Smartphones "should have" started usurping the desktop by now, but for various reasons (no serious innovation in that direction from big players, and no focus on turning smartphones from 'non-dumb appliances' into real serious OS's / computing devices), so desktop computers remain the only way to do real "serious" work ... this actually remains Microsoft's 'hidden strength' and they should be focusing on that, rather than trying to 'me too' what Google have done (Apps and their App Store, invasion of privacy etc. .. they're trying to copy Apple and Google, but they don't have the market position of either on phones to pull it off).

The mess that is the new Skype (that Microsoft are excitedly bragging about) is just one example ... they want to drop Skype Classic already, yet the new Skype App can't do basic things (like have two open at once, message syncing doesn't even work properly, their 'Skype Web App' is even more of a mess).

People aren't mass-adopting smartphones and privacy-invading [cr]Apps because they're 'better than desktop/notebook computers' .. they're adopting smartphones because they need a phone anyway, and smartphones are occupying that niche, and have some benefits like built-in maps/GPS.

What MS should be trying to do, I think, is focus on trying to make desktops cheaper (e.g. ARM-based Windows? Cheaper OS?) - Intel have been helping dig Microsoft's grave by keeping PC's overpriced (new competition from AMD may help that slightly). None of this is easy; they have their work cut out for them.

To be fair, the Apple engineers may well be capable of doing the necessary design; it's possible the discussion went something like, "Well, we could do A, B and C but it's going to delay production by a year" but the business/marketing managers said, "But we want to be able to announce it offers performance level Y by next month" and went ahead. Either way, it isn't acceptable. Apple have the cash to absorb a launch delay like that, but they are probably afraid of longer-term erosion of public perception of their products.

No, it's why engineers focus on thermal design as an important issue when designing laptops. Or at least, they're supposed to. I have a high-end laptop and it rarely throttles, even under constant heavy load. Why? Because it wasn't designed by amateurs. Stop making excuses for crap. This isn't rocket science, this isn't something new that humans are only just starting to figure out; engineers have been successfully designing laptops for given thermal loads since probably before you were born. If you advertise that it supports a given CPU, it better support that configuration with relatively minimal throttling, or don't advertise it as such.

I have been following for a while as Google increasingly used all the exact same disgusting tactics to force their stuff on everyone that Microsoft used in the '90s (in some ways worse - e.g. even at the height of Microsoft's power they would have never dared to demand anyone who sells software that runs on Windows must give a 30% cut to them, yet somehow this absurd forced-middleman-cut has become the new normal ... there's no valid reason an 'App store' should require more than 5% for the services they provide, and in any case there should be competing App stores on any platform). I followed the Microsoft case closely back then; there are so many parallels, even the excuses regurgitated by the apologists are the same. What's interesting though is the US media seem to be silent on the case (while the Microsoft case got heavy coverage) - I know it's an EU court case, but if you ask me, it's highly suspicious that US media have been so silent on all the tactics they've been using (e.g. strong-arming OEMs).

That's a valid point, true.

Your point is true, but the situation's actually even worse, as ultimately what does the Samsung do that a feature-comparable-but-much-cheaper Chinese phone won't do? Not much. Hence Samsung has "only" about 28% market share in India (while Apple don't even make the market share pie chart, getting bundled into "Others"), while Chinese brands dominate (https://www.thenewsminute.com/article/chinese-brands-dominate-indian-smartphone-market-51-share-q1-2017-report-62166) ... Apple's a ripoff, Samsung less so, but I now only buy Chinese brands (my current Huawei is specification-wise almost as good as a Samsung S9 but literally half the price). Indians are less likely to buy into the 'pay 2 or 3 times as much because muh status' than Americans, but I'm surprised Apple are even doing as well as they are there, relatively.

"Mistake"? Or is this the journalist an Apple shill? In which case the idea is to deliberately strawman the competition. This reads like an Apple ad, pushing fallacy of false dilemma.

