Before Apple was printing money with the iPhone it was printing money with iPods. Microsoft had nothing to do with that.

For all practical purposes Apple invented the GUI-based personal computer, the modern portable music player, the smartphone, and the tablet computer. It is really completely irrelevant that there were similar things in each of those categories that existed in tiny volumes or in a lab somewhere.

It turns out that your are just wildly, fantastically wrong. Apple makes money by selling physical products that humans want.

Does your small company pay extra taxes just for fun?

We're talking about the unpatched Google Nexus stuck a 4.3, no option to upgrade.

Sure it uses some internal components made by other companies, so does the iPhone, so does every consumer product. That's not an excuse to stop supporting a product made by your company.

All those carriers sell iPhones too and every iPhone is software upgradeable--and has been from day one.

Seems more like an Android problem to me.

because the consumer often has no choice of ISP--that's why the enhanced regulation is justified.

You have plenty of choice in smartphone applications and operating systems.

Technological progress is not usually monotonic.

On the occasional day when you have to travel further then a Volt can travel 350+ miles between fillups (on gas). Why is this so complicated? Most people don't have to drive 500+ miles everyday. If you do, then fine, enjoy your gas bill--but YOUR USAGE MODEL IS NOT TYPICAL.

NT

If a single individual can make a mistake of this magnitude, without it being caught by checks and doublechecks, then the process itself is fragile and flawed. That is a systemic problem and deserves a systemic response.

Are you saying that there is no working health care in Germany, the Netherlands, Japan or Switzerland?

There is more than one way to make a "working" health care system. With sufficient regulation you can have an efficient health care system which utilizes private insurance companies (and private health care providers). Once properly regulated those insurance companies nolonger compete with eachother on who is best at denying care or filtering out the expensive patients, but rather on lowering administrative costs and incentivizing preventative care.

Done.

1. Lots of Windows users never upgraded past XP (>15%) and have no UAC at all
2. Lots of Windows users have disabled UAC prompting because it's so annoying (seriously, do a Google search for UAC and the top results are about how to disable it)
3. Nobody uses the Windows backup options
4. Malware can't delete a Time Machine backups

Theoretically Macs could be at just as much risk as PCs, but in practice it isn't anywhere close. There are well over 50 millions Mac users in the world, and they have plenty of money, but for some reason they are nowhere near as infected as PCs.