Loud Thoughts

How much money Apple makes with each iPhone?

Part of every $400 retail sales, probably 15%, so that is around $60 each. But this is only the most obvious part.

Steve Jobs also gets a cut from the owner’s cell phone bills, voice and data. Unlike other handsets, iPhone is not open. It works only on the networks of the authorized carriers, e.g. AT&T in the USA, that leverage exclusivity for marketshare.

IPhones owners all subscribe to various internet services. Since they access these services via an exclusive carrier and an unique device, the device became an interesting aggregator. If an advertiser wishes to access this most affluent segment of the consumers, they must pay the exclusive carrier and Apple, the near exclusive music supplier already.

Steve Jobs once stated,

The problem, of course, is that there are many smart people in the world, some with a lot of time on their hands, who love to discover secrets and publish a way for everyone. They are often successful in doing just that.

There are many smart people who like iPhone but hate the exclusivity nature of it. They have a lot of time on their hands and often successful hacking the protections.

I have encountered many iPhone users in China. They proudly show off the cool gadget and enjoy using it. The fact that iPhones are not sold or supported in China is hardly a deterrent. Walk into a store, ask for an iPhone, the clerk will give you a choice of hardware or software “unlocking” scheme. In China, iPhones cost $50 to $100 more, the smuggling and hacking surcharge.

China has more than twice the number of cell phone subscribers than the US. And China Mobile dominates the market. It is not hungry to for a competitive edge as the exclusive carrier for iPhones. By waiting, Apple becomes vulnerable to copycat products.

Take the money when it is still on the table, Steve.

Cell phone market is too big. The amount of money attracted the biggest and strongest players into this arena. Lots of marketing competitiveness and economic strategies are vying for advantages: really fun to speculate over a good glass of alcoholic drink.

There are 4 main forces shaping this market place:

• First there are the handset makers. Nokia, Samsung, Sony-Ericsson, and Motorola are the giants and there are hundreds of smaller players looking for a fraction share of the market. Strategies fall into two general categories: targeting general population or specific segments. There are companies specializing, for example, “black label” handsets that are customer-made for a specific client, usually with a large field personnel that used to carry pager in the old days. These handset are hard-wired for a carrier, stripped of unneccessary features (camera, mp3, etc.), and come with standardized parts and services. Whatever the strategy, the handset manufacturers pursue a single objective: to differentiate. They must be different, preferably unique, in some ways: pricing, features, color, form factor, software, contents, etc. IPhone reaches the pinnacle of this objective.

• The carriers have a different strategy and objective altogether. They pursue market share, use volume, and the ARPU (average revenue per user). Carriers are usually a monopoly for a country or is part of an oligopoly (joint monopoly of very few entities). Market share is usually not an interesting factor. They want users to use more services and higher priced ones too. When carriers introduce new services, they want all handsets to support them. For this reason, carriers do not really like handsets to differentiate themselves too much. In fact, they push handsets to conform to standards that they control.

• Next come the content providers that crave for attention: movies need watching, music needs listening to, web pages need browsing, etc. There are various business models, all of them depends on the number of eyeballs. Some of the content providers think the handset is similar to the TV set in the living room, with more personal data and interactivities. Most of them standardized on one or two formats and rely on third parties to create “players” for their contents.

• Last are the developers that create the software (most likely games) that run on either the carrier side or the handset side or both. They need the carriers to at least distribute their bits and collect money from users. They exploit the most of the hardware capability provided by the handset. They can usually create several versions of their software for the most prolific or “cool” handsets. They don’t mind handsets being different, just good enough to show off their latest creation.

Goggle eventually wants to make money off Android. Since the customers do not seem much benefits from one handset OS to another. This is a supplier side question? Which one of the 4 players will pay? How much?

I will leave the question as an exercise to you the reader.

Definitively Maybe Ryan Reynolds and Abigail Breslin Pub. Date: 14 February 2008

Cross posted at http://blogs.sun.com/syw

What a cute movie! Romantic comedies ran out of originality long time ago. Of course, they are never meant to be. The formula includes the chemistry, the tug-of-war of characters, some situation-comedy, and just enough sappy emotion to earn this genre the alternative name of chick-flick.

