75% of the country is white. FB is obviously doing a very good job of attracting non-white employees--they are [in fact] over-represented by a significant margin.

I'm glad that option is available to people who want to work that way, but it sounds way too rigid for me. I like being able to work on my schedule. What if I get on a roll and want to work later one night and then roll in late the next morning? I don't want the work/life balance Gestapo to padlock my keyboard at 5:00pm and then cattle prod me into the office at 9:00am the next morning. Seriously, it sounds horrible.

I have met *a lot* of workaholics--it is a really common personality type in the US for a variety of cultural reasons.

Some people just like to work a lot. People are different.

to most Europeans why someone might enjoy work.

Are you claiming that Americans are stupid because we're tricked into working long hours? or are you claiming that it's a myth that Americans work so much because Mexico & Greece work longer hours? (presumably this is why those countries have such impressive economies).

I don't see how you can have it both ways. We're either dumb and exploited for working too much or we're lazier than a couple of countries that need bailouts every other year. Pick one.

VMS had this 25 years ago.

You know that, right?

Why would they bite off on the hassle of supporting their dev environment running on a bunch of incompatible Linux distributions? (not to mention Windows).

It's entirely possible. Don't bother denying it, the guilty always deny it.

otherwise everything checks out.

By your own admission Apple does test the products before they reach customers. Your original post claimed that they didn't--obviously that post was wrong.

Maybe that's what they're doing when they disappear into the backroom for awhile.

You seem to have a solid handle on all the engineering & market challenges involved.

If 2 out of 3 Apple products failed then we probably would have heard about that by now.

They were dumbing down the explanation to make it understandable, there's obviously enough of an absorbtion difference to be detectable--that's all that matters.

Maybe stop investing so much of your self-worth into your choice of consumer electronics and then you won't feel the need to invent lame excuses (like bullshit marketing) for why someone else's choice is flawed.