
Linus Torvalds: Is Engadget really that stupid? Just corrupt? Trolling us all? - cramforce
https://plus.google.com/u/1/102150693225130002912/posts/8KBkzumMEc1
======
ericHosick
The entire "cell phone thing" in Vietnam (and I am sure other Asian countries)
is far superior to the USA (in my opinion). I can go to practically any corner
and get a SIM card for 5 USD and put it in a phone. I don't have to give my
name or an ID or join some plan. I just give them the phone, they put a sim in
and it works.

I can get a cell phone within a few blocks of basically anywhere I am.

The carriers make money selling calls and data: not phones.

And while I'm talking about this kind of thing... I can go anywhere and get
"free" wifi: even at Circle K. Ya. They have free wi-fi at the Circle K. I can
sit at a coffee shop, get a 3 dollar coffee, and work all day. Restaurants are
the same.

Admittedly, the internet speeds to the USA are not that great. However,
internal to Vietnam, they are really good.

~~~
tlianza
The USA has these things, don't they? They're just not popular options.
BoostMobile, AT&T's "GoPhones", Verizon PrePaid, etc. You can either get a
cheap phone, or bring your own phone, without a contract. Is it that
different?

~~~
greggman
The USA does not have cheap pre-paid sims with data. I visited Singapore. Got
a $50 credit pre-paid sim. Got 1gig of data for $7 a week, taken from the pre-
paid sim.

As far as I can see there are no pay as you go data plans in the US. Only
subscription plans. If there are I'd like to know of them

~~~
benmccann
I use T-Mobile's prepaid with my unlocked Android phone. I get 100 minutes
voice per month and unlimited data for only $30. They certainly don't
advertise it, but you can buy a prepaid SIM card from their website for only a
couple bucks and then sign up for this plan. I go over my minutes frequently
and pay $.10 per minute for the rest of the month at that point, but it still
comes out far cheaper than any regular plan.

~~~
jarek
FWIW, T-Mobile has recently withdrawn this plan, it is no longer available for
new or switching customers. Cheapest "unlimited*" prepaid data plan is now $50
a month.

~~~
subway
Must have been quite recent... I signed up for this plan about 12 hours ago.

~~~
jarek
Oh! Sorry, looks like I'm wrong. I do see it being offered on their website,
but it's for new activations only - that would explain why I was under the
impression it's no longer offered after not seeing it in the prepaid plan
switcher in my account.

------
programminggeek
This is one part of Apple's model that I swear people just don't get at all.
Apple, as a company, refuses to operate in unprofitable hardware markets. So,
they make a $329 7" tablet instead of $199. They make a $400 tablet with
"outdated" hardware, they make a $500 tablet that is top of the line. They
won't sell a sub $999 laptop.

Apple then focuses on selling as much of those products as they can
irrespective of market share. They don't deep discount just to gain
"mindshare" or "marketshare".

Engadget and others could moan that it isn't fair, but to be fair the only
company that has been able to build and sell even remotely comparable hardware
at comparable margins is Samsung, and frankly that is largely because Samsung
supplies the same parts to Apple, so Apple is effectively subsidizing
Samsung's overhead.

Other companies could play Apple's game, there certainly is room to do so, but
it is a low volume/high margin strategy traditionally. The anomaly is Apple's
been able to take low volume/high margin to very high volumes while leaving
the high volume/low margin business to everyone else as prices fall downward.

I don't feel bad for Acer, LG, ASUS, Sony, Dell, or HP because they've all
become so bad at designing, building, and selling a premium product that they
really don't deserve to be competing. Ironically, much of iPhone's design was
inspired by Sony's design heritage, and yet, Sony is still yet to truly match
it.

To put it another way, you know it's kind of a sad state of affairs when
Microsoft can put their own team together and ship a legitimate competitor to
the iPad in a very short period of time and Microsoft isn't even a hardware
company.

~~~
UntitledNo4
I disagree with the comment about Sony unable to match Apple's design. I have
an Xperia S and although I don't flaunt it around, people who have seen it
made comments about how good it looks. Including a few Apple Fans with
iPhones. A couple of friends even bought Sony phones after seeing mine. The
design of the phone was one of the main two reasons I chose Sony (the other is
sound quality when playing music on the phone). They even manage not to screw
up the Android experience, in my opinion. They are not the most popular
phones, but I think the design is not the reason for that.

