The last thing game developers want is to make it easier to create native variants of their games for OSX and Linux.. That would be silly.

ace JavaScript developers who can write brilliant code

There are so many things wrong with that statement, my brain hurts trying to figure out where to begin

What laptops have dual 6 core xeons and four channel 1866mhz ram?

Ugh, I got my port speeds mixed up. Yeah, the TB2.0 ports still wont be fast enough for running external cards.

SIgh, was getting excited too.

Ok, true. At first I forgot the second slot was also x16 and that the cubix enclosure is also x16.

All of a sudden not looking as good as it could have been

The system is targetted towards professional workstation use. Having rare expensive "external" devices is already common place. External enclosures for running multiple video cards for resolve systems, firewire / esata raid arrays, etc its all being done currently. Also makes it a lot easier to swap devices between systems.

While I would like to have at least an upgradable graphics system, having everything external (for meanyway) is already a standard thing. There's only so much storage you can fit inside the system as is, and most of my graphics needs are via additional cards for cuda/opencl processing.

Being able to swap drive arrays like I was using FW800 but with speeds greater then eSATA will be nice. Being able to just plug in an external enclosure and run cuda/opencl accelerated applications more accelerated.. and not having to worry about internal power, additional psu's, etc will be welcome.

Ram is upgradable

Then, it has 6 Thunderbolt 2 ports running at 20gbps managed by 3 controllers.

Get whatever external enclosure you want and run whatever you want. Raids, Video cards, etc..

Isn't the main purpose of the iTunes Music Store to sell iOS hardware? If I recall, doesn't most of the 30% of Apple's cut go into running the store?

Apple is predominantly a hardware company, and they want people to buy their hardware. If the main purpose of their music/app stores is to sell the hardware then why would it matter where people actually get their music/apps from? Amazon is just giving people another reason to get an iOS device. They now have more options for their music purchases. Win/Win.

As another said, you could have freeform placement.

Though my comment was more pointing out that Apple had a device with a "grid of icons" long before 2002. I've seen many people trying to point out phones and devices that had this a year to a few years before Apple, yet they ignore the Newton which was many years before that.

Now this isn't saying that another device didn't have a grid of icons before the Newton, just pointing out that Apple had one before the device(s) people are trying to use as prior art.

And Apple had the Newton MessagePad a decade before that.

http://www.thocp.net/hardware/pictures/pda/apple_newton_sml.jpg

Except the 5 and a half year old mac that I have runs the latest Xcode just fine.

iPod Touch I can see having to replace every few years.. but an additional $200 every few years should be insignificant if your product is making money. If its not making money, then either stop developing it, or stop complaining.

Agreed. Admittedly there are significant changes from Xcode 3 that can easily turn one off to it, but if you actually read the Xcode 4 transition guide and put in a bit of time with it, its actually far better then Xcode 3 was.

VirtualBox and VMWare Fusion are not valid solutions for all enterprise use.

Apple needs to allow OSX Server to run virtualized on non-Apple branded hardware so that it can be run under a bare-metal hypervisor like VMWare vSphere.

Yeah, I know there's Parallels Server, but that only runs on Apple branded hardware and doesn't even come close to the capabilities of vSphere.

OSX Server running on a HA-FT vSphere cluster would be, basically speaking, amazing.

http://www.engadget.com/2010/11/18/exclusive-woz-misquoted-almost-every-app-that-i-have-is-bette/

Woz says he gave the De Telegraaf reporter a lengthy demonstration of voice commands on iOS and Android, pointed out that Android offered the ability to say "Navigate to Joe's Diner," and suggested that Apple would catch up through its purchases of Siri and Poly9. According to Steve, that's about it -- he says he'd "never" say that Android was better than iOS, and that "Almost every app I have is better on the iPhone." Woz did say he lightly prognosticated that Android would become more popular "based on what I've read," but that he expects Android "to be a lot like Windows... I'm not trying to put Android down, but I'm not suggesting it's better than iOS by any stretch of the imagination. But it can get greater marketshare and still be crappy."

So in the next year and a half will we expect to see WebM 1.0, 1.5, 1.6, 2.0, 2.0.1, 2.1 and 2.2?

I can see it now, not being able to watch video on all sites because they use "2.1" and the hardware decoder in your Android phone only supports 1.6 even though it was just released yesterday.

Seriously, is Google the company that we want attempting to control a video standard? Sure they have a lot of smart developers over there, and so far I'm not convinced they can hold back and not change things too often. Is WebM as is really considered release ready by Google? After the decoder is put in a bunch of hardware will they all of a sudden come out with "Don't use that version any more, use this new one, its better. Oh, and you have to re-encode all your video."

Just my thoughts.