Really? How amazingly successful were all those cell phones which only had touch screens and no keypad/keyboard before the iphone?

I'll grant you that they don't usually come out with entirely new categories of devices. But what they do which no one else does, is radically change them in ways no one else is willing to risk.

iPod: Reduce the buttons, polish the interface. Integrate seamlessly with iTunes. Made a user experience that was superior to anything else out there. Push for reasonable prices on content. Fought for and eventually won DRM free content with the publishers.

iPhone: Whole screen touch screen interface with just one physical button. A user experience that is superior to anything else out there. With the iTunes App Store they made it easy to get applications which users can be relatively sure will function well and not blow up their phones.

iPad: Completely redesigned the tablet computer interface. Something no other company was willing to do. Huge color screen and great battery life. It also hooks into iTunes and makes it easy for people to use.

I'm getting tired of all the trolls on here who continuously say that Apple sucks. I've got news for you all: the reality distortion field that Steve Jobs projects is JUST A MYTH! If Apple didn't produce insanely great products which people want to buy they would be out of business. In fact, had Jobs not come back Apple computer would have died years ago because they were simply trying to do what every other PC company was doing.

Too many self-proclaimed tech-heads forget that the vast majority of people out there don't care if a device has every feature including the kitchen sink. What most people care about is if the device just works. They don't want to think about it. They don't want to program for it. They don't want to fix it. They just want it to work every time they pick it up. There's no other company that does this better than Apple. Simple marketing tricks may boost sales in the short term, but you have to have a solid product to maintain it in the long term. Remember "Plays-for-sure?" I'm pretty sure my iPod and iPhone have both outlived that.

The Apple anti-fan-boys will easily dismiss this and I'm not saying Apple is perfect. Apple may not be first to market, but they are more than willing to push the market in directions no other major player is willing to go. As long as they maintain their fanatical devotion to design and ease of use, they will become the dominate player in the industry. And it's going to happen faster than anyone thinks.

Don't like their stuff? Don't buy it. But the market seems to like Apple products pretty well, and it's not because they're simply following what everyone else is doing. Fads change much faster than that.

Why is it so many refuse to believe that people could want something without flash? Why is that so far outside your world view? You know youtube gets me video on my iPhone just fine. I have no problems syncing video from iTunes. You're absolutely right. Me and millions of people want to watch video on our iPhones. And we do it all the time without flash. The design flaw is that Adobe can't make flash not suck.

This is the free market at work. No one made anyone buy iPhones. People bought them of their own free will. Even though we knew from the start what it could and couldn't do. Why? Because they don't suck. Did you see that JD Powers survey where iPhone satisfaction was so high that the average for all smartphones was higher than the next company? Form and function matter a lot. Any company that can nail the two will own the market. Apple hit it out of the park with the iPod, then the iPhone and here comes the iPad.

Call it kool-aid, fan-boyism, reality distortion, whatever. The truth is people are buying these things just about as fast as Apple can make them and they seem to be pretty damn happy with them. It's up to the competition to stop sucking.

I don't care if there's a company that's going to release the "iPad killer" that has a spec sheet a mile longer than the iPad. If it sucks to use, I won't buy it. The market is voting and it's not voting with you.

I find the whole argument that Apple is forcing people to adapt to them ridiculous. Wake up and smell the reality. The tech industry has been forcing people to adapt to crap for decades. All Apple has really done is shown the world just how much nicer technology can be to interact with.

What's stopping Adobe from porting Flash to iPhone, iPad, iPod?

Oh wait, they would have to make it not suck.

Flash is cool. I too have played some great flash games. But when my system goes from idle to 100% and all I did was open a web page with a flash based add, something is wrong. Why does something that takes up no more than a tenth of the web page cause my system to go to 100% cpu?

Everyone thinks Apple is the big bad wolf here. The reality is, Adobe has every opportunity to port flash and make it an outstanding piece of software. Instead they want to settle for good enough. Good enough is what has given us software that works, but requires ever increasing amounts of processor power, memory and disk space just to run at an acceptable level.

Processor, memory and more importantly battery life, are not unlimited in a mobile device. Apple is the gatekeeper so yes it does appear that they are the bad guys, but the reality is that Adobe has had every opportunity to make Flash better. Make it use less CPU, less memory and make it world class software. Instead, they've chosen to whine and complain about it.

