You're talking like Google's a minority player in this deal. Google's the big dog here. Google dictates terms, and this one isn't so onerous. They patch the OS and they send the patch to a bunch of handset makers. They integrate the patch and push the update. This isn't a fundamental system overhaul, it's a bug fix. Unless the phones are incapable of receiving an update at all, they should be able to get this no problem. If there are costs, Google can offer to defray them. This is about building a brand and taking care of your customers. All this is doing is further pushing the perception that Apple takes care of its customers and Google and it's partners don't. Samsung is the only one that could theoretically afford to turn Google down because they could switch to Tizen, but they're getting drubbed by Apple at the top end and Xiaomi at the bottom; I don't think they're in a position to make a afuss.

But if that's what they want, that's fine--I'm an Apple shareholder (20 whole shares!) and that just makes my stock more valuable. And I own an iPhone and will continue to buy them. Whenever I look at Android, one of my big concerns is how long I'll get updates. If this is the sort of thing I can expect--buy a new phone for the latest security patch--I'll continue paying $700 for an iPhone and getting updates for 4+ years, thanks. I'm sure I'm not the only one.

Apple released a security patch for iOS 6 when that SSL vulnerability was found. It was a deprecated OS running on a MINORITY of Apple phones and they issued an update anyway. (http://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT202920)

Why are so many people excited to give Google a pass over this? Support your customers or don't, but be up front about how long they're going to get to see updates. If you're going to drop security support after 18 months, at least let everyone know so they can make an informed decision.

Twitter's request is asinine. Twitter is only set up to share with other Twitter users. When I post something to Instagram, I get to share with people on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr. I do occasionally use VSCO and send things to each service individually (usually when I want to preserve the aspect ratio of an image; the lower res square that Instagram demands doesn't always work best).

If Twitter wants people to use their service for images, they have to make it easier to share outside of their network. People interested in sharing usually want to cover all their bases, not just one population.

But this is what's wrong with Twitter's current managementâ"they don't understand their own service and the people that use it. And they don't seem to get that if you want to grow, you have to reach outside of the network and bring people in, not broadcast to the people that are already there. I have friends that have joined Twitter because of my own active cross-posting (using third party tools)â"if Twitter made that part easier, maybe they could convince people to give them a shot. (That and doubling back and making third party clients easier to develop again; the official app is trash compared to Tweetbot. If they want ads, just make it part of the stream that the clients can't skip. It's not so hard.)

I'm not sure I buy this. Apple's control extends only to their own product. There's a active market below Apple's pricepoint (though there's not much profit there, I'll grant you). When Apple's prices change (actually, has that happened in the last few years? I think the price has been steady for a while) the market doesn't reconfigure around that price. Apple certainly has a monopoly on Apple phones, but I'm not sure that's particularly insightful.

In theory, someone could also release a product that's priced ABOVE the iPhone (perhaps as a Veblen good) as long as they can make a sufficient appeal to the wealthy that their product is superior. (I know about Vertu, but I haven't seen anything that makes me think that anyone thinks their phones are better than even ordinary Android phones.)

If Apple disappeared tomorrow, the world would still have smartphone manufacturers. The only way this monopoly argument could hold water is if we decide that Android and the handsets it runs on should be considered a completely different category of product.

What?

Sorry, this makes no sense to me. Why should Apple be forced to open up its protocol? Why is that necessary for the public good? As people are always delighted to point out, Apple's market share is by no means the majority. Apple isn't a utility.

If people don't like iMessage or people they know aren't on iMessage, then they can use something else. I chat with friends on Hangouts (which, if I'm honest, is the worst of all the chat apps out there), WhatsApp (some clumsy UI elements, but lots of good features) and Facebook Messenger (surprisingly good, despite the fact that Facebook is behind it; also the one I'm least likely to trust privacy-wise). I don't demand that my friends only use iMessage. I'll find a way to chat with them one way or another.

If I happened to have a friend with a BlackBerry, I'd use the BBM app. Or ordinary texts. There's plenty of interoperability here.

If Apple didn't allow the BBM app (or any other chat app) on their phones in order to ENFORCE iMessage use, maybe you'd have a point.

BlackBerry missed the boat about a dozen times at this point and that's their fault, not Apple's.

In India, until March of this year, antibiotics were an off-the-shelf drug.

http://bsac.org.uk/news/major-...

You can't blame the doctors there for this one.

But as usual, things are probably a mixture of things. In India, antibiotics were easy to get, and waste at the plants was an issue. In North America, over-prescription and people not taking the full course of drugs when they ARE required is an issue. In all places, prophylactic use in animals is definitely an issue.

