Aw gee, and after all the talk about how Apple was a horrible company for "abandoning" the iPhone 4 users in September 2013 (phone released in 2010). Oh, "abandoning" means that the iPhone 4 merely doesn't upgrade to the latest iOS full version release, it's still supported AFAIK under iOS 7. Queue the Android shills in 3, 2, ...

We grew things in 6/7, in 8+ we cut them up.

actually, the hardware is better. Decidedly better. Samsung would kill to be able to have the same touchscreen. Have you actually used a Galaxy S4? I have. They suck hardware wise in comparison. Just because you make a paper mache tiger doesn't make it like a real tiger except from a viewable distance.

I hope "Macs" do not get touchscreens. The last thing I want on my 4K+ screen is a bunch of fingerprint smudges.

Apple is a platform company, and always has been. The user experience is driven by software running on applicable hardware. Apple started as a hardware company, and has always focused on having a reliable platform. A Jobs snippet taken out of context doesn't mean much.

On this, just about everyone will disagree. Their hardware is different, performs within published specs, and lasts better and longer than any competitor. Putting windows on a MacBook Pro gives you the ultimate windows laptop, lighter, faster, and longer battery life as well as longer lasting hardware. Putting OS X on non Apple hardware can result in a relatively fast solid system at a lower cost than comparable Apple hardware, but rarely better functioning, at least until the latest soldered on memory garbage on minis at least.

And you knew this, so why do you state they're a software company?

Just remove parties from ballots, you'll have the fixes percolating through in no time. No parties, no party vote. Two party system? Done.

Automatically on Yosemite, turns out that install system and security updates was checked. No more. I don't like things happening to my system automatically.

They're trying to patent something called yield management. I do believe a wikipedia article about an age old process invalidates any legalese patent language you try to wrap around the idea.

All depends on what you're doing. And, as a side note - citation needed that the code was 10s of millions of lines, and that it was refactored programatically. Mail just isn't that much C/C++ code. If it is, Google is doomed. Same for search.

I merely corrected your misinterpretation of what I said 2 entries earlier. You seem to be stuck in a faulty logic loop. I don't care about Google's success on refactoring their code nor that mail and search have largely remained up. I would be surprised if either was fully down, actually, based on how they're running them.

I inferred no numbers, only the overall trend of reduced traffic and that reduced traffic = reduced pollution. To make any statement about the reduction amounts would require study.

The fleet aging effect would assume the same number of vehicles on the road. The only thing you can say about that study is that for an average of 'n' vehicles, the median age is older, and they would be dirtier than a newer median age. In fact, that's all TFA says.

Sure (it's not direct a direct study on recession vs pollution, but supports the fewer cars on road aspect. Fewer cars on road equals less pollution.)

Are you sure that the recession didn't result in less people being on the roads in LA particularly, thus resulting in less pollution than if the recession was avoided?

ie, the mail backend is minor, sending, receiving, as all you're doing is integrating with system provided services. No, I haven't written an SMTP type server in more than a decade, why would I? There are very suitable choices out there that are current with the latest RFCs and easy to integrate with. As far as inbound, that's not terribly hard either, but again, there's systems out there that handle that. What's needed is a client that can handle the UX. Simple mail isn't too bad, where gmail excelled (for 2005 anyways) was in allowing you to categorize and search (hence the lookup) your mail via a web front-end. Hopefully that clarified things a bit.

and, as an FYI, recently I designed and wrote a flexible notification system in about 1 month. That included sending notifications via email and SMS and in-app messages on triggers as well as accepting inbound responses and acting on them, and included search capabilities. That system has been in use for years with 1M+ users and no faults. IOW, this stuff isn't all that damn hard. FYI - Google's search isn't even all that great, IMNSHO, they just initially had better interfaces and results (ie, they crawled more web) than all the competing services at the time. Hell, I'd bet I wasn't the only one that was writing their own crawler/search solution at that time and stopped when Google became available. Google's claim to fame was in monetizing search. Now that, I grant you, is more than a little challenging.

Gosling did it, as did Ritchie. in a panel conversation along with Stroustrup. That covers all the majors. So how many other big language creators do you know that haven't said something similar?

Not particularly, because I don't really use them much. And how hard is a lookup routine anyways? (Even mail is mostly lookup with a minor backend that I personally have written at least 4 times - ie, even I can do it:) The rest is adserving (blocked significantly, apparently) and tracking, and other things that don't really affect the general user's services.