Why bother installing the dist at all if you don't like what it does?

Aluminium is a terrible material to make a phone from and I bet Apple have milled it to within an inch of its life. Maybe it doesn't matter so much for a smaller device but these phablets are so big that they are going to suffer increased leverage and bend forces. Perhaps it would have been better to use plastic over a steel frame like most other phones. It might not look so good but it would probably be stiffer and more resistant.

I think it's quite reasonable to rag on it given that Apple are claiming they encrypt data on the phone. Maybe they do but if you can get at it with a fingerprint then it's not hugely more secure than before. Not that I would single out Apple for all the heat here - most phones are only protected by a short pin and even alternative authentication schemes are likely guessable in some way - e.g. Microsoft's photo login and Google's pattern unlock can probably be inferred just by looking at the finger smears on a screen.

Young earth and old earth creationists. And holocaust deniers. And climate change deniers. They all play the same tricks - quote mining & simile abuse, nitpicking, cherry picking of facts, pseudo science etc.

Exactly. It's essentially whack-a-mole but with paranoid and stupid people.

People such as moon landing hoaxers, 9/11 truthers etc. are so far gone that you could methodically tear down each and every one of their assertions, employing evidence, science, logic to beat it to a pulp and they'd still start right up with the first one again.

That's why I said the "official" store should be a subsiduary that buys its stuff wholesale like every other store. Then they can put whatever margin they like to turn a profit and they don't have to worry about what other retailers think.

I guess the problem that Apple & Sony demonstrate is that going to the manufacturer doesn't necessarily get you a better price even without a middleman. They just use it as an excuse to have bigger margins.

The proper form of competition would see the manufacturer required to sell its products at a wholesale price in a transparent and unbiased way. If the manufacturer wants to sell its own product it would have to set up a subsiduary company which would be subject to the same rules as everyone else.

I think I'd have more sympathy for dealers if they sold cars for the price on the sticker with no negotiations, no hidden extras, no hidden fees. The price you see is the price you pay. It would be better yet if they did this online where they can't bamboozle people with figures or promises they won't keep or with high pressure sales for extras.

Perhaps it would be more accurate to say a 3D printer SHOULDN'T require any skill on the part of the user. That is assuming the hardware and software are up to snuff. The software shouldn't accept impossible shapes and the hardware / firmware should be reliable enough to accurately print what its told to print. The only reason it shouldn't is if it suffers a jam or runs out of material.

When that actually happens and we see reliable printers it'll move from being a niche thing into the mainstream. The problem I see for Makerbot et al is if they don't pull their fingers out soon then someone like Canon, HP, Brother etc. will surely make such a machine and they'll probably have the brand recognition to dominate the market.

Actually the first thing you need is a giant plastic ball. Let your robot run inside the ball like a hamster. Then you don't have to worry about half of this stuff.

Most cars would be sold in the thousands and besides, nobody would buy a car if the finish was as bad as this. They only achieved the speed at all by rushing the printing, extruding from a wide nozzle. If they were to use high precision nozzles to achieve makerbot quality finish it'd take 100x the time and it still wouldn't look great. It's just not practical except for the crudest of prototypes.

Most extruded plastic 3D printers look bad, but this particular one looks terrible. The flaws are big enough to see in the promo video in SD. It's like a lumpy coil pot.

As usual 3D printing is being used as an excuse for free publicity. Most of the parts could have been injection moulded with far greater quality & accuracy in far less time, assuming plastic was the best material to make them with in the first place.

The US was bitching that Apple paid a really low rate of tax in Ireland just recently while Ireland was claiming it was all above board. I'm not sure if it was or not but Ireland has always insisted their taxation scheme is transparent - it's just that it allows big corps to launder their profits through a few countries to shake off the tax liabilities.

The requirement to use their payment system probably doesn't apply to Amazon. Their Play policy

has an exemption which says "where payment is for digital content or goods that may be consumed outside of the app itself (e.g., buying songs that can be played on other music players)". As long as Amazon lets rentals play through other apps then they're probably perfectly okay.

A more likely reason it hasn't appeared until now have been Amazon's own ambitions to run an app store and tablets/phones that are tied to it. They're holding back the goodies to make their own platform more attractive by comparison. Google did it with YouTube to Microsoft, Blackberry did it with BBM and so on.