~~~
GFischer
A coworker has a Sony (Live Walkman, not Xperia), and I don't like what they
did to his Android (maybe I'm too used to Samsung's TouchWiz).

Other than that, it's a nice phone.

------
CountSessine
Isn't this the same Linus Torvalds who just last week complained about how PC
laptops, commoditized and cut down to their marginal cost of production for
years now, weren't the target of innovation and how they were stuck using low
resolution screens?

~~~
drivebyacct2
You missed the part where the Nexus 4 out specs the iPhone? And many do? And
many outperform the iPhone?

~~~
CountSessine
I don't disagree with that, but remember that the development of each of these
smartphones is made more than a year ago with the profits of the last
smartphone. If LG is just scraping by with the Nexus 4, and Apple and Samsung
are ultimately forced to lower their prices to remain competitive, can we
really say that anyone in this industry is going to have the money to keep
pushing the technological envelope?

On the other hand, maybe the big players have exhausted themselves of their
creativity for the time being. After all, how creative is an extra row of
icons on the home screen? Or an even wider, bigger version of last year's
phone?

------
jordanthoms
Engadget has really gone downhill recently, AOL screwed up bad and everyone
left for The Verge. Just compare the quality of their Nexus coverage...

~~~
w1ntermute
Yep, _The Verge_ is the only site I visit for gadget-related news these days.
The production value on their videos is ridiculously high - just take a look
at the one in this article[2]. And on top of that, they have absolutely
amazing features[0], which integrate various aspects of culture as well.
Finally, there's _On The Verge_ [1], the show they record in front of a live
audience - I think it matches the quality of shows broadcast on TV.

0: <http://www.theverge.com/features>

1: <http://www.theverge.com/on-the-verge>

2: [http://www.theverge.com/2012/10/29/3570034/inside-android-
bu...](http://www.theverge.com/2012/10/29/3570034/inside-android-building-the-
nexus-4-nexus-10-android-4-2)

