Apple’s new levy on content is bad news for authors

Apple have announced new rules for all purchases made on an Apple iOS devices (iPad, iPod, iPhone), where all content purchased via an app will now be subject to a 30% processing fee, with rules forbidding any links to external purchasing methods and ensuring the Apple in-app price is as low as any external option.

Considering the cost of credit card processing is around 2.5%, this 30% levy is obviously hugely profitable for Apple, but it’s extremely damaging for small content producers like self-publishing authors and musicians.

To give you an example of the costs involved, a £10 e-book sold here in the UK via the Apple iPad by Amazon’s Kindle e-reader application will now have a price breakdown of:

  1. List Price: £10
  2. Value Added Tax at 15%: £-1.50
  3. 30% Amazon Publisher fee: £-2.55
  4. Amazon Delivery fee: £-0.10
  5. 30% Apple Levy: £-2.55
  6. Remaining profits for author: £3.30

Adding all these fees together leaves a self-publishing author with just £3.30 out of the original £10, with an amazing 67% removed by middlemen along the way.

While the Amazon fee is high, at least they’re doing some work to justify their margin – storing the content, providing the customer services department, the retail store, etc, Apple are simply skimming an extra 30% off for little or no work.

Similar situations will occur with all music sold, magazines, newspapers, in-game purchases, and pretty much any other digital content sold.

Do you think this is right? Personally, I think it’s unjustified, and definitely a step too far by Apple in attempting to become the gatekeeper for all content on their iOS devices.

IBM Storwize V7000 and DS5000 storage array comparison

There’s been a lot written about the new IBM StorWise V7000 disk array, the first time in years that IBM have developed an entirely new storage array in-house.

Sitting firmly in the middle of the storage range, the obvious question now that IBM has the Storwise V7000 is “What happens to the DS5000 range?”. With the LSI designed DS5000/DS4000 range showing something of it’s age, some people have taken the view that the DS5000 range will disappear from the IBM line up very quickly.

I’ve put together a comparison chart to show that right now, the high-end DS5300 model certainly still has the edge over the V7000 in some areas, something IBM will have to rectify before they can simplify their storage range.

The figures above are all taken from the various datasheets supplied by IBM on the 2 products except for the V7000’s external virtualisation capacity – the 1PB figure is how much the IBM SVC can currently virtualise, and since the V7000 runs the same code-base, they should be the same. Whether IBM supports that or not, I don’t know yet.

If you find any additional figures you’d like to add to the comparison, or any figures that you believe are wrong, please let me know in the comments below, or email me.

Linux Is On Parity With AIX Unix?

On the AIXchange blog I came across a link to an article stating that Linux is now on parity with AIX Unix, something people have been saying for at least 5 years now – each time, AIX proponents have been able to clearly show that AIX still had a clear advantage over Linux, though each time the advantage has been lessened.

This time, though AIXchange have given a number of reasons why AIX still leads over Linux, this time I don’t believe it’s true for the vast majority of users.

Firstly I’d like to say AIX I’ve used AIX ever since I left university, my first job was as an AIX sysadmin, and I don’t believe AIX is going anywhere fast – it’s a very stable, secure, high performance environment for people who need it.

Given that, I think after reading the article, I’d pretty much agree with it entirely. Sure, AIX has all the technology bits and pieces that Linux doesn’t have to the same level of maturity, but what business benefits do they provide over and above Linux?

In terms of IBM hardware and software support, IBM support Linux to the same level of AIX, on IBM system P (POWER), and system X (x86 hardware), you can go to IBM.com/linux and sign up for IBM’s Support Line for Linux, and get excellent quality support from IBM for your Red Hat and Novell Linux systems.

For the technical benefits around the excellent AIX LVM and other disk management tools like mksysb, NIM, savevg, and alt_disk_install, these are all fantastic but have largely been made irrelevant in the x86 world by the advanced virtualisation options available. Whether you use the commercial VMware vSphere, or the open source KVM option, you can do online snapshots, rollback, clone, and backup your entire Linux systems in ways above and beyond what AIX can do with PowerVM.

Mentioning virtualisation, yes PowerVM is rock-solid and can scale to great heights, it’s currently falling behing vSphere when it comes to both features and management tools, and the only outstanding feature it has over vSphere is the ability to scale from a machine from a fraction of a processor through to 32 processors without downtime or significant performance overhead (vSphere has a maximum of 8 vCPUs at the moment).

And that to me is the only area where AIX currently beats Linux – if you need a machine with more than 8 processors (not cores), and more than 255GB of RAM, then I would pick AIX every time, but other than that I would strongly recommend a Linux server running on top of VMware vSphere.