Define "meaningful".

I use my iPhone to make calls, send texts, take and send photos, connect through social media. As a pocket communication device, that fits the meaning perfectly.

I use my MacBook to do graphic design and digital photography.

I use my Apple TV to stream media to my TV, which is what it was designed for.

Strange. I've never encountered that problem on my Toshiba. I have all my inputs into the TV's HDMI, and digital out from the TV to my receiver.

The collectors market will certainly disappear, but Lego won't (unless they're foolish and bank on the collectors market.)

Parents will always buy their kids Lego, because it's a fun and creative toy with universal appeal. Your average parent doesn't give a damn about the collectability of Lego, just that it will keep their kid occupied with something constructive.

Some people appreciate industrial design. Some people don't. It's like how the ugly "beige box" ruled the industry for decades, and some people still have them and say "it works just fine."

This is not a put-down, just a statement of fact.

In any case, it's not putting form over function, it's a matter of form complementing function.

Ya, China's probably not the best market to compare to.

In North America and Europe similarly spec'd phones run in the same price range, which means everyone loves making a healthy profit off their customers.

Android outsells Apple 6:1 in the "I use a smartphone like a featurephone and don't know what apps are, oh and this phone is only $79 on prepaid" area.

"The Web We Lost", which I indeed missed, required effort. You had to build your own presence on the web.

When the effort was taken away, with the added bonus of being linked directly with your friends, the old ways were unsurprisingly dropped.

So yes, the hobbyist web went away, as it was bound to. No one should be shocked or surprised by this.

One of humanity's greatest flaws is the general inability to see in anything other than black and white.

He's not exactly wrong, but he's not exactly right either.

There's one more component that differs from back then: Content is king.

Users adore their apps, but at the end of the day it's all their media and what they have stored "in the cloud" that matters. All your media will run on pretty much any platform effortlessly now, and web content is generally universal, whereas in the '80s getting content from one platform to open on another was extremely difficult. (Simply *moving it* from one platform to another was equally difficult.)

So, platform lock-in isn't quite as rigid as it was. Dominant platforms can change in the blink of an eye. (BlackBerry, anyone?)

What I find funny about Anarchists/Libertarians is that if true Anarchy came they'd probably be the first ones to get pwned by roving gangs of thugs.

Being a skinny street punk or obnoxious capitalist won't save you from that.

He must have the same advisor Toronto Mayor Rob Ford has.

That guy wanted to use prime waterfront property to build a giant ferris wheel *and* a monorail.

"Want to take a photo. Just look at the scene and blink one eye."

In normal human world that is called "winking". It can be taken several different ways. Use extreme caution around human subjects.

...and neither is a trustworthy authority on anything.

You're missing my point, and you proved my point.

Android is only in the position it's in because manufacturers were looking for a standard OS to compete with, and it was in the right place at the right time at the right price. It's not there because of some ideological virtue of "openness".

It's true. Android isn't popular because it's "open", it's popular because after the iPhone launch handset manufacturers were clamouring for an OS to compete with it, and Google just happened to have Android under development and told everyone "Here, you can use this. It's free." The handset manufacturers clamped onto it because it meant they didn't have to go to the trouble of developing their own modern mobile OS.

If Microsoft, or even Palm, had had their shit together at the time, Android may have just been a niche OS today. But they didn't, so here we are.