[Jimbotomy5cxd]

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How many other products and services are available from Apple that don't actually generate a lot of revenue on their own? Let's see: iLife, iWork, Mac OS X, Final Cut Pro and other pro apps, iCloud... iTunes music, movies, TV shows, and other content... iBooks... Apple Maps, Siri... So why does Apple keep doing anything of these things, if they're each not at least $10 billion businesses? Obviously it's because they add value to Apple's other products.

All of those things you've named are software, software that enhances existing hardware products. And while you've mentioned the Apple TV as a hobby, there's no question in my mind that if it worked, once the pieces were in place, it could generate significant revenue.

The response to this iWatch objection is that people will suddenly start wearing iWatches when they wouldn't wear a different watch. I don't think this is the case. I'm very skeptical that Apple would enter such a market unless they had a strong belief that it would add at least $25 billion in annual revenue or so. It doesn't seem like a good return otherwise.

I'd much rather they buy Tesla and see what they can do to the car industry.

[lkrupp]

"Apple, Google and other companies." Uh-huh. You know that not one of those companies has actually released a wearable computer, right?"

Unless and until Apple actually releases the mythical iWatch the others will simply sit back and wait for Apple to 'fail' before doing anything. When such a device takes off only then will we see Samsung and the others turn on the copy machines.

[Sigivald]

"while Dell has made headway building supercomputers, they lack the second part of the puzzle, a natural language processing solution. It is the marriage of both that makes platforms like IBM’s Watson possible. "

Dell "builds supercomputers" by plugging rackmount servers into one another with clustering software; this is *totally standard stuff* in the industry.

(Indeed, Apple has its own distributed computing solution - Xgrid - that nobody uses, figuratively speaking. The only real difference at the high level is that you can't get an Apple system in a rack anymore.)

There's very little demand or profit in that - even with "natural language processing" thrown in for gravy.

It's a very interesting Computer Science research area. It's not a money-pump, at least not yet. (Possibly never, but definitely not yet.)

[RipRagged]

Fake Steve Jobs was funnier than hell. Dan Lyons is painful. The difference is analogous to the difference between watching an animation of someone juggling open straight razors, and trying it by yourself – drunk – while someone squirts your hands with lemon juice.

[BrianM]

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I have to admit that with Mr. Cook at the helm of Apple Inc. It seems the product cycle has quickened to a dizzying pace. <...>

Typical Mac hardware upgrades has been 6-8 months for many years, it is only iDevices that were around a year... and the only thing to break that was the one recent iPad update (about 7 months, so not even dramatically short)

[jpmhughes]

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Dear M-A-L You had a type up there in the first sentence of the third paragraph before the conclusion of this scathing Dan Lyons critique: As yourself why someone would do that. He probably does it because he believes it. Siegler is certainly opinionated and antagonistic ... I believe "As" should be "Ask".

You have a typo up there where you typed type in response to the Macalopes typo. Now go away. : P

[ericole]

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The redoubtable Richard Dawkins identified a main source of evolution denialism as "argument from personal incredulity". As in "Why, personally I just can't BELIEVE that X could happen, therefore it didn't."
Lots of this kind of reasoning among the tech punditry.

Unfortunately, Dawkins suffers from the mental case he defined - which is probably why he defined it. He has a hard time making a rational case for his beliefs. "Of course there couldn't be an all-powerful being that made all this stuff - that's just too unbelievable. I'd rather believe we came from genetic dust sprinkled here by aliens billions of years ago." Oh, wait, where did they come from....?

Many who don't believe in evolution do so not because they can't imagine it happening - I can imagine anything - but because the real-world science doesn't really support it happening, or being able to happen. For one, the statistical odds make it an impossibility.

[ericole]

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It's about as annoying as the kid who screams "Mommy, mommy, watch me, watch me!" at the top of his lungs at the public swimming pool.

As if there isn't a ton of noise at the public swimming pool already? If it is your kid, and you want to see them doing something they think is cool, this isn't really a bad thing.