Other manufacturers manage to make cheaper phones under better conditions, e.g. LG which has factories in South Korea

Can't argue with BBC about this sad statistics,

For computer equipment, buy used and learn how to repair it. It's not a perfect solution since no electronics are made without slaves, but it's better than Feeding the Beast directly. It honors the people who bled for your equipment by not throwing out their labor when it has lost its shine.

You don't own the music; the label does. You own a copy of the music.

Your previous post which linked information from 2006, this was prior to 2006, it did not work.

The long term plan is to run iOS on laptops and desktops, or have you not been paying attention? This is why Apple has stopped caring about POSIX, and has put all of its efforts into the iOS runtime environment--UI, toolchain, etc. OS X is a second-class citizen.

I think that's nominally true for CPUs designed from the ground up. Given that chip's taking most of it's cues from reference designs by ARM themselves... I think this is less of the usual case.

If anything, it's the opposite:

http://models.weatherbell.com/...

The graph shows the global annual counts for all hurricanes and major hurricanes. From '92 through '98, there was around 35 major hurricanes per year, falling this year to 29 major hurricanes. The peaks of the graph roughly correspond to el Nino years, with the stronger the el Nino the more hurricanes.

Clearly not every device is bad for customers if what he/she said was true, as devices exist which don't require DRM to run, or will minimise any interoperability issues with DRM'd media.

No, not at all.

Apple didn't allow competitors with DRM. (reminds me early Apple vs PC days) Music industry decided it's better to have no-DRM + competition, than Apple only DRM. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12...

Within a year of Amazon opening their digital music store, they had the major labels. Apple was still heavily into DRM then.

Article from 2009 announcing price cuts to iTunes music, mentions Apple has plans to go DRM free in the future:

http://www.computerworld.com/a...

From same article:

"While iTunes is the most popular digital music store, others have been faster to offer songs without copy protection. Amazon.com started selling DRM-free music in 2007 and swayed all the major labels to sign on in less than a year."

Awfully weird indeed.

> April 28, 2003 12:16 PM PDT
Apple unveils music store
...
The songs cost 99 cents each to download, with no subscription fee, and include the most liberal copying rights of any online service to date. Jobs has been an outspoken opponent of so-called digital rights management (DRM) in the past, arguing that limitations on digital music will undermine the market for legitimate content.

Back when this lawsuit started, iTunes most definately worked with nothing that wasn't sold by Apple.

Even if it costs tens/hundreds of thousands of dollars to own legally? Renting is cheaper (1/10th or 1/100th the price to own).