By Mark Tennent in Reader
Posted in iPod, Broadband, Internet, iPhone on December 26, 2009 at 2:04 pm
Every morning I drive alongside the harbour. It’s not a big port, mainly aggregates and timber but Constable and Turner thought it good enough to visit. When the economy isn’t doing well or rough seas send the fish down deep, the fishing fleet stays behind the lock gates and Carrot’s Café is full.
This year something is different. Alongside the fish market quay, tough little beam-trawling day boats rock with the wind, each marked with SM on their bows to show their port of origin. The fleet are stubby little craft, halfway between what land-lubbers would call a boat or a ship, all streaked with rust but with smart blue and white stripped bows.
Red Snails in the Sunset
Further along the harbour, lines of much larger stern trawlers are moored two or three deep, their bows showing they have come from harbours around southern Britain, some from much further. Where the day boats go a fifty or a hundred miles into the English Channel, these larger ships can stay out for days. Usually a day boat’s mast will have a radar and VHF aerial but these new trawlers are festooned with gadgets designed to extract the maximum amount of fish from the sea.
As so it looks like our local fishing industry will be ruined by these interlopers. It has weathered cuts in fishing quotas and sometimes complete bans on certain species but the extra ships are just going to decimate local fish stocks. Even for the solitary fishermen who go out a couple of miles off-shore in small open boats. They come back on the tide, pull their clinker built wooden hulls up the beach and sell their catch to passers-by, usually so fresh it is still flapping.
Roe, Roe, Roe Your Boat
Meanwhile in California, with Steve Jobs at the helm Apple has taken on and beaten some of the world’s biggest industries as well as investing in innovation to create a host of new gadgets. Apple also make some pretty neat computers.
First they tamed the music industry which was desperate for a way to control illegal downloads, so that now the bulk is via Apple’s severs. They even have a quarter of all music sales on any media.
Next Apple took on the likes of Nokia, Samsung and Sony Ericsson, redefining the form-factor for cell phones in much the same way they invented the shape of all laptop computers.
The Impossible Bream
The latest rumour is that Apple has its sights on TV and film distribution and is about to launch an alternative to cable and satellite TV. According to this Wall Street Journal report it will be via a subscription-based service through the iTunes store.
The networks will pay a little more for their current presence and in return Apple will pay the networks a fee per subscriber. As it will be risking none of its own money, Apple doesn’t even need to make a profit from the service. The rumoured price of the iTunes TV subscription service will be $30 per month, which, while offering an alternative, is not likely to make the UK’s current TV services lose any sleep.
Final Fintasy
In 2007 Jobs is reported to have said that he saw the iPhone’s impending launch as an effort to put the third leg onto a chair with only two legs, these being Apple’s Mac and iPod business. Time has proven that his three legged chair is inherently stable but will adding a forth leg make it wobble? Personal struggles with broadband speed, telephone services, cell phone reception, cable access would say so.
Shark! the Herald Angels Sing
The other thing fishy about Apple’s offerings is their pricing structure. In the UK, opening the iPhone market was meant to make prices fall as competition forced companies to lower costs. Instead we see similar prices across the field, hidden by slightly different packages making it is almost impossible to compare one with the other.
One suspects Apple has a tight grip on cell phone distributors leaving them little leeway to cut prices. Only in France has iPhone prices plummeted, an iPhone 3Gs dropping from €149 to €59, but it took a court ruling to open the market. In the UK a thirty quid TV subscription service is just not going to succeed and especially as a lot of programs are available on-line for free already.
Rated: 100% (2 votes)
Loading ...Make a comment
Tag cloud
Archives
- July 2010
- June 2010
- May 2010
- April 2010
- March 2010
- February 2010
- January 2010
- December 2009
- November 2009
- October 2009
- September 2009
- August 2009
- July 2009
- June 2009
- May 2009
- April 2009
- March 2009
- February 2009
- January 2009
- December 2008
- November 2008
- October 2008
- September 2008
- August 2008
- July 2008
- June 2008
- May 2008
- April 2008
- March 2008
- February 2008
- January 2008
- December 2007
- November 2007
- October 2007
- September 2007
- August 2007
- July 2007
- June 2007
- May 2007
- April 2007
- March 2007
- February 2007
- January 2007
- December 2006
- November 2006
- October 2006
- September 2006
- August 2006
Most commented posts
Highest Rated Blog Posts
- Blinking Cursors (100%)
- iPhoniness (100%)
- Relevant eloquent pleading (100%)
- Frozen in Time Machine (100%)
- Moondrop to Agony (100%)
- Coding Monkeys and a Hat full of Sky (100%)
- Grrrr Growl (100%)
- Chasing the dragons (100%)
- It just sits there dribbling (100%)
- And the Winner is… Who cares? (100%)
