Nah, it's Adobe's fault that Adobe made he spend several thousand dollars. Apple said "hey this is going away" a long time ago, and Adobe said "well when it does, people will just buy the new one!"

Also, I fail to understand why upgrading to Lion (which worked on the existing hardware) forced her to buy new hardware (which came with Lion)?

I'm not 100% sure, but I think the video card requirement is about OpenCL. AFAIK the video card cutoff is at the OpenCL compatibility line.

+1. I put Mountain Lion on both my Macbook Pro and iMac, both mid 2007 models. That's 5 years old. I spent under $1000 for both of them combined.

Streaming to a TV via HDMI is achievable via a dongle. Not as elegant to be sure (and not discounting your point, just clarifying a detail) but it is possible.

I don't think there's a software warranty on a machine even with the factory load, is there?

For reference, I use Safari on OSX for little more than watching youtube videos and light web browsing (this site, XKCD, Anandtech, etc) and the memory usage blows up over time. I've found through Activity Monitor that's it's really the flash plugin. It appears that it never gives back the RAM it takes until I close Safari (or force quit the plugin, but then I have no Flash until I reboot Safari).

That, combined with the fact that I have occasional stutters playing back an HD Flash video with a 2.8GHz C2D and 3GB of RAM makes me unsurprised that Apple hates Adobe and all things Flash.

Calling an i5 a desktop chip and an Atom the mobile chip is fairly inaccurate. Intel has a whole line of mobile Core i parts that are much lower power than their desktop variants. This isn't the old days of shoving Pentium 4s into laptops, and an Atom is NOT a good choice for a full size laptop (nor is it anywhere close to a Turion in performance), being designed for netbooks.

The only problem I have with this is the statement that "Intel graphics downright stink." For gaming? Mostly. For everything else in the world? Intel graphics are more than enough. The HD3000 that came with SandyBridge (and the new IvyBridge GPU... HD4000?) is good enough to play Diablo 3 pretty well, and definitely good enough for any general desktop work.

Though, also to be fair, 2006 is what, 7 years after HL1 came out, and several years after HL2? I think by that point the game had long been in the bargain bin that spurred this topic.

On one hand, yes. On the other hand, we're talking about them replacing a 5 year out of warranty iPod Nano. Who gives a shit if you're without it for a week? It's an iPod!

I do recall the guy going to plug an external hard drive with a label saying something like "GPU Test" on it. My impression was they boot from that drive and it runs some sort of, well, GPU test. The way my GPU failed though just displayed ridiculous graphical corruption on the screen, so when the tech powered it on and saw the screen he just said "yup, that's a GPU failure" and skipped any further testing.

That's strange... I had this exact same problem and Apple replaced my motherboard for free when the time came. I wonder why they denied it for him?

Woah woah woah.

You mad bro?

When I was still young enough that I regularly would go to my friends' to play Xbox games I would typically log into my account on their xbox either way so that my gameplay would still go towards my stats/unlocks/achievements etc. That, and on the xbox, online multiplayer wasn't free so often times you *had* to be logged in to play or to get full support (typically guests don't have voice chat). Finally, logging in let you play as you, with your gamer tag that you use and not just a (1) after your friend's name.

I'd imagine taking your profile with you would be the prevalent method of bringing a game over, rather than your whole console.

Then again, I am/was a fairly hardcore gamer, so maybe all of those reasons to sign in anyway don't apply to the rest of the market. Either way, it would be more convenient than lugging your console, though lugging a console isn't that big of a deal (2-3 cords to unplug, swap it in when you get there to their existing cords).