It's true, the recent changes were not completely bad, although they removed some fair use and made digital lock circumvention illegal.

Care to point out a case where Google has actively used patents to sue a competitor without being sued first? Please don't include Motorola suits from before they were purchased.

I've actually had reference sites blocked by a filter because they were classified as 'hacking' sites.

It most definitely can make it more readable in many cases. Have you ever tried to debug Perl written by an 'expert'. The rules are all there, but the meaning is quite obsfuscated. Breaking it up and adding characters helps a lot. I'm not saying it would definitely herlp here as I don't know the new syntax, but it's quite conceivable.

More lines does not neccessarily mean more complexity.

Which means that you could proibably come up with something to do this yourself. I'm sure quite a few people would be interested in it.

They also seem to have an interest in power (as in electrical), probably because of their huge power requirements. The Nest thing is kind of similar to what they were doing with home power monitoring, or at least it's in the ball park.

The convenience factor does enter into it as well. It's pain taking stuff in for repairs. Apple makes decent hardware, but they do seem to have at least as many lemons as anyone else. From what I've seen it's more, perhaps because of the size of the laptops. Most people I know with MacBooks have had at least one repair in the first couple of years. A couple have had machines that had to be replaced as they kept having problems. The good news is that they were replaced free. It's still a pain though.

One of the biggest sites on the web uses it, as well as many others.

This doesn't answer the question.

It is not open in any sense of the word. The decoder is free as in beer, the encoder is not.

Why exactly is Apple not supporting the open standard? I'd really like to hear the defence of that decision, from both Apple and you. That's what this whole thing really comes down to ... why is Apple explicitly not supporting open formats.

If people see yet another format that Apple has decided they don't want you to see, it's another reason for people to avoid their intentionally crippled environment. What exactly is their reason for not supporting an open format? I'd like to hear their reasoning.

There's also no reason they can't be the best, but certain media cartels have packs of lawyers that are certainly going to take a run at making sure it doesn't happen.

... you mean upsetting the established business model. There's absolutely no reason someone on *any* mobile device cannot use these open standards, other than being greedy assholes. I can see reasons for not using the codec for which encoders must be licensed for, but not supporting *open* standards is pretty much the definition of greed.