"Are the CPUs finally getting there to run the full windows desktop?"

ARM has always been capable of running a full desktop. I remember when the Acorn Archimedes came out back in the 1980's and it was the fastest machine out there running rings around anything Intel, Motorola or MOS had. There was even a software PC emulator that could run DOS and Windows at full speed.

Over the years ARM found itself in a variety of platforms but not so much the desktop and the design focussed on efficiency and low energy but there was always the potential to make a storming fast desktop machine again. Of course, it is going to be hobbled again trying to run Windows but stick Linux on ARM and it moves along pretty well.

ARM64 with gobs of RAM, a fast GPU and SSD would likely be a very respectable desktop today. The Apple A10 is very similar in performance to an Intel i5 so it is no slouch.

"lose the desktop OS market"

More like the desktop OS market is lost. People used to buy a PC because that's what they needed to access the internet. These days a phone can do that and MS already ceded the phone market so they're living on borrowed time as more and more people move away from the desktop. Being king of an ever shrinking market isn't a good thing. Linux doesn't need to win on the desktop, it already won the internet because the battlefield moved and MS couldn't move with it despite some very valiant attempts.

So on my Mac I have Chrome, Firefox and Safari. Firefox has a whole heap of extensions that help keep things tight so I'll use that in the darker regions of the net, and Chrome works well with Google Docs so that's pretty much all I use it for. Safari is my main browser and that's what I'm using now. For all the hate Apple gets they did kill Flash and if they can kill cookies then all the better, especially on mobile.

As others have said, Google is an advertising company and for all the good things about Android, that's the main thing that keeps me away. You would think though that the rise of AdBlock, and do not track, and cookie controls would be enough to tell these advertisers that we don't like what they're doing? Don't they track that stuff?

"I would imagine that they'll label it in some way just because I can't imagine vegetarians or vegans objecting to eating it."

Vegetarian here (almost vegan but very difficult to get rid of all dairy although I'm trying) and I won't eat this. I don't object to it on principle since it doesn't require an animal to die, but I won't eat it because meat just isn't something I want to eat regardless of source. If you've not eaten meat for any length of time, going back is hard because it actually doesn't taste that great. It has a strong flavour which drowns all the other food. I applaud the move to supply meat to the population without killing animals and the associated environmental harm of having to grow these beasts, but I wouldn't eat it any more than I would eat a real steak.

Netflix has clients on a large array of platforms so it is always easy to watch material. I have an Amazon Prime subscription but only a few devices have a client so I either watch on my laptop (rarely) or stream from my iPhone to my Apple TV (rarely) and I only have the subscription because of other benefits of Amazon Prime. Disney won't have such additional benefits so even at $5 a month, if I can't watch it other than on a few devices or in an inconvenient way via AirPlay then I'm not going to bother. There are other similar services around that are similarly limited and I don't subscribe to them either.

"The Tivo comes with 4 tuners, 1TB DVR storage and lifetime "service"...for about $399."

I have two TiVo's (actually three if you count the old Series 1 in storage but that's no use without an external tuner now) and the big problem I have is that TiVo's service provider here in the antipodes is dropping it. So, I've got two boxes with lifetime service which will stop working in October. There are some people working on chipping the units to allow them to be hacked and then use a local source of guide data but I'm just about ready to give up on this. TiVo was good while it lasted but the amount of stuff on broadcast TV I actually want to watch these days is slow small I don't think I'm going to miss it. All the good shows moved onto subscription services years back.

I've struggled a bit with weight for years and recently started a new diet which includes not drinking zero calorie fizzy drinks. Instead I keep chilled filtered water in the fridge and drink that. I've also calorie controlled my diet like I have previously but this time the weight is falling off. The only real difference is the lack of these zero calorie fizzy drinks. Anecdotal yes, but seriously worth considering.

"Solar power produces about 5 W/m^2, which means a nation would have to cover 20% of their land in solar PV panels to achieve a standard of living like the UK."

Hmm, now if only houses had a large surface area above them where you could fit solar panels. Then we wouldn't have to cover 20% of our land in solar PV panels, we could just use the land that is already covered in houses.