~~~
btipling
Agreed, although ArsTechnica is pretty good and I'm starting to like anandtech

~~~
masklinn
Anandtech has long been a staple of my tech browsing, especially when it comes
to hardware and devices. I think their whole series on SSDs a few years back,
before SSDs being A Good Thing becoming accepted wisdom, is nothing short of
legendary. The day-to-day stuff is not very interesting, but when they dig
into something they dig deep. They're my go-to resource for all explanations
on new CPU, chipsets and GPUs.

------
beloch
The Engadget piece seems to argue that Amazon and Google are engaging in
predatory pricing when it really boils down to the fact that Apple and Google
are trying to fight the iPad's market incumbency.

Let's look back a decade for a moment. i.e. The iPod.

Apple made the iPod good. Then they made the iPod cheap. Nobody could compete.
Could companies like Diamond or iRiver have made better devices if they didn't
have to compete with cheap iPod's? Almost certainly. Once Apple diversified
the iPod line into the extremophile niches other mp3 player manufacturers were
clinging to it was game over. Complete and utter dominance. Now almost nobody
buys iPod's because everybody's phone can do the same job.

Apple knew that the key to maintaining dominance was to drive down prices
faster than the competition without compromising quality. By offering premium
devices at prices that are just barely above that of inferior devices Apple
made the iPod a no-brainer purchase for consumers. They did this so well that
it was only Apple themselves who finally obsoleted the iPod with the iPhone.
They've tried to do the same thing with the tablet and have arguably built up
some degree of incumbency with the iPad. Low-margin pricing on the Nexus 7 and
Kindle's can be seen as attempts by Google and Amazon to fight Apple's tablet
incumbency before they're locked out of the market completely.

Let's face it, if Amazon or Google tried to sell their tablets at the same
price as Apple's offerings they'd never catch up. Even if they were of exactly
equal quality, Apple's is the proven product because it's been around longer.
If Google and Amazon made poorer quality tablets and sold them cheap, but with
decent profit margins, they'd wind up like Diamond and iRiver. Only their
ability to sell at low-margin and profit from ads/media sales gives Google and
Amazon the edge they need to compete with Apple and have any hope of catching
up.

The end result of this is a three-way battle for tablet superiority where
there would have only been one choice: the iPad. Oh, and now Microsoft is
throwing their hat into the ring too... Quite frankly, I think the next few
years are going to be very kind to tablet-fans, and that's partly in thanks to
"predatory" pricing.

------
doctorpangloss
Linus misses two key points. First, Engadget focuses on tablet pricing moreso
than cellphone pricing. Second, all Engadget is inelegantly saying that the
lowest price for something isn't necessarily its most efficient one.

Efficient prices versus low prices will play out spectacularly poorly in U.S.
v. Apple and publishers, the book price fixing case. Like with tablets, Amazon
undercut the true price of books, which harms authors and publishers.
Hilariously Apple and publishers did a legal "corrective action" that is
precisely described in the DoJ's own guidance on anti-trust. But I digress.

I would agree with Engadget that Amazon and Google selling tablets at or below
cost is unequivocally bad for the tablet industry. I'd prefer efficient
prices. Otherwise, Amazon undercuts everyone, all the other tablet
manufacturers cease to exist, and then they let the product stagnate.

------
mdasen
I think there's a real issue here and that's one of _sustainable pricing_.
There are times when companies or countries are willing to dump goods at cost
or even below cost for a certain period of time in order to gain market power.
That's a bad thing for consumers.

What we want is vibrant competition with many players offering low prices.
However, if companies dump their products at or below cost, we may find we're
left with fewer players as some companies exit the industry. Apple and Samsung
are both doing wonderfully, but others including HTC, LG, and Motorola
Mobility aren't in such a sunny position.

Amazon hasn't said this, but some have justified Amazon's high P/E ratio by
saying that Amazon is going to be the future of retail and once they've killed
off some of their competition, they'll be able to raise their margins. That
may or may not be true, but such a situation would be bad for consumers. We
want low prices (that's a great thing), but we also don't want to lose options
and competition in the future (that's a bad thing). Amazon is running razor
thin on its profits to be popular. I'm not suggesting that Amazon is evil.
Rather, it seems to just be Jeff Bezos' attitude towards margins: they should
be low so that people can buy more stuff. However, that attitude may not
always prevail, especially if competition dies out.

It's good to make things cheaper and more accessible (as Linus has said).
However, sometimes you can make something too cheap to be really sustainable.
Often times large players will sacrifice profits to gain marketshare and that
can sometimes be justified. Still, it's important to recognize as the play for
market power that it may be and the temporary situation that it may be. A
company does not intend to lose money forever. If they're able to eliminate
competition in their industry, that gives them power in the future to raise
margins.

It can be hard to judge an industry sometimes. Apple and Samsung are clearly
going to be sticking around: they're making products people want and raking in
money. However, other players just haven't been so profitable. Having to
compete with a device like the Kindle Fire being sold at cost is hard to do
and may drive them out of the industry. You can say, "well, they weren't able
to compete" and that's somewhat true.

However, it hides the fact that Amazon may not be playing "fair" (for some
definition of fair that I'll explain). Let's say (hypothetically) that Amazon
is actually Evil, Inc. They have a war chest of money and are willing to lose
money over the short term to become monopolistic. So, they price the Kindle
Fire even below cost - $50 maybe. Some competitors will just fold. Others
might try to continue competing for a short time, but their war chests are
empty before Evil, Inc.'s. So, we end up with only Evil, Inc. selling us
tablets. Nice for Evil, Inc. They can now charge a healthy $300 as well as up
the margins on content purchases - charging higher prices to consumers as well
as negotiating harder against content providers. "Ah, but if they did that,
someone else would come in with a $250 tablet to compete!" Probably not
without government intervention. Why? Because they know Evil, Inc. will
temporarily drop the price on their Kindle Fires until the new company goes
bust.

That's an exaggeration, but dumping products like this isn't unheard of. The
more people that get Kindles, the better Amazon's market power is over content
providers and consumers. Similarly, if the margins become so low that many
companies can't create devices, we end up with them exiting the market and
competition is reduced. The fewer competitors in the tablet market, the better
it is for Amazon long term.

Basically, we want competition today _AND_ competition tomorrow - sustainable
competition rather than one or a few companies winning. We want prices at a
point where they're low, consumer friendly, and encourage wide adoption while
making sure that 5 years from now, we're benefitting from similar low,
consumer friendly prices. If we're left with only Apple, Samsung, and Amazon,
we'll be worse off.

It can be hard to think about. In some ways, we might see a company like
Amazon as winning by providing things cheaper in a way that's good for
consumers. However, we don't want Amazon to win - we want others to be able to
match Amazon so that Amazon will have to keep innovating and competing in the
future. At the same time, we want the lowest price. It's a balance similar to
investing in the future (or taking on debt). We don't want to starve ourselves
now (we want to enjoy our lives). At the same time, we know that we shouldn't
just rack up debt in the present having fun because we want a strong future.
We don't want to pay high prices for devices now, but at the same time we
don't want one or two companies to come out as the survivors of the "tablet
price wars" who can then charge us more money now that the competition has
been vanquished.

* I know I picked on Amazon a bit here and that's just because the Kindle Fire is being sold at cost below the competition. I'm not saying that Amazon is evil, but even in the absence of evil, we wouldn't want Amazon to win because competition brings innovation and discourages slacking off. Even if you're a good company trying to do positive things, seeing what others are doing makes you better. As such, even a purely altruistic company is bad as a monopoly.

