Apple? They did get slapped with anti-trust issues when colluding with publishers on e-book pricing. Apart from that, though, Apple is a curious choice when finding examples of technology companies with past anti-trust abuses. The far more obvious picks here would have been Microsoft or Bell Labs.

You were doing good until you used the word "alarmist", at which point, poof! Bye, bye, credibility.

How is it a bad thing to receive information that "could" be true? You shouldn't trust the information is true, of course, but you could take a conservative course of action that will protect you in the event the information is either true or false. For cars, if the information is of a hazard ahead, a prudent action is almost always to reduce speed, for example, even if it turns out there is no hazard.

It is mostly trademarks, yes, but if you are a publisher, you obviously need both.

Brand protection MATTERS. It's worth hundreds of billions in the US alone. And that's a lot of jobs and a lot of livelihoods, which the government would be idiotic to ignore, especially if the only real opposition is flocking to torrents regardless the legal outcome.

Agreed that building in that HDMI switch functionality into end devices sounds horrid. For the existing discrete HDMI switches... are these things reliable? They certainly cost a lot, presently. Any chance we'll see HDMI switches that will dual switch paired HDMI/Ethernet lines? That would be compelling... especially since the industry seems slow to adopt HDMI 1.4+ functionality in this area.

That's a more reasonable use case you outline, one that sounds great for frequent travelers perhaps. Pretending for a moment that WiFi is tolerable... the biggest issue remaining is the lack of a "quick pause button". I do not like fumbling with a touchscreen phone for 10-20 seconds (swipe, pass code, etc) just trying to pause a movie or TV show. For other controls I don't mind, I guess. Does Android/iPhone have a solution for this?

No Ethernet port means no sale to me. Not going to stream HD video over a flaky WiFi. Thankfully, Apple TV and Roku did it right, even if they cost significantly more. And, by the way, a dongle is kind of a silly form factor when there's a power brick hanging off it.

Look how profitable they were last quarter. Mighty fine corpse, eh?

There is a market for people like you... It's called "dumb phones". As for smartphones, I think the telcos should focus on making typical users happy, and not go to extreme lengths just to satisfy a few Slashdot purists over an inane issue like this one.

A lot of non-technical people expect a "smartphone" to be able to do a list of tasks as soon as they take it out of packaging, and would find downloading a bunch of "basics" from the App Store quite an annoyance, if they even manage to do it at all. Why is it better to annoy 80% of users who are non-technical just to satisfy the egotistical demands of a few technical purists?

Most of the non-technical smartphone owners I know (iOS or Android, doesn't matter) are incapable of doing any of the things you mentioned. They have no idea what bloatware means, nor do they have any understanding of the pros/cons of it. For the most part, they are even afraid of those settings menus provided by the OS. You really think the telcos are not profiting from added software layers to these customers? Really?

Name a bigger, more effective distributor of non-DRM FOSS games compared to Steam.

Funny, I never see this attack directed towards Samsung Galaxy devices, which cost roughly the same as iOS devices, run Android, and dwarf Nexus devices in terms of units sold. Go figure.

Strangely enough, iPhones also have a pretty good integrated Google Apps experience. Google spends a lot of effort porting their important apps to iOS, and it shows.