How many marketing gimmicks do YOU respond to. I think I remember getting a spam text, once. But I'm not certain it even happened once.

Perhaps I'm weird. I've owned quite a few laptops over the past 15 years and I only once ran into insurmountable issues regarding the battery. And, now that I think about it, it wasn't actually the battery that was the issue because I bought a replacement and it still wouldn't charge, so it was something else in the power chain.

I think many other people are like me in that they have a laptop and use it quite often while plugged in. As my laptops age, I just don't count on being able to use them away from a plug for long periods of time. Outside of the one unsuccessful battery replacement I mentioned above, I've never bought a replacement battery.

I can see how it is nice for people who do use their laptops daily, but if the 1000 charge cycles hold up, that's almost 3 years. If you use a computer that much every day, you might consider a new model every once in a while.

I do think I will miss the ability to add RAM (well, not in this computer since I maxed it out when I bought it, but, the idea of being able to upgrade) but again, assuming anyone else uses their computer in a similar way to me, it isn't a huge deal.

I was pretty disappointed I was going to have to get a glossy screen when I got my Retina MBP... I haven't thought about it more than once or twice since it came in the mail.

speaking of which, the other day someone was watching a youtube video on their phone in a restroom stall... without headphones. Is that a thing now? I hope not.

everything I've ever tried that is in-ear gets slowly (sometimes quickly) pushed out of my ear-canal... I might try these sometime if I get $20 to burn :D

i.e. when I want to listen to something and not annoy everyone around me.

Your claim is false.

How do you explain that?

No they don't

I recall a few years back that they had a LTS release with a beta version of Firefox that was broken, broken Pulse Audio, and even worse, a bad binary blob in the Intel gigabit NIC drivers that would permanently brick your NIC if you loaded the driver.

LTS releases are supported longer, but that doesn't make them more stable on day one. Nor does it change the fact that the packages get the same polish the other fairly bleeding edge Ubuntu releases get.

Red Hat and Debian Stable seem to be overly cautious with sticking with old packages forever for "stability", even if known bugs exist in old packages. Ubuntu is very bleeding edge sometimes at the cost of stability.

I think there needs to be a fairly sane middle ground where each package gets reasonable polish, but you also get newer packages out somewhat quickly. But that takes a lot of package maintainers.

I haven't checked it out recently, but Ubuntu doesn't necessarily have a reputation for solid bug-free packages that never crash. Ubuntu doesn't have as many engineers, developers or package maintainers as Novell or Red Hat.

Ubuntu's KDE packages were so famously awful that it soured a lot of people who assumed KDE must be buggy and unstable on its own (when openSUSE and Fedora KDE packages are rock solid).

FWIW, I don't think Unity has done much to improve the desktop experience, though that is somewhat a matter of taste.

Canonical marketed Linux to the extent that Ubuntu was tracking higher as a keyword in searches than Linux.

I'd like to thank the KDE devs however for making Linux usable on the desktop.

your budget is less than $500?

all your tracks that they have copies of.

c*o's ?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyOTq1EpV5o

Fun times