It's almost impossible to think of anything that will create a $140 billion business out of nothing."

Lol. Just waiting on the tech. These will all be many-billion dollar businesses: fully immersive 3D entertainment; electric cars; household robots; sex robots; space habitats; real 3D printers (by which I mean they'll be able to print electronics, mechanicals, hydraulics and so on -- able to print any item you can provide the raw materials for. The "3D printers" we have today aren't good for much yet.)

As to what you could do today and have a chance to meet that metric... all I know is it isn't going to be an iWatch class device.

Of course if we were collectively smart we would have "Manhattan project-ed" solar, solar storage, and the means to pass massive amounts of energy around long before now at a similar level, and we'd already be off the middle eastern tit.... but of course that means the big oil cronyism in congress would have to be reined in, and that isn't happening.

That is indeed what he said, but I suspect that was just spin.

I'm about 99% sure it wasn't. As evidence, I cite the fact that the head of the iPod team left Apple for Palm and started an OS that was web-based just like iOS was originally going to be. I think it was more that the people Rubinstein left behind clung on to the iPod mentality of a closed architecture that allowed only a handful of developers to write code for it for a very long time before finally giving up.

I think the iPhone was successful before they supported 3rd party apps.

Not particularly. The pre-app-store iOS market coincides precisely with the original iPhone's sales. Apple sold only 6.1 million of them over the course of about a year. The iPhone 3G sold a million in the first three days. And yes, the original iPhone hardware was behind the times, so that contributed to the difference somewhat, but there's little doubt that the App Store is a big part of why iOS is a success.

Want to know how I know this? Palm WebOS. Notice where Palm's top engineering management came from. Yup, you guessed it. Apple. They followed Apple's original plan, and they completely cornered the market... no, wait, that other thing... tanked.

Chromebooks have the advantage of four more years of improvements in web browser technology. With that said, remember that the #1 thing people do with their phones is play games, and that games are pretty high on the list for laptops as well. Without native apps, gaming isn't very practical, which is why the Chromebook is still just a low single-digit percentage of laptop sales, and why a web-only phone would be pretty much DOA even in today's market, with today's technology.

It wasn't Apple that killed Nokia; it was Android. Their big niche was cheap feature phones. When Android came along, suddenly, there were cheap smartphones, and nobody wanted cheap feature phones when they could get cheap smartphones. To be fair, Apple had a lot to do with forcing the UI changes in Android that made it popular, but the mere existence of Android in any form would have pretty much cut the legs out from under Nokia.

As for Blackberry, Apple didn't really start killing them until much later, as iPhone hardware wasn't really all that welcome in the business world until after Apple started adding stuff like mobile device management. I always found it odd that they were a hardware manufacturer, given that their hardware was fairly boring, and most of their interesting creations involved software and services. I'd expect them to reinvent themselves as a software and services company fairly handily, and freed from the shackles of having to build their own hardware, I'd expect them to do fairly well.

Ericsson got bought out by Sony, who still builds plenty of phones and other devices. Given Sony's size, I wouldn't count them out just yet. But if somebody does drive them out of the market, it will be Samsung, by undercutting them.

Heh. Obviously I was talking about OEM devices, not user customizations. If you include custom configs you'll find just about everything.

There were cell phone based payment systems before iPay, but now the point of sale terminals are going to finally happen. I think apple Pay is going to be a huge money maker as it becomes wide spread. It's timing is interesting. Credit card makers in the US are on the cusp of rolling out chip and pin and merchants will need to upgrade their point of sale terminals. . No one is excited about this mandated cost since analyses have shown didn't change the total amount of fraud (in the long run), it just shifted it from in-person fraud (where the chip works) to internet sales. However, apple pay, which does work, can just slip stream right along on the mass pos changeover without imposing an extra cost the merchants were not going have to pay anyhow (for chip and pin).

Second, this year at least, apple appears to have the best finger print reader. As motorola noted recently they left finger print ID off the new nexus because all the other vendors of the technology produce unsatisfactory finger print ID. It's either too many false positives or too many false negatives.

The challenge to apple pay of course is the market share of handsets. But as long as there are enough to make it worth making the NFC sensors compatible with Apple's bank authorization schema they will be in stores, giving apple a growing drip feed of cash.

Er, vast majority. If only there were some way to see my post before I submit it...

Yup.

have you ever worked in a union? while this is true, most of them make it hard as heck to jump through the hoops needed to jump through to ensure none of your dues are used towards political campaigns.

Yes, I worked in a union shop. I didn't join, but I seem to recall that being one of the checkboxes on the paperwork you had to fill out whether you joined or not, along with the option to opt out of the union and pay "fair share" fees.

Yeah, but park ramps have been around for a couple of decades (the earliest patent filing I could find was filed in 1992), and they only started having insane levels of trouble fairly recently (by comparison). So it's probably the combination of excessive amounts of parking (as you mentioned) and having less structural support for the heads that makes them so problematic.

Not all devices show LTE bars identically, so your mileage may vary. To compare apples to apples, we'd both need to be using dBm. Truthfully, even that wouldn't necessarily be a valid comparison, depending on multipath interference and a whole host of other factors. My point was that there are a lot of places that have service, but where the minute-long connection latency caused by high packet loss results in such a horrid real-world speed that it might as well be truly slow.

Would be nice. I also wish they'd go back to the pre-retina enclosure, and instead of wasting space on an optical drive, I'd like to see them use most of that extra space for additional battery capacity. If I run Photoshop or Finale or Xcode or any of the other software that I use to actually get stuff done with my retina MBP (about one year old), I'm lucky to get 2.5 to 3.5 hours out of it. If I were designing a computer to meet my needs, the "four cores running at full tilt" duration would be eight or ten hours, and the "just wasting time doing light-duty web browsing" number would be measured in days.

Or just bring back removable batteries. Either way.

Ah, I see what you're saying. In all of those cases, I'd say Google shifted to working on a component that integrates with other Google services. It does happen that the service-integrated component largely duplicates the features of an existing OSS component, plus adds a lot, but I don't think that's because of any move to close Android.

At this point there's really no need for Google to maintain generic apps for all of those things; there are plenty out there in every category you mentioned. I'm less sure that there are open source apps in all of those categories... but anyone who wants is free to pick up that ball. I suppose it would be nice if Google were to do it, but that's no longer necessary for the success of the platform.

I reiterate that the above represents only my personal opinions. Google pays me to write code, not define platform strategy (except in my narrow area) and certainly not to act as a proper corporate spokesperson. When I say stupid stuff it reflects on me.

It wouldn't be hard to do something nicer, but my Tasker profile is a pretty crude hack. Since I never connect anything that doesn't have its own volume control, I just have a profile that runs every minute and turns the volume up to max. So if anything turns the volume down, it quickly gets turned back up.

The volume thing annoys me, too. I fix it with a Tasker profile.

As for navigation, try using voice to start the navigation. It's zero-click. I don't know that the maps team intentionally increased the number of taps in the non-voice case, but I think it may actually be a good thing for safety if it encourages more people to use voice rather than taking attention to poke at their screen.