"high-end gaming PC capable of running VR"

That's the problem right there. I have a PS4 so the PSVR wasn't too expensive and I'm enjoying the games I've got for it. I couldn't contemplate a Rift because my PC is too old and would need a serious upgrade. I don't use it much for gaming anyway so there's a substantial investment to get a Rift versus just buying the PSVR for the PS4 I already had because it has loads of games I like.

"2017 Tesla Model S 0-60 in 5.0, 1/4 mile in 13.6."

Your numbers are out of date. Tesla just updated the car and even the base Model S 75 without dual motors can now hit 60 in 4.3 seconds and costs $69,500 but you also get a $7500 tax credit bringing it down to $62,000. For that you get a car that needs very little servicing and you can get free supercharging for the life of the car with a referral. I know which one I would prefer.

"paleontology research is utterly useless"

Without palaeontology, oil would be much harder to find. Is that useful enough for you?

Having been through the OSX transition from PPC to x86 this sounds very much like they've bought in Transitive's technology to allow them to dynamically recompile x86 native applications (I refuse to call them 'apps') to run on ARM. Apple handled this pretty well and there was very little that didn't work. We lost MacOS9 support, but we gained performance for native applications and PPC binaries actually ran surprisingly well if they were mostly GUI based. I did compile a few command line tools and run them under Rosetta and they were about 10x slower than native (still impressive honestly) but for something like MS Word the hit was much less. Today I can still run Word 2004 on my x86 MacBook under VMware which allows me to run Snow Leopard and it runs faster than the native Word 2016 I have on macOS Sierra. Go figure. Anyway, this is something MS should have done from the start as the technology was already out there but I suspect politically they wanted to push the store apps (yeah, those are apps) rather than let people continue running their old x86 binaries. That worked well for them didn't it?......

I used to buy PC laptops and desktops to run Linux and found I was always having issues unless I bought top spec equipment and even then for laptops the build quality was subpar unless you spent a lot of money so I would kill laptops each year with all the hard use and travel. I tried my first Mac back when the G4 iBook came out and that lasted 3x longer than any PC I had had and when I retired it, it went to my wife and continued to work for another 6 years in various uses. That's the thing, the Macs may not be the best bang for the buck but you get a well integrated and supported UNIX on hardware that is built to last so unless you're very cost sensitive at the time of purchase, the Mac will save money and be a better long term experience. Nothing to do with hipster this or shiny that, I'm a scientist working in genomics and the vast majority of my peers also use Macs. PCs running Linux are second most popular and Windows PC are a pathetic third place. We use Linux extensively for computing but for desktop and portable use a Mac is terrific.

Brand loyalty is a tricky one when all the companies that made computers when I was at school are gone. What I did learn from exposure to primitive 8 bit machines was variety and flexibility which took me into software development. Later when Macs and PCs hit schools, the level of interest kids had in programming or even understanding computers dropped so we ended up with a generation of kids who couldn't do much more than type up a letter in MS Word compared with my generation which were writing hand coded assembly and building robots. Thank goodness Linus came along with his kernel and we were able to have a real OS on cheap PC hardware and that has given me a solid career so if there's any brand loyalty it is to Linux. While I use a Mac today (best tool for the job when dealing with a mixed environment) I'm a Linux admin and programmer by profession. The fight by these companies to control the market is bad, we need a mixture and devices like the Raspberry Pi are what we should be using to get kids hooked. Typing up letters and doing spreadsheets is not computing but seems to be all the schools are prepared to teach.

There are cars on the market with range extenders but they're typically short range EVs and then REX and I can see the need for those. Once you've got to 200+ miles (or even 300+ as the top Teslas can now do) you're into a car that can do everything most people will want and you can't cripple it just for the few that want to go further and don't want to stop for an hour after driving for three hours. There are people who routinely travel long distance and for now EVs aren't for them but it will be and there's no reason to add a REX to a Tesla because the charging network is coming and in a few years that REX will be dead weight. For now, you should indeed buy a short range EV with REX or just stick with petrol for a bit longer but battery price and capacity are changing so quickly now that buying into long range EV and including a REX makes no sense to me. The next generation of batteries and chargers will get the recharge times down to around 10 mins and you should really stop for 10 mins after driving a few hundred miles if only for your own health.