How is your usage of electronics products from company X any better?

I don't really understand this argument. In Diablo 2, you could play single-player, but that character would never make it onto battle.net. Sure, you could just always play LAN games with your friends, but you'd never be able to take any of your progress online. Or if you go on open battle.net, anyone can just edit their save file and give themselves whatever items or levels they wanted. In Diablo 3, it's the same thing if you want to play your character on closed battle.net.

Same process, not same processor. And besides, Samsung's foundry is completely separate from their mobile business.

Doubt it. The consumer electronics industry, including CPUs and GPUs, is keeping well in pace with the technology developed by semiconductor companies. Each new process node nowadays costs up to ten billion dollars to develop and put into production, and it's highly doubtful anyone is secretly hiding years of advancement over publically known technology. Now, if you want to talk about the companies keeping "hyperfast" architectures in wraps for slow release, then that is plausible, although still, highly doubtful.

Is it worth paying twice as much for all of your GPS devices to be able to get Lightsquared?

Ah, you're right. Reballing can be annoying but the people in China do it all the time, somewhat reliably. No telling what effect the PoP will have though.

Since the raspberry pi itself is pretty cheap, they could just desolder one off a working board.

Of course, you're buying a final product from the Raspberry Pi guys. It's understood to be assembled and fully tested. I was talking about a "kit" version where they sell you the PCB's and let you assemble it and test yourself.

I don't understand why people even want a kit at all. The assembled version is already ridiculously cheap due to high volume. There's tons of surface mount parts that would be annoying to even package for people. Why ruin a perfectly good small form factor to make it a little easier for a few people who want to solder it themselves? Also, it would take you hours of your own time assembling it. Why don't people design their own hardware instead?

The much bigger problem is the lack of documentation on accessing the GPU (which is a more modern design and pretty powerful compared to the older ARM CPU core they're using)

Another issue is that it is very hard to debug an assembled board. If one of the pads on the BGA doesn't make contact it's nearly impossible to diagnose. A power to ground short would be very difficult to locate. They can't use their automated test jig to sort out defective parts or errors in assembly, etc. And then the manufacturer will be prompting tons of support requests by people. It really isn't worth the effort.

Ultrasonic is highly directional so it is unsuitable for any-angle proximity detection. Also, it is pretty bulky due to the size of the transducers. Theoretically it should be possible to create omni-directional ultrasonic transducers but no one sells them (for hobbyists).

I use my Amazon card exclusively for all my purchases now. No fees and the cashback structure is very nice. Since I pay off my balance monthly there's absolutely no downside to using it, but I gain convenience and 1/2/3% cash back on my purchases.

There's semiconductor fab companies that manufacture the wafers in the USA, but still ship them to Asia for packaging and testing, which requires less labor skill and investment. See this Micron video for instance: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvf29R7nXlM

Obviously power consumption is important but performance is also very important. An Atom is an extremely cheap CPU that doesn't deserve to go in a $1000 laptop, like I said. Otherwise you can take the argument to silliness by asking why Apple didn't go with ARM or something.

I've found that Macbooks are pretty comparable in price to a Windows laptop now, at least the Airs (since we're on that topic). Nothing out there matches a Macbook Air in price, considering that the Air comes with an SSD and a Sandy Bridge CPU.

Honestly, who cares? You're mischaracterizing the DRM feature as something that is a backdoor into your computer that can what, spy on you? Remotely disable your computer? I haven't seen a single source demonstrate that their DRM feature does this.

Atoms are friggin slow compared to a regular CPU and should only be used for sub-$400 netbooks, not $1000 laptops. One of the great things about the Air is that it doesn't use some dumbed down CPU, it's just a regular Sandy Bridge clocked down.