I'd say the USA is the greatest enemy of the USA. If the madness don't stop soon, the 1% will have sucked the 99% so dry the USA will be a dessicated husk.

They could be propping up regimes that routinely use torture and abuse human rights, and randomly killing innocents with drones. But then there'd be nothing left for the US to do...

You're right, Apple products are very good for some specific uses. But Apple need broad markets to maintain their growth and profits, I doubt all Devs + all Musicians + half of all Graphics/Video Artists would be enough. For Joe Publics like me, buying Apple means getting luxury products at luxury prices, and getting locked into a system where there are *only* luxury products at luxury prices, even the apps and accessories/peripherals are more expensive. Add to that a few irritating drawbacks (I put the biggest SDs I can in all my devices because I'm often not on-line, I find all-in-ones a very bad choice, I need a server with oodles of hard drives...). As for MS forbidding dual-booting, that's the first I heard of it. I even remember reading they gave keys to some Linux outfit so that you could dual-boot w/o even disabling SecureBoot. Apple on the other end, make it illegal to install their OS on non-Apple hardware, as far as I recall.

Indeed. And there's a big difference between being locked in to an ecosystem with a single vendor, expensive on top of that (iPhones for the whole family, at $600 a pop, then $1k+ Macs and MacBooks, $300 iPods, $400+ iPads), versus a multivendor ecosystem where I can get a $600 GS4 or HTC One, but also $200 phones for the kids, $100-200 tablets, $50 Android desktops... Sure, the quality of the cheap stuff is not the same, but the big difference is between having the stuff or not having it; how good the stuff is comes a very distant second. I got a phone, a tablet, a netbook, and an Android stick for less than the cost of a single 64GB iPhone...

You're mixing up "casing shininess" and "quality". I have a $200 cheap Chinese phone and a $600 (at the time) Galaxy Note (v1), and there's no doubt which is higher quality. The Samsung has a much better screen, camera, sound, buttons, touch reactivity and precision, extra apps. Both are wrapped in plastic though. Both do the job, though.

OK... let's push this a bit more: guns are made of steel. Lots of people (in Japan and everywhere) got killed by guns too, like by atomic bombs. We should ban steel then ?

This is dumb, insensitive, and offensive. Nuclear accidents have nothing to do with people lobbing atomic bombs at you, especially atomic that are redundant and being lobbed for the sake of doing a live test. Maybe it's the US who have a bad record with responsible use of weaponry...

I rather prefer my Android tablet to my brother's iPad. What bugs me with iPads (apart from price,I/O) is the totally inconsistent UI: Android has a menu key and a back key, and that's where stuff gets done. iOS doesn't, so there's buttons all over the place, sometimes even off-screen. Shades of single-button vs 2-button+wheel mice ...

that's "whose", you illiterate twit !

I'd never put my phone in my back pocket, for fear of sitting on it. It does in the front, and nobody ever noticed it. And no, it's not being overshadowed nor given extra rooms by having an overly large or tiny neighbour.

fits in pocket - check (it's actually only about 1cm longer than my 5.1" Note, not wider, a bit thicker)
fits in hand - check
thumb-navigable - 80%:
- I can reach a tad less than half the screen while holding it securely one handed; and that's the area of the screen where most interaction goes on: typing, scrolling dialing...
- I can reach the whole screen one-handed while.. not... holding it securely
- I do have 2 hands, so having to occasionally use the second one is not a catastrophe. My nose is going a bit more unpicked, though.

That's what people usually think indeed. Until they actually use a big device for a few hours or days, and then most (not all) change their minds. The "must fit in my shirt pocket because I'm me and I express my being through random criteria" can easily be morphed into "must fit into my pants pocket" or "must be usable without hunching over" or "must be able to browse w/o panning and zooming constantly" or "must be able to double as my ebook reader", so random criteria don't *have* to be altogether lost in the process, they can be substituted.

OTOH, some people do use their phones mostly for phoning, and/or have eagle eyes, and/or are very fashion conscious.

"b) showing everyone that you've "given up" and just don't care what you wear anymore", nah, only judgmental assholes jump to that deductive a conclusion. And fashion victims (which are the same, mostly).

It's not an opinion, it's fact: a 6.1" screen has 232% the area of a 4"; a 23", 235% of a 15" (assuming both are the same ratio such as 16:9 or some such)

As for "carting" around, a 6 incher doesn't need carting either, it fits in my pockets.

Well... my 6.1" screen is to a 4" screen what a 23" is to a 15" on the desktop. Would you go back to a 15" on your desk ?