Slippery Oil Price

What in the world is going on with the price of oil? Just a few months ago, in June 2008, it was $140 a barrel and now it's less than $97. The high price was justified because of demand, but what justifies the drop? Surely, the demand has not dropped 40% in four months?

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Surely it has nothing to do with keeping Oil as the primary energy source? With a oil price above $130, it makes economical sense to develop alternative sources of energy. With the oil price dropping, this might not be the case anymore. So the investments in alternative energy sources will come to a halt. And oil remains the primary energy source.
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Zaaf

iPhone App Store exclusion policy

Apple's application store for the iPhone and iPod Touch has some nice things about it: One central point for the developer to promote his app, one central point where the billing and accounting is done. For me as a user it has some nice points as well in that it is the only place I need to look if I want to find an app or an app update.

However, since Apple is also the one allowing or disallowing applications based on their functionality, this single point of entry is not so shiny. In the past, Apple removed the I'm Rich app that cost $999,- because it did not have any functionality. The other thay, a genuine podcatcher application with more functionality than the iTunes / iPhone combination was rejected because it duplicated Apple functionality. Read about it here. Ultimately this will lead to the Worst Case Scenario Extrapolating From the iTunes App Store, Fully-Expressed in the Form of a Single Tweet by Steven Frank

(For those to lazy to click):

Scenario: Apple makes code-signing mandatory for desktop Mac applications. You can now only buy them through iTunes. Think it can't happen?

Scary isn't it? When that happens, the Mac-platform as we know and love it will be dead.

Zaaf

Reduce Mac Pricing?

In a recent article, ars technica suggests that Apple should reduce the prices of their products in order to gain market share. In my non-statistically sound experience of buying two high-end Apple-branded laptops I can definitely state that macs have become a lot cheaper.
My first ever Macintosh computer was an Apple Titanium Powerbook G4 667MHz with 30GBytes of hard drive and 512MBytes of RAM, which I bought for € 3229 (excluding 19% sales tax) on March 30th, 2002. I recently bought a MacBook Pro 2.5GHz core 2 duo with 250GBytes of hard drive and 4GBytes of RAM for € 1995 (excluding 19% sales tax). My TiBook had only half of its maximum RAM where the MacBook Pro has its full RAM allotment. So over the course of six and a half years, the high end Apple Macintosh laptop has become 38% cheaper.

I wouldn't mind if Apple dropped their prices even more, but I'm not complaining about their current prices.

Zaaf