Ryan Reynolds and Abigail Breslin (Little Miss Sunshine) play a divorced father and daugther. The story starts when she insisted to know his past relationships; he obliged but turned it into a game. Both the little girl and the audience kept on asking, “What next?” As the story unfolds, it gets a bit strange that a daughter can be so obsessive about her father’s past. “Why is she so into this?” A little voice inside gets louder and building up the anticipation.

And that’s the gripping part of this movie: part plot and part acting. Every characters is likeable but the little girl was the best.

Not an ordinary chick-flick.

同步上网于http://blogs.sun.com/syw_zh

真是部好片子！没有落入传统浪漫喜剧的俗套。当然，俗套是必要的。元素包括：心灵“化学反应”、角色间的矛盾冲突、情景喜剧桥段和足够多的煽情，是的，这就是所谓的“言情片”。

瑞安·雷诺兹和“阳光小美女”阿比吉尔·布莱斯林分饰离异的父亲威尔和十几岁的女儿玛雅。故事的起因是玛雅不停地询问爸爸过去的罗曼史，威尔无奈之下只好同意，但把它变成了一场别有趣味的猜谜游戏。引人入胜的剧情引领着观众同玛雅一起不停的追问：“后来呢？”当故事逐渐展开，你会对玛雅的行为感到不解， “为什么她对老爸的过去如此感兴趣？”困惑感油然而生，对结局的期待也愈发强烈。

这正是影片精妙所在：情节跌宕，表演精彩。每位演员都很可爱但小美女才是最棒的。

绝对不是一部爆米花电影。

This tool makes a small dent on the surface for ease of drilling. A tap with a nail will also do the job. But if you are drilling all day long, this tool saves you from fetching the hammer and finding a nail every time.

It also saves lives. If your car plunges into the water, the best way to escape is to break the window and swim out. (You won’t be able to open the door.) How would you find a sharp object to deliver a quick blow on that piece of glass? Concerned for my family, I sought out this apparatus: eBay, local hardware stores, etc. I found a vendor quoting a price about 5% of the average selling price on eBay. Two conditions: minimum order of 500 and he is in China. Hmm…

In addition, I have a dizzy variety of customization choices: color of the punch, inscription (branding) on it, the style of packaging (none, plastic with stock-paper back, all plastic casing, etc.), insersion of a printed material or not, shipping options (boxes of 10 or whatever easy for them), etc.

For a minute or two, I dreamed of starting a business selling Automatic Center Punches. Buy here, sell there, make a bunch. All done with a simple phone. My own brand too. What should be my company’s name? Hmm…

Snap back. And I found Wall Street Journal explaining why manufacturing industry is not coming back to the US; the economy, infrastructure, and willingness to customize for a small order are forever gone. They are here in Asia, particularly China.

For decades, enterprises tried to scale up to capture the economy of scale. The art moved from vertical integration to supply-chain management. But the world has shifted to the demand side. Customers, individuals and companies alike, want it just right, just fit, just for them, one of the kinds, with style and personality. This is the era of massive customization, nano-segmentation, or whatever the new MBA buzzword for the same concept.

The equilibrium, or the optimal balance, point of this supply- and demand-side tug-of-war seems to be in China. It exists in the form of clustering: hundreds or thousands of small suppliers close to each other for the same industry. They, all anonymously together, funnel to a far fewer brands that distribute to the final paying customers. It is a complex economic organism. Nobody knows how they came together. But they used to be in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Now they are in ShengZhen, SuZhou, and pretty much the entire south-eastern China.

Is this how the world is becoming? I agree with that Wall Street Journal reporter, the US has lost it already.

Cross posted at: NomadicMinds, Sun English and Chinese blogs. Note that the Chinese and English contents are not quite the exact translation.

到底什么是北京小吃？北京人说豆汁焦圈，但真吃过的没几人。胪打滚，碗豆黄，艾窝窝去哪找？九门小吃把几个百年老字号召齐了，店开在后海北。游人转进孝友胡同,宋庆龄故居西，就看到了。进门先到吧台买卡（俩人百元尽够了，没用完可以找），再端个托盘逛去。爆肚冯、年糕钱、奶酪魏、羊头马、豆腐脑白、德顺斋。看招牌就谗了。贪心每家各买几盘，自己找张桌子（有点费劲）。再去拿筷子，盘子，点饮料。大张朵颐。吃撑了逛后海消化，日丽风和，柳枝拂水。人生不过如此。

许多点心都是名气大的百年字号。吃起来不错，但不能说是人间美味。德顺斋的烧饼及豆腐脑觉得很好。奶酪魏卖完了。羊头马，年糕钱就是地道但熟悉的味道。

I have heard so much of those famous, yet elusive, Beijing snacks. No one under 35 years old really have tasted the foul-smelled DouZhi (fermented soybean milk) and greasy JiaoQuan (fried dough, not even close to doughnut in taste, but similar in shape). Everyone said that someone else is crazy about them. Hmm.. Make you thin.