~~~
no_more_death
Google claims that prices have fallen and that the supply chain is efficient
enough to bring down prices:

[http://www.droid-life.com/2012/11/02/googles-director-of-
bus...](http://www.droid-life.com/2012/11/02/googles-director-of-business-
strategy-for-android-calls-299-nexus-4-revolutionary/)

We have seen over the last 20 years that computers not only get faster but
also cheaper. The fact that the top phones have stayed at 600-700 for the past
several years suggests that they are padding costs or simply have no
compulsion to be efficient in their supply chains. Google says this is
definitely the case and they are still making money on the Nexus 4, even
though it costs much less than other flagship phones.

Also note just how horrible Motorola built-in UI is, for example. Something's
wrong if they can make an inferior project and not expect to get killed.
There's a lot of inefficiency at these companies and they don't care and they
don't have to care. Google is trying to change that.

The Galaxy Nexus was sold at $399 unlocked (some time after release). The
Nexus 4 is $299. Google is trying to bring the cost down further. When top-
line phones hit $150-200 unlocked, people will be able to upgrade once or
twice a year.

This will actually encourage even higher quality phones. Once all the topline
phones fall to $299 or less, it opens up a space for someone else to make a
really, really nice phone at the old $600 level. This is not crazy talk. This
is exactly what happened with PC laptops over the last 5 years. Now the better
Ultrabooks that are now jockeying for the position of "high-end PC laptop."

So there are a lot of benefits and I believe the drop in prices will lead to
better phones and tablets across the board.

~~~
mdasen
I think part of the disconnect here is phones vs. tablets. Intuitively, phones
seem to have kept a premium price probably being propped up by carrier
subsidies (in the States). However, there's a part of the link you provided
that sounds a bit hollow. _We simply believe there’s a better way of doing it
without extracting that much payment from end users, because there are other
ways to drive revenues._ That line in particular basically says, "we'll find
other ways to get margins off of consumers". It also rings slightly hollow in
that Motorola is losing money, LG just swung to profitability this quarter
after losing money for a few years (as well as exiting the tablet market
because of the inability to profit), and HTC has seen its ability to profit
plumet. There are certainly inefficiencies and some companies have kept good
margins (Apple and Samsung), but it's not as if most players are doing so
well.

In tablets, we see really hard price competition. Amazon is selling the Kindle
Fires at cost. In short, tablets are cheaper than phones with much smaller
displays and smaller batteries. In a certain light, why is the Nexus 4 a full
$150 more than a Nexus 7 (assuming the same 16GB storage)? Sure,
miniaturization probably has to do with the cost difference,

Also, I think the comparison to laptops might not be so great. Ultrabooks
aren't doing so well and we've seen huge consolidation of competition in the
PC/laptop market. Heck, we nearly saw HP leave the market. Dell generates less
than 5% of its income from the consumer market. Yes, we have some Ultrabooks
coming in, but they aren't selling so well and seem more driven by Intel than
by the manufacturers (excluding Apple here). In a lot of ways, Laptops are
actually showing how this is a problem: I hate that 1366x768 resolution, but
everyone uses it because it's cheap and everyone is focused on price. Yes, I
can spend over $1000 and get a nice resolution, but there's this gap in the
middle. I remember reading an article lamenting how Dell would try every
couple years (in a half-hearted sense) to create a MacBook Pro competitor line
just to get hit by a complete lack of sales as people only cared about price.
And that's ok in a certain way, but it also leaves little room for innovation
and risk taking (what Engadget was commenting on). If I want a Windows version
of a MacBook Pro 15", what is there? Certainly, there is no Retina MBP
competitor. Really, I don't want Apple to take the high end and have every
Android vendor compete on price alone like laptops devolved into. Heck, laptop
vendors compete so much on price that poor quality keyboards and trackpads are
the norm. Any hidden place they can save a cent gets hit. I'm sure the Nexus
devices have fine touchscreens, but if price becomes the _only_ object, things
like the touchscreen quality could get hit in the future. We want the lowest
price for good stuff. It's easy to read processor and RAM specs, but we also
want to make sure that the non-listed stuff works well. And we want to make
sure that we don't get to a point where we aren't improving because we've
programmed ourselves to be so cheap that we won't spend an extra $15 for
something much nicer - I feel that way about trackpads.

We'll see over the coming years how it all plays out, but LG already exited
the tablet market. Motorola's last tablet was a year ago? There certainly are
vendors struggling and some giving up. That's not to say that there isn't some
bloat in there and not efficiencies to be had. Google is a great company -
great companies push the bounds. At the same time, I'd like to be sure that
the level of competition will stay high - that there will be many companies
able to remain competing. It's hard for us on the outside to be commenting
because we don't have complete information. Google is saying things to the
effect of, "well, prices are sorta coming down and we think we can make up the
money in other ways like making sure that people continue to think of Google
for search". According to the link, even Google's Motorola division seems to
think Google's vision for pricing isn't quite fully realizable.

You might be totally right and in 5 years we'll have awesome competition at
better price points than we have now and I'll have been the silly spoil-sport
raining on the parade. I was mostly trying to point out that these prices may
not be sustainable (at the same time, they may well be). Even if companies
aren't purposefully trying to corner the market or anything, this could
happen. Amazon might think that they'll make $x off of content for each Kindle
Fire only to find out that people just don't buy on them, but were buying them
on price alone. Then, a few years later when many companies leave the market
due to price, we're left with less competition. Low prices are certainly good.
We want to make sure that the prices and innovation keep going into the
future.

