OS X server, a $20 purchase, lets you manage iOS devices and install whatever apps you want on them. Yes, without having to obtain App Store blessing. I don't think that the walled garden concept can be reasonably still thought applicable. Given that you get a reasonable device management capability for $20, I'd tend to think of it as a bargain, actually.

Why would I care? :)

"My late 2009 i7 iMac is unfortunately still going strong" Unfortunately? You're getting your money's worth! Enjoy it. With 16G of ram and a fusion drive it's likely a screamer. I only upgraded the late '07 iMac to the latest model a few months ago since every once in a while I need to do ports builds and they took a day on that '07 model and I got tired of waiting :)

Apple products have excellent resale value, I don't think of it as ridiculous at all. You're reaping the benefits of a solid brand, even many years after the purchase. What's not to like?

A buddy of mine is evaluating a design of a small 32 node HPC cluster with nothing but thunderbolt as point-to-point interconnect. So far the results are very positive, and it's a huge bang for the buck. I don't think you quite know what you're talking about, because the presence of an ethernet controller "somewhere in the system" would be immaterial.

First of all, Firewire was never able to transfer arbitrary PCI traffic, thus you couldn't use it to attach external PCI/PCIe devices to your portable device. When PCIe "extender" solutions became available, they were expensive and bulky. The connectors were huge, and the cable thick, and sometimes it would just refuse to work in a particular setup. Thunderbolt provides this kind of functionality on a manageable, off-the-shelf interconnect that you can buy in nearby Walmart. A brand name thunderbolt single x16 PCIe card cage runs about $500, and you can buy off-brand ones for half that. This lets you pull off stunts like adding two graphics cards to your laptop. I'd say calling it a "bigger flop than firewire" is borderline trolling.

Connecting "directly" to PCIe for expansion/extension purposes is setting the clock 10 years back - if you have any PCIe to attach to begin with. Fewer and fewer laptops have expressCard slots, and some high end laptops rightfully (IMHO) got rid of them. I don't really miss expressCard on MacBooks. Thunderbolt is much easier to deal with.

Thunderbolt lets you do things that were never possible with firewire, even if we ignore the speed disparity. You can, for example, attach a card cage with PCIe (and PCI) slots for whatever specialized hardware you need. Then you hook this up to your laptop. Before thunderbolt, you had to have a laptop with expressCard slots, and use expensive (think $1k for one card bay for good brand name products), bulky, finicky and rather short range PCIe extender solutions. This wasn't possible at all with FireWire.

If your desk is 5 feet deep and you put your 15" VGA monitor at the far end, then sure, a VGA display is "retina".

Now, back in the real life, the viewing distance is what people normally have on their desks. Normal desks. Heck, there are even standards that specify what the "normal" viewing distance is for a computer monitor. IOW: You're making up imaginary problems.

It is a semi-technical term. It pretty much means that when you foveate at the middle of the display, at a normal book-reading distance for mobile devices, and normal monitor distance for desktops, there's roughly no more than one photosensitive element on your retina per one screen pixel.

I love the times we live in. This all reads like yesteryear's science-fiction. We're fast approaching a cinema quality display in an iMac - a simple to use piece of off-the-shelf consumer hardware. In an aluminum chassis that would be considered viable only for military grade hardware a mere decade ago. One can bitch all they want about "Apple tax", but if it weren't for Apple, we wouldn't have that hardware. Never mind that nobody else makes a PC in the aluminum iMac-style chassis, AFAIK. Or at least not in the volume that'll ensure ample supply of replacement parts a decade from now.

The one-time-use token is very clever and backwards-compatible, too. It's a one-time-use credit card number, generated on the fly for that particular transaction. That way the merchants can keep using legacy infrastructure - they still deal with credit card numbers etc. Just that those numbers are ephemeral, and are useless when they get stolen/leaked (as they all eventually are, it seems).

I don't think there's anything particularly 1st gen about retina iMac. It's just an iMac with a higher-resolution screen. I'm sure some enterprisey folk will start "backporting" those screens to older iMacs in a few years as the used-screen supply gets going on eBay.

I don't read "CDC should be all over the hospital" the same as "hey, we've come to help, but feel free to turn us away".

An open source router has open source software/firmware and hardware. You can't claim that with an off-the-shelf hardware, unless that hardware was open-source to start with.

MSDN's value proposition is a bit murky. If all the value you get out of it is to have OSes to test on, and you target consumer systems, then it's much cheaper to buy said OSes individually on eBay/Amazon. Quite a few things from Visual Assist exist in Creator, I'm told, with more on the way :) Anyway, you only need VS Professional to use extensions. That doesn't cost $2k.

There's no reason whatsoever to mine more of them for the system to be successful. A finite supply would be perfectly acceptable.