You complain about anecdotes, then pull that out of your ass?

This isn't true. Marco Arment for example bought a Mac Pro, then traded it in a year later to get an iMac. Clearly he could afford the Pac Pro, but the year later iMac offered a better display, without compromising the speed.
http://www.marco.org/2014/10/1...

The question is not whether D-Day was right, but whether it's right for 15 year olds to be fighting in wars. Any wars. It's not.

It's still not the right thing regardless of your admiration. 15 year olds should not be fighting in wars, D-Day or otherwise.

That was neither a good thing, nor the right thing. Just because your dad believed something doesn't mean it should dictate your view on life.

And yet is less stable than those currencies that do.

That's a no true Scotsman definition. For any number of examples that contradict the idea, you can just say "well they aren't rational markets."

For example, where I come from bottled water is more expensive than soda, and about the same price as milk. Has been for years, probably decades now. That makes no sense from the production+distribution side, and is stable. So you'd just say it's irrational. Without having defined rational other than the implied "doesn't conform to your model."

I don't disagree with you that "The peak price of Bitcoin was pretty much a classic case of a bubble caused by irrational speculation". But I'd take it further and say that ALL of the value of Bitcoin is speculation. Without a government backing it, it's worthless, other than to speculators.

Sorry, but the other poster is right. 1997/8 was essentially a reverse takeover of Apple by NeXT. Not just Jobs, but the rest of the XeXT management team also. And Jobs had plenty of time when he knew he was dying to put the company into a state where it would continue in a good direction. None of your examples come from the last 16 years, and there's no reason to think that current Apple would ever become anything like the mismanaged company of the late 80s early 90s.

It's none of those things. If it was, Google certainly would not have stopped selling the developer prototype. They'd have ramped it up into full production.

Google Glass is dead in the the form demoed. There's a chance they might come up with some different concept. But there's a bigger chance that this removal of the Glass team from the Google incubator is a first step to selling it off or closing it down.

Nice idea.

I know car metaphors are de-rigour here, but that's really not a good metaphor. This is approvals of add-ons and consumables, not repairs. And there are a few other examples. Games consoles, printers, razors.

The bizarre thing is it's framed as if it's imposed on consumers. But of course it isn't. It's entirely opt-in. There's a large number of people that are willing to pay a bit extra for the safety and quality that the iPhone platform gives. And one of the important mechanisms by which that safety and quality is delivered is by controlling what can be installed.

People aren't being MADE to be safer. They CHOOSE to pay extra for the service of being made safer.

If a phone ever needs the kind of maintenance a PC or Mac needs it's a failed phone. Consumers these days have got something that for most of their casual uses is better than a PC. That's progress.

Sure, there's a need for an industrial grade computing device too, for a start to develop the apps on the more casual devices.

But to make modern consumer computing devices with as troublesome a set of ideas as a PC would be silly. Consumers need reliable appliances, not unreliable boxes of bits that continually degrade and require maintenance.

Take a look around sometime.

And certainly they do need protection. (Where clueless kids using smartphones is a wide category from about 5 to about 35.) Insightful knowledge of the dangers of the internet does not come along at the same time as the ability to switch on other app-stores.

The clueless old folks might not. The clueless kids certainly will.

Right. Apple now has censorship rights over the entire internet. The conspiracy theory just gets bigger.

But it's not "same shit different name". Desktop metaphor is desktop with multiple opened documents side by side, and a filing cabinet and folder metaphor for data storage. Generally with pull down/ drop down menus. WinCE and the old GEOS Nokia Communicators used it. Modern phones don't.

A phone which has random files placed around it's file system by the user is a phone with a broken OS.

Clearly I don't. I mean for example the people who want to spend time organising MP3 files when they have apps available that sync up songs between multiple devices, organise them in albums or artists or whatever order, and display metadata at it's best.

Why can't you program using dip switches and blinken-lights any more? Because higher abstractions are more powerful.

Files have become too low an abstraction even on the desktop. Take Office documents, these days they are stored in multiple files, but file systems are in general too dumb to coordinate multiple files as a single thing, so they are zipped up to make them into a single file. Not only does that add to loading and saving time, it means that VCSs can't generally deal properly with their XML and end up storing them as undiffable binaries.

Or take applications. On Linux you need a package manager to deal with the multiple files. Or deal with tar and gzip. Windows requires installer apps to unpackage and then distribute the files around a filing system. MacOS has a bundle system that's not supported by foreign file systems. And all of them have the problem of leaving detritus when deleting the app.

But mobile OSs have this issue sorted. To a user an app is always single thing. You download it from an app store, or you delete it as a single thing. The abstraction of the multiple files required is complete.

Indeed it has changed. Nitro used to be limited to Safari, for security reasons, but from iOS 8 the Webkit available to apps uses exactly the same Nitro engine that Safari does.

And here's the thing - Javascript works the same on in all apps and all browsers in iOS. In Android, that's far from the case. At work we have an app in development that opens a 3rd party web page with a video embedded. On iOS the video zooms to full screen, and plays. Always. On Android, the behaviour is different on different phones. Some zoom to full screen, some don't, and some don't play the video at all.

I should note that for reasons such as this, the development team for iOS is 2. For Android it's 5. With iOS development still always outpacing Android.

As to data-mining, that's also an advantage on the iOS side. CyanogenMod might pull some Google spying out of the OS, but Android apps are far freer to spy on users than iOS apps. Such is the benefit of the "walled-garden".