When I looked at it earlier today, it was rather lacking. No ability to set your Home or Away status and no ability to control temperatures for people who set both an upper and lower bound rather than a single temperature. Ended up being a rather disappointing update from a user's perspective. From a developer's perspective, it was pretty meh. It's just what you'd expect, and not much more.

I'll keep that in mind next time someone makes a baseless ad hominem attack in response to something that has nothing at all to do with Apple or Steve Jobs.

You're putting words in my mouth. I never said those people were weird. I said the space between the two classes of device was weird. Big difference. And not wanting to own both a laptop and tablet is fine, but there are different ways to approach that objective besides trying to make a tablet that acts like a laptop or a laptop that acts like a tablet, both of which have been tried numerous times and failed to gain any traction.

My basic "complaint" isn't a complaint at all, which is to say, I have no problems with the situation, I'm merely analyzing why it's not working out for them and why I don't expect that to change. Even so, your comparison to Apple doesn't work, since you're ignoring the fact that the value proposition for Macs changed dramatically over the years (from overpriced nonsense that nearly brought Apple to bankruptcy, to overpriced in terms of hardware but offering significant value in other regards, to (mostly) overpriced in no way), whereas that hasn't happened with the Surface.

And it's a mischaracterization of what I said to suggest that it's merely an issue with it being overpriced. It's not just that, though that is one side to the coin. The other side to the coin is that it's under-performing in the areas that matter. To keep the price down after adding the tablet features, they had to skimp on the hardware that would have made it a competitive laptop while also shackling it with a PC OS that is getting overwhelmingly negative reviews, which means that they skimped on the simplicity that would have made it a compelling tablet. That's on top of the fact that it's coming up incredibly short in comparisons between the various app stores.

People who don't want to own both a laptop and tablet are perfectly reasonable for wanting that, but what they want is a full-fledged laptop and a full-fledged tablet, not something that comes up short in both regards.

Hold up: you're missing an important distinction.

The MacBook Air isn't just a laptop. It is a laptop. That's all it is, and it's a darn good laptop. It does laptop things really well.

By not just being a tablet, the Surface has failed to be good at being anything at all. If you pit it against laptops, it's under-specced for the price. For that sort of money, you can do a lot better elsewhere. And if you pit it against tablets, it's lacking apps and overpriced. It's in a weird space between the two that no one is interested in. I commend them for trying something different than everyone else and trying to carve out a unique niche (really, I do!), but I don't see how this particular execution of their strategy can be painted as anything other than an extended failure that has yet to turn the corner. I honestly hope it will, but it has yet to do so.

That's nice and all, but your lack of useful and relevant examples is rather glaring.

I don't think anyone here is denying that the Surface line is trying to do something that's quite a bit different from what other tablets are doing. They're definitely targeting a different set of use cases than what the iPad, Fire, or Galaxy Tab lines are hitting, and I have no doubt that the Surface Pro can do stuff no other tablet can. But the important question isn't, "Does it do stuff no one else can?" The important question to ask is, "Are the things it can do of interest to people and executed well?" And based on sales numbers, professional reviews, and numerous firsthand accounts both here and elsewhere, the answer is a resounding, "No".

Really, when you get down to it, the Surface line is simply a fresh iteration of the same strategy Microsoft has been employing in the tablet space since the early 2000s: put Windows everywhere so that users can have the power of a "PC" in their hand. The only thing that's changed is the execution, and you don't need to look long and hard at Windows 8 reviews to know that they botched that as well. The strategy may actually work for them if it is executed properly, but the fact that the market stayed nascent for ten years until a competitor introduced a device employing an alternative strategy indicates that they didn't get it right then, and the fact that the Surface line hasn't seen any real uptake should be good indications that either the strategy is a losing one or else that they have yet to execute properly on it.

TL;DR: Just because a device can do stuff other devices can't doesn't mean it's a good idea. We don't want compact cars with truck beds, wedding cakes from Burger King, or tight-fitting exercise shorts made of designer denim. In trying to be both a tablet and laptop, the Surface ended up being good at neither.

