Liberty

I'll be surprised if the have more than 12 million in earnings...

I totally agree but it seems to me that, this may be the case b/c maybe the analysts interested in publishing a contrarian view are discouraged by their editors sometimes... I cite the case from "Confidence Game" where the author; Christine Richard said a financial reporter's performance is judged based on how the stock market reacts to their reporting. Also, she mentioned (if I remember correctly) how her request to cover MBIA's faux shell company; Negris Caulis was out right rejected by her editor. Along with that, I think we don't usually get a chance to hear the analysts who are right on the money about a company going down way before it's cool, because they're usually hushed away or the general news consumer isn't interested in listening to them (though I think the case is different for most of the members here). I too would like to see things change; maybe they would if we aligned the interests of the financial reporters with the buyside investors... but here's my guess; once things start to stabilize again (in w/e # of years) and the next bubble gets in the making and market sentiment goes up... once again the best of analysts shall again be ignored... and rinse, repeat. What do you think? I wasn't saying it's always their fault. The system is definitely structured in such a way that their interests are not aligned with most investors (who signs their paycheck? Who do they spend their day hanging out with?). The result is still the same, though.

One thing that bugged me a bit was the part about how analysts and journalists are so critical and always looking for the problems... I wish! Once something is crashing and burning, of course they are, but most of the time they don't dig nearly enough and are way too cozy with management.

Yeah, the battery would be an issue. But they could make the screen black, but when you flip to camera mode, it goes clear for the photograph. They have the technology to do that today, but hiding the battery and circuitry would be difficult around the rest of the phone. But they will do it one day! Heck, if you watch even the newer Star Trek's with Picard, their communicators were bigger than phones today, so technology has come a long way in a decade. Cheers! I'm not saying the laws of physics preclude it forever, just that we won't see it in the iPhone 5 :)

Am I the only one who had never heard of Yammer before this? Good for them for getting a billion, but I'm not sure if MSFT will get its money worth.

Lol, as soon as they invent the see-through battery and as soon as people aren't annoyed by having a random background constantly intruding into their content ;)

Thanks for sharing your epiphany. It reminds me of one of Buffett's stock answers in interviews, about how (I'm paraphrasing) if you could have told someone born in 1930 that the US would go through a depression, a world war, many recessions, the cold war, financial and political crises, social unrest, inflation, etc.. That he would probably never want to invest, but that in fact, over the past century people got much wealthier and many businesses did extremely well.

Thanks for posting that. His book was very interesting, good to hear the man speak. I just wish they would fire Joe.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-investor/personal-finance/the-sad-end-of-saving-and-investing/article4257700/ There's starting to be more capitulation in the air. Contrarian indicator?

Each person must decide for themselves if something is a good value for them, and I'm sure your decision makes sense for you. There's not one right answer for everybody. Personally, I spend maybe 10-14 hours a day in front of my computer, and usually keep each model for years before upgrading, so whether I pay 1000 or 3000 for a computer, it still ends up being a ridiculously low hourly amount and I feel I get a lot more value than the amount I pay. It matters a lot more that I'm happy with it, which is why I have a Mac Pro as my main desktop. I'd be more likely to consider a Windows computer now than a few years ago, though. Windows Vista was truly terrible and I wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot pole. But Windows 7 seems good. I still prefer OS X, though.

Thanks for posting!

Question for you Dell holders out there: Does the company break out its operating margins by segment, and if so, what are they like for their service/SaaS segment?

Indeed. And it is also having a huge health/quality-of-life costs in places like China where the air can be extremely foul mostly because fo it.

If only for environmental reasons, I'll be glad when coal is mostly gone.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-investor/investment-ideas/prem-watsas-stock-picking-aces-the-guru-test/article4249305/

I can't really say because I'm only about 70 pages in, but even if the rest of the book was to start sucking, just what I've read so far would be worth it IMO. Some insightful stuff about mindsets and avoiding bad decision downward spirals, psychological resilience, etc. Some stuff I already knew about, but always good to refresh memory, like re-reading Buffett.

Indeed. It's probably a consequence of teaching efficient market theory for so long. After all, if that theory is true and you make public some info about a company and the market doesn't move, it either mean that the information was either not important or not new.

You definitely need an edge over other market participants, and that can come from doing research until your eyeballs bleed. It also helps to be wicked smart like Ackman :P

Indeed, that's why I said that he hasn't seen every detail of what came out, but if he had died, say, 3 years ago, we would truly see what the companies does without his input. I'm sure that when Jobs was still alive they were already looking into HiDPI screens and flash storage and maps, etc, and planning prototypes around them, but they had to wait for costs to go down and suppliers to ramp up and such (as well as waiting for the most to be squeezed out of current designs - you don't want to do full refreshes too quickly, especially if competitors aren't close to catching up). Product cycles at Apple are pretty short, but not that short afaik.

I've read the biography and watched the interviews and followed Jobs for years. I believe that his two biggest contributions were his ability to set strategic direction by knowing what to do and especially what not to do (when he came back and redefined Apple's computer line as a grid of "desktop-laptop/consumer-pro" that was genius in itself) and his taste as a consumer/beta-tester/designer (how he could try a product prototype find minute flaws in design and reject anything not "good enough", as well as define some attributes of what "good enough" was). Considering the length of product cycles and how it seems like until the very end Apple was Jobs' passion, I'm pretty sure that he still steered the company in certain directions and was shown prototypes and gave his approval and disapproval. That doesn't require spending 70 hours a week at 1 Infinite Loop or whatever. Could be done in very little time, but still matter a lot. I'm not saying he approved all the little details we're seeing now, but chances are that he steered prototypes in certain directions and put resources into certain lines of R&D (TV?). IMO the next product cycle will be more interesting for the post-Jobs era.

To be fair, most of what we're seeing right now was almost certainly pretty far along before Jobs died. We'll truly know in a few years. The company is full of extremely talented people, so they certainly have the potential to keep it up. But Jobs truly was special, both for his taste and purity of vision, and without him it's less probable that they'll be able to keep doing as well as they have in the past 10 years.

Not sure if you are kidding or not, but if you aren't, compare the nose, ears, and glasses here: http://www.inquisitr.com/wp-content/2011/07/Warren-Buffett.jpeg The shape of the glasses in the photo where he's holding the computer makes me think that that photo might have been squeeze horizontally, which makes buffet looks like he has a narrower head. But it's definitely him.

The wedge shape makes me think it's not a Macbook, but rather some kind of netbook (Asus maybe?).

BTW, if you guys like this, I highly recommend these three books: http://www.amazon.com/Surely-Feynman-Adventures-Curious-Character/dp/0393316041/ http://www.amazon.com/What-Care-Other-People-Think/dp/0393320928/ http://www.amazon.com/Perfectly-Reasonable-Deviations-Beaten-Track/dp/0465023711/ I've read them all and they're amazing.

[amazonsearch]The Art of Learning[/amazonsearch] Haven't finished it yet, but great so far. Manages to have nothing to do with investing and business directly, but everything to do with it indirectly. A successful investor needs to be a very effective learning machine and - as Munger keeps reminding us - have many quality mental models to make sense of the world. Trivia: The author was featured in the book and movie "Searching for Bobby Fisher", documenting part of his youth as a child chess prodigy.