Having just an iPhone is not enough to be locked-in. But if you purchased a lot of applications, are relying on iCould and iTunes, have an Apple TV and an iPad, tons of Apple-only accessories such as cables, chances that your next phone will be an Android are close to 0. The cost of switching would be too high.

I get your point about lack of post-sales support and upgrades. However, I don't understand how hardware/software permutation is a problem. You only need one good device. Why would I care if a cheap device I didn't buy from one of these chinese vendors is buggy and lacks support?

No single company will always make the product that conforms the most with your life, and which you like the most (if you take the time to compare with alternatives, of course). That's why it's important not to be vendor locked-in, so that you can move the best vendor easily.

I am not saying JavaScript can't perform in some specific scenarios. Just like C isn't always fast (code can be badly written in any language). But globally, JavaScript isn't known as a performance language, unlike say C, C++, Fortran and of course assembly.
Also, according to these benchmarks, JavaScript is much slower than C: http://benchmarksgame.alioth.d...

Since when are VB6 and JavaScript "performant" languages? I can't think of anything slower than JavaScript.

I know there are many different ARM processors. But ART can't target ARM v4. So again, how many targets do ART actually have?

How many different targets are there? I don't think ART has more than 3 possible targets currently used.

Why must the ART compiler be installed on any phone? Can't Google compile the code ahead of time? There are like 3 architectures out there (arm, arm64, x86-64) so Google could afford to store 3 binaries isn't it?

Is it really worse than Qualcom Adreno or ARM Mali?

There is a $199 version.

The point is that the Zenphone 2 offers 90% of $700+ phones for a third of the price. It totally kills the iPhone 5c/s for half the price.

There is no valid reason for corruption to occurs on RAID0 anymore than on any other setup. The problem of RAID0 is data loss (drive failure).

Except that no one uses PPPoE without */IP on top of it.

Except that the IP address is configured in the software he is updating. He's the guy doing the update, not the developper who choose to have the same IP address on each pump. But there are good reasons to put the same IP address: simplicity and manufacturing. All these pumps are identical. You don't want manufacturing to need a different software configuration depending on the physical location of the gas pump. For the same reason, all Linksys routers are configured with 192.168.1.1 and not random IP addresses.

If you need more money, just raise the tax. If everybody switches to electric and the tax becomes ineffective, then at least the air will be cleaner.