Since the massive QianMen renovation, many 100+ years snack stands moved to JiuMen Snacks, a food-court in traditional Chinese setting near HouHai district. Turn into this narrow alley, enter the imposing gate, you will be surrounded by Beijingers seeking their childhood comfort foods and snacks.

This are the real Beijing foods. Some could be too alien for out-of-towners, but the experience is definitively memorable.

Beijing discourages high-rises, no ShangHai-styled skyscrapers. CBD’s Hyatt Park holds the current record: 64 stories of nearly 250 meters. Others are strangely uniform at about 60 meters, or about 30 stories. Not too high and consistent enough to create an industry for future spider men.

  A single rope is his lifeline. The job requires covering a range just out of reach. Don’t waste the bucket of soapy water; it needs to survive the lowest window. A harness is a meager insurance attached to the same lifeline.

Keep up! Everyone needs another sweep before lunch.

Hey, you missed a spot.

Day Light Saving comes with many assumptions; the key one is that it saves energy, and therefore money.

In summer, when days are long, why not go home and enjoy your lives under the bright sun: catch a short round of golf after work or walk in the park after dinner. Save energy by not turning on lights for a couple of hours. That’s very nice.

It works only for regions of certain latitudes. Daylight change very little near the equator. In polar regions, the summer days are so long that it does not matter. In both cases, daylight saving time has little, and sometime negative, effect on energy consumption.

The shifting of clock comes with some undesirable effects. People turn on air-conditioning or other cooling devices when they arrive home. If they stay outdoor, they increase the risk of getting skin cancer. Activities start at dawn will deal with darkness.

Global coordinating are bothersome since regions are inconsistent. China and the state of Arizona, for example, do not observe daylight saving at all. Most European countries do it 3 weeks later than the US. Airlines, meetings, computer software, TV schedules, etc. all must tolerate several weeks of confusion.

Record keeping is a problem too. If an event happened at 4pm 5 years ago, how many hours it has been since? Astronologists will have trouble telling your future if your birth time is off. Do you know what time will it be 30,000 hours from now? You cannot. The regional government may change how it observe daylight saving before then. Are these important? I do not know.

Can the world simply live with one and only one clock? What happens if everyone observe UTC (Coordinated Universal Time)? Does it really matter that it is 12pm when Sun is at its peak? What’s wrong with mapping “sunrise” and “dinner” to a different clock marking than 6am and 7pm? If millions of people can be taught to change clocks twice a year, they should be able to learn to have lunch when the sun is near the peak, instead of at 12pm.

What’s amusing is the choice between two obvious solutions. The government may order the society to change the clock (what was 11am is now 12pm) or change the schedule (everyone takes lunch break at 11am instead of 12pm). Both are governmental edicts. I like the latter, but the world chose former.

User's Manual to Human Body 人体使用手册 吳清忠 ISBN: 7536046316 Pub. Date: 2006年1月 Publisher: 花城出版社

Cross posted at http://blogs.sun.com/syw.

If a free and legal version of the same book is available online, would you go to the bookstore and buy a copy with, say, 4 dollars? The answer is over a million resounding “YES.” The physical version of this book is a best seller in China (and Taiwan alike). It has sold more than a million copies. I personally bought 10 copies; friends asked me to get them a copy while I am there. The author describes a sales peak soon after publication followed by a even stronger one a couple of months later. The 2nd one was not only stronger but also diminished much slower. Words of mouths from the 1st peak readers is the only explanation.

The central theme is an alternative to our medicine concepts. The traditional medicine training see human body as a machine with complex parts. As we get old, or subject to invasion, those parts need chemical or mechanical assistances to maintain normal operations. The picture of an old, beat-up car come to mind. The engine needs tune-up, the tires need replacements, etc. Eventually, the whole thing wears down and we kick the bucket.

