I use Safari, and I find it to be better than Chrome because it's easier to sync with my iPhone and iPad, and with iCloud keychain even my passwords are synced.
I used to track AAPL when I was interning at a financial services firm last summer, and I can assure you that their profit margin is around 20%. Since AAPL is publicly traded, this information is publicly available so anyone can verify it. I'm not sure where you get the idea that their profit margin is 70%.
According to Yahoo Finance (which is a pretty good resource for non-professionals), the profit margin is currently 21%.
Unit margin is the marginal profit for selling one more unit. It doesn't include the (large) fixed costs of, for example, your personnel or your office real estate costs or R&D or legal. It's basically the bill of materials for your item plus the costs for transporting the item from where you made it/bought it to where you hand it off to the customer, any taxes on that particular item (like import duties), etc.
Unit margin is an important number to account for and work to maximize, basically because you assume that as the number of units you sell increase, your fixed costs become less and less relevant to your overall company profit. But unit margin is always higher than overall company profit margin.
EDIT: Also, obviously, unit margin varies by sku. The iPhone 5s and the iPad Air are probably the highest-margin items that Apple sells (some of their Macs may compete). Things like iPods and iPhone 5cs are likely lower-margin.
Thanks for the clarification. I had actually never heard of this concept of ``unit margin,'' but it makes sense now. It's funny that I managed to go through an entire internship at a financial services firm (which included working with valuation models of AAPL) without ever encountering this concept. I guess it's no surprise that I didn't get offered a job at the end of the internship!
Upon getting accepted to YC, your company is promised $120K for 7%. Does this imply that if your company is accepted to YC, then it is worth $1.7M (because 7% of $1.7M is $120K)? Or is this not the right way to look at it? Why / why not?
There are two chunks (as Sam mentions in his post) -- one chunk is for common stock and the other is in the form of a Safe that converts to Preferred stock.
Can someone please explain the role that carriers play in the United States? In most countries, the carrier simply provides you with a SIM card that allows you to make use of their network, but they have nothing to do with your hardware / OS. How come carriers control OS updates in the United States?
To me, this sounds as absurd as an ISP having control of your computer - imagine if you had to wait till your ISP allowed you to update your OS. Yet that seems to be your situation with respect to mobile.
Actually in this case, you even get your PC from your ISP. So i think it works out like this:
first the OS people update it. Then the manufacturers launch a device with said OS. Then your ISP gets to sell said devices to you. (or maybe you can update on your existing device but the ISP still has to approve it)
In simpler words:
In US, people do not directly buy their phones from the manufacturers. They buy the PHONE from the carrier, who also includes a SIM with said phone. And the cost of the phone is distributed over several months and is combined with your monthly cellular service charges.
Pro: you get to have expensive phones for far less.
Con: The carrier apparently gets a lot of say. In fact you can't even switch carriers easily. They make you sign a contact.
Interesting fact: Originally when the smart phones came out in the pre-iPhone era, the carrier's tried to control app stores by having exclusive, carrier specific app-stores. It was apple who convinced one carrier (can't remember which one) to let Apple control the app store and thus this revolution.
It seems to be that way in much of the world - I don't have much knowledge on the topic outside of the UK, but a month or so ago when I was waiting for the new Blackberry OS update to roll out, I had to wait over a month for my network to approve it and send out the update (Vodafone UK), so I kept an eye on stories about the update and saw that it was reaching different networks around the world at different times (for example, Vodafone hadn't put it out to their customers in any other regions either, such as Australia).
This isn't unique to the US. In most countries the carrier restricts ota updates for android and windows phone. I don't know why the iphone is the only device which doesn't need carrier approval prior to rollout. I also don't know why the carriers are involved, but it's definitely not unique to the US, most of europe is the same way.
Why is this priced on par with Apple TV? That's like pricing a Kindle on par with an iPad. I always thought that unlike Apple, Amazon's strategy was to sell really cheap hardware so that you can consume more content.
Why? That's like saying that Amazon has a motivation to remove the Kindle app from iPhones and iPads so that you'll be forced to buy their Kindle. Amazon actually doesn't care if you buy their hardware or not, they only care about selling you content.
Yes, he is a kid, but I believe that the best way to show respect to a kid is to treat him like an adult. The article mentions that he was encouraged to publish in the Journal for Emerging Investigators, and it goes on to say that this journal has the same standards as academic journals. The whole point of this exercise is to treat him like a grown up in the grown up world, because that's the best way of showing respect to a kid.
Therefore, it is in fact your comment that is more disrespectful to the kid than the other comments which are pointing out flaws with his proposal.
