Blog Posts by Henry Blodget

There have been a bunch of theories about why Apple decided to put a $329 price tag on the iPad Mini when well-reviewed competitive tablets from Amazon and Google are priced at $199. (In the accompanying video, TechCrunch East Coast editor John Biggs and I discuss Tuesday's Apple event which he says lacked the shock and awe of previous product announcements.)

The theories include:

• Because Apple can charge this much--its fans are either so brainwashed or so locked-in to Apple's ecosystem that they'll pay anything
• Because Apple wants to protect its extraordinarily high profit margin
• Because Apple's "mini" is better than the Google and Amazon tablets

All of those theories probably factored into the decision.

And now there's a new report out of Asia that adds a fourth theory, one that also makes sense: Apple's iPad mini production, at least for the time-being, is supply-constrained.

According to Siu Han and Alex Wolfgram at DigiTimes, Apple can't get enough of the screens for the new iPad

One of the biggest challenges for the U.S. going forward is the country's massive debt and deficit problem.

The U.S. government is currently spending about $1 trillion more every year that it takes in, and we've now piled up $16 trillion of debt. So far, this debt burden has been sustainable, but only because interest rates are at generational lows. If and when our creditors wake up and start demanding higher rates of interest, our ballooning debt-service costs will quickly swamp everything else in the budget.

Related: Who Owns America's Debt?

A mere glance at the federal budget reveals to any reasonable human being that we can't go on like this.

And yet, so far, our elected leaders have refused to do anything about it.

Instead, our elected leaders have formed themselves into two ideologically-driven camps that, like groups of children, refuse to compromise. The Republicans want to fix the debt by cutting spending. The Democrats want to fix the debt by raising taxes, especially on

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One of the most important issues in this year's election is energy.

Our ongoing addiction to Mideast oil leaves us dependent on countries that are often unstable and hostile. Developing our own domestic energy resources and investing in renewable energy lessens this dependence. It also has the potential to create jobs and improve our trade deficit.

The two presidential candidates have laid out energy plans that sound similar: both President Obama and Governor Romney want to continue to develop domestic energy resources, including renewable energy, with the aim of making the U.S. less dependent on foreign oil.

But according to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the president of environmental group Waterkeeper Alliance, the plans are different in several important ways. And President Obama's plan, Kennedy says, is much better for the country.

"We need to be energy independent but we can't look into the future by looking in a rearview mirror and say that we're

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As the U.S. continues to rack up more than $1 trillion of new debt every year, Americans are beginning to worry about who we owe this money to and how much power our creditors have over us.

According to Barry P. Bosworth, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, our two biggest foreign creditors are Japan and China.

Although it may seem as though our debt to these countries renders us a puppet on strings, Bosworth says this fear is overblown. The U.S. market is very important to China's economy, so China would be loathe to do anything that might exacerbate tensions or disrupt trade between the two countries. And the same can be said for Japan. China owns $1.15 trillion of U.S. government debt -- more than any other country -- but U.S. taxpayers actually owe less money to China compared to recent years. China holds 10% of U.S. Treasuries, down from 12% two years ago.

Related: China's Slow Growth 'Marks An End of an Era' But No Hard Landing

And

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A Foxconn executive has acknowledged that the company is having trouble making enough iPhone 5s--creating a supply problem that has contributed to Apple's (AAPL) falling stock price and led to analysts cutting their estimates for the company's December quarter.

The Wall Street Journal's Lorraine Luk quotes an official at the company as saying the following:

"The iPhone 5 is the most difficult device that Foxconn has ever assembled. To make it light and thin, the design is very complicated," said an official at the company who declined to be named. "It takes time to learn how to make this new device. Practice makes perfect. Our productivity has been improving day by day."

The executive said Hon Hai has taken steps to improve its productivity and address scratches on the metal casings of some new iPhones that were shipped. Hon Hai has recently implemented a new quality check procedure to reduce the chance of damages. But he noted the iPhone 5 uses a

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Since the first presidential debate in Denver two weeks ago, Mitt Romney has staged an amazing surge in the polls. Many Americans agree with pundits that Romney clobbered a surprisingly passive President Obama in the debate, and Romney has gone from nearly-hopeless underdog to, in some polls, the front-runner.

That puts even more pressure on Obama to put on a strong performance in the second debate.

Related: Romney's Surge in the Polls Not to Blame for Stalled Rally: Weisenthal

One thing Obama can do to help himself is rebut the Romney charge that Obama "can't run on his record."

Obama's record, at least with respect to the economy, has been solid — especially relative to the economy of the prior adminstration.

Before Obama took office, the economy was in freefall, obliterated by tax cuts, runaway government spending, massive consumer debts, and lax regulatory culture of the prior administration.

The moment Obama arrived and implemented the

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Politics is not generally a fact-based realm, and last night's VP debate was no exception.

According to Robert Farley, the Deputy Managing Editor of FactCheck.org, both Joe Biden and Paul Ryan stretched or stomped all over the truth during the debate.

Related: 2 Debates and No Mention of the Fed: How Is that Possible?

Some of the key fallacies the candidates uttered, Farley writes, included the following:

• Ryan said Obama's proposal to let tax rates rise for high-income individuals would "tax about 53 percent of small-business income." Wrong. Ryan is counting giant hedge funds and thousands of other multimillion-dollar enterprises as "small" businesses.
• Ryan exaggerated the claim that "20 million people...are projected to lose their health insurance if Obamacare goes through." According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, it's more likely that 3 million to 5 million Americans would no longer get health insurance through their employers.

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Sales of personal computers worldwide declined a shocking 8% in the third quarter, according to technology research firm Gartner.

Part of the decline was the result of people waiting for the release of Microsoft's (MSFT) latest operating system, Windows 8, which comes out this month. But part of it was also likely due to cannibalization of PC sales by smartphones and tablets, especially tablets.

Related: HP's Historic Loss: Can Meg Whitman Save the PC Giant? Can Anyone?

Last year, in a profound shift in consumer technology usage, the number of smartphones and tablets sold eclipsed the number of PCs sold. This trend is likely to continue in future years, which means that PCs will become an ever-smaller portion of the overall personal-computing market.

PCs aren't likely to die off completely--it's hard to imagine those who work at desks ever sacrificing large screens and keyboards for tablets or smartphones. But many tasks that used to be done on a