Like basketball, which will suddenly explode in popularity. Or you'll have an elite rowing team picking on freshmen. Perhaps a thug squad of a lacrosse team.

If football were to go away tomorrow, I promise you something would replace it, and quickly.

Step one: put barely-thawed turkey breast in crock pot.
Step two: turn it to medium and walk away for 8 hours
Step three: eat a ridiculously moist and tender bird

There are tastier methods, but the marginal gain per effort exerted isn't worth it to me.

I think you're really grasping at straws. Note that Apple is donating all of the proceeds to charity. It's kind of hard to make a profit in volume when you're losing money on each individual sale.

Why would you get a tax writeoff for buying something? They're the one donating their part of the transaction, not you.

They did, at WWDC 2013. More to the point, I wonder why the Trim Enabler dev isn't signing his kext? Are there legitimate reasons, like he needs a special kind of thing that can't be signed using the provided tools, or is it because he doesn't want to pay for a dev license to sign the software he's selling? In a vacuum of information, there's not much point in speculating.

Why? Is TRIM empirically faster on your drive, or is this something you think you need?

I'm wondering about that myself. Early benchmarks showed that the 840 EVO benefits from TRIM, but that drive also had wonky firmware that was causing read degradation. Could the old firmware have accounted for some of the benchmark problems?

Side note: I applied the firmware upgrade myself last week and it went through without a hitch. YMMV, but I had an easy time of it.

I don't work for Apple, but... Older MacBook Pros came with instructions for replacing the RAM and hard drive. This was considered a normal thing to do and didn't void warranties. For example, my 2011 MBP has normal Phillips screws on the bottom, and it takes me about two minutes to have the back panel off and the RAM and HDD snap right out.

SSDs have a history of notoriously horrible firmware. SandForce, anyone? Someone goes to Best Buy and comes home with a new SSD, pops it into their MBP, uses it for a month, and the thing asplodes and eats their data. They call Apple support to scream at them for writing a terrible OS that loses their data, and Apple loses money and reputation.

I can imagine perfectly non-nefarious reasons why Apple would disable TRIM by default and only enable it for drives that have been explicitly tested for compatibility. Even today, you can still turn TRIM on for yourself as you described, at the price of reverting to pre-Yosemite security. I haven't done so on the 840 EVO I swapped into my MBP because I've judged that it's not worth the tradeoff for me, but it's an option. Trim Enabler even has a GUI to do it for you.

I'd be hard pressed to come up with more of a manufactured controversy.

Apple has never enabled TRIM on non-OEM SSDs, which is probably the conservative and correct thing to do. If you're clever enough to install a new SSD, you're clever enough to enable it on your own (and presumably to know whether you should enable it, and whether it's even a benefit for your particular drive).

The current workaround involved a single software vendor who didn't sign their kexts. Apple's new security policy won't let you load random unsigned kernel modules unless you explicitly turn off the signature checking. While this is inconvenient for me personally - because I have a 3rd-party SSD and I used that software myself - on whole, I'd rather have a more secure OS than the dubious benefit of a possibly slightly faster SSD.

RT Surfaces go up against cheap Android tablets, not iPads or good high-end Androids. $449 is way more expensive than the competition.

At $749, you get a bottom-end CPU and no keyboard, so you're not competing against laptops at all. It's also $150 more than an iPad Air 2 with the same amount of storage (although the iPad will have more available space after subtracting the OS install), so you're paying more for a tablet with less available tablet-centric software.

OP was right: Surface is a hybrid that does neither thing well.

While I don't disagree with your general point, theft rates started dropping as soon as Apple added Activation Lock to iOS 7. There's not a lot of street value in a device that can't be used, and they're not the thief magnet they were even a year ago.

...unlike natural, free-range grains that are invulnerable to pests and thrive under the gentle light of the waxing crescent moon. Sorry, but you lost me at "chemicals". Yes. They're matter-based lifeforms, and need a whole slew of chemicals to exist.

At mine, it was specifically allowed. You absolutely weren't allowed to share work unless explicitly told otherwise, but discussing your approach and debating the benefits was considered a legitimate learning method.