"To travel. To experience new things, new people, new places. Not to fuck around with a gadget" I totally disagree. A couple of years ago, I started a business that allows me to work anywhere as long as I can connect. I've taken several trips, and travel with an iPhone, iPad, MacBook Pro and a couple of 1TB Passport drives. The tech gives me the freedom to travel, and carrying it with me avoids the need to "return home because there's a problem..." or spend hours on the phone talking someone through something. One trip, I spent 24 days going throughout Europe with nothing but a backpack...which was mostly filled with my tech. The additional thing about it, in terms of experiencing where you are, is that the tech provides incredible resources, from GPS navigation, wikipedia'ing all kinds of information about the things around you, and changing reservations on the fly. And yes, sometimes when you travel, there is downtime, and the tech can not only entertain you, but others as well. On a bus in the middle of night going from Marrakesh to Agadir, I showed *Glee* on the iPad... that was pretty surreal and unforgettable. I don't have much advice to offer in terms of Android tablets... I can say that I used a Chromebook and absolutely hated it, so go with a tablet or a real notebook.

I know a lot of people with a lot of money, and it cracks me up when I find them agonizing over price differences for things that are relatively insignificant to them. Why would you consume *any* time whatsoever over a trivial amount of money? For me, $1 for an app is definitely below the threshold of consideration. However, having yet another app littering my library, is a problem. I currently have 544 apps for my iPhone and iPad consuming 25GB. That's friggin' ridiculous... what's wrong with me? And this is after I purged my library a few months ago of unwanted apps. Anyway, now I look closer at the ratings and descriptions to see if it's really going to be worth adding the app to my library, as opposed to just the cost. I'm much more likely to go with the better app, than the cheaper.

Your comment is just as bad as the article. I love my iPad 2, and loved the original iPad before it, but for $100, the TouchPad is pretty damn awesome. I would've gotten one just for a picture frame if I could have gotten my hands on one.

QuickTime doesn't require you to allow it to take control of any extensions. I'm not a big fan of bundled apps, but at some point people are just being cry babies about this. It's worth noting that iTunes uses QuickTime for more than just video. Audio is being driving through QuickTime as well. As sglewis said, WebKit is in iTunes as well, and nobody complains about that. Perhaps that's what Apple should have done to silence the whiners, just *hide* QuickTime inside iTunes with no option to remove it or run independently.

All you need to do is select QuickTime and then go to the menu bar to select Ignore Update, and you'll never see it again.

Screw ports, I'm all about BlueTooth or WiFi for audio out of my iPhone.

"Not that Apple wouldn't be inclined to try it, of course, along with some blathering public statement along the lines of "in order to protect the user experience, we have decided to disallow the use of Google's proprietary video formats on our operating system..."

They already did. Notice the hundreds of millions of iOS devices that Apple won't let you install any plug in for Mobile Safari.

Apple is gonna fight against WebM every step of the way. So will many others. All Google is doing is prolonging the use of Flash.

So, the tax is also on iPods, even the nano, Shuffle and classic. Can someone explain how you use one of those devices to pirate music? I know how to do it on any Windows PC, but last time I checked there was no Kazaa, LimeWire, Bittorrent or for that matter any 3rd party apps whatsoever on those iPods.

"It pisses me off to hell that schools are pushing the iPad when it lacks the one thing that made tablets a killer tool for education: a stylus."

I couldn't disagree more. I can type far faster on a keyboard and even a virtual keyboard than I can write. Better, my notes can be better organized, spell checked, etc...

The use of a stylus is specifically what made me *not* get a tablet before the iPad. Also, you know what's faster than even typing on a keyboard for me? Simply recording the audio.

But input aside, the iPad's ability to play audio, video, and have interactivity make it a great tool for education. My iPad has a bunch of manuals on it, along with how-to videos and so forth.

I had no interest in ever getting an iPad until I used it and realized how useful it was. It wasn't the marketing or anything else. I would say 75% of the people I know who got one had the same reaction before they actually started using one.

