Where do you live? I have had zero issues with Apple support, and I have used it via telephone on a few occasions. I am in Australia.

Maybe it is not possible to offer all of those things, and do R&D at the scale apple does at 10% less?

Why isn't Google doing it? Why not Microsoft? They are both companies of similar size, and only 10 years ago Apple was very, very far away from the size they are today. They succeeded because of one major reason: they care about end user experience. Microsoft? Not so much.

What is this "dictated on how you use it", you speak of?

Seriously, i want to know what you think I am unable to do with my devices - or rather, what tasks you think i am unable to perform with them?

There are a few things I know i can't do with iOS, but I'm keen to see what your concerns are, and if they are anything more than petty "in theory" things.

We've seen a web server running on a Commodore 64. Wasn't that a 12 kB OS? It's been a while, but IIRC the OS was in memory from D000 to FFFF.

I've worked on mainframes where the "recovery OS" fit on one tape block - a hard 32 kB constraint (used for disaster recovery - it would load a program that also had to fit in 32 kB which would restore a system from backups). The normal OS wasn't much bigger. Most device drivers weren't memory resident, for example, and shared 4 kB by swapping in and out, which could lead to some mighty odd behavior by today's standards.

That's pretty trivial and already occurs.

The convention center effectively gets no signal due to the way it was constructed anyway and so the major brands have repeaters inside the hotel while the minor brand phone's don't work.

DFW Hyatt is a good example of this. If you are not on Verizon- good luck using your phone inside the convention center downstairs.

No. They sell a solution to a problem. You buy an iOS device, and a Mac, and you get the benefits of tight integration between the products to get things done with a minimum of fucking around. Transparent sync between them. Transparent phone backups to either the cloud or your machine. Transparent voice calls from your laptop via your phone. Application state shared between devices. Transparent, out of the box encryption. No one else in the market place offers such things without manual fucking about to get it to work.

That is what Apple sells. And a lot of techies will argue "blah i can do that with my Android + Chrome + Linux box just fine!". Good for you. How many hours did you spend setting it up?

Setting all of that up in the Apple ecosystem is merely logging into your AppleID on all your devices. Job done. Move onto something more important.

Also: I just replaced my iPhone 4s. It lasted me 4 years.

Perhaps you should have a whinge about the workers who are manufacturing things for Samsung, Dell, Lenovo, etc.

The free market does work. What you, and a lot of others don't seem to understand is that things like after-sales support, firmware update, cloud services and tight integration with your other devices are worth real money to people. None of those things would exist if apple was operating on the same margins as their competitors.

25% mark up for an OEM is pretty envious, especially in the electronic market where usual retail markup is less than 10%!

And that argument conveniently sidesteps the fact that apple make no claims to operate on lower profit margins. Running on 10% margin means that the company you buy from can not do as much R&D and can not provide the level of support or absorb things like the Nvidia GPU disaster on the MacBooks from a few years back (offering people replacement/repaired hardware well beyond the warranty period - 4+ years), etc.

You get what you pay for. Buy from a company operating on razor thin margins, don't expect them to do you any favours. Apple support is second to none in both the computer and phone markets.

Actually, they're not. You can claim expenses on your tax return if they were incurred to perform your duties at work.

I'm sorry, what? My macbook is a 2011 and in way better condition as far as wear and tear goes, still perfectly serviceable than the MS Surface Pro 3 I have at work. I only recently upgraded from an iPhone 4-s (which is still getting updates) to an iPhone 6. If you want to cry about planned obsolescence and waste then you ought to be looking at DELL and the Android marketplace.

Depends what inflation numbers you are using, i'd say that comparing such things just leads credence to the thinking that the treasury is massively under-reporting real world inflation due to their habit of selectively excluding figures that aren't in-line with their desired reporting.

OK. Question:

Answer:

Regret lateness of last night's reply resulting in an incomplete thought.

Thank you for making my argument for me. Private sector unions are an obvious extension of freedom of association. But public sector unions, as you note, work for their members. The inescapable conclusion is that a public sector union, over time, is going to serve its members, to the detriment of the public.
We understood that the Commies were attacking the culture, subverting academia and Hollywood. One must offer props to them for infiltrating the IRS. The suppression of the Tea Parties leading up to the 2012 election, with a wink from the GOP, and to the surprise of Mitt the Milquetoast, was a brilliant bit of work.

I have faith in God and confidence in the basic principles upon which the country is founded.
The Constitution is an expression of a lack of faith in people, irrespective of their labels du jour.
Your bogus rate of fire argument is a (perhaps not deliberate) attempt to distract from the 2A's absolute right of self defense.
The NRA is so strong, and the blowback against gungrabbers so strident, because nobody is buying the 'boil the frog' argument. The Left is understood to argue in bad faith, because the Left ultimately hates liberty and wishes to reduce a free people to livestock.

Let's flip that around, and inquire why the 14th Amendment has been used to incorporate the entire Bill of Rights except the 2A, against the smaller governments?
Hint: "educe a free people to livestock" is the ultimate goal.