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WASHINGTON POST: "If Apple merely continues to turn out better and better products for which consumers are willing to pay premium prices, it’s hardly a bad fate. Microsoft has been milking its Windows, Office and Xbox cash cows for years, and probably can for years more — especially if the company succeeds in re-inventing its offerings for the touch-screen products that appear likely to dominate our near-term future in consumer electronics. But an Apple without startling new innovations wouldn’t be the Apple we’ve known for so long. It wouldn’t be Steve Jobs’s Apple. And that, investors may decide, may make it something less than the nation’s most valuable company."

A conversation between me and Tumblr about Apple.

ME:  One day people will realize that buying a new iPhone every single year — and, also, the idea that a company convinced people will buy a new iPhone every single year — is just insane and also just plain unrealistic and in no way a sustainable business model and, sky-high as its stock price is now, its share price will take a hit once folks arrive at this rather common-sense conclusion.
TUMBLR:  Shut up you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about*.
ME:  OMG you’re right.  What do I know?

Taiwan’s Foxconn Technology Group, which assembles Apple’s iPhones and makes components for top global electronics companies, closed a plant in China on Monday after about 2,000 workers were involved in a brawl at a company dormitory.

It was not clear how long the shutdown would last at the plant, which employs about 79,000 people in the northern Chinese city of Taiyuan, while police and company officials investigate the cause of the disturbance.

Foxconn said the trouble started with a personal row that blew up into a brawl. But some people posting messages on a Twitter-like site said factory guards had beaten workers and that sparked the melee.

“The plant is closed today for investigation,” Foxconn spokesman Louis Woo told Reuters. An employee contacted by telephone said the closure could last two or three days.

Reuters, “FoxConn China Plant Closes After Clash Involving 2,000.”

Meanwhile at Apple stores.

Imagine that every year or so a shoe manufacturer releases a slightly different shoe in that it’s slightly different because there’s like totally new shoelaces and that pattern on the sole is slightly different and despite that you absolutely need to have that newest pair even if the pair you have on right now is just fine, because hey look at those different laces and reworked sole and did we mention they’re made in some inhumane factory in China? Gotta have those new shoes.

AP: "When AT&T started slowing down the data service for his iPhone, Matt Spaccarelli, an unemployed truck driver and student, took the country's largest telecommunications company to small claims court. And won. His award: $850."

Sounds like precedent to me.  Good thing AT&T only has 17 million other customers who could be subject to throttling.  Let’s see: 17 million times $850 = oh, shit!

Glad I’m not an AT&T customer.

iBAD   Sarah Ryan of change.org delivered petitions to Apple store team leader Ryan Sprance, center, at the Apple store in New York’s Grand Central Terminal Thursday. The petitions ask Apple to change manufacturing practices and to address worker conditions at manufacturing partners in China. (Photo: Mary Altaffer / AP via the Wall Street Journal)
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iBAD   Sarah Ryan of change.org delivered petitions to Apple store team leader Ryan Sprance, center, at the Apple store in New York’s Grand Central Terminal Thursday. The petitions ask Apple to change manufacturing practices and to address worker conditions at manufacturing partners in China. (Photo: Mary Altaffer / AP via the Wall Street Journal)

To Tumblr, Love Pixel Union