Not to split hairs, but an anecdote is very much a single point of data.

I think you were looking for "the plural of anecdote isn't data", which isn't quite the same thing ... :)

Maybe so, but it seems silly in retrospect. That original Mac changed everything -- there just wasn't much software for it in 1985.

Wasn't referring to the specs, just the coolness. (plus ça change, and all that ...) However, I've just realised that the IIc came out in the same year as the original Macintosh, so I clearly am on crack :)

Oh, the IIc was *the* computer of the mid-80s. My family only had an "Orange" (an Apple ][ clone) ... but it did have a 128k card and 80-column-text card (and a dinkly little black box to switch between text modes, IIRC). From there it was MacOS via a Mac SE30 and a Powerbook 100 (still very fondly remembered). And then I discovered Pentium chips, and how much faster they were than the Motorola chips Apple was still clinging to -- that started a brief and sordid affair with Windows. It all ended with my transition over to linux (back in 1998 with RedHat 5.1) and it's been Linux ever since for me.

Nothing's ever been as amazing as that first Apple ][ clone, though -- I still remember my Dad teaching me to code in BASIC when I must have been four or five, and the thrill of

10 PRINT "HELLO!"
20 GOTO 10
RUN

No computer before or since has been so welcoming, so encouraging, so ... insistent ... of programming. Good, happy times.

What's more concerning is that Tim Cook just came out and said that Apple wouldn't be considering larger screen sizes in the foreseeable future. I'm not entirely sure what I think about 5" phone screens either, but trying to deny they're not popular is as stupid as trying to deny that 7" tablet screen sizes aren't popular.

It seems too me that ever since the iPhone 4 Apple has reacted to the loss of its market share by not daring to change anything. The phone design is still the same (nearly three years old now, and it wasn't even a very attractive or practical design to begin with) and the screen is the same width (which feels too small and cramped to me, now that I'm used to larger Android screens). It's like they're caught in the headlights and don't dare move, not realising that standing still is what's killing them.

Out of interest, does either have an IPS screen? It's the low-viewing-angle hideous TN screens that drive me to distraction, and I don't know why more manufacturers don't care about screen quality. Even Apple seems to be slipping with their latest laptops.

I would have thought that viewing photos and watching movies on laptops is pretty common these days, so screen quality *should* be important to people.

Samsung Series 9. Expensive, but worth every penny if you can afford it. Amazingly good screen, too ...

The parent means a three-finger tap (three fingers at once on a multi-touch compatible trackpad), not three sequential left-button taps! It's a neat feature -- you can also do a three-finger drag to move the window around.

... which are, in fact, the default bindings in Unity.

I'm not sure how that Ars reviewer was picked to write TFA, but he seemed a bit dated in his ideas about Linux compatibility. Granted that I do my research on hardware before buying, but it's been a very long time since I've had any trouble using two-finger scrolling (with inertial scrolling), or getting wifi to work, or getting (for crying out loud!) sound to work. Those are issues from a decade ago; they shouldn't be problems now.

I'm not so sure it's that simple -- one of e-Ink's great strengths is the battery life, since the screen requires no power except for page turns. It's a one-trick pony, of course, as you by nature don't want a high-refresh rate and so most other applications except for reading books won't work. But the trick is so damn good, I think it'll stick around for a long time to come (or at least for as long as people still care about reading books). Apart from anything else, it's just so damn nice to have a piece of electronic equipment that goes months without needing a charge, even with heavy usage.

Personally, I carry both a 7" tablet and a kindle with me when I travel: I use the tablet for doing tablety-things and the kindle for doing booky-things. They're both so small and light (especially the kindle) that it's no issue carrying both (and if I had to ditch one, it'd be the tablet). Maybe the biggest problem for the kindle is that it does it's job *too* well -- I still have an old kindle keyboard, and haven't felt the need to upgrade; but assuming Amazon are treating them like cheap razors with the ebooks as the blades, I guess that doesn't matter too much.

Seriously -- you're using an unsupported community build of CM with god-knows-what kernel and you think this is a representative experience??

I'm not sure what to say to FUD like that, except that official CM builds are very carefully vetted (there still isn't an official "stable" build of Android 4.2, for example, even six months after the 4.2 codebase was merged and an enormous number of fixes and changes applied since). But I've never seen any issues like what you're complaining about, even running nightly builds (which I've been doing since 2010).

The other major piece of misinformation in your post is claiming it's a time sink. It's not. For some considerable time now, CM has shipped with a CM-updater utility that will (as an option) check regularly for new builds (you can specify whether or not you want nightlies, experimental releases, stable releases included) and will download any updates. On your acceptance of a prompt, the new build will be installed and the device rebooted without the user having to do or manage anything -- it's that simple. No messing about with recovery, no downloading files from XDA, no mess, no fuss. It's all automagic, and it works perfectly, so much so that current builds actually disable the ability to manually reboot into recovery by default. The whole process is just as easy, in fact, as installing an update from your carrier. (But of course, you wouldn't be aware of any of the above as you're not running an official CM build.)

The great thing about open source software is that anyone can take CM's codebase and build their own ROM for any particular unsupported brand of phone. But please don't judge some half-baked, buggy XDA community build with the quality that's coming out of cyanogenmod right now.

Oh, I'd take a phone with 128Gb storage, but I'm not sure it's going to happen any time soon. At least, not from Google while they're still pushing their stupid cloud storage concept ... :(

That's storage space, not RAM. Your Nexus One may suffer from memory constraints as well, but they'll have nothing to do with the number of applications you store on your SD card, or where you put your Dalvik cache ...

... would you prefer the full memory allocation of the browser to be swapped out to disk each time?? If you've got the number of tabs open that I normally have, that's a substantial amount of disk space being taken up (and free space on my phone is generally at a premium, it being one of the non-SD-card-compliant nexii ...)

I'm sure you could write a browser that would do this, but I doubt many people would want to use it ...

I wasn't referring to Keep in particular (which I agree isn't particularly innovative except perhaps in its sheer simplicity, which I do rather appreciate). But the Google cycle of trying lots of new things out and seeing what sticks is something I very much approve of. One thing you have to give Google credit for -- they haven't allowed themselves to stagnate like Apple has in the last few years. And maybe it's all just a ploy to protect their search advertising revenue, but either way the results have been amazing.