I might if Apple's business was advertising. But it's hardware, so they are less likely to abuse it than someone like Google.

Talking at your phone like it was microphone makes you look like a total mong. Talking into a phone held up to your ear makes you look like a normal person having an important conversation.

That's why Siri ties into the phone's proximity sensor and will automatically start listening if you hold the phone up to your ear, so you can use it without having to look stupid.

Funny you should mention that as a counterexample, because there's an anecdote about Steve Jobs and rounded corners:

Bill [Atkinson] fired up his demo and it quickly filled the Lisa screen with randomly-sized ovals, faster than you thought was possible. But something was bothering Steve Jobs. "Well, circles and ovals are good, but how about drawing rectangles with rounded corners? Can we do that now, too?"

"No, there's no way to do that. In fact it would be really hard to do, and I don't think we really need it". I think Bill was a little miffed that Steve wasn't raving over the fast ovals and still wanted more.

Steve suddenly got more intense. "Rectangles with rounded corners are everywhere! Just look around this room!". And sure enough, there were lots of them, like the whiteboard and some of the desks and tables. Then he pointed out the window. "And look outside, there's even more, practically everywhere you look!". He even persuaded Bill to take a quick walk around the block with him, pointing out every rectangle with rounded corners that he could find.

When Steve and Bill passed a no-parking sign with rounded corners, it did the trick. "OK, I give up", Bill pleaded. "I'll see if it's as hard as I thought." He went back home to work on it.

Bill returned to Texaco Towers the following afternoon, with a big smile on his face. His demo was now drawing rectangles with beautifully rounded corners blisteringly fast, almost at the speed of plain rectangles. When he added the code to LisaGraf, he named the new primitive "RoundRects". Over the next few months, roundrects worked their way into various parts of the user interface, and soon became indispensable.

Jobs did not create brand new designs and schematics and techniques out of whole cloth; he had his research staff to do that. His contribution was pushing the researchers in the right directions, pulling them back from going in the wrong ones, and enforcing a consistent vision and design strategy for the whole enchilada.

The one who pushes a new idea past the tipping point can be at least as important as the one who came up with it in the first place. Tim Berners-Lee did not invent the Internet, but without the Web it could not have become the inextricable part of life that it is today.. Henry Ford did not invent the car, but he applied to it the industrial practices (which he did invent) that put it in a position to change the world. Steve Jobs did not invent the smartphone or the tablet but it's because of him that those are now household words and we're moving towards a world where everyone carries a personal Internet-enabled device at all times, and all the technological and social change that entails. That's already shaped 21st century society more than any other person in the technology (or fashion) industry has to date.

There are just too many architectures capable of browsing the web now, and some of the most important ones will never support a feature like this (read: iOS). This is the new ActiveX, only without a dominating monopoly and OS integration to push it.

If you look at how Pixar fit into Disney creatively and politically, it was a takeover in everything but name. Pixar execs were immediately moved into high-ranking Disney positions- John Lasseter is now in charge of the entire animation studio. Tons of soulless projects were axed and the overall creative direction of the company shifted significantly.

It implies that Apple ever condoned or deliberately enabled this. They are strengthening their protection against an activity that they never intended to be possible. You might as well post "Apple Stops Jailbreaking".

WebKit.

Then the guy on the ground says "You must be a manager!" The guy in the balloon asks how he knows this. He says "You ask dumb questions while having no idea where you are, where you're going, or how you got there, but now somehow it is my fault."

It could easily be done but I got a headache just from trying to imagine this.

Games, film, and TV are covered by consoles and STBs. Coding counts as a specialized field, and not one that mass-produced consumer desktops (as opposed to workstations) need to be appropriate for.

From the description in the article, especially the phrase "sneak in", it sounds like he deliberately obfuscated the functionality of the app. It's happened a few times before- an app is submitted with a questionable feature disabled, then once it's in the wild a switch is thrown on a server and suddenly it's capable of more than was ever shown to Apple. The vetting process being susceptible to targeted attempts to circumvent it does not mean that a "total breakdown" occurred.

Apple is not trying to coexist with cable TV, they are trying to destroy it. Once they get you to cancel your cable, DVR functionality will just be dead weight.

what happened to the heady days of the internet when a standard popped onto the scene and quickly matured to give way for the next one?

They didn't last beyond the days when the net was only used by a small group of experts and highly technical users. The state of the web in the late 90s and the early zeroes (remember that?) was a direct result of following this sort of philosophy on an unworkably large scale, with multiple competing platforms with inconsistent feature sets (sometimes deliberately so).

You can't just throw something together when it will be used by literally billions of people, many of which will never update their software unless forced to, and implemented by dozens of entities with differing agendas, technical constraints, and visions of progress, that just leads to madness, browser wars, and the biggest installed base winning.