Exactly. Just because they won an appeal to the trademark office doesn't mean that the Redskins can't win on appeal on an entirely different basis, which is precisely what they did 15 years ago. They may change the name, or they may not. In the end, it's just politics and sportsball to me, both of which I make a point of avoiding the details of on a day-to-day basis.

FTFY

Just because you're not the target market doesn't mean others aren't. And while public transit is a nice idea, it isn't practical for everyone. The fact is, most of the US urban centers were built with personal transportation in mind, not public transportation, so cars make the most sense for the most people, and automated cars seems to be the future there. As such, getting into this market seems to make a lot of sense.

SELF CORRECTION: I shot off my mouth with some numbers I heard the other day, but it turns out I either heard them wrong or they were reported incorrectly to begin with. This report seems to indicate that I got the 95% and 55% numbers basically correct, but that it's not "two or fewer", but rather "two or more". Mea culpa.

A) We had net neutrality for over a decade without any issues of this sort. It didn't cripple or destroy anything. Quite the opposite, in fact.

B) There is no competition to cripple. 95% of the urban dwellers in the US have two or fewer choices for wireline broadband ISP. Of rural folks, that number drops to just 55%.

C) Even if we did have competition, the only three ways to compete are on bandwidth (which are reaching "good enough" for most, at which point it ceases to be a differentiating factor), usage (i.e. data caps), and on actual speeds users get. None of those are impacted negatively by net neutrality.

D) In fact, when there is competition, ISPs are incentivized to peer with companies like Netflix, on account of it providing better speeds/experience to their customers than what the competition might offer, while also reducing the load on their transit links, which saves them on infrastructure costs, while also providing more bandwidth for Netflix competitors.

If I have to choose between money and being good, I'll take being good, and I'd prefer that the companies I work with do likewise by making an effort to find ways to make money by being good. Google used to do that. Nowadays? Not so much.

I don't like being put in the position of defending this practice, but taken on face value, I don't see how it's illegal. If a company makes a minor update to a product that shaves a few bucks at the expense of quality, changes the product number to indicate that a revision has been made, and the news doesn't get picked up by any of the review sites, that doesn't mean the manufacturer did anything illegal. Sleazy, quite possibly, but they just as easily could've made a tweak that they thought was for the better and gotten it wrong, in which case it's not even sleazy: it's just a mistake.

In this case, however, we have no reason to believe that they were doing anything but compromising the product in order to line their own pockets with more cash, in which case I say screw 'em.

I was curious, so I did a quick search. The first result seems to indicate that 7 of the top 10 universities globally are based in the US (MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Yale, University of Chicago, Caltech, and Princeton). The others that round out the top 10 are all UK schools. Of the top 25, the US has 14, but they start to drop off after that, gaining only 5 more in the next 25 ranks, bringing them to having 19 schools in the top 50, though that's still 11 ahead of the UK, which was next closest in the top 50, having 8 schools ranked that high.

It seems you may be arguing that US schools aren't as well-funded as others (I'm not sure what "quality of tuition" means), and that may very well be the case, but that wasn't what the person you were responding to was talking about. They were talking about the quality of the school itself, not the "quality of tuition" which you were talking about, and in terms of the quality of the schools themselves, the US is still the (admittedly, declining) world leader, even if the schools may not be as well-funded as other world-class schools.

They haven't ditched Chiat/Day yet. They're simply pitting them against their in-house team for now and choosing the best from each.

He just got done explaining how vaccinations don't always take, so some percentage of vaccinated individuals are still susceptible to the pathogen, meaning that those people unknowingly depend on the successful vaccinations of those around them to protect them. Did you really just skip right by that?

That's okay. Thanks to herd immunity, so long as there aren't too many people avoiding vaccinations, you should still be able to enjoy all the benefits of immunity. In fact, you, more than most people, should have good reason to support vaccinations and encourage others to get them, given that a significant risk to your health is directly related to the vaccination rate of those around you. Herd immunity can generally support a small population that isn't immunized, such as yourself. The problems begin when that minority population gets too large, which is the case we're seeing here with the anti-vaxxers, who are ruining things not only for you, but for everyone else as well.