Honestly this is smart... well as long as the power user still *CAN* change things if they want (i.e. using the jailbreak switch).

Obligatory (probably poor) car analogy:
To fill up gas you don't open the hood and take apart the engine. Sure you can get under the hood and if your a mechanic you should be able to mess around as much as you want. But its better for the user (driver) to not have to worry about anything besides the interface (steering wheel and gas and brake).

Its silly that users who have no idea how the system works should be expected to decide what applications to trust. The default should be zero trust of the user and that shouldn't need to be changed for 90%+ of users out there. And thats what Chrome does.

For one multitasking. I get annoyed when I get a voicemail because I have to check out of whatever conversation I am in, or if I am in class leave to get it. With a text message, I can glance down and see if its important, and if not ignore it until later or if it is then respond.

Another thing is the idea of your landline. (I know VOIP but still its tied to your house). Why would anyone call that number first and then call my cell phone when they could just call my cell phone and immediately reach me? Then there is the separate voicemail box. Oh and what number do you give to people who aren't interested in having 2 numbers? Your cell phone would be the most versatile, but since you say you are on a prepaid plan then that poses issues.

For me sure I pay a pretty good sum to AT&T for my iPhone with a good amount of minutes and a data plan, but its well worth the ability to have a single point of contact for my life, no matter where in the country I am. Last summer I worked in California, but I go to school in Ohio, and often go home to my parents house in a different city in Ohio. When I give out my phone number to companies I need to be able to be reached no matter where I am.

This definitely is a generation gap. The fact that you GET and not send text messages shows you are from the pre-texting generation. I have no idea how I could adequately communicate with friends taking text messages out of my life. And whats interesting is that I even am close enough to the cutoff where I remember days when it used to be "hey do you get text messages?" or, god forbid, "hey do you have a cell phone?". Now were in a world where everyone has a cell phone from age 10 up. Some a smart phone. And everyone is on facebook since the day they learn what the internet is.

In any case, I think you are right that this SHOULD go both ways, and hopefully it does as it will make their service more useful for people like you. But I am not sure that is really the intent of this, I feel its targeted at people like me, so who knows.

Except this is for going the other direction. I'm not looking to get my social messages onto a device. I'm now saying my social messages are my primary way of communicating in this inherently social world and I want to get my other messages into this service. When this allows.

If you don't see this then either your too old and senile to understand or just plain have no friends.

As a college student, I already find Facebook private messages to be the most reliable way to communicate with other college students and younger. The reason? Everyone is on Facebook multiple times a day and many of my friends have Facebook messages set to be sent to their phones or receive a notification on their smartphone when they receive one. Email? Well its really only used for "boring" communication like stuff from teachers and classmates for group projects.

Plus I only know a handful of my Friends email addresses anyways, whereas I can message anyone on Facebook by their name. I really do believe that is the future of social communication. Sure email will always exist for business communication, getting bills, etc. but as a way to say "hey, want to do such and such tomorrow?" definitely not. All this Facebook messages thing is doing is recognizing how people already use the messages feature and expand its capabilities to better serve that use.

Oh, and the combination of different mediums of messaging is long overdue. I always feel silly every time I'm sitting in front of my laptop and yet typing way on my 3.5 inch touch screen to send a text message. Or the awkwardness (awkward really isn't the right word, but weirdness of some sort) when I start talking to someone on Facebook chat and realize that I missed a text from them on my cell phone and completely ignored it. Or had an instant message from them on iChat. Or the usual "hey did you get my email" when I'm talking to someone on instant messenger. Really that is just silly we need a cohesive messaging system.

I can't believe no one has commented on this yet: I know when they fubared the signal strenghth meter! Right after the 3G came out! Right when the 3g came out everyone was complaining that as soon as the phone switched to 3g mode their bars would drop from full to like 2 or 3. This was because at the time AT&T's 3G network sucked. And a lot of time it was on the 1900mhz band which has trouble penetrating walls whereas EDGE was on the better 800mhz band. So what did apple do? They came out with an update that "fixed" the issue by just changing the scale that bars use for 3G service. This was also the same update that changed the look of the "3g" logo.

Although they CAN go hand in hand. My love of driving cars has led me to fixing them up as a hobby. And, opposite of what the OP is asking, my love of programming has led me to like video games.

And for good reason too. It really is confusing that your itunes library is just a database that points to the actual files. Oh but the default action in itunes is to copy to the itunes music directory, so now theres 2 files.

Same confusion with iPhoto, etc.

The file concept really does not need to be exposed to most end users today. Sure it will still exist but the primary mode of access these days is through applications that index the files.

NeoOffice is unusably slow, or sat least it was last time I used it. When I got my Intel MacBook Pro before MS released an intel version, I had to use Word 2004 though Apple's emulator environment (Rosetta). Absurdly slow. NeoOffice was SLOWER and they had a NATIVE BINARY!

Ok, I'll bite. What else? They moved to intel almost 5 years ago. Since then they have gone in the other direction and have made their hardware move away from "stock standard" PC. What have they done since their move to intel that has made them more stock standard? I can think of quite a few thing they have done to move away from it:
-custom LiPo battery tech (their smart charging or whatever) which supposedly provides 1,000 recharge cycles by monitoring each individual cell.
-If you want to count Unibody as a technology then count that.
-Their trackpad-is-a-button amazing multitouch glass trackpads.
-The Geforce 320M integrated graphics in the new 13" MacBook Pro's is custom designed by NVidia to Apple's specs.
-The graphics switching tech in the 15 and 17" macbook pro's is custom designed by apple (its not optimus or whatever NVidia's tech is, contrary to misconceptions).

And the iPhone and iPad are clearly not "stock standard" anything so I assume you are not referring to those

Its the Mac OS X API. There is Cocoa which is the "native" API and Carbon which is designed for cross-platform compatibility. This argument is especially funny because Apple's own Final Cut Pro uses Carbon. In one of Apple's stupid cross-platform killing motivated moves Apple only made Cocoa 64-bit aware.

Not sure if you are from America, but stop signs are a pretty bad idea here. They are used in neighborhoods as a way to slow traffic, so everyone routinely ignores them and rolls through. When you place them in spots that require an actual STOP COMPLETELY EVERY SINGLE TIME people get confused (and I don't blame them when they are used as a YIELD sign half the time).

Your milestone has hardware on par with the 3GS, not the 3G. I have jailbroken my 3G and sure I CAN do background apps but it definitely slows things down (i.e. not something apple would find acceptable). Hell, the 3G only has 128mb ram, thats barely enough for safari.

The thing is I want my computer to be open but don't really care about my phone. My computer is a development machine and I am a power user and programmer. But my phone I want to be simple and intuitive so I can instantly do what I want to do with it.

The iPad is the "locked down Mac" that people here are threatening is to come. I see there being dual product lines, the MacBook Pro's, (maybe iMacs and Macbooks), and Mac Pro's. Then there being iPad-like devices, maybe even coming in a laptop-with-touchscreen form of some sort which run an advanced version of iPhone OS. Give this touchscreen clamshell MacBook/iPad hybrid a faster version of the A4 ARM processor in the iPad and it could easily have 15+ hours of battery life in a form factor the size of the MacBook air. I see this being the second product line available IN ADDITION to the MacBook Pro's.

As someone else said both newbies and power users use OS X. I see Apple differentiating their lines and keeping OS X for their power users/content creators and introducing an iPad-like line of computers for the newbie croud. (lets face it, if Apple made a cheap 3g MacBook Air form factor device running a souped up iPhone OS (adding say printing capabilities, etc.), there are soo many people I could recommend this to (my mom, grandma, etc.)