Part of why Adobe is struggling with Flash is its sense of entitlement.

The company believes not just that Flash is a good idea, but that you *must* adopt Flash. As-is. Without question. No matter how much it slows down your device, how it hurts battery life, how it affects the stability of whatever browser you're using (I know it's not nightmarish, but it's far from perfect). Oh, if you're making an Android phone, could you please make Flash a core part of any marketing you do, no matter how much it actually matters? Thanks!

And if you dare to omit Flash like Apple (and now Microsoft, partly), then you're an evil commie dictator who hates freedom and life itself. Just look at how John Dowdell and others from Adobe react to Apple, or how Android phone and tablet makers are practically forced to parrot Adobe's line of how you're not getting the "full web" unless you use their third-party plugin. Never mind that HTML5 lets me AirPlay a video to my TV where you can't do that with a Flash video on any other platform.

This wouldn't be a problem except that Adobe hasn't really addressed many of the underlying problems, and I'm not sure if it entirely can. Hardware acceleration is good, but when a Galaxy S II or an Optimus Pad (both dual-core devices) can still choke on a moderately sized piece of Flash, that's a problem. It's also still very common to hear of Flash crashing things or of security holes specific to it... when Apple, Google, and Mozilla design sandboxing code specifically because of the problems your plugin creates, that should tell you that you're doing something wrong.

There's a difference between improving your product and doing it purposefully in a way that makes your product look more like your competitor's. Samsung did this to copy the iPad 2's look, not just to get it thinner.

When Samsung goes from a fat design virtually ready to ship to a complete re-architecture of the casing in six weeks, that not only shows that it was relatively easy but that it was a knee-jerk reaction to emulate a rival product. And what does it say about Samsung that it could have easily delivered the same battery life and performance in a much thinner case but waited until Apple had put out the iPad 2 to suddenly get serious about it?

Again, if it were me, I wouldn't have been in Samsung's face about it. Still, there is zero question that this wasn't natural competitive evolution; this was Samsung being knocked out of complacency and deciding the best route was to imitate what Apple was doing.

Remember what the Galaxy Tab 10.1 looked like in February this year? It was fatter and it only somewhat looked like what Apple was doing.

And then... the iPad 2 came. You can tell that Samsung completely freaked out that it would lose to Apple, because it almost immediately said it "would not be outdone" by the iPad's new design:

http://www.electronista.com/articles/11/03/24/samsung.says.galaxy.tab.101.thinner.to.beat.ipad/

Yep. Samsung openly admitted that it was going to change the shape of its tablet because of the iPad 2, just two weeks after it had unveiled its own work. And sure enough, in March, the Galaxy Tab 10.1 was suddenly a lot thinner and looked remarkably much more like the iPad 2. I was at the CTIA's spring show, where they first showed off the remake: they even made it a source of pride how quickly they'd changed the look and had a glass case showing the old version and the new one.

I would personally keep the Galaxy Tab 10.1 on shelves because it's different enough, but there's no question that the model you see now wouldn't look the way it does if it weren't for Apple.

I talked to an IDC analyst when this broke: Apple was at 10.5% back around spring/summer 2010. The difference here is that Apple is likely to keep this spot because of gangbuster sales -- and, of course, Acer's "there are no iPads in Baghdad" strategy of depending way too much on netbooks and cheap notebooks.

I write for a website which covers a lot of Apple news in its coverage, so I do see that leaning; by definition, if you're knowingly going against the mainstream by getting a Mac, you're probably willing to change the status quo elsewhere.

However, one day the site got this absolutely indignant feedback e-mail from a Mac user complaining about Apple. You see, Apple had the audacity to endorse a No vote on California's Prop 8. How dare this company support the freedom of sexual orientation and 'assault' family values! It was making this reader and his wife question their choice of platform.

Never mind that it's a San Francisco Bay area company. Whose logo was a rainbow-hued apple for half of its history. Whose slogan was "Think Different" for several years. It just goes to show that even conservatives will lean towards Apple... if just in spite of themselves.

When Richard Stallman makes paranoiac comments like that, he makes a pretty good argument for getting a closed-source device. The guy lives on an extremely slow Chinese netbook, avoids using as much of the Internet as possible, and is basically a hermit! His version of "freedom" actually makes him one of the most enslaved people on the planet. He's dependent on what other people say to make judgments because he won't use their devices and has little access to modern news sources because he's afraid of most of the web. Meanwhile, an iPhone owner might not have his pick of apps, but at least he can actually communicate with the outside world and get knowledge about what really matters -- political freedom, not theoretical software freedom.

The podcast is pure (and false) speculation -- it doesn't cite sources, and it's providing supposedly very definite details about something that won't show up for half a year. Having talked to Apple workers and knowing a bit of what goes on in the inside, even *Apple* doesn't know what the system will necessarily be like that far out. It has cancelled systems at the last minute or made part swaps weeks before launch because they either didn't work properly, cost too much or even for political reasons. Apple dropped ATI video cards from a line of Power Macs because an ATI PR confirmed the new models a day early.