~~~
doctorpangloss
_We want low prices (that's a great thing), but we also don't want to lose
options and competition in the future (that's a bad thing)._

I think the idea you're getting at is an efficient price. Not too low to
devastate competition, not too high to be unaffordable.

The idea of efficient prices ties up a lot of concepts, especially anti-trust
concepts. You're really spot on. Consider though that there's a whole body of
language that specifically outs Amazon and Google's behavior as plain anti-
trust violations. E.g., Amazon bundling its book marketplace with a tablet
sold below cost; Google bundling its search and advertising business on an
operating system sold at inefficient cost (by sharing ad revenues on partnered
devices, Google is essentially paying manufacturers and carriers to use
Android).

How does Apple compete against tablet undercutting? How does Microsoft compete
against operating system undercutting? Maybe the parameters have changed, and
we should embrace the "better way of doing it without extracting that much
payment from end users." But beware the world where Microsoft can't sell
operating systems and Apple can't sell hardware. We would prefer to have that
competition and innovation than none at all.

------
forgotusername
Torvalds must be on drugs or also trolling hard to be talking about an absence
of carrier lock-in and Android in the same sentence - an OS rendered
practically unusable should you elect not to associate your device with a
Google account, and all that such entails.

~~~
chongli
He's talking about the new Nexus 4 which is $299 unlocked with no contract;
hence no carrier lock-in.

~~~
recoiledsnake
If you're in the US, the Nexus 4 doesn't support CDMA, which rules out Sprint
and Verizon. AT&T doesn't give a discount for bringing your own phone, so
you'd be losing money if you don't take a device for them but buy a data plan.
So you're effectively locked into Tmobile.

~~~
eropple
Postpaid plans are the problem here. They're something of a tax upon people
who can't do math if you have a subsidized phone; they're terrible if you
bring your own phone.

If you bring your own phone, you want to be looking at the prepaid
arrangements. AT&T has considerably cheaper prepaid plans than their postpaid
plans (I think it was like $40 cheaper when I looked?). T-Mobile's prepaid
plans are even cheaper; I pay $30/month for 100 voice minutes ($0.10/minute
overage, which I've hit a couple times), unlimited data (speed-throttled at
5GB), and unlimited texts.

I paid $350 for my Galaxy Nexus and ditched my $90/month AT&T postpaid plan
for the $30/month T-Mobile prepaid plan, and the delta in plan costs paid off
the cost of the phone (over a carrier subsidy) in about four months.

