Actually, it is a bitch to install them in their laptops. Unless you have 2cm miniature sized torx6 tools. They don't give you any room to get the screwdriver in there. And actually getting the ram and hd in and out is kind of awkward, unless you use a specially designed tool to grab the edges and pull straight out.

Not that I'd actually expect you to have worked on one, Apple apologists are always the same. There can't ever be a flaw in their precious products, because they spent so fucking much on them. Any flaw would mean they weren't perfect, which would imply they weren't perfect. Boo hoo. Learn to accept that it's halfway decent hardware, but it's not the best, and it's certainly could be designed to be far easier to work on.

I've put more RAM and a larger HD in every Apple notebook I've owned—even the oh-so-magical-to-reassemble original PowerBook G4, so yes, I've worked on one and I know how bad it used to be.

Requiring a T6, which can be found in any hardware or big box store you enjoy, does not make it hard to work in it. And while they don't give you room enough for your a gigantic magnetic multidriver, I've never had difficulty with any of the drivers I have.

Could it be easier to work in a MacBook or MacBook Pro? Yes, if they designed them to be larger in all dimensions. But are they "actively designed to make working in them as hard as possible" as was asserted above? Absolutely not. They're designed to strike a balance between making it somewhat easy for the owner to upgrade RAM and HD and being as thin as possible.

I assume by "case" you're not referring to the physical case of any Apple product made in the past decade, because those are actively designed to make working in them as hard as possible.

Yeah, the Mac Pros are really a bitch to move around in what with not having to worry about the tangle of ribbon cables.

Also it's really hard to install memory or a hard drive in their new laptops.

Don't be a moron.

How is a daemon not background processing?

It is background processing.

But instead of 10 background tasks monitoring twitter, RSS, AIM, Facebook, etc., there's just one task.

And chances are it's not killing the battery by chewing 10% CPU all the time for no reason just because the guy who wrote it doesn't know what Instruments is or how to use it.

This is probably true and isn't that bad (I remember having to clear memory on my old PDA which was odd since it supposedly hid that from the user) in most cases.

Why hide it from the user when you can eliminate it as a concern instead?

However, I would like to be able to copy/paste between applications without having to start and stop each as I move between them. Since copy/paste is the only real way to move data between most applications, the start and stop and start process gets a bit old after awhile. Perhaps we can have one background task in a new iPhone OS?

Or maybe application developers can follow Apple's guidelines and write applications that retain state and launch quickly.

I do wish they had decided to simply make a multi touch computer instead, it would have been much more exciting.

Apple did, in fact, make a multi-touch computer. It's called the iPad.

Simply slapping a multi-touch screen on a MacBook—which is what it seems a lot of people think Apple should have done—would have been a huge, huge mistake. Touch is worthless without software designed to be touched.

Software designed for Windows, Mac OS, KDE, Gnome, etc. is intended to be used with a keyboard and mouse as primary input devices. There simply isn't a way to create a good experience using these applications when you replace the keyboard and mouse with an intermittent on-screen keyboard and fingers. So that leaves Apple with two choices:

1) Create a new variant of Mac OS X designed around touch interaction
2) Use the one they already created

Apple chose option 2. This not only makes it simpler for Apple to manage, but it also gives developers for the platform a relatively easy way to create applications for both iPad and iPhone/iPod Touch.

As with the iPod touch/iPhone if you are accessing Facebook and want to look up a contact, you have to quit safari and start the address book app, then to go back you have to start up safari again and wait for it to load facebook AGAIN.

1) Safari stays active in the background.

2) Use the Facebook app.

[I]t amazes me that Apple has dumbed down people's expectations of what computers are to such a degree that almost everyone on slashdot celebrates their crappiness instead of condemning it.

It amazes me that Windows and Linux have dumbed down peoples' expectations of what user interaction is to such a degree that most everyone on Slashdot celebrates shitty UI instead of condemning it.

And you fall back to the "just go somewhere else" while market pressures are clearly pointing for "somewhere else" to become marginalized and disappear.

Really? Apple has no competitors in the media player market? Apple has no competitors in the smartphone market?

If Apple's satisfactory-to-you competitors are becoming marginalized and disappearing, maybe it's because an insufficient number of people share your values to justify the costs of producing the products you desire, which is entirely too bad for you.

You don't have the right to have everything you want in life. You either make compromises or do without. How the fuck old are you, anyway?

Bravo on your cognitive dissidence and doublethink. Big Brother would be proud.

I'm sure your Che-shirt-wearing friends in #debian are proud of your dedication to your values.

Keep in mind, however, that they're your values and you don't get to dictate them to others.

Well shit, I hope Apple gets some competitors for its mobile platform, then, so they can apply some market pressure.

The iPod's been a "crippled Apple product" for over eight years now. It's the market leader (because a lot of people value user experience over idealism), but, more importantly, you can still buy competing products that you would, I assume consider "open."

You don't like Apple's products. Good for you. Given Apple's financial results, while you're clearly not their target market, they do indeed have customers.

Move on and purchase something else instead of demanding that the market accommodate your desires.

I don't claim that right, I'm just pointing out the fallacy that you can just "go without it".

Really? You're required by law to purchase internet service or cellphone service or a tablet computer? By whom?

Your life might be less convenient without internet at home or a cellphone, but you don't enjoy a right to convenience, either.

Let's not confuse "I can't" with "I don't want to."

That's equivalent to saying, "you can just live someplace else" if you criticize the U.S.'s policies.

No, it really isn't. A corporation competing against other corporations to provide a product or service in exchange for your money cannot directly compel you--under penalty of law--to purchase its own products.

Since you can just forgo any product that has terrible restrictions on it that we wouldn't put up with from the gov't I assume you don't have a cell phone cable internet and are posting from your local library.

Yes, I can. But I shouldn't have to forgo a product or service provided by a private entity merely because you don't like the terms under which it's provided.

I have a cellphone, cable television, and DSL, provided by private entities because I decided that the value I get is worth the price I pay.

I don't, however, have curbside garbage pickup because I don't believe the value I get for it is worth the price I'd pay vs. taking my garbage to the transfer station.

Just like Apple doesn't have a right to make you purchase an iPad and content from the iTunes Store, you do not have a right to impose your desire for openness on Apple's platform and relationship with its customers.

Untill it becomes so mainstream that you really have a hard time functioning in society without one. How many people do you know who do not own a telephone of some kind?

Since there's more than one manufacturer of telephones and more than one provider of telephone service, what point are you trying to make here?

Not buying it is all well and good, but now it seems nobody can even question the policy?

By all means, question the policy. But don't equate a government (whose powers include passing laws and requiring you to do things) with a corporation (whose powers are not the same).

I honestly can't see why Apple don't give advanced users the ability to do more - badge it as a developer license or whatever, this is obviously not about making things easy for the customer),

You mean like the developer license you can already buy for $99 that allows you to install applications you compile on the device?

Why are the privacy nutcases always so ready to imagine the most terrible wrongs about potential abuse of power by the government, but think it is super okay to give all control to a corporation?

Because you still retain the option of not buying the corporation's product.

Personally, I think it makes it a bit more disgusting that the completely innocent person you are torturing over a frivolous, nonexistent, totally unnecessary, case, happens to be a disabled single mother of a small child whose sole income is Social Security Disability.

What happened to justice being blind?