Did Opera whine and complain about Apple's rules and how it was going to hurt them? Or did they innovate?

Adobe has every opportunity to make Flash function so well that Apple would have no problem letting it exist on the iProducts. Apple has provided the tools to write code for the iPlatforms. Adobe has access to those tools just like everyone else. The only thing stopping Adobe is Adobe. Apple has no further responsibility to make some other companies product work.

Well considering I paid about $500 for two other smart phones, gray market ones from Japan in fact, and still bought an iPhone before the price was subsidized means one of two things:

1. I'm stupid, which I'm sure many people will agree with.
2. The iPhone, despite not having all the features of the other smart phones I owned, did everything I wanted it to do phenomenally better. So much better that paying the unsubsidized cost was not a deterrent.

Freedom is not merely the possibility to do things. It is the ability to do what I want and do it well.

You seem to forget history. The iPhone was not initially sold in a subsidized version and it still sold and sold a ton before Apple came out with a subsidized pricing plan. What did it offer over other phones that made millions of people go out and buy it for full price? It's widely accepted that feature wise the iPhone has lagged over the competition, and still it's been wildly popular.

If you have great form but lousy function your product will fail. If you have lousy form but fantastic function you may be successful, but only because people have to have your function. If you pair fantastic form with fantastic function, you will own the market.

You can argue against that all you want but Apple's fast rise to prominence in the smart phone market tells the story.

Apple's been playing a long-term game here. The ipod and iphone have been gateway gadgets to bring people to the realization that not all tech has to suck and merely be tolerated because it does something useful. I wish other manufacturers would learn that lesson.

The iPad is a harder sell because it's not a phone and bigger than a simple ipod, but I think it will sell. And I think it will sell a ton when people see what kind of apps are available. Apple is shifting the computing paradigm away from the desktop metaphor, and they're doing it fast.

1. They did. They were told repeatedly that it was merely a malfunction.

2. They were told they could be expelled for covering the camera.

It mostly "seems" to be the republicans based on the media you choose to pay attention to. Make no mistake both parties are equally guilty and as long as they both succeed in keeping the populace sedated and distracted from what government is really doing, neither party really cares who has the majority.

I don't develop. I sysadmin. Recently I was asked to build out 15 new servers. At 5:30pm. It was an emergency and had to be done ASAP, oddly enough because the coders wrote a crappy code release that required a threefold increase in horsepower just to handle the normal load and the companies QA process never picked up on this highly important fact and the code was pushed to production where it ground things to a standstill. I know the company isn't going to do squat for me. I don't get overtime. I won't get a bonus. I won't get comp time.

For my managers manager to stay the night was a show of solidarity. He doesn't know how to build the systems, but at least he was there. Now the important thing is that he wasn't watching over my shoulder every step of the way. He'd ask for updates every couple of hours and he went out and brought me dinner so I could stay working, but otherwise stayed out of the way and let me do the work.

Psychologically it helped to know that he also missed playing with his kids and putting them to bed that night. Sometimes inspiring your employees is as simple as demonstrating that you share their pain, even if you can't share the workload.

Now if this behavior becomes the norm, it doesn't matter what management does. People will soon be burnt out and will leave.

They haven't really. They just haven't bothered to try and support every esoteric configuration under the sun.

Last I checked, Apple wasn't suing people who build hackintoshes. I did hear they sued a company that built and sold hackintoshes with copies of their software. Imagine that. Not wanting some other company to profit off their hard work. Hardly seems reasonable.

You're referring to DRM. Apple pretty much believes DRM doesn't work. But hey, maybe one of these days Microsoft will prove them wrong. Better to spend money making great products that work on very specific hardware than wasting time, effort and money trying to keep them from working on generic hardware.

I'm so tired of the whining. You want a hackintosh? Go build your freaking hardware or buy your Dell, IBM, whatever. Go to the Apple store and buy a copy of OS X. Install it. Apple's not stopping you. But they are not obligated to support whatever craptastic combination of hardware you cobble together.

Yes I've done it for a living. That means people PAID me money to do it. I didn't do it because it's fun. I didn't do it because it's cool. I didn't do it because I like it. I did it because people PAID me to do it. If you are not prepared to PAY me, I'm not prepared to fix your Windows problems. I don't care if you're family.

