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.

Sure there is- the iPod Touch has lacked a camera since it was launched, and it hasn't caused major disruption to the store, development headaches, or app instability. Apple lets app developers limit availability to the models that support their desired features- something that's only feasible when there are only a handful of models.

You don't even have to imagine- if you RTFA, it presents this situation as a failure of the luxury sites, not of the iPad.

Did you miss the runup to the iPad announcement? For months, the entire tech world was abuzz with rumors about the Apple tablet based solely on leaks, guesses, unofficial sources, and so on. Apple did not say a single word until late January and it was already one of the most anticipated electronic products in history. They are absolute masters at this because they've been cultivating it for years.

The trackpad uses a different approach because it's not in 1:1 correspondence with the screen, and it's not direct manipulation. The phone is- you are literally touching the web page and moving it with your finger. There is no concept of a cursor on a touchscreen, there is no persistence of user interaction when the finger is off the screen.

A touchscreen is not a trackpad and it's not something that can be glonked on top of a mouse-driven GUI and expected to work as well as a mouse would. Apple knew it required a completely different approach to many aspects of the interface, such as ditching the concept of "hover" entirely.

It's not just that, it also has a lot of hidden software tricks that make it easier to communicate your intent. When you put your finger down on a button, it invisibly grows larger, so your finger is less likely to slip off if you move it a fraction while tapping. The keyboard keys also do this, based on the text predictor, to make the next letters in the likeliest words easier to hit. Safari allows you to scroll in every direction if you want but it also makes the horizontal and vertical axes "sticky" so if you're trying to go straight down the page you'll probably succeed without realizing the phone helped you.

This is a vast improvement over the old policy of any hiccup in your approval instantly pushing you to the back of the month-long line.

Actually, it has everything to do with demand. If the distribution of music collection size works out so that you've covered the majority of the audience at 16GB, and the vast majority of them at 32GB, there's not that much money to be made chasing the ones left over with yet more product lines. Someone will still do it, obviously, which is why e.g. Apple still makes 160GB iPod Classics, but that segment is not exactly the low-hanging fruit.