The difference is, you could write your own software to run on that SPARC, you weren't at the mercy of whatever was in the 'SPARC App Store'. You weren't made to jump through many many burning hoops to get the toolchain to build new SPARC apps. You could distribute those new apps any way you wanted, you weren't dependent on the 'guardians of the gate' at the 'SPARC App Store'. You could get a wild hair up your ass, sit down, code and compile your new app however you wanted it. Try that with your iphone.

I haven't found anything else with comparable audio quality. I know the ageing ATRAC codec used on Minidiscs are inferior to the latest generation codecs, such as AAC, but the D/A converters and amplifiers were far superior to those in the latest portable units, even iPods which are not just hampered by poor amplifiers, but also shoddy encoding and a high level of dynamic compression in iTunes. And I must say that as a portable recorder they actually seem to be cheaper than comparable solid state recorders.

So much of the language is context sensitive (e.g., this arbitrary symbol means a certain thing, except in some cases where it means something completely different) and there are so many features that I always felt overwhelmed. Sure, I always managed to get the code working but it felt hackish and thanks to "there's more than one way to do it," I was never sure if the way I implemented was the right way.

At least if there's one single interface between a website and the mic/cam we can do our best to ensure that interface isn't exploitable. If every website has to roll their own, overall it's much less secure.

I thought the printer sharing only worked with a very few "supported" printers, and wasn't actively being updated. Is this not true?

Sorry man. That's why I moved away from apple. Contacts and meetings should sync without iTunes

At this point the only thing that keeps the iPad being a truly viable replacement for a computer is the need to sync it to a computer. But if you buy in an Apple Store you can have them set it up there, and then just buy apps and media on the device going forward (though it makes me cringe at the thought of people doing that and not backing up the device regularly).