"Mac Minis of the time".

Which in the P4 era (mid 2000s), would have been powered by motorola PowerPC chips as used in mac laptops.

And ending sentences with a preposition is exactly what every Germanic language has, dones and always will do.

"This is the sort of bloody nonsense up with which I will not put." - Churchill.

Well for the last 4-5 years I haven't owned a tablet. :) A phone can do everything a tablet can do, albeit on a tiny screen such as "convenient data access and occasional very light data entry".

What constitutes a "real PC" these days? Laptops are, for many, a desktop replacement. Touchscreens are becoming the norm because it's a 'value-add' that adds little to the purchase price. If you embed the CPU in the screen instead of the keyboard, you have the option of detaching the keyboard altogether.

Should one device perform both functions, or do we stick with the Apple mantra that you need both an iPad AND a macbook? Or the Google mantra that, increasingly, you don't need a desktop OS altogether?

Well I agree with GP's assertion that a 4" phone shouldn't have the same interface as a 2x21" desktop. As such one of my 'computers' runs Firefox OS and the other KDE atop debian.

But I don't have a tablet in my life. A 9" phone, running iOS or Android, that doesn't make phone calls, no thanks! What would convince me to buy a tablet would be one that comes with a fancy stand (we used to call it a docking station back in the day) that allows me to plug in all my existing peripherals and transform into a workstation OS.

MS share that vision. KDE share that vision via plasma (though their Vivaldi tablet didn't make it to market).

To rely on a rival SoC vendor for parts undermines Apple's commitment to develop their own chip, as opposed to using an off-the-shelf component such as Qualcomm's Snapdragon, Exynos or Tegra.

12,000 only made; never intended for mass production.

It was a Jony Ive concept machine - the iMac G4 didn't debut an LCD desktop until almost 5 years later.

Seriously, $30 retail for a DVB-T tuner to watch free to air digital...

Another FUD article denigrating the great leader? Jobs missed nothing.

Of course Apple ][ machines used TVs for output via RF modulation.

Also how are the tools for typescript? Having static typing but no auto-complete IDE is a major drawback.

Visual Studio 2013.

Which Google are embracing in Angular as per today's story.

Getting a team of half a dozen or so to do a mooc is way cheaper than a 3 day training course.

Your client saveie6.com has migrated to IE 8?

Dan Grossman's Coursera offering has Racket as one of the languages too.

https://www.coursera.org/cours...

Well I've mainly worked for corporations where the Windows desktop reigns supreme and most correspondence is still done with Office and Outlook plus all the inhouse tools they foist upon us. If I can't get away with Libreoffice on Linux and use an ad-hoc calendaring system then having a copy of Windows on hand is then the next easiest thing than to find that this piece of software doesn't run on OS X and you'll have to run a copy of Windows in a VM.

Certainly that's been my experience in the technological backwater of Australia. Perhaps the acceptance of platform agnostic workflows is greater in other parts of the world.

We had such typing in Java once. Then programs started failing at runtime with a ClassCastException. So the burden moved to the compiler in the form of generics. This sporned a new category of NullPointerException, when referencing primitive int and double variables (autoboxing). So people switched to Scala, where null pointers where eliminated at compile time via the Option type.

Casting is a bad smell in a sufficiently evolved statically typed language.

Well regarding Eclipse, Java was a 2nd class citizen under Jobs, so I am skeptical of any commitment to the platform under OS X. from the time we couldn't ship Java 6 features because Apple were still on version 5, and refusing to update some computers from 1.4.2.

Things may have changed since Larry took over the port but the distrust is still there and for cross-platform development, I see little reason to embrace a Mac. Vim and emacs work equally well on Linux, if not better. :)

Understably if one were developing products for iPhone or Mac then certainly.

Yep hence Vala, which transpiles to C-with-GObject.