parislemon:

Pay no attention to the headline of their press release, Amazon had a bad quarter. They’ve been warning about dipping into the red for a few quarters now and have narrowly avoided it each time. No more.

The company lost $274 million on sales of $13.81 billion. Yes, you read that right. Sure, a large part of it was due to the disaster that is the LivingSocial deal (a loss of $169 million as part of a goodwill write-down), but they still lost over $100 million when you take that away.

I’m sure Apple is really regretting not selling the iPad mini at Kindle Fire prices right now.

See what happens when you sell hardware at lost? Amazon sees it right now.

Apple must have been listening to what Amazon had to say this week when then announced their new Kindle devices. I think Amazon is much more competitive than any other Android tablets for Apple. The reason is very simple: they kind of have a similar business oriented model: they have content and they build their own devices. They have  complete control of the stack. This is one of the thing that makes Apple so successful. 

How is Apple going to answer that? Lowering prices is not an option. They don’t go after  market made of lower priced machines. Apple’s answer is going to be the iPad mini: a great device, with plenty of software to run and content from the iTunes store. But, Apple must take into account Amazon’s announcements. From the Betanews’s post:

Apple must be scrambling to retune its iPad Mini announcement for later this month, but what Microsoft has to be feeling (especially with this week’s lackluster Nokia phone intro) is panic.

I really like this Cult of Mac’s point of view on all this emotional criticism about iBooks Author and the EULA that comes with it. My only diverging point of view it this: Amazon may have a book store spammed with junk or sub-quality books written by pseudo-author but I must say that if you look at the App Store state of affair right now, you can find a lot of crappy apps that are simply piece of junk that Apple Review Teams should have stopped from being put on the App Store shelfs. I expect the same kind of crappy ibooks in the iBookstore in the next few years.