Chinese think differently. The body is a system that is capable of self-healing to infinity. For it to work, it requires energy similar to power-supply for computers. When the battery runs low, many parts of your computer stop working. There is no point fixing those part; re-charging the battery will restore everything to normal. In fact, if one is careful about the energy balance, immortality is quite possible.

“Heresy,” you cried. There is no scientific proof of such non-sense. Mr. Wu answered this challenge. The medicine researchers primarily learned from autopsies; there is no more energy flow in cadavers. Since Chinese tried to achieve longevity, they study those who live well and healthy, not the sick or dead.

Hmm… The nice thing about being a Chinese is that we can work with both systems. I will practice Qi control and take a Tylenol for headache too.

如果你可以从网络上免费下载到该书的正版，你还会去书店花大约30块钱买一本吗？一百万多人肯定。该书是中国大陆最畅销的图书之一（好像在台湾也是）。已累计销售过百万本。我一个人就买了10本送人。该书的初版即创销售记录，而几个月后的再版销售更是风潮猛烈而且更持久。首批读者的口口相传功不可没。

该书呈现了一种全新的健康理念。传统医学（西医）视人体为一部复杂的机器。当我们变老或生病，我们身体的某些零件就需要化学或者机械的协助来维持正常的机能。想一部老爷车的样子吧，引擎需要调校，轮胎需要更换等等。最后，当所有的零件都不听使唤了，我们也就到时候了。

但中医不这么认为。中医视人体为一个有自我修复能力的系统。要干活就得有能量，就好像给笔记本充电一样。当电池电量低时，许多组件便停止工作。但这并不意味着你需要修复那些组件，重新充电后一切就恢复正常。理论上讲，如果一个人可以一直保持能量平衡，那长生不老也不在话下。

你肯定会说：“胡扯”。这既没有科学依据也不合情理。但吴先生这样解释：西医学者们都是从尸检中探其究竟，但尸体已经没有任何能量了。而一直在追求长生不老的中国人，往往向那些长寿、健康的人取经，他们可都是无病无灾且充满活力的。

嗯，作为一个中国人的优势就在于我们可以兼容并包。我会勤练御气之功，当然，头疼也会吃两片扑热息痛。

6年前来北京，看到“苟不理”真兴奋。这包子可是天下闻名哪。迫不急待买他一屉，大失所望。勉强吃半屉，油味就塞饱了。老婆来时也过了同样的历程。我们双双发誓，永不再吃苟不理。和北京人谈起，“苟不理是天津菜，北京的不地道。要吃上天津去。”有回，老婆真去了趟天津，找到了正宗狗不理包子。“好吃，和北京的大不同。下次一起去天津吃。”

没错，“苟”不理，应该是“狗”不理。

几年过去。上个月，老婆有事去大闸栏。一看居然狗不理有个新门脸，买屉试试。一吃大大兴奋，味道和天津的一样。好极了。回家上网查查，东直门内簋街也有一家。刚好有个朋友要回美国。给她饯行呗，一伙人尽欢而归。而我至今还没吃到真正的狗不理包子呢。

Hal Stern几年前看了我的博志，及后来续篇。当他决定访华时，也一心要吃这大大有名的包子。终于，我有机会一尝天津狗不理包子了。他在华的最后一晚，一行四人，初试簋街狗不理。

这可不是路边的包子铺，是个观光大饭店。有门面，有带位，有经理，有伙记。当然也有彩色菜单，酒水饮料。包子一个可以20元。现包现蒸。Jim Baty一口咬下，“感觉像喝了口香槟。”哇塞，有这么好吗？大伙纷纷动手动口。又热又香，小到一口吃，热到拿不住。皮甜馅香，微带点汁。是好。

其他的菜就一般了。值得一提的是狗不理烧酒，点了高度的，顺口流畅，白酒里是不错的，但比名牌的便宜太多。值得一喝。

This 2008 election made fools out of pundits. Which of them even considered McCain just a few months ago? Bright-eyed, confident, 72-year-old, he is too pleased to see the attrition war on the other side.

Hilary definitely did not expect a bloody and exhaustive hand-to-hand battle. The party sees a classic prisoners’ dilemma: their fights to win will make the winner lose the big one and hurt the party. Is the sure-win Hilary-Obama ticket — experienced at the head and charismatic as 2nd-in-command – too obvious? The dynasty lives on when she returns to Arkansas to build the 2nd Presidential Library.