My wife's MacBook Air came with no crapware preinstalled. My Ubuntu Dell XPS 13 neither.

I have no idea what you're talking about.

Why prevent your spouse to have fun? Share the love !

About the nefarious code, this can be said of any device in your home. What if your refrigerator has a WiFi chipset and silently tries to break in every reachable network ?

But to prevent the TV from doing anything it is advertised to do, deactivating the network should be enough.

It is perfectly safe if you don't plug it in your Wifi or your rj45 wire. That's how my HDTV is configured today. I envision my TV as a dumb screen, and it's been working so far.

Are you implying that northern Europe is a disaster? You should visit Greece and Sweden, you'll see a great difference.

My wife is a teacher and she uses an "interactive board" and it really helps. She can prepare stuff in advance (do that with a chalkboard) move stuff around the board (do that with a chalkboard) show Wikipedia, youtube, anything in just an alt-tab (do that with a chalkboard). When she brings a student to the board do do something, she can them replay it (...)

Well, you get the point. An interactive board is much more than a chalkboard on steroids.

Ok, but both work with an exchange server, right?

The iPhone already have nice native apps that have the additional advantage of being build-in.

the default client for iPhone (mail, contacts, calendar) has supported the exchange protocol for many years now. This is all build-in. Ironically, SMTP is just for hotmail (which didn't support anything else as of last year)

Android is running Linux, just like your latest Ubuntu release. You know Linux is the kernel, right?

Changing for Apple has the benefit of letting you use MS Office. Believe it or not, this is the main point I've seen raised over switching from Windows to Linux. For a reason.

True. And it's not that people prefer MSO over OpenOffice, it's just that they need to be able to interact with people using Office. And opening a Word document on OpenOffice usually ends up like a big mess. Same for Powerpoint or Excel. Interchangeability is just a mess right now.

It is over. They launched an assault on both sites at once, killed all the terrorists and saved all the hostages. Two cops lightly injured, one more seriously. Given the circumstances, I'd say it's a pretty good job.

I used to agree with you about thinness until I got an iPad Air into my hands... It really makes a difference on how you feel the device. Same thing for the iPhone 6 and 6Plus. I thought "Gimme more battery instead of a thinner phone", but how good does the thinner (and lighter) phone feels in your hands? Well, it does make a great difference.

Note: I don't own any.

That's assuming the global warming is mostly due to the CO2 levels which is all but a certainty right now. I've read that the correlation isn't really up to speed these last years.