It’s a killer squeeze for players like Samsung. They must choose between low margins and price parity with Apple, or higher prices/margins, but much lower sales (how many non-geek consumers will buy a $599 Galaxy Tab when they can get a $499 iPad?)

@Brian — I do think it’s a new phase for Apple. Steve Jobs is rattled by the rapid rise of Android and the specter of what MS did to Apple with its Windows model. My guess: in 2011 a wider range of price points on iPhone, from $400 to $700. This would kill Nokia’s attempts to get back into the high end, and take the wind out of Android’s sails.

Still a good time to buy AAPL.

If Apple’s director of technology development had marketed the character-glyph model for TrueType with intact character information for any complexity of composition, and the colour-colourant model of ColorSync with intact CIE colourimetry information for any complexity of separation, and if Apple’s Portable Digital Document format 1992-1997 had unified the character inforrmation so that search was supported, then PDF would not have the place it has today.

The trouble with PDF is the business model which was that Adobe did not need to work with application developers and OS developers, because Adobe could take PostScript which is page-dependent and convert that into PDF which is page-independent (: the word ‘document’ in Apple PDD and Adobe PDF refers to the page independence in Xerox Interpress which was a page and document description language). The pitch in Seybold 1993 was that the information in the application’s memory store could be inserted ex post facto into PDF.

This is still the pitch from Adobe, but the trouble is that PS to PDF does not work either for ICC imaging or for Unicode imaging. ICC profiles are subset and stripped down to work as PostScript Color Space Arrays, and TrueType SFNT fonts are subset and stripped down to work as PostScript character-coded fonts. Direct export to PDF 1.3 supports the ICC file format, but not transparency and not TrueType SFNT. ISO 19005-1:2005 still does not support transparency and TrueType SFNT. There are other troubles, too.

IMHO this situation might still have unfolded without decent developer documentation from the start, but the scale would have been significantly smaller. It has been said before, and it deserves to be said again, that the switch from impact writing to image writing is not a knowledge-free zone.

/hh

I’m not fully convinced yet that this is part of any larger Apple strategy. Rather, it’s the culmination of the company’s (unheralded) leadership and management not named Steve Jobs. Apple is generating so much money, so much foot traffic in their stores, are able to get cash from customers long before they pay suppliers, have created such a lean mean global logistics machine that they can move downstream rather effortlessly. Much to the dismay of others, Apple is now able to lower their price point while doing little harm to their margins I suspect.