His other articles have headlines like this: "Here Are All The Cool New Things Coming To Your iPhone And iPad Soon", "Apple Will Reportedly Help India's Telecom Regulator Build An Anti-Spam App", "This Is The Brand-New Apple TV 4K", "These 12 Augmented Reality Experiences On iPhones Already Look Like The Future" etc.

There are, as you say, plenty of good-value alternatives to over-priced iPhones that are less than half the price of an iPhone and deliver comparable functionality in the middle of the market.

The mobile cartels lobbied for this to help protect their profits; from another source: "The Ugandan government has implemented a law forcing mobile users to pay taxes to use mobile money and social media apps like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Skype" ... basically the mobile providers are unhappy that users are able to send messages to each other at very low cost using the data network over FB messenger, WhatsApp, Skype etc., where in the past they used to be able to charge exorbitant rates if those same messages were sent as SMS.

Thank you, you just helped prove my point by regurgitating a string of the same irrational anti-porn talking points they're teaching kids in school - silly arguments that are popular with millenials as what is effectively the new Puritanism takes hold in our culture ... just a few decades ago it seemed we were entering an era of more enlightened, rational values. Now the curtains are closing and it's going dark again.

I was one of Microsoft's harshest critics back in the 90s, but the ugly reality is we were better under their monopoly than we are today. E.g. even at the height of their monopoly, MS would never have had the gall to demand a 30% cut of every single sale of any software ever made for the Windows platform (yet this absurd 'new normal' is the situation developers are in with the Apple and Google duopoly - and most developers today even think it's normal that the OS developer should take a massive cut just for some simple middleman services, as younger developers have never known different.) (And while 30% might sound relatively low, that used to basically be the typical developer's profit margin, so today most App developers lose money, while the 'App store cartels' profit richly - and companies like Google offer a share of those profits to OEMs like Samsung to hook them into further pushing their ecosystem - while App developers are expected, presumably, to be subsidized by their parents as they live at home, or something). (I am not an App developer; this is one of the reasons.)

Didn't you get the memo? Puritanism is in again, and the sexual revolution all but forgotten.

Even schools are now teaching that 'porn is bad', which makes one wonder who is behind this new trend back to Dark-Ages values.

$0 for the certificate, plus the hours you have to pay a technically skilled person to update your websites. But fortunately website admins all work for free, so it's still $0. Oh no wait, they don't, those skills are expensive. Or, it's free if system administrator time is valued at nothing.

Not all hosts support installing LetsEncrypt certificates for free, either.

Then of course when something goes wrong with that it isn't enough people will be like ah ha! You actually should have used multiple providers

Exactly; one of the core selling points of "cloud" services is that they're supposed to offer increased fault tolerance (e.g. a virtual server can be restored in a different data center if one data center explodes) ... so now these knee-jerk Google defenders are telling us we need 'multiple cloud providers - let's call this new service a "cloudcloud" - so when your cloud service is shut down you can continue running your backup clouds from the cloudcloud ... what next, we need a cloudcloudcloud for your cloudclouds?

The core issue here isn't that a server went down - of course everyone knows servers can go down - it's that they were deliberately shut down, with no warning, with unreasonable recourse, after the user paid for a service that Google failed to provide through incompetence. It should be a an SLA issue, you should be able to sue your service provider for something like this, but you can bet Google's lawyers have covered everything in the fine print.

This is like, you order a burger at a restaurant, and instead of a burger, you get a plate with shit on it. And then the people here would say, 'well you should have expected that you might get shit on the plate you dumb-ass, why didn't you order five burgers from five different places!?' Uh, because no reasonable person expects that.

I admit I initially made the mistake of naively believing the media bullcrap that Felix was some sort of racist anti-Semite Nazi. Eventually, I started watching his actual videos, and seeing the entire context, and much more of his body of work, and realized that the media was literally full of sh-t.

He made a minor slip of the sort that many people make now and again, and he sincerely apologized for it. He didn't go out and lynch someone. People are acting like he literally lynched someone. I'm not excusing saying the N word, but come on, the pitchfork mob has lost all perspective.