This reminds me of something mentioned in a (very interesting) lecture that hinted there is some deeper fundamental reason for apple's advantage. The clip is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RYXqCtsZsc (watch from 21:00 for the exact part).

It claims that Apple has some major advantage in terms of capital cost for the devices themselves. It mentions their chips but I don't see how they can have such a major advantage.

I'd love to hear if anyone has any insights into how they might be able to have radically lower costs.

The guy seems pretty credible.

He's talking about the supply chain optimization. One example is the dram chips used to build the iphone came from Samsung. They were sourced at quantities so large they are actually cheaper for Apple's iPhone than they are for Samsung's own phones. Streamlined products where the only segmentation is storage space make this possible. They can actually request such a large order their competitors can't match and get squeezed to the end of the manufacturing line while also paying more. To match they have to spend more. This hurts even more if your'e not controlling the distribution.

To the average non-techie all they have to decide is what color and storage size they want. This makes the device friendlier to consumers and takes away stress of understanding the hardware choices. The customer is actually happier if they don't have too many choices. People pay as much for this as they do the curated apps.

I've read elsewhere that Apple also started fronting the capital for the plant investment required to build the components they need, in return for very favourable lock-in agreements ("We will always be able to buy your product at 10% less than anyone else." That kind of thing.)

In short, Apple is thinking big & thinking long term all the time & they are reaping the benefits. Even if you don't like the products (and I personally find the whole walled garden thing somewhat creepy) you have to recognise that their strategic thinking is what's lead them to this dominant position in terms of profits.

(There's also the taking advantage of something approximating slave labour in China thing of course, but sadly that's hardly limited to Apple: like everything else they just seem to be better at it than anyone else is.)

I very much agree with your skepticism when it comes to believing the results of large scale simulations of complex systems. I personally think many people incorrectly transfer the certainty that we have of the underlying phenomena to the results of these complex simulations. No rational person disputes the direct effects that CO2 has on the absorption and re-emission of IR but once this is included into hugely complex simulations, I believe a very large degree of skepticism is warranted.

However for almost exactly the same reasons I maintain some skepticism over the simulation results, I am personally very strongly in favor of minimizing man's impact on the environment. Precisely because it is a hugely complex system and I don't believe we can predict the effects of any changes we make to the environment.

Depressingly, it seems that the chances of persuading America to really embrace a serious reduction in its CO2 emissions (especially if the Republicans get any more power) is extremely small. And even if America were on-board getting world-wide consensus would still be difficult in the extreme.

It may very well be that the only option we have is deal with consequences of climate change as they arise. This will likely be more expensive than if we were investing in reducing our impact now but the way politics works the world over means that people are very reluctant to take short-term pain for long-term gain. And it should be remembered that even if the climate changes even faster than has been predicted, it will still be a gradual process, and countries will adapt to it the best way they can as and when it is required. By this I merely mean to dispel the idea that some people seem to have of utter catastrophe if action is not taken.

At its core, the CO2 argument is an energy balance argument and many of the details are unnecessary. To determine long-term, global temperature rise, you just need to know the energy in and energy out, which can be done in principle without knowing anything about climate.

The problem is that some things that affect the radiation balance, chiefly changes in water vapor and clouds, are products of the local conditions, and it is to estimate the effects of those that you need simulations.

The problem is that people seem to transfer their skepticism of the global climate simulations to the basic energy balance argument. Humans ARE affecting the climate, it's just that we may be affecting it in such a way that the net warming is hard to estimate because there are fairly large forcing terms that cancel.