Put all those things together, and here we are. But it's nice to see this guy cop to his industry's (and his own, by implication) complicity in this problem. They're making drugs to help people, and the part that HE can control is how safely they manufacture the drugs. The agriculture and medical industries will have to be dealt with separately (and probably through legislation).

Actually, it's even worse than that. India JUST banned the sale of antibiotics off the shelf this March. Until recently, you could just walk in and grab them. http://bsac.org.uk/news/major-...

There are way too many things wrong with that, but among them is that a lot of unused antibiotics probably wound up in the trash.

Not only does Apple support MOST of its devices for about 4 years, the first iPad's abnormally short update lifetime is still longer than Google's official support lifetime of 18 months.

And on top of that, they even pushed out iOS 6 security updates when that SSL bug popped up. That was a security patch for an OS and device that was basically EOL.

If you toss your phone after two years, that's your problem. My iPhone 4 was working great when I gave it to my Mom in September after getting my iPhone 6. Maybe she'll only get a year or two out of it, but six years is about as long as anyone ever owns a computing device these days.

I buy Apple phones specifically because I KNOW I'll get 4 years out of them. Don't pin any of this crap on Apple, because it's just not true.

100% true.

Something that helps a lot (in all industries, including academia) is stripping names and gender/race identifying characteristics from resumes and papers. When those documents are assessed in a context absent the nature of the writer, they're considered more equally. They've done experiments where the same paper has been submitted with male, female and neutral names, and the female names see more critical judgement and a higher rate of rejection. This is for exactly the same paper, remember.

The problem isn't overt racism, it's subtle, institutional discrimination that most of us suffer from. Even female researchers and professors are guilty of discriminating against other women.

The CEO of Intel can't affect those industries, except, perhaps, indirectly and through example.

All of those are good questions. Those are all places where we should be striving to see a better mix of genders and races. You tell ME why those industries aren't trying to change. Could it be the institutional sexism that's so pervasive in our culture, starting when children are young, allotting toys on a gendered basis? Is it because we don't discourage construction workers in many of our cities from catcalling really offensive things, making women wonder why they'd ever want to work on a site like that? Is it because when women DO go into the armed forces, they're raped or sexually assaulted at distressingly high rates? Is it because we tell men that caring for children is women's work, and simultaneously tell them it's a horrible thing to be feminine?

By the time someone is looking for a job, it's probably too late. The people that want to be in construction have already made their choice, male or female.

Uh, no. The A7 and A8. The ones that Apple developed themselves. The ones that Qualcomm dismissed as a gimmick while desperately trying to get out the door themselves and only just achieving this year.

I've tried the ONE other that's on the market. On the face of it, it's a poor system, and much slower. The swipe action requires a lot more precision and a specific orientation. I've unlocked my iPhone upside down.

It seems like it's a triviality, but because of it, I can have a 15-ish digit passcode and unlock my phone and buy things from the appstore rather quickly. I feel like I'm in the dark ages every time I use my (3rd-Gen) iPad. It's a small change, but it's one that I quickly wanted on almost everything I owned. I'm not made of money, though, so replacing my iPad will have to wait.

Right, but for the same price as the Dell monitor, you can buy the iMac. It's like you get a computer for free.

The heat dissipation design is really clever. I had a PowerMac G5, and the bloody thing (while gorgeous--one of the loveliest industrial designs in the last 20 years) was insanely loud. I've worked with a few sound engineers in my time (I'm in the games industry) and they hate how loud the computers are.

I think you're misreading my statement. It used to be that buying Gen 1 of any Apple product was a recipe for disaster. You always waited for the next revision because the first one would have an irritating problem. Now, I feel like Gen 1 of Apple's hardware is a lot less worrisome from that perspective.

But to speak to your point, while Apple does frequent updates, they support old hardware for a long time. My iPhone got OS updates for four years--they're the only ones in the industry that do that. My 5 year old iMac is still getting OS updates. They're not really designed to be replaced quickly, it's just that their new designs are awfully good. I switched to Macs a few years ago specifically to AVOID the upgrade treadmill, and it's worked rather well.

And, to tie it back to the original thesis of this article, I feel like there's been a dip in the quality of the software that makes the longevity of the hardware a little less pertinent. Sure, I've got Yosemite running on my iMac, but the OS is mystifyingly crash-prone. It doesn't matter if my Mac is new or old, problems like that will drive you insane.

Well, except for that 64-bit processor that was 2 years ahead of everyone else's. Or the fingerprint sensor that works quite a lot better than any current competing models. Or the custom timing controller they built so they could release a 5k iMac for the same price that Dell is selling (a not-yet-available) a 5k monitor. Or the rather cleverly designed Mac Pro.

