I want Save As back as a first-class citizen as much as anyone, but the entirety of your rant there is simply flat-out wrong. You say there's no save option, but (as you half-acknowledge after complaining it doesn't exist) there is - and yes, it shows up in every document-based app. You say you have to go to Finder to duplicate a file, but the whole complaint here is that Save As has been replaced by Duplicate in the menu. The actual, still 3-step process is: Choose "Duplicate" (no need to save beforehand as it is the current state that is duplicated), type new file name, and (either the first time you do an explicit save or when you close the new document) deal with the Save dialog. The only way that is more difficult than Save As is that it disconnects renaming the new file from the save dialog. And if you prefer documents revert to the last manual-save state on close, simply check that box in the system preferences.

You're right - it should be (United States of America)ns. But that's kind of long and awkward. Maybe the world could agree to abbreviate it a bit for convenience sake, and drop the USof portion. As long as everyone understands the abbreviation it should work great even if it isn't 100 percent perfect, barring a few obnoxious internet pedants complaining about it here and there. (I hear some of them actually like to abbreviate the other way, as if the "US" portion couldn't also refer to the United States of Mexico. But that's holier-than-thou Internet pedants for you, they don't care about accuracy, they just care about looking smarter than everyone else.)

I hate to ask, but are you certain you were quitting the apps (App menu -> Quit / Command-Q)? There's a big difference between minimizing an app's window(s) and quitting it, certainly, but there's also a big difference between closing an app's window(s) and quitting it. Most Mac apps will continue to run happily even after you've closed their last window, very unlike Windows apps (this includes Adobe apps). If the process was still appearing in Activity Monitor (or top in the terminal) as taking up X GB of memory, then you didn't actually quit the app.

If you didn't like it, you didn't like it, and that's fine... you should certainly work using whatever tools you feel most comfortable with. But your specific points I don't get.

Why are you trying to micromanage memory usage? This isn't the 90's. The OS will free up memory when it is needed. Any memory that is just sitting around "free" is memory wasted. The best way to check if you're running into memory constraints is to check if the OS is using swap at all (Mavericks has a nice memory pressure graph too, though in 2013 you probably did not have Mavericks).

Adobe software sucks, but it should be cleaning up its own temp files except in rare circumstances. I've never had orphaned temp files in the decade+ I've been using Photoshop and Indesign. Still, if they're a problem, you only need to learn where they're stored once.

The easiest way to view long filenames is in list mode. If you're looking through a bunch of files with long filenames, it's stupid to do it in grid mode, where you're obviously constrained by the grid. The desktop itself is grid-mode-only, but the desktop folder can be viewed in a Finder window like any other folder. And if you must - hover your mouse over a truncated filename and the full thing will pop up as a tooltip (if you're navigating through the files with the keyboard, hitting enter or return will show the whole thing).

And your resale value - obviously this varies from place to place but a Mac about a year old should sell for at least 2/3 its original value - $2k or maybe even $2.2k would have been more than reasonable for a 6 month old Mac. 1/2 the original value is more common for a 2+ year old laptop. I have a number of friends who do the sell-and-upgrade cycle every year or two and it works quite well for them (though I personally don't find it worth the trouble). If you live somewhere where the local resale value is low, just use eBay. Based on the price, I assume this was your Mac, and now at >1 year old they're going for $1800.

It has, and AFAIK it defaults to enabled (mine is on, and I've never messed with it).

Slashdot search does kind of suck, but in fairness the dupe is actually the #3 result when you search for "iMessage".

I have a number of friends who are cellphone salespeople and they're ALWAYS told to push Android phones (and afaik there are no incentives or commissions to push iPhones). iPhones are expensive to carriers, both in what Apple charges the carrier initially and in the long term hit to the network (iPhone users use more data). That's not to say they aren't happy to sell you an iPhone (especially if you're switching from a cheap dumbphone plan), but they are much, much happier to see you switch away from an iPhone to a Samsung or whatever.

1.3 men for every woman. Of course, the women see through this - the extra 0.3 he's claiming is typical male exaggeration.

No shit, I didn't say Thunderbolt invented docking stations. I said docking stations are very much a "legitimate use" for Thunderbolt - probably the most common. And previous custom docking connectors rarely had the flexibility of Thunderbolt (being a PCI bus you can put damn near any kind of ports you want at the other end, not just what's pre-built into your laptop's custom pin-out), nor a standardized port that allows for many different brands/products to interact.

The first? There are any number of "docking station"-style solutions that are less specialized and therefore legitimately useful to even more people - the primary one being the one integrated into Apple's Thunderbolt display (but there are cheaper solutions from Belkin, Sonnet, Matrox, CalDigit, etc). Get home, plug your laptop in, and with that one connector it instantly has access to your 30" display(s), gigabit ethernet, and your USB 3, Firewire, and other Thunderbolt peripherals (and the speakers, mic, and webcam built into the display, too). For a laptop, Thunderbolt can be remarkably useful. On a desktop less so IMO.

That myth about Apple getting a one-year exclusive deal on Thunderbolt was debunked by Intel the day after it's release, three years ago. On top of that, Thunderbolt could never work as a standard PCI add-on card, because it is lower-level and needs to expose/act as an entire PCI bus itself. Asus makes add-ons for certain of their motherboards that have an additional specific Thunderbolt header, though - and Displayport is optional there, busting yet another one of your claims.

I got to see Jobs give the commencement address at my friend's graduation from Stanford a while back. But I'm pretty sure that by the time this kid is a senior, Jobs won't be there. He's kind of dead already.

I've always hated the move toward "omnibar" seach field/URL field combos for this very reason. Add in dynamic search suggesting and every damn thing many (if not most) of the people on the planet put in that field gets sent to Google. Anything Google does with the URL bar is solely for their own advantage. No thanks.

Uh, the California Aqueduct was created in the 60's to do exactly that. (Map for the visually inclined.)

The plant is, in fact, a reverse osmosis plant.