They have some nice niche products not related to the noise-cancelling tech. I used to travel a lot for work and a pair of these made life a little more comfortable; you can't wear headphones all the time. They are expensive and the sound is quite coloured, but the bass and the volume you get from such a tiny thing is impressive. I had an equaliser setting saved in iTunes to flatten them out a bit.

Best?

For whom? By what standards?

They make some very good products and have a consistent and effective design language but they are as much a fashion company now as a technology one.

Damn, Posting as me to delete the accidental downmod when I was trying to upmod. Fat fingers, sorry...

From what Ive seen in the press recently it looks like the phones might come out of vapourware. I'm still quite a fan of Ubuntu, even with Unity, I think it would make a nice UI for a phone.

To be eligible for the record the start and finish have to be within a certain distance of each other. Times set at Boston, for example, are not permitted

FTFY

Well, maybe they're not exactly the same, but to say they are fundamentally different is a bit of a troll for somewhere like slashdot? The interviews are interesting and well worth watching anyway.

This.

Also, whoever does finally break two hours is going to be an outlier on all of the charts, so looking at averages of statistical samples isn't going to help.

For example in my own case: I'm 49 and I ran 2:57 this year, which puts me in the top 2.5% overall and 1% for my age. For me to run my best I need a day temperature of around 60F so I'm way off that particular chart.

I also disagree with the idea that a flat course is necessarily the fastest. Of course you don't want mountains, but some small changes of gradient can allow changes in muscle usage leading to reduction of fatigue. I've run both Hamburg and Berlin several times; I find the slightly more undulating Hamburg to be noticably easier than Berlin.

I run linux on my home desktop. I only ever buy Intel with integrated graphics. Their open souce drivers may suck for gaming but work perfectly well to run a modern desktop

True, that would then find other potential weakspots. There are many tests you could postulate that would be better than the one they did.

I'm an aerospace engineer and I have designed and run plenty of tests for certification of aircraft parts. This test is fine as far as it goes but it is not testing the real issue, the FAA would have thrown me out of the room if I'd shown them this.

What the test shows is that most phones will resist a reasonable amount of bending when the load is applied uniformly at the centre. They all do pretty well. That's great.

The issue with the iPhone 6 Plus is that it has a weak corner, if you watch the 'bendgate' video you can clearly see that the bend line is not straight across the phone, but at an angle near to the weak spot.

A properly designed test would have clamped each phone flat with a corner sticking out unsupported and force applied until it suffered plastic deformation (stays bent). Each phone could have all four corners tested and the weakest result is the 'winner'. In such a test the iPhone 6 Plus would clearly fail at its weak point much more readily than any of the others.

Bad science.

I admit the anti-Apple trolling in my first post. Sorry about that. It was late and I'd had a drink or two...

I didn't say I haven't used obj-C, just not much, not recently and really only to experiment to see if it would be a good choice to use for my particular Python/Fortran based project. It was the Python bindings that made me take a look and I particularly liked how I could use dynamic typing and garbage collection, making it a good 'fit'. I was amazed by the quality of the Apple developer tools too.

The point I should have made was partly made by others later, namely that obj-C is well established and integrated in the toolchain and since all the frameworks are written in it it makes sense to choose it as his first language. Not to say that he should ignore Swift, but to leave it until he's got obj-C nailed.

Yes, a little, but I admit not for GUIs. I liked it precicely because of the low-level control. It was quite an adventure for a naive Python/Fortran coder...

I ask in ignorance, why would I design the GUI in obj-C when I have X-tools/interface builder to do all that for me? I just connect the dots, right? +1 for Python, btw: I write science code in Python/Fortran. nasty messy stuff, but puts food on the table...

I grew up with Fortran, C was a revelation and obj-C was an epiphany. C++ was, of course, a heresy...

I was very tempted by Xamarin but put off by the $$$. Is it as good as claimed?