~~~
kbutler
T-mobile's postpaid "value" plans can also be a good deal (no phone subsidy,
but yes contract/ETF). We just moved from the prepaid $30/month/line plan to a
family value plan, because we could get 5 lines for <$20/month/line (unlimited
talk/text on all lines, 200mb data on two lines).

~~~
eropple
Yeah, I can see that being valuable for somebody who needs a ton of phones.

I'd blow through 200MB in three or four days though. =)

------
mycodebreaks
Linus is right. I agree with him. Engadget is stupid, corrupt and trolling in
this case.

Lower prices aren't hurting consumers. Good quality Nexus devices around
$200-400 ranges aren't hurting consumers. In fact, it encourages a fair
competition. As a result, Apple/Samsung have to work hard to make their $600 &
up devices feature-rich to justify higher price. Consumer wins!

------
larrybolt
I like Torvalds posts/articles. Most important people that blog/post/comment
about stuff in their field of "expertise" (I'm assuming in this case that
would be technology in general) try to do research on the topic, give
advantages and disadvantages. Which isn't bad! But Linus just seems to post
his own opinion on things, just the way he sees it.

------
sosuke
You could take the Engadget article as a defense for the iPad Mini pricing, or
you could say it illustrates that it is tough to compete with companies who
can sell devices at cost. I took it as the latter before reading Linus's
opinion.

In case you missed the HN comments on the original article:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4737154>

~~~
hyperbovine
Sorry, I must be missing something -- isn't AAPL, the company furthest away
from selling anything at cost, the most valuable company in history and making
more money in a week than most of these other companies make all quarter?

~~~
seanmcdirmid
They have incredibly great logistics, they have made lots of forward looking
investments. It is difficult for competitors to produce similar devices at
similar costs to Apple, and their margins are much crappier when they do. But
they should catch up, as long as Apple stops improving logistics and making
forward looking investments (or the competitors do).

------
jsz0
I'm guessing most of Engadget's traffic comes from the US where
unsubsidized/unlocked phones are not popular at all. That should explain it.
No need for conspiracy theories.

~~~
grecy
And if the media never covers the fact those are valid (and much liked)
options in other countries, all you get is confirmation bias, and a
continuation of the (broken) status quo.

~~~
fleitz
Yeah, a big problem is that no one offers unsubsidized plans, so you can
either pay $199 for your phone and $100 a month for three years, or $699 for
your phone and $100 a month til you decide you no longer need phone service.

About the only advantage paying for your phone gives you is the opportunity to
leave your carrier, but since the buyout is usually less than the subsidy on a
smartphone it's usually better to use the buyout.

------
shinratdr
All I learned from that article is that Linus Torvalds is as uninformed as
your average Engadget commenter. I thought that was one of the most spot on
and original pieces to come out of Engadget in months if not years.

------
alpeb
The editorial raises some valid concerns, namely how unfair competition can
destroy an industry. Not surprised at Linus' again calling people stupid, and
his cortege blindingly cheering him up.

------
b1daly
Aside from the technical argument about whether predatory pricing really
exists there is another aspect of "race to the bottom" that is at least worth
a thought.

Ironically, Torvald's post and the Engadget article both have an assumption
that whatever provides better quality(innovation) and product choice at lower
prices to consumers is an unequivocal good. While seems likely to me that this
is true, I don't quite get the conflation in popular culture between
"consumers" and the public good.

I recently picked up a Nexus 7 and I was a bit stunned at the level of
technology I could get for $200. If the margin is getting squeezed, that means
entities on the other side of the transaction are too, including labor.

At what cost to humans (and the environment) is this rock bottom technology
being created? Is there a connection between ultra competition and increasing
income inequality in the US, if not the world. It seems at least intuitively
plausible.

------
shimon_e
Yes because it really costs $600 per phone to make a quality one.... so 600
billion would be the cost for 1 billion people to have quality phones.

These phones should be dropping to $150 already... but there isn't enough
competition for that yet.

------
brisance
That g+ post is particularly bad because it shows that Linus is opinionated
(we knew that already), that he doesn't understand business (predatory
pricing) and that he doesn't read very well (the Engadget article clearly
explains that in the short-term, lower prices work in favor of the customer).
In fact his own post can be considered a trolling piece since at the end he
suddenly switches tack and justifies his choice of Nexus phones. Which is due
to his own _preference_ of the UI, but similarly ignoring others who may
instead prefer iOS.

