Golden Apples

How Does Apple Make so Much Money?
I sort of knew most of what's in here, but some of the numbers were very surprising. I am now carrying a cell phone with me. I've had it for a year or two, but recently my life has gotten a little more complicated, so having it with me helps. It's just a flip phone from Tracphone with a miserable camera, but the cost is negligible.

I guess the biggest surprise is the business about "easy to use". I don't think Apple products are easy to use. Seems to me like they make you take a zillion steps to do the simplest things. I think people like them because the endless maze of menus gives them something to play with. "If you just do this, and this and this and this and this and then this other thing you can send a smiley face to your BFF." Wonderbar. Not. But since Apple is making money and I'm not, I must be wrong. I still think their products are overpriced crap.

Ural Motorcycle with sidecar

It's kind of like Ural Motorcycles that way. Ural Motorcycles might be decent bikes now (I don't know), but a few years ago they were the epitome of Eastern European junk. They were cool though, if you were into 60 year old mechanical designs, and they were cheap. But they were unreliable, the dealership network was non-existent, so your best hope of getting any help fixing your broken machine was from another Ural rider, and so a network of Ural riders grew up. Sort of the same thing with iPhones. Kids saw other kids do cool things (for some value of 'cool') with their phones and the best way to find out how to do that cool thing was talk to other iPhone users. Which is what iPhone people like to do: talk to other people. Me, I'm more like Sargent Joe Friday of Dragnet: just the facts, ma'am.