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...
Apple announced that 300,000 devices were sold on the first day a figure which included preorders. Meeting the expectations of financial analysts who were keeping a track on tabs on the company's highly anticipated tablet computer. With Apple CE Steve Jobs saying "It feels great to have the iPad launched into the world". Now you may be wondering who bought these devices. The version that went on sale on Saturday can connect to the internet only via a Wi-Fi connection. The question is how many people are committing to buy only when the 3G version is released. According to a survey by Piper Jaffray he breaks down the iPad buyers into these categories listed below. 74% were Mac users (26% owned another kind of PC). 96% planned to continue using their computers. 66% owned iPhones. Only four or five respondents (1%) thought they could replace their iPhone with an iPad. 13% owned Amazon (AMZN) Kindles and 58% of those planned to replace it with th...