Harsh? Not really. Those family member who want my support follow my advice and get a Mac. And guess what? I spend maybe one hour total each year for all Mac owning family members supporting them. Those family member with Windows don't call me with their questions. And that's the way I like it.

Am I a jerk? Well I'm sure my mom's new husband thought so the second time he called me for support on his Windows system and my answer for the second time was, "Get a Mac." But seriously, if I thought it was the bees knees I'd do it for free. It's not. It's a horrible time sink and a waste of my free time. Hmm, take the kids to the park? Or fix Grandpa's computer...again? Easy call for me.

The iPhone was such a disaster that ATT stores couldn't keep them in stock? That people stood in lines and paid the full un-subsidized price to get them? That they sold millions in their first year in just the US alone? That ATT decided to act on their optional contract extension before they actually had to? Wow, I wish I had a company that could manage that kind of disaster.

It's okay to not like Apple, the iPhone or any of their products. But I'm getting tired of the revisionist-historians who keep popping up all over the place.

Um, the technical work was already done. It could have shipped with Snow Leopard. Again, the reason it didn't has nothing to do with the technical feasibility of it.

Why? Because you say so?

While I may be an idiot, you have to convince me that ZFS is not practical for a desktop. Again, just because you say so is not reason enough. I stand by my statement that ZFS is the only file system with enough benefit to make me explicitly choose it for building servers. You may argue that there's a difference between a server and a desktop but those really are nothing more than abstract concepts. A file system that has too much overhead for my desktop has too much overhead for my servers. Performance matters. ZFS may not be the fastest, but it is no slouch either and the other benefits it brings to the table far outweigh miniscule performance concerns.

What exactly is this severe price? Can you spell it out? Exactly? "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." In that respect yes I will say it is magic because it is head and shoulders more advanced than anything else I've had the pleasure of working with. File systems have not had this kind of improvement in decades.

How do you know? It's not a significant problem till the data you need is unavailable when you need it. At home my own modest media library sits on just 500 Gig with no guarantee that any of it will still be whole in 6 months. Sure I back it up. Routinely. But until you access the file you don't know if it's been corrupted. Then how long as it been corrupted? Do your backups go back far enough to compensate? Yes you can checksum everything routinely and maintain a database of checksums to validate file change. Part of the beauty of ZFS is it does this with every thing you put in it, at the block level, and it validates the checksum every time you read the data. If a block fails the check, it not only sends you the valid block from the mirrored copy (You do have redundancy right? Even ZFS won't save you if you only have one copy.) but also replaces the bad block with a copy of the good one.

Storage capacity is skyrocketing. Going to backup to fix problems is a real problem in itself. Are the tapes on-site? Do we have to go to the vault to find an uncorrupted copy? Did the media pool get recycled and now there is no uncorrupted copy? Do you enjoy explaining to an executive why the data they want is unavailable despite spending millions on enterprise class storage and backup solutions? The problems of enterprise storage are becoming problems of home users. I have three terabytes of storage just to backup my home system in a replication layout I'm okay with, but I really would have loved the protection ZFS offers against bit rot to top it off. Stick your head in the sand if you want, but I consider my data and it's availability a little more important. ZFS handles it elegantly, in the background, with negligible performance hit.

I've dealt with people in Sun who were close to ZFS and who were also excited to have it in Mac OS. It wasn't pulled because it wasn't technically ready.

ZFS is the next generation file system that all others will have to live up to. I've never felt compelled by any file system. Use whatever is there or whatever my peers are comfortable with. ZFS is the first file system that's compelling enough to make me take a stand. I use it on servers daily at work, and I was looking forward to having it on my Macs at home. Bit rot is a very real problem. ZFS handles it automagically. And if you think your mirror or your raid 5 array has you protected, you are dead wrong. Those handle failure at the hardware level. What handles failure at the data level? Nothing. Hope you make backups of your arrays.

Um, exactly where was it ever listed by Apple that iTunes is supported with anything other than Apple's devices? That's right. Nowhere. Apple didn't sabotage iTunes. It does everything it did before the update, that Apple said it would. If it no longer does something they never said it would, then feel free to never update iTunes. You know you have that option right? Just keep using the version of iTunes that does sync your Pre.

You might as well be complaining that you can't run System 7 on your intel based Mac.