Apple consistently puts out really high quality hardware still, I think. Apple used to really consistently lag behind in performance-per-dollar, and I think between the longevity of their products and the high quality of the releases at the start of the generation, there's much less of a penalty to being an early Apple adopter than there ever was. Of course, this all relies on you being willing to give up the control of expandability and repairability. There's certainly a trade-off there that has to be considered; I 100% respect anyone that makes decisions based on that criteria.

But the software is noticeably worse. I had a problem the other day where I couldn't drag and drop files in my Finder in Yosemite. Turned out I needed to delete some sort of Finder plist file; something migrated badly from Mavericks and screwed me up. And ever since installing Yosemite, I've been plagued with random kernel panics. I actually don't use my desktop machine much anymore, but I used to keep my account logged in even when my partner was using the machine. I've used it a bit more in the last couple of weeks, and I've made sure to log myself out because I was suspicious that I had some rogue process running causing the crashes. Well now when she logs back in after I've logged out, Yosemite will log her out after a minute or so. Then she goes back in again and it's fine.

Everyone has a completely different list of software problems now. It's madness.

Meanwhile, my iPhone 6 replaced my iPhone 4 (only because the iPhone 4 wasn't eligible for OS updates anymore), the iMac and Mac Mini hardware have no trouble at all, and our two iPads are rock solid. Hardware-wise, I haven't had to warranty anything from Apple in the last 6 years. Now I'm just faced with weird random problems with OS X crashes and dumb iOS bugs.

Your viewpoint is, ironically, too narrow itself. Ecosystems are hard. They're big, and complicated and saving them is going to be difficult. Those ecosystems are things that we rely on as a species, so it's hard to tech your way out of the mess entirely.

For example, take the Great Barrier Reef. It's immense. It protects an enormous part of Australia's coastline. Artificial reefs that we build aren't as effective as natural ones at least partly because natural ones regenerate, given the right conditions. Additionally, they act as fish nurseries and give refuge to species that we eventually want to eat. As the population of the planet grows, it becomes ever more important to protect these areas to ensure long-term benefit to us. (Also, I beleive that it has its own inherent worth, beyond what we can exploit or derive from it.)

Heating of the oceans drives acidification. Acidification is bad for animals that make shells...the acid eats away at them. Additionally, the corals have evolved to live in a certain temperature band and so there are just issues with forcing them to live at different temperatures.

On top of all that, jellyfish don't have any issues with rising temperatures or acidification because they have very few hard parts, and they compete with other sea life at all tropic levels. They eat eggs and larvae and adult fish and invertebrates. Suddenly animals around the reefs are under competitive pressure as well. Jellyfish don't really have many natural predators--it takes ecosystems to keep jellyfish levels where they are.

I'm not a marine biologist, and this is just grazing the surface of what I've read. While I agree with you that tech will help, we've got so much to do on so many fronts. Out survival depends on the survival of a lot of things. We like to think we're important, but we're really just a disruptive force, not a particularly useful one. The planet would do no worse with humanity gone, but if you could wipe out all the insects with a snap of your fingers, humanity would almost certainly disappear.

So, think bigger. I think we're mostly on the same page, honestly. But if what you hear is unrelenting gloom and doom, it's because when you start looking at the massive scale of disruption that we're faced with, it's sometimes hard to think of a way that we can legitimately fix it. We're really in a bind. I hope you're right, and we can just think our way out of this mess, and I hope you're part of that solution. We kind of need everyone on board.

Here's the issue as I see it.

I owned an iPhone 4 for all four years of its lifeâ"release to EOL. It was the 16GB version and I got by by managing my music playlists carefully and occasionally offloading the photos. Even in iOS 7, this was fine. When I was deciding which iPhone 6 to buy, I figured that I'd pretty much work the same way I always had. Sure, I can't carry as much with me, but I'm rarely away from home so long that it matters, and I was already planning to buy the iCloud storage package.

Even still, the space problem on my 16GB iPhone 6 is getting on my nerves. I've had to delete and restore my music at least once. Connecting to my Mac first uses a bit less space, but not so much less that I don't have to delete things. The iCloud photo system now works well enough that I'm definitely saving space there, but as a whole I'm running much closer to my limits. I get low space warnings from time to time, and I've started to monitor whether or not I REALLY need certain apps on my phone.

I would've paid the extra $100 for the upgraded version if I'd known the delta between 16GB on iOS 7 and 8 was so large. Apples cloud services just aren't good enough for me to rely on, and I cross into the USA all the time, so I go fairly long periods without reliable mobile data frequently (I had to have a GPS app that relies on stored data, I can't stream music or podcasts, etc.)

When availability is a bit better, I may sell this one off to someone that more easily gets by on 16GB, but Apple shouldn't have put me in this position in the first place. I use and enjoy their products, and I'm willing to pay for what I needâ"I'm just irritated that what I need changed with no behavioural change from me. It's all on Apple here.