Just saying. Every one of those things you listed, my mother thinks is an advantage, not a drawback.

proprietary interface - she knows that to get something that really works, she just goes to the Apple store. There's never any "driver" or compatibility issues. She gets a straight answer from someone she trusts.

designed to sync through itunes only. Yep. She loves that. Nice and simple, and again, one easy path to getting what she wants.

she doesn't use Outlook or Google apps (whe wouldn't know a google app if it came up and introduced itself). She doesn't want complexity layered on top of her nice simple interface just to make someone else's life easier.

excessive control over apps - well "excessive" is a judgemental term, but she's happy there's next-to-no malicious apps for the iPhone compared to other vendors offerings. She knows she's not that technical, and she likes that the people who do know techy stuff are helping her against these malicious apps.

clumsy UI - well, simple anyway. Simple is good. Simple is easy to understand, and she likes easy to understand.

I'd be willing to bet there are more people in this world who are on a technical level with my mother, than with you or I; which is why Apple have maintained these "drawbacks" - because they're advantages.

Simon.

*chortle*. Good one.

I had an Atari ST at college. It booted (to a graphical, no less) desktop pretty much instantly, say a few seconds if you had a slew of SCSI peripherals (especially a CDROM drive), but otherwise it was about half a second.

It was ready to go, too. None of this crap of *showing* the desktop and then spinning the busy cursor for another 30 secs...

Simon.

Indeed.

My position is that the qualification is meaningless. I can think of no job which does not have a specific skill-set requirement, from cleaning windows to CPU design. Different skills, for sure, but skills nonetheless.

My comment was therefore aimed at the age-related aspect of the conversation.

Just started a new job in Apple R&D. I'm 44.

No company will hire you if you don't have the skills they want, but I'm hardly the oldest person in my (fairly small) group; likewise in general on the floor around me. That's not to say there aren't younger people around - of course there are, it's just that age doesn't appear to be any sort of criteria.

I live in CA. 4 years ago I installed a $70k ($50k after rebates) 8kW solar system on my roof and my garage's roof.

Prior to solar, my original electricity bill peaked at ~$1100/month, more commonly about $600. This is due mainly to my own choices, no doubt, but still that's what we are dealing with - in Summer, the AC is on quite a bit (it's been 106F this last week) and the pool pump needs to run 8 hours a day for good cleaning. There's also the 2 pond pumps which run 24/7 and the reef tank pumps which also run 24/7. Add in a baby (so lots of washing-machine and dryer activity) and it adds up...

After the solar installation, my bill peaks at ~$100, more commonly about $50. This gives me an average saving of ~$8500 per year, and if you divide $55k by $8.5k you get 5.88 years to pay for itself. By some definitions that's 5 years...

In terms of cost, certainly the main issue is that I consume a lot of electricity. I'm happier now that most of that comes gratis from the sun, but also partly it's California's (or at least PG&E's) electricity pricing which ranges in tiers (the below taken from www.pge.com)

$0.1323 ... baseline
$0.1504 ... 101% -> 130% of baseline
$0.3111 ... 131% -> 200% of baseline
$0.3511 ... 200% -> 300% of baseline
$0.3514 ... 301%+

My baseline is set at 7.5 kWh per day (or ~225 kWh/month) , and I consume about 40kWh per day on a "good" (no AC, pool closed) day (pumping water is energy-intensive...). For me at least, the maths works out. When you're looking at individual cases, using average numbers is not such a great idea...

Simon