~~~
brigade
It's kind of funny that the other day he was complaining about low-res screens
in laptops... when the degradation/stagnation in laptop screens is in a large
part due to the race to the bottom he's arguing is unequivocally a good thing
today!

~~~
Osiris
Those things are not mutually exclusive. LCD manufacturers can both 1) make
better displays with higher resolutions and 2) reduce the cost of producing
said displays.

So, there can be a 'race to the bottom' of high quality products.

~~~
sbuk
How?

~~~
Osiris
Example: I bought a AMD 3-core CPU a few years ago for about $120. The
passmark score for that CPU is just under 3,000. Today for $120 I can get an
AMD FX-6100 for $120 which gets a passmark score of 5,400. So, nearly twice
the computing power at the same price.

In another year that FX-6100 will cost considerably less, thus giving the same
horsepower for a lower cost.

Race to the bottom does imply making things cheaper but it not necessarily
true that it's also worse. The XBOX 360 is now half the price it was when it
was first released and yet more reliable and uses less power.

~~~
sbuk
That's not an example of race to the bottom economics, it's an example of
commoditisation.

------
dewiz
my 2 cents: complaining that underpriced hw kills competition, is like saying
that a free Linux will kill Apple and Microsoft. I can see where Linus is
coming from here :) Well, that is apparently not happening yet after how many
years of free software? Welcome then to free hardware, however free hw won't
happen thanks to volunteering, there are paid ads, content, services, is that
bad? good ? did free Skype, Gmail, Github, Youtube, Zip compression kill the
market, or was the market itself creating the conditions for them to be free?

------
rbn
Engadget stopped being Engadget when everyone moved to the Verge.

------
TechNewb
I agree with what his argument is with cell phones, but if it were not for
Apple's higher margin tablets and laptops we would probably be using crapy
netbooks today with a crappy OS. Both Engadget and Torvalds have a good point.

------
ricardobeat
The post is cut off at the third paragraph, is there a way to read this on
mobile?

~~~
sounds
Linus Torvalds 4:11PM

Editorial: is Engadget really that stupid? Or just corrupt? Or trolling us
all?

Here is another "race to the bottom is bad" article, this time in the form of
an "editorial" from Engadget. It's even more idiotic than usual.

The whole "race to the bottom" concept is odd to me: people complaining about
how technology gets less outrageously expensive, and more available to
everybody, and more commoditized. Like that would be a bad thing? So the whole
argument is fundamentally flawed to begin with - any time I see some pundit or
CEO complaining about how the competition is making things cheaper, I go
"Uhhuh, crybaby".

But when it comes to cellphones, it's not just a flawed argument, it's doubly
stupid. Because in that market, particularly in the US, the alternative is the
whole broken carrier subsidy model, with all that entails. None of which is
good, and all of which is much worse than any (hypothetical) "race to the
bottom" arguments.

And at no point did that deeply flawed editorial even mention carrier lock-in
issues. What crock.

I have many reasons to like the google nexus phones: I just think that the
plain android experience is generally cleaner than most of the skinned ones,
and even when there is superior hardware (Samsung Galaxy SIII) I tend to
prefer the Nexus model (honesty in advertizing: I've gotten free phones from
both google and Samsung, but I actually bought my own Nexus One and Galaxy
Nexus on google play store. And I installed CyanogenMod on the SIII Samsung
gave me, because I wanted the JellyBean experience).

So I like the Nexus phones just because I think they have a nicer interface.

But I like the Nexus phones even more because they are clearly pushing the
whole "no carrier lock-in" model. And price is absolutely part of it.

Link to [http://www.engadget.com/2012/11/03/editorial-amazon-and-
goog...](http://www.engadget.com/2012/11/03/editorial-amazon-and-google-are-
undermining-mobile-pricing)

------
gaving
oh look another Linus Torvalds Google Plus link

~~~
lrobb
Said the exact thing his other post said:

Enter profile information Your profile and +1's appear publicly in search, on
ads, and across the web.

------
Ramonaxvh
Linus is a socialist, and has always hated big corporations and profiteering
too much off technology.

Thats why I think he's awesome.

------
drivebyacct2
So what happens if Desktop Linux ever takes off? What's going to happen when
there isn't one organization to target and attack and villanize?

