Day: December 1, 2015

A good review of Amazon’s The Man in the High Castle. And a good critique of what works based on the Philip K. Dick get wrong.

That review,here, is worth reading for anyone watching or interesting in watching the Amazon Prime series.

Anyone interested in works based on the novels of Dick should focus on this key quote (I added the emphasis):

Pop culture has exalted many of Dick’s wilder stories and novels. Since the release of Blade Runner (1982, based on the short novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) and Total Recall (1990, based on the story “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale”), his pet motifs of false realities and artificial identities have captivated filmmakers. …Along the way to becoming popcorn entertainments, Dick’s motifs have shed a lot of their existential baggage. Today, the revelation that capsizes everything a movie character once believed about himself and his world is just another mind-blowing plot twist. No sooner have we gasped Whoa! than the film has moved on to the next chase scene, martial-arts display, or explosion. Nobody sits around questioning their own reality or humanity the way Dick’s protagonists do. Those questions, however, were the whole point of Dick’s fiction

That’s a great critique of even the better works based on Dick, like Blade Runner. Whenever you see or plan to see a film or TV series based on one of his works, it’s better if you can read the novel first. Doing so will add much more complexity and richness to whatever you are about to see.

Apple will not be getting into the car business, no matter what you read, because…

…it makes no business sense. A key take away from the article linked to below:

Ford’s revenue and operating income: $134 billion, 3.9%. Apple’s corresponding numbers: $234 billion, 40%! Or consider the world’s two largest car companies, Toyota and Volkswagen, both of which hover around $200 billion in revenue. Toyota just reported a higher than usual 10% net profit versus Apple’s 22.8%. The Financial Times recently pegged the VW brand’s operating margin at about 2%. (We’ll see how the German auto giant, which was ever so close to taking the industry’s Ichiban ranking from Toyota, extracts itself from its current engine management software troubles.) Yes, the car industry is large (around $2 trillion—that’s two thousand billions), but it grows slowly. In 2015 it saw 2% annual growth—and that was considered a good year.

There are so many other lines of business that could bring more revenue and profit to Apple. Unless the car business changes dramatically — and that is possible — then I can’t see how it makes any business sense for them to become car makers.

For more details on this, see: Why should Apple even bother building a car? – Quartz