This isn't just to be an Apple fanboy. I thoroughly expect Android based tablets to become very popular as well as Windows based ones. The one thing Apple did do right with the iPad was to get it first to market, not as a Tablet PC, but as a consumption-priority device that serves its purpose as an auxiliary computer using recent advances in mobile tech.

@Jaime2 "If you bought all of Apple's stock, it would be 30 years (once again, based on history) before you made your $234 billion dollars in profit."

It's (as of Friday's close) just under 22 years. However, that's multiplying how much they've made over the past year and multiplying it by 22. In other words that assumes growth flatlines. That in of itself would be misleading because during the past 12 months included in the PE, there's been a near doubling of growth YOY. If you look at Price to Earnings Growth, you'll see a much different number.

"If a company has a device that doesn't support tethering, why would you buy their products if you want to tether it?"

Because almost everything else about the iPhone outweighs this one issue.

"If a network does not support tethering for your particular device, why would you join them if you one day hoped to tether?"

Not that I have a choice in the US with the iPhone, but if I did I would still have AT&T because:
1) Roll over minutes and in-network calling have resulted in a cheaper plan (than what I had with Verizon).
2) Customer service is much better (IMHO).
3) You can do voice and data at the same time.
4) GSM makes it easy to use my phone internationally (and cheaply with rented GSM SIMS)
5) Faster data speeds (in my geographic areas).
6) Dropped calls etc... hasn't been an issue for me (again in my geographic areas).
7) Free connectivity at AT&T hotspots, like Starbucks.

"Stop hoping for half-arsed solutions, trying to "jailbreak" your phone to do that, etc. "

There is no "try" there is only "do", and it's not half-assed. I have no problems with jailbreaking iPhones. It's always resulted in an iPhone that just worked better and enabled more features and functionality, including tethering and tether-sharing. I see no reason to ever stop, unless Apple eventually enables all the reasons why I jailbreak.

"And, besides, phone tethering is old-hat anyway. It costs literally a few pounds / dollars to connect a PC to a 3G always-on connection on a decent tariff in the country of your choice."

Ya...I'm not likely to change countries based solely on the price of 3G cards/dongles. Here in the US, with any carrier, 3G laptop service sucks on a price:utility ratio.

Damn. I just bought a copy of this movie. I had never heard of it until the parodies, but watching them made the original seem like it would be interesting. Now I feel guilty paying for it instead of pirating.

" In 2000, DOD had fewer than 50 unmanned aircraft in its inventory; as of October 2009, this number had grown to more than 6,800."

Did I just read that correctly? Are they saying that between 2000 and 2009, more unmanned aircraft were built for the US military than all of the F-14s, F-16s, F-18s and F-22s ever built *combined*?

I never buy insurance for my iPhones because I know that I'm going to want to upgrade them each year. It never occured to me to smash and replace. I wouldn't want to do that though. On the other hand, sell me a policy where each year I get to send in my old iPhone and get a new one and I'd be all over that. The insurer could then sell my old iPhone or use it to replace someone with cheaper insurance who didn't buy the upgrade option.

"Jail-breaking facilitates piracy" Well it's a step that one must take before being able to pirate an iPhone app. Of course buying an iPhone is a prior and more critical step. Jailbreaking also facilitates the selling of 3rd party apps through an additional store (Cydia). I've jailbroken. I've pirated apps. I've never not then purchased an app that I ended up liking/using. In a couple of cases I've purchased the app, and then pirated it so that I could modify the plist file and customize the app to my liking. It's *very* easy for developers to check if the app is pirated and then disable it. The piracy of apps is a hole that could be easily plugged without closing off jailbreaking. Many developers are starting to do this, but I'm also seeing where developers are putting nag messages in for pirated copies of apps, or figuring that the piracy is ok since they're then seeing people pay for add-ons to the app. My guess is that Apple, AT&T, and developers are all better of with allowing jailbreaking to occur.