On Thursday, Donald Trump will walk into the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, shake Xi Jinping's hand, and declare it a great meeting. There will be announcements. There will be numbers — billions of dollars in Chinese purchase commitments, a new bilateral mechanism with an important-sounding name, possibly a joint statement on Iran. Trump will post on Truth Social. Markets will rally briefly. Pundits will argue about who won. None of that will tell you what actually happened. What is actually happening in Beijing this week is something more consequential and more uncomfortable than the summit theatre will reveal: two leaders of two deeply mutually dependent superpowers, both of whom need this meeting to succeed for entirely different reasons, sitting across a table in a world that has already moved past the assumptions that defined their last nine months of negotiations. The Iran war changed the equations. The rare earth gambit changed the power balance. Taiwan is sitting in...
Yeah that's right Apple is seriously considering cutting the price of the iPad. The launch was good and people were satisfied with the product but the price was too high. Let me explain the iPad is good but seriously lacking some features once the price is dropped it suddenly begins to make more sense. After all, 16GB iPad for $449 (a $50 cut) is the sort of pricing to which even a jaded tech columnist might succumb. The iPad is I believe a device from Apple that needs to be sold to every users. It is not supposed to be a device that only some can afford. If that is the case then I believe that this device is a total failure. It is an internet utility device and when I first heard about the iTablet, iPad, MosesTablet and what not, the feeling I got was this was a device finally coming from Apple that was for the masses. So if a Tech company wants to bring out an iPad like device I feel they need to understand that the subtle message of such a device is that it is for the masses and...