $529 https://www.google.com/phone/choose . Or are you quoting prices in a different currency than USD?

He's talking about phone + service over two years.

Here an unlocked HTC Desire is a good 30-40% cheaper than and unlocked iPhone 3GS.

When I bought my first Macbook Pro a few years ago, I purchased it for the hardware and intended to use it to run Windows in Bootcamp. After spending a little time with OS X I came to appreciate it and I now use it exclusively. But my favorite thing about it is the UNIX like underpinning. Which in a sense makes it less locked down than Windows.

Same here. I bought by Macbook just as a nicer alternative to a Dell and six months later I erased my Win partition.

However I may feel about iPhoneOS, Mac OS X is a beast that nothing else can compare to. At least for a consumer unix experience where everything just works.

For values of "everything just works" that don't include standard developer tools. Getting a new macbook into configuration for (for example) web development is a PITA compared to any distro I've used that came with a decent package installer (apt, yum) out of the box. You have to hack up the damned keyboard settings just to get home and end keys to work.

That is because you are trying to use your Mac like it's a Linux box. Use the OS X keyboard shortcuts (which happen to be the same as Emacs, Ctrl-A and Ctrl-E respectively) and grab MAMP and you are good to go.

You don't even have to grab MAMP or Xcode, since Apache, PHP, Ruby, Python, emacs and vim come preinstalled with OS X. So you just have to get the database server. Until you have to compile something.

I don't see the difficulty with compiling. Just get out your install disk, open up the optional installs, install XCode. You now have all the standard Unix developer tools (in addition to the XCode app, which you don't have to use).

I agree, I don't see it either. The whole point of my previous comment was to show that OS X ships with so many things that you don't have to install anything to start programming in PHP, Python or Ruby. "Until you have to compile something" refers to the fact that this claim doesn't hold anymore when you have to compile, for example, a native extension to those languages.

Discs still exist? I haven't installed an OS from a disc in years. And I haven't installed a compiler from one ... ever.

You can download xcode too, you just need an apple developer account. I prefer downloading than going hunting for my Mac OS X disc.

Honestly, do yourself a favor and check out MAMP. It works great and won't gack the next time apple updates php, mysql, etc. I even kicked in and bought MAMP Pro and its arguably the biggest time saver on my laptop.

It also comes with sqlite.

Mapping Caps Lock to Control helps. Now I find myself trying to do it on my Windows box at work vs reaching way over to the home and end buttons.

I can't work on any machine that doesn't have this done. Of course, I always have Emacs open, so convenient ctrl access is critical. :)

Might I suggest running a VMWare image with the same flavor of linux that your production server uses? I've been using this set up happily for years. As a bonus you can copy the dev image to other developers or use it to set up larger dev server.

Install xcode + mac ports? True about the terminal settings I guess, especially if you use screen + irssi.

The hardware lock in is the much less interesting of the two lock ins you mention. Regardless of which platform you use, you are locking yourself to the software much more than to the hardware.

I think it is more of a case of the software locking you to the hardware for apples case which is rather interesting now that the hardware, at least for Macs, is now pretty much standard hardware with regards to processors and such.

Uh, battey tech? Trackpad? Everywhere you look on Apple products (if you are discerning) you'll see them utilizing the crap out of their hardware control. If I'm not mistaken we're about to see Apple turn up the heat on further hardware differentiation on notebooks to take advantage of their multi-touch gesture patent portfolio, perhaps by elongating the glass trackpad. On the iPhone front I'm guessing that Apple's custom silicon will allow them to get raw graphics performance while simultaneously preserving battery life. Logically this is kind of technology that Google, without control over hardware, is powerless to compete against.

> On the iPhone front I'm guessing that Apple's custom silicon will allow them to get raw graphics performance while simultaneously preserving battery life.

Where does this assertion come from. Apple has produced a processor that does a great job at conserving battery life. Nothing that I have seen leads me to believe that Apple has the tech/experience to 'get raw graphics performance while simultaneously preserving battery life.'

It comes from the iPad. It seems to have an incredible combination of power management, hardware-accelerated video decoding, fast OpenGL (for a handheld) that yields a long-lasting video device. (Despite it being a first generation iPad)

Does apple not support their older notebooks with new OS upgrades like tiger to leopard? If they do support them then I see no real reason why hardware cannot innovate with respect to android in a similar way and still provide support to older hardware styles just as new OS versions do.

Google powerless to compete? That seems like a fairly strong statement given how deep their pockets are.

Isn't that a conveniently simplistic way of looking at the past 30 years of Apple?

You mean the same simplistic way Apple users look at Adobe?

Remember Occam's razor: The simplest explanation is usually the right one.

Occam's Razor isn't a proof, it's a rule of thumb to help you find the answers you're looking for.

It's not even that. It just says unnecessary details are unnecessary.

It's better to think of it as a rule for constructing theories than for evaluating theories.