I don't think the word "alienated" means what you think it means.

If you go back and read, the case I was making is that Intel's real problem is, it can't afford to drop the price of its chips to ARM levels because that will eviscerate its lucrative margins.

It's not just the irritation of having to basically throw the phone away when the battery inevitably fails, it's the fact that you can't ever actually turn your phone off. Doesn't that creep you out? Or perhaps by Apple standards, that amount of creepiness doesn't even move the needle.

As for flash slot and *standard* USB port *on the phone* like all Android devices have... did it ever occur to you that just apologizing for it doesn't get back all those customers who bought Androids just because of that blatantly missing functionality? It's hard to overstate just how convenient it has proved to be, to be able to power my Android phone from any USB cable. Without needing a dongle, which, trust me, you will never have around when you need it.

What is up with you Apple people, modding down a legitimate post like that, are you determined to alienate yourselves from everybody not already alienated?

How about a standard micro USB, removable battery and micro SD slot?

You can get a perfectly respectable desktop machine for $300 now, a smartphone will cost you more than that.

Speaking of burden of proof, ARM is considerably more power efficient than any x86. Rhetoric doesn't change that.

PCMCIA cards... really? Last time I used one of those was for ethernet on a laptop that didn't have it. No USB either.

Indeed. The only desktop machine that I every actually saw die was an eMachine where something on the motherboard gave out (some say cheap caps... just say no to eMachines). The whole thing was so cheaply made that a motherboard change just wasn't work it. Solution: pull out the hard disk and junk it. Otherwise, the only component that dies is the hard disk. Each of my machines typically goes through three hard disks before being retired due to being too far behind the performance curve.

More to the point: we now spend more on each phone than we spend on a new desktop.

Stated without proof. The decoder is per-core, so you can't immediately see the amount of real estate it takes up. To avoid decoding the same instructions multiple times Intel has the complex "loop stream detector" logic. I'm sure that's not the end of it, somebody whose business this is might comment. And besides the real estate this logic consumes (which on ARM would instead be devoted to more cores) this all eats energy. I doubt this in itself accounts for the power efficiency multiple Bruce claims, and I wonder where he got his numbers. But it certainly counts for something.

Anyway, power efficiency is far from Intel's biggest problem with ARM. The real issue is price. Intel just can't afford to sell power efficient processors at the price ARMS cost, that work well enough to compete with its big server and desktop iron. One word: margins.

Actually, Sony's console business is doing pretty well, making money on both hardware and software especially the latter. Sony's losses are due mainly to getting completely hammered in the tv market. (Koreans set took it upon themselves to drive Japan out of the TV market and by all appearances are now just mopping up.) What Sony can't afford is another disastrous specs war with Microsoft. I expect, next generation neither will be foolish enough to try to cram state of the art hardware into a space that just can't dissipate the heat. Next generation will be about leveraging bespoke game properties like Little Big Planet and Playstation at Home and not trying to take over the world. Basically, Big Console had its last hurrah and the torch is now passed to mobile and indie gaming.

Worse than the flag, that's an achievement.

More whining, it's getting old. Transcode it on an Apple computer if you must. Feh, what kind of geek are you.

Eh, no they don't. This is an autograph score.