IntelliJ code inspection and refactoring features are so great that it's worth sacrificing power tools like apply-macro-to-region-lines. Maybe theoretically some of these things could be configured in Emacs, but work to discover the packages and create/learn keyboard shortcuts is too much for my patience. It would help to have "emacs distributions" with task specific documentation for particular use cases.

Apple's very survival can be traced directly to accepting an $150 million investment from Microsoft. Success of iPad and subsequently iPhone is a direct result of porting iTunes to Windows and opening app store to 3rd parties. Today's market cap of Apple is in no way related to decision to break ties with Bose, or Fitbit. My bet is that in long term cumulative consequences of these decisions will place Apple back into the spot before Steve Jobs came back. It will be them against the world, and the world will win.

For most users, complete privacy from all internet services is not an option. When you enter a query into a search engine, you are providing the server with knowledge of your often very private interests. Your IP address and cookies make it easy for anyone determined to discover your identity as a person.

So the first question is, do you directly benefit from your personal information being collected and retained? In case of a search query, collecting it for the purpose of showing search results is obviously necessary. Long term retention in the form that can be traced back to you is murky. Forwarding it to Apple seems unnecessary and I hope that the company provides an explanation.

As far as safeguards go, it's reasonable that available information is provided to authorities with a subpoena which is narrowed down to minimum required for investigation. Like a list of queries with specific, obviously incriminating keywords made in the last month.

But the notion of complete anonymity is about as practical for most people as living in the cabin in the woods. As a matter of principal, I don't think either should be made illegal. But most people will not be happy with the results, and most crooks will be too dumb to follow these lifestyles so strictly that they don't slip up and get caught.

The primary focus should be on driving people to your stores and selling products with are your core competency. It's understandable that an Apple store will not sell Windows laptops or Android phones. But they should absolutely have a decent choice of keyboard, mice and headphones. If not, people who simply want a Mac with different keyboard will go to shop in Best Buy rather than Apple Store. But there, core Apple products will be presented side by side with with competition and without regard for complete experience that Apple wants to create for customers. While I am there should I pick up an $99 Android tablet for kids to watch Netflix rather than spending $399 on an iPad mini? Hmm...

The way it always goes down:

PM: We have to unify iOS and OSX experience
UX, working on a nice 4K monitor: Oooh. Looks pretty!
Developer: whatever, I have a deadline to meet

Rare developer with some UI taste starts a flame war on the mailing list, followed by a thread of me toos and managers explaining some of the factors behind the decision but not really listening to feedback.

It's not even a horrible process. If UX was forced to redo the work, their heart would not be as much in it as the first time around. At minimum, the product would be delayed or released with more bugs. It's just a sad fact that collective intelligence is much less than a sum of individual intelligence. Therefore products have to become mediocre in order to gain more features that only a big team can implement.

Not even close. Removing developer mode so that no other OS can be installed would be "OtherOS all over again".

Four smart guys who are not $450 short each?

On Mac, Apple's Mac Store is just one of the choices. As such, requiring sandboxing is a defensible position. They are basically saying that they guarantee maximum amount of damage that can be done by certain category of apps. If yours requires full root access and installs device drivers, this doesn't make it a bad app. It just can not be effectively reviewed and determined safe in a realistic amount of time.

What most developers are missing is general shift to mobile, freemium model and need for creative advertising to stand out. In most cases, it makes sense to have an iOS/Android/Web app before a Mac app (and I trust you know Windows still has a higher market share). Users should also be able to find your app useful at free level before being expected to spend money.

Then, if you can explain to users why extra functionality can not be achieved on mobile or web, you will have no problem having them find you on Mac App Store or any alternative store like Amazon. Microsoft Office, Adobe products and many other big names are not on Mac App Store. They do fine.

I love the idea of folks with money to burn subsidizing my subscription. Even if my rates are not directly lowered, extra income would allow Netflix to purchase better catalog and build out infrastructure. Would gladly go 720p only for further rate cut.

With your own spam filtering, you decide what is the acceptable false positive rates, which spam-high country domains you never get legit e-mails from and so on. With public services, same filter has to work for millions of users. If you are diligent about reporting rather than ignoring spam, you will probably get better results. But still not as optimized for you personally as filtering that you setup yourself.

So, do you typically develop your apps directly on an iPad, Android Phone or Playstation, or do you have a nice developer laptop for coding and devices for testing?

For the first time in ages there is a computer that comes bundled with Mathematica and has shortcuts to programming IDEs on desktop. Contrast this with what modern mainstream OSes and even Linux distros like Ubuntu come bundled with. Even being 40 years old, I am tempted to learn how to make these cools 3D graphs and drive some from some simple sensors attached to GPIO pins. Say graph of daylight and its changes over seasons. For kids I think it makes a huge difference what you put in front of them and iPads fail pathetically in promoting actual learning.

If you answer this question, you will be in better shape to evaluate importance of ext4 support on flash cards. If it's for web browsing and flash card is just for uploading photos from a camera, I don't see any reason to care.

If you are a developer/power user, I don't see why you want Chrome OS. I would think a choice of web browsers and support for running local development IDEs would be a far bigger issue than ext4 external drives.

Or if you are a hobbyist and like to tinker, you can boot to chrubuntu or a modified version of chromium OS. So what exactly is the problem?

Forever? Just round up people based on nationality, participation in a protest or a house of worship. Then carry out waterboarding in public view, giving each person in line a choice to spill the beans or experience waterboarding and then spill the beans. Should take no time at all. Regimes far less wealthy than US have been doing great job keeping tabs on their citizens with good old secret police work rather then tech. Weather we allow that, or Prism, or consequences of no secret surveillance at all is really up to us.