Pretty much. Also, given the general purpose nature of GPUs now for running "other" code, it's only a matter of time before someone writes malware that lives in your GPU firmware.

Doesn't even have to be profit driven. If the government (or anyone with sufficient $ / technical skill) either owns or co-erces the CAs in the current model, you're boned.

To illustrate the advantage this gives Apple. Apple don't hide it - they aim for 35-45% margins on their gear. Turn that around, it means they could drop prices by 25-30% and still be making the same margin that most of the PC OEMs are making. The PC OEMs can't drop much further to compete.

It cuts costs in various ways. As you say, it cuts the cost of your supply chain. And it does add up. You go from 1 colour to 2, and you have doubled your inventory tracking costs. If you're going to different chassis builds (as per samsung and the rest), then you're massively increasing costs to re-tool the factory, keep track of a whole inventory of other components for the manufacturing, etc.

It most definitely adds up, and this is why apple can do stuff like maintain 45% margins on the macbook air whilst keeping the build quality of the enclosure, fund OS X development, NOT include shitware, provide iCloud and all the other support, while the PC guys can barely clone it somewhat without providing any of the additional service/software stuff - on margins so thin that most of them are posting losses or otherwise not doing well.

HP/Dell are completely insane with the configuration options you can do on their notebooks. For example, I can select whether or not to include a $5 option analog modem on our corp issued laptops. I can select multiple different WIFI cards, I can select a heap of different screens, etc. The number of different combinations that were possible with our Elitebook 8570s for example was simply huge.

Now because HP offer so many different options on that same model that really don't matter - they can't stamp out a few million of them in case people want something tweaked. They can't order bulk on CPUs in case people don't order that CPU. Etc.

Apple? Here are 3 different sizes, each has 2 different CPU/RAM options. We offer a custom build ultra high end option for bumping the CPU/RAM.

95% of sales they can fill with machines they can just stamp out en-mass.

And I'm saying that unless you have personally audited the source code, and the machine code for the compiler, you are trusting someone else, and that it does what it says it does. Which is not any different to running closed source software. I still have a compiler and development environment on my mac if i want to write my own software.

/. story submission approval has a clear anti-apple bias, this is just yet another example of it. click-bait for ad impressions, that's all.

... seems about on par with 7 to me maybe with a little better battery life on my 4s. I did a back up and install through itunes, not over the air (didn't have enough free space). I have had issues with previous iOS before (Betas mostly) that were solved by backing up, setting up as a new phone with the new OS and then restoring data from backup.

The fact that Samsung has a "galaxy line" among a heap of other android handsets is telling. If they were to get rid of most of the lineup of garbage that few people want, they'd be able to sell more of the higher end models at a lower price due to cheaper cost of manufacturing. Henry Ford worked this stuff out with the Model T.

I get evaluation phones on a regular basis at work. I've had perhaps 3 crashes on various iphones since 2008. I've used the Galaxy S4, The HTC One as examples of recent alternatives. Didn't like either of them. The shipping firmware on the HTC had bugs I stumbled across within a week, the S4 feels unpleasant to hold. And I do not like the android UI. If you do, great. I have zero interest in spending time to "learn how to use" my phone. It is an appliance.

So you understand the Linux kernel source and have personally audited it?

Much better to use XML and thus have the files readable with any XML parser, than design yet another configuration file format that needs yet another configuration file parser to be written.

Plenty of people use OS X to "get things done". About all people "get done" in a satisfactory manner using Linux is network administration.

... seems to work adequately for the 70+ million OS X installs out there.

You get logs on the Mac and plenty of diagnostic tools including dtrace. If the phone is broken you take it back to apple and they give you a new one, but there are diagnostic logs on that too that you can get off it.

Sounds like you're a typical nerd who gets asked to support apple gear and you're out of your depth, so just